That is not to say that America’s motives in the Gap, or more specifically in the Middle East, are selfless, because they are not. In the end, it took the System Perturbation of 9/11 and all the pain it inflicted to motivate America to finally do something significant to address the region’s long-standing security issues, and by “significant” I mean something more than just keeping rogue regimes in the box. But the Big Bang as grand strategy has plenty of arguments going for it, even if these advantages seem illusory to Old Europe.
First, when the United States acts as System Perturber, we set the timing of the rule-set creation. Osama bin Laden got to pick the date of 9/11. But America was able to select—long in advance—the spring of 2003 to launch the Big Bang, which gave us maximum time to make our case to the rest of the Core regarding our motives and goals. If we did poorly in this regard, we have only ourselves to blame. The bigger point is that we made time to argue our case; we were not rash in our strategic tempo.
Second, when the United States perturbs the system, we set the conditions under which the new rules emerge. We can decide to fight the war in such a way as to signal to the rest of the world, “This is what happens when the rule set is transgressed as badly as this regime has done.” But rather than just signaling threat, the way in which we wage war can show the promise of a better future as well. We showed Iraqis and the world that this was not a state-on-state war between the United States and Iraq, but between a multinational coalition and a collection of bad actors who had hijacked a society’s freedom for a couple of generations. We also waged war with an eye to the economy’s recovery, putting us in the strange position of actually caring about Iraq’s future far more than did the enemies we fought.
Third, when America orchestrated a Big Bang in the Middle East, we targeted a specific audience for rule-set export. Operation Iraqi Freedom was a message to the region as a whole, not just Iraq, which, in many ways, serves more as trigger than target. The Big Bang targets Iran’s “sullen majority” that has already given up trying to create any future in that country. It targets Bashir Assad’s regime in Syria, letting him know that our patience with his slow pace of reform is finite, and that we do hold Damascus responsible for what goes on in Lebanon vis-à-vis Israel. It targets the House of Saud, telling the royal family that we will no longer turn a blind eye to their “export dumping” of terrorism around the region, much less to our society. It tells the region as a whole, America will stand beside you as you seek greater connectivity with the world outside, because we are never leaving the Middle East until the Middle East joins the Core.
Finally, the Big Bang shifts the dialogue in the Middle East from “why” to “why not?” Think of the three biggest voices there over the past decade: Yasir Arafat, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden. What did any of these voices have to say about a better future for the region? About a more connected future? About a more peaceful future? Basically nothing, Arafat’s Nobel Peace Prize notwithstanding. But we have heard many new voices since: a Jordanian king, a Qatari emir, and a Nobel Peace Prize-winning female Iranian lawyer and human rights activist. All with something different to say, but all speaking in the future tense about a Middle East that belongs in the world, not separate from it.
What are the likely pathways for this Big Bang? The application of System Perturbation as grand strategy is a risky affair, by anyone’s measure, because two dynamics are set in motion, only one of which the United States can exert much control over. First, there is the question of Iraq itself. Let me posit a spectrum of outcomes, ranging from a successful makeover of Iraq to the frightening notion that Iraq will become America’s West Bank. A second spectrum describes the impact of Iraq’s transformation—for good or bad—on the rest of the region. On the negative side we could describe Iraq as the Muslim world’s new chosen trauma, and on the positive side we could imagine the hoped-for Big Bang spreading throughout the region as a whole.
The worst-case scenario is a combination of America’s West Bank and Islam’s chosen trauma that I call Black Hawk Down—the Series. In this pathway, America remains trapped in the “mother of all intifadas” that never seems to end, counting up close to 1,000 annual combat deaths in what is supposed to be a peacetime occupation. But our military presence never quite achieves that status, because jihadists from all over the world flock to Iraq looking to kill Americans in a big shooting gallery. So American soldiers die unceasingly, but in dribs and drabs that are covered extensively by the evening news back home. Instead of the one tragic big-screen tale, it is more like a reality-TV series played weekly, to numbing and/or enraging effect on American viewers. The only upside to this scenario is that America is essentially trading soldiers for civilians, in effect using the former as bait overseas to deflect attacks on the latter back home. The downside is clear: The more the occupation becomes an international tar baby, the more likely it is that America and America alone will be left holding the bag.
The best-case scenario is just the opposite: the makeover of Iraq proceeds apace and triggers a Big Bang effect elsewhere in the region. Here we would be talking about significant political reforms in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Syria, along with the region as a whole opening up significantly in economic terms. Likewise, the Israeli-Palestinian situation would settle into a peaceful coexistence. In this scenario, which I dub Persia Engulfed, U.S. military presence in the region would remain prevalent, but behind the scenes. It would simply become accepted as a fact of life, as it was in Europe during the Cold War. The biggest force-protection issue for such bases would be protests by peace groups, not suicide bombers. But the main measure of progress in this scenario would be a significant decline in public defense expenditures and a commensurate rise in broadband economic connectivity between the masses and the global economy. A good signpost would be a sharp decrease in the so-called wallers in major cities, or underemployed young men who spend their days leaning against walls waiting for their adult lives to someday begin. These disenfranchised urban youth are prime recruits for terrorist groups.◈ If the Middle East truly joined the world, either these young men would have jobs come to them or they would emigrate to jobs abroad.
