Everyone Is Part of the War
by Austin Bay
http://www.strategypage.com/onpoint/articles/2004518.asp

Within a week, I deploy to Iraq, as another U.S. Army reservist called to active duty. I will be serving as a staff officer in Baghdad, and I will not be writing newspaper columns, though from time to time an essay with my byline may appear on this page. I've "pre-written a number of columns addressing themes and concepts that I think will be particularly pertinent during this long, hot and history-making summer.

One column reviews Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis' new book on grand strategy in the War on Terror. Another examines the legacy of economic corruption that has damaged many large international developmental aid projects. That issue obviously has resonance for the War on Terror.

A third column draws on a recent interview with former Nebraska Senator and 9-11 Commission member Bob Kerrey. That column asks, and I believe answers, this tough question: "How will our efforts in Iraq be viewed in 20 years?" Here's a future-history snippet from Kerrey: "Twenty years from now, we'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who says it wasn't worth the effort. This is not just another democracy. This is a democracy in an Arab world ..."

Which segues to my summer and early fall in uniform: For a short time, the U.S. Army will make me part of the minute-by-minute, ground-level effort in Iraq. I specify in Iraq, for every American, in some form or fashion, is part of this war. It is sad that some people do not realize that.

America's wealth makes it easy to create the perception of distance, that "here" and "over there" aren't intimately linked. American successes in the War on Terror have created, for a vocal segment of the America body politic, the illusion that 9-11 didn't change things too darn much.

The inevitable difficulties of war -- war, by definition, is a mistake-ridden enterprise, Carl von Clausewitz's realm of "friction" -- lead another vocal faction into the delusion that America is somehow responsible for fomenting the conflict.

That clan touts figment utopias and fantasy options that ignore the difficult facts. This war cannot be willed away, it cannot be won by slick talk or poignant U.N. resolutions. The war is not America's fault. Islamist terrorists -- the export of decayed Middle Eastern dictatorships and autocracies -- decided if they could knock out America they could knock off the world.

We are now fighting a worldwide, "simultaneous war" in at least two dozen places around the planet, with the fight in Iraq key to America's long-term strategy. The dysfunctional political systems in the Middle East export their tribal, civil and religious wars as international terror. Porous borders, weapons of mass destruction, commercial jet transports, ballistic missiles, mass communications -- the light and dark of modernity -- mean their tribal battles are no longer local horrors.

Removing Saddam began the reconfiguration of the Middle East -- a dangerous, expensive process, but one that will lay the foundation for true states where the consent of the governed creates legitimacy and where terrorists are prosecuted, not promoted. The job of building New Iraq falls on the Iraqi people, but they have a precious opportunity, one supported by government civilians and contractors, volunteer workers and, of course, the uniformed military personnel serving with the U.S.-led coalition.

It is my privilege to join that group for the next few months. I know the hardest burden in this deployment will be borne by my wife and daughters. I thank them for their sacrifice.

Traitors to Animal-Kind
A big cat in Palo Alto says much about the culture.

By Clinton W. Taylor
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/taylor200405210925.asp

Dangerous cats, like most dangers, are uncommon in mellow, affluent Palo Alto, California. Then two horses were attacked by a mountain lion near the Stanford campus earlier this month. Stanford University's response to this assault was decisive and emphatic: Jeff Wachtel, Senior Assistant to Stanford's president, immediately announced that no firearms could be used to capture or kill the creature, citing concerns about public safety. Nothing would actually be done to capture the panther.

Following the horse-slaying, the cat apparently worked its way up creek channels into residential Palo Alto, and rumors of its arrival followed. A professor I know correctly instructed his children that, should they encounter the beast, they should shout and raise their arms over their heads to look big, in order to frighten it off. His concern was appropriate: Mountain lions, though rare, have killed at least six Californians over the past 114 years and mauled eight more.

On Monday, Palo Alto police tracked the mountain lion to a tree on Walnut Drive. According to a grim video report by area TV station KPIX, police considered using a tranquilizer dart, but decided against it because local elementary schools would soon release their students, and darts might take 20 to 30 minutes to knock the animal out. So an officer aimed her rifle at the mountain lion's heart. The sleeping cat stirred, and the officer fired. It tumbled through the tree past a child's swing, ran behind a hedge, crossed a driveway, and lay down to die amid some cactus and lavender.

That is quite a bit of excitement for these parts, and it is not surprising that it has generated some headlines. What is surprising is the way a wildlife-control operation unleashed such a torrent of moralizing and outrage.

Second-guessing and recriminations began immediately. KPIX showed a video of the shooting to Alfredo Kuba, a member of a group called In Defense of Animals. "I think it's absolutely atrocious the way the police behaved," Kuba told them. "Obviously the animal was not posing a threat to anyone. It was in a tree."

Meanwhile, the Palo Alto Daily News headlined Wednesday's paper with "Lion's Killing Sparks Furor." It included a picture of flowers and written tributes left at the base of the tree, including this eulogy: "Your death will not be in vain. Tears are shed for you, and this brutality will inspire ACTION. You are loved." (This was not the only written message directed to a specific animal in connection to this incident. The San Jose Mercury News reported that the owners of Kelsey, the Labrador retriever who chased the cougar up a tree, received an e-mail calling their dog a "traitor to animal-kind.")

The letters page of the Daily News carried four notes condemning the shooting. A letter asked where the "backup plan" was to prevent the suffering of the dying animal. Another from a South African biology student faulted the "trigger-happy", "incompetent" police for not packing adequate firepower, and noted that the lion was not a threat because it was chased up a tree by a dog. Another allowed that, had the cat been "alert and aggressively approaching something or someone, then shooting the animal might have been the only option," but insisted there had been time for "trained professionals to be brought in."

A fourth letter, by Robert More of Palo Alto, compared the shooting of the mountain lion to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and found both unnecessary. "It seems to me that what is potentially dangerous is the attitude that we need to annihilate anything determined to be potentially dangerous."

I disagree with More's conclusions, but we both draw the same analogy from this situation: There are underlying cultural ideas at work that inform reactions both to the cougar's shooting and to the war in Iraq. It is not a perfect analogy: The young cougar was a genuinely beautiful creature and its death is regrettable, while Saddam Hussein's regime was a hellish travesty of government mourned only by the deluded and the complicit.

Nevertheless, these (over)reactions to the cougar's demise stem from some of the same ideas that drive opposition to the current worldwide war against terrorism. Whether on the local scale of a dangerous predator loose in the neighborhood, or on the grand scale of rogue states that sponsor terror and proliferate weapons, many of the same ideas about the legitimate uses of force shine through.

Idea #1: Weapons are bad, and taint those who use them.

The comment that "trained professionals" should have handled the situation ignores the fact the officer who killed the mountain lion was herself a trained professional, not some jackleg vigilante. There is a notion shared throughout these letters and comments that the force used was excessive, and that a tranquilizer gun should have been employed. But tranquilizer guns are not instantaneously effective, and they are not standard issue.

There was no non-lethal option at hand that could neutralize the threat quickly. The officer on the scene could have stood there wishing for such a device, but instead she did her job with the best tools and judgment at her disposal.

In the right hands, tools like that rifle make civilization possible. Without them, we'd be up to our navels in mountain lions, or worse; and we'd have no time for civilized pursuits like writing panegyrics to feline martyrs and e-mailing canine traitors.

On an international scale, weapons under the command of a competent and disciplined military are especially good for deterring human threats, because humans are social animals that can occasionally learn from others' experiences. An excellent example of this sort of behavior is Muammar Qaddafi's relinquishing of Libya's WMD programs. After seeing how dictatorial regimes like Taliban Afghanistan, Saddam's Iraq, and Charles Taylor's (remember him?) Liberia fared against American resolve, Qaddafi folded, without a shot being fired. This example is antithetical, however, to the blue-state mantra that violence absolutely never solves anything.

Idea #2: We had it coming.

What do you expect, when development expands relentlessly into the habitats of wild creatures? Each new house and road and parking lot destroys more habitat area, and then the creatures have nowhere to go.

We have two choices: somehow stop the expansion of civilization, or learn to live with bears rifling through our garbage, deer crashing through our windshields, and mountain lions carrying off the occasional cyclist. A third option, resisting these incursions, would be immoral, since we are all complicit in prosperity's depredations and the animals don't know any better.

The same principle is writ large in the opposition to the war on terror.

Western success, according to anarchist philosopher Franz Fanon, rests on slavery and oppression, an idea shared by both the American and European Left, and the terrorists. So what do you expect when unjust Western prosperity establishes a toehold? It causes an inevitable reaction, in the form of terrorism. This principle assumes that, like wild animals, potential terrorists are utterly incapable of exercising the restraint we demand of ourselves. This idea is dreadfully condescending, of course, as well as wrong: See Qaddafi, above.

Idea #3: Treed animals don't pose a threat. And Saddam was up a tree.

Nice theory, but in fact, threatened, cornered, or wounded animals are at their most desperate and dangerous.

Saddam was boxed in, all right. The problem was that the population of Iraq was boxed in with him, and paying a terrible price for our forbearance. And the other problem is that through the corrupt U.N. Oil-for-Food program, through payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, and through relationships with terrorists like Abu Abbas, Abu Musad Al-Zarqawi, and possibly even Mohammed Atta, Saddam continued to threaten and corrupt the world.

Idea #4: A deadly attack must be imminent to justify deadly force.

In criminal law, this statement is strictly true. But when dealing with rogue nations or terrorist groups seeking WMDs, just as against stealthy predators in the neighborhood sizing up the schoolchildren, imminent is far too late. As President Bush put it in his 2003 State of the Union address, "Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike?"

Considering this list of reasons shows how simplistic and wrong it is to accuse the antiwar left of cowardice. In fact, they are quite brave, I would even say reckless, to bear the risks of predatory felines and predatory states so cheerfully (if, that is, they truly understand the risks.) But that bravery is simply the logical outcome of these deeply held, deeply flawed principles that deem effective resistance to be immoral. Stoic resignation is the only option left to them.

I, on the other hand, remain an unabashed coward. Hungry cougars, sarin-spewing terrorists, nukemongering dictators, I lack the courage and the intellectual agility required to keep on ignoring them. Threats to civilization must be confronted, with deadly force when necessary. Waving our arms around, shouting, and trying to look big is no way to go through life.

Clinton W. Taylor is a lawyer and a Ph.D. student in political science at Stanford.

Fail Proof
by Daniel W. Drezner
TNR Online
http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=scholar&s=drezner052704

In early April, President Bush confessed that the United States had been going through a tough stretch in Iraq. That tough stretch looks better and better in retrospect every week. The deluge of bad news from that country--Muqtada al-Sadr's armed resistance, Ahmed Chalabi's alleged duplicity, Nicolas Berg's gruesome murder, and, oh yeah, a little problem at Abu Ghraib--raises the question of what, exactly, went wrong. Was the very idea of bringing democracy to Iraq ill-conceived, or did the problem lie in our implementation?

A growing chorus of thinkers across the political landscape are arguing the former--that the neoconservative vision of exporting liberal values into a society that has known nothing but tyranny for the past generation smacked of foolish idealism. Americans have been naive in the past about their ability to remake societies--remember Nebraska Senator Kenneth Wherry's 1940 statement that "with God's help, we will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up, until it is just like Kansas City." The neoconservatives, many are arguing, were wrong to believe that it was possible to turn Basra into Buffalo.

A competing view holds that the fault lies not with the idea of democratizing Iraq but with our execution of that idea. Adherents note that the near-total absence of proper contingency planning prior to the war has led to a rash of policy screw-ups. These errors range from the premature dissolution of the Baathist military to the excessive faith placed in Ahmed Chalabi to the stringent ideological litmus tests used to screen Coalition Provisional Authority personnel. Along these lines, it is telling that in President Bush's Monday speech, he spoke of Saddam loyalists melting into the civilian population as if this possibility was a complete surprise to the United States.

With each of these mistakes or failures of foresight, the U.S. has made its task in Iraq--which was never an easy one--more and more of an uphill climb.

We can't rewind and rerun history, so it's impossible to say definitively which of these competing explanations is correct. But with that crucial caveat in mind, a strong case can be made that the bulk of the blame lies with the implementation. As I argued repeatedly last year, the social science evidence suggests that democracy was not an unreasonable goal in Iraq. A necessary condition underlying that argument was that there was sufficient security; as James Dobbins and his co-authors pointed out in their RAND study last year on democracy-building in postwar situations: "What principally distinguishes [successes from failures] are not their levels of Western culture, economic development, or cultural homogeneity. Rather, it is the level of effort the United States and the international community have put into their democratic transformations." According to Dobbins's calculations for peacekeeping in multiethnic states, 450,000 troops were needed in Iraq--a number that was, and is, anathema to the Pentagon's civilian leadership. Our failure to deploy sufficient numbers of troops probably goes a long way towards explaining the current situation.

But the political problem for those sympathetic to democratization is that even if fault does lie with the implementation--which may well be the case--Americans are likely to blame the strategy that got us involved in Iraq rather than the nuances of how we carried it out. Most voters don't have time to reach sophisticated conclusions about the competence of the government's post-war planning; they will therefore respond to our setbacks in Iraq by writing off the neocons' big idea altogether, concluding that democracy promotion in the Middle East was a pipe dream. Without public support, the grand strategy of reforming the Middle East will inevitably fall by the wayside, no matter who wins the upcoming election.

If this is how events play out, the Bush administration will have left an ignoble mark on the history of U.S. foreign policy. Say what you will about the neoconservatives' skills at manners or management; their big idea cannot be dismissed lightly. There is a compelling logic to the argument that the primary source of frustration among Arabs in the Middle East is a sense of powerlessness. Trapped in a region littered with authoritarian and corrupt regimes, they are encouraged by these regimes and their Islamic critics to blame their situation on Israel and the United States. This is an ideal environment for fomenting terrorism. Creating an open society in Iraq would put the lie to this kind of hate-mongering.

To be sure, democracy promotion is far from easy. Indeed, regime change in the Middle East looks like a lousy, rotten policy option for addressing the root causes of terrorism, until one considers the alternatives--appeasement or muddling through. The latter option was essentially the pre-9/11 position of the United States and its allies, and has been found wanting. Appeasement or isolation has the same benefits and costs that the strategy had in the 1930s: It buys short-term solace but raises the long-term costs of facing a stronger and potentially undeterrable adversary.

For all their criticism of Bush's grand strategy, Europeans and left-wingers have offered very little in the way of alternatives to his vision. Some say that American soft power could bring about change in the Middle East. But decades of alternately coddling, cajoling, and ostracizing Arab despots has not led to liberalization or democratization. We have showered Egypt with aid, but have succeeded only in propping up an authoritarian monster in Hosni Mubarak. We have tried to isolate Syria, but have only strengthened that country's anti-American credentials. Maybe U.S. soft power is part of the solution to the Middle East's woes, but soft power alone cannot accomplish our desired ends.

The craft of foreign policy is choosing wisely from a set of imperfect options. While flawed, the neoconservative plan of democracy promotion in the Middle East remains preferable to any known alternatives. Of course, such a risky strategy places great demands on execution, and so far this administration has executed poorly. It would be a cruel irony if, in the end, the biggest proponents of ambitious reform in the Middle East are responsible for unfairly discrediting their own idea.