Clearly, where we started in this process following the war was in the worst-case scenario, in which U.S. soldiers were dying in twos and threes on a regular basis. The longer America remains stuck in this scenario, the harder it becomes to leave it, because the harder it becomes to attract other Core militaries to this hardship duty and the easier it becomes for our enemies to draw in new recruits from abroad. As Paul Wolfowitz has said, Iraq becomes the “super bowl” for terrorism, and the longer that continues, the harder it becomes for America to remember why 9/11 convinced us that this effort once made so much sense.◈
How does America move the pile from the worst-case outcome to the best-case? Three routes seem most likely. First, the most direct route from worst to best cases happens when America internationalizes the occupation force in Iraq and successfully “indigenizes” the apparatus of political control, meaning we put Iraqis in charge of Iraq and the world becomes its bodyguard. Then you work to attract foreign direct investment like crazy and let Iraq’s more than adequately educated masses do the rest. I believe this scenario will be largely set in motion within eighteen months of Saddam’s removal, possibly paving the way for a second Bush Administration in the November 2004 elections, assuming the economy recovers enough and the public forgives the President for all the debt rung up on his watch.
Say that scenario falls apart, or takes a lot longer to materialize. Then the most roundabout route from worst to best cases describes the third scenario, or what I call the Arab Yugoslavia pathway. Here, any successful or unsuccessful development in Iraq may be followed by the United States being pulled into some new neighboring instability (e.g., Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt). If success in Iraq triggers sequential “baby bangs,” then clearly this is an exhausting route, but it’s one worth taking. But if a “bleeding Iraq�
� simply spills across borders, then it will feel like America is buying one big babysitting job on the installment plan. So the key distinction here would be: Do the responsibilities incurred seem additive or merely one damn thing after another? If it is the former, then “imperial fatigue” sets in, but if it is the latter, then America is far more likely to be able to internationalize the Core’s continuous response, much like in the former Yugoslavia scenarios across the nineties. There is a thin line between “peace breaking out all over” and “chaos breaking out all over,” so calm American leadership would be at a premium, because international perceptions would matter.
The harder route from worst to best cases is captured in the last of the four scenarios, which I name The New Berlin Wall. In this pathway, change comes slowly to the Middle East no matter what happens in Iraq, primarily because nothing can really change until the Arab-Israeli conflict is resolved. I call it the The New Berlin Wall because I believe a physical divorce between Israel and the West Bank (plus Gaza) is the most likely route toward a lasting peace. Israel is currently constructing a “security fence” to divide itself from the West Bank, in large part because the fence already separating Israel from the Gaza Strip has largely prevented any suicide bombers emerging from there. Plenty in the West are upset about Israel’s construction of the wall, but this anger is both misguided and shortsighted. The barrier is not Israel’s creation, but that of Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Israel’s population agrees to this wall because it keeps suicide bombers out while creating a de facto border between the two states, separating a demographically moribund Israel from a youth-bulging Palestine.◈ Simply put, this wall makes sense today and it will make even more sense tomorrow.
The way America solves this situation is exporting security not to Israel but to the wall and the border it marks—basically that left by the 1967 war. The United States should spearhead a long-term peacekeeping mission along this barrier, effectively walling off Israel from Palestine. Israel, its security intact, will do just fine without Palestine. Meanwhile, the Core will need to pour aid into the West Bank and Gaza for two to three decades, or long enough to wait out all the hatred that currently suffocates peace there. By that time, the extremists in the West Bank will be gone or buried, and Palestinians will finally raise a generation untouched by war. It will not be too much money, nor will it take too long. The West has successfully sat on walls elsewhere around the world (Berlin, Korea, Cyprus), and we can do it here too.
In my mind, the road from the worst to best cases lies more logically through the West Bank than through Baghdad or Teheran. Any dream of transforming the Middle East without first dampening this conflict remains just that—a dream.
The biggest threat to the Big Bang lies not in jihadists drawn to Iraq but in our own inability to fully comprehend the sacrifices involved in the outcomes we seek. When al Qaeda sought to wage war on the West through the System Perturbation of 9/11, their goals were negative, or simply the promotion of disconnectedness. But what America seeks in the Middle East is far harder. The Big Bang as grand strategy seeks Iraq’s eventual integration into globalization’s Functioning Core. That integration is simply impossible without the world’s help in integrating Iraq, as well as the region as a whole moving toward global connectivity. These goals extend so far beyond the war as to make our military victory in Iraq almost inconsequential—just a slight perturbation of the system. It is only the everything else part that makes the war in Iraq worth winning, otherwise we are guilty of waging war simply for war’s sake. In this interconnected world, war fought only within the context of war is a complete waste of blood and treasure. It is the equivalent of waging war according to the Gap’s twisted rule set, not extending the Core’s security rule set.
Until we as a nation come to understand the nature of system-level crisis in this globalized world, not only will we remain unable to discuss security issues intelligently among ourselves and with our allies, but we will learn little from our own attempts at fostering positive system-wide change through the demonstrative use of American military power. A myopic focus on “direct threats” to U.S. national security is what gets us shocks like 9/11, or bolts seemingly from the blue.
We live in a world system. We enjoy that world system more than any other country. We also pay more—militarily—for that system than any other country in the world, and yet we debate wars as though each were somehow a transaction between ourselves and merely the country in question, as in, “What did America really get in exchange for the war in Iraq?” We are the world’s Leviathan. Every war we wage perturbs the world system on a multitude of levels. Until the way we plan war in the twenty-first century matches the complexity of the peace we live in the twenty-first century, America will remain more feared than admired for our global war on terrorism. But once that complex understanding is first achieved and then wielded through the grand strategy we pursue, America will resume its historical role as the most revolutionary force on the planet.
6 – The Global Transaction Strategy
LAST SUMMER I TOOK my kids to New York City for a weekend of sightseeing. Naturally, one of the attractions we took in was the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. You cannot tour either without being deeply impressed by the symbolism both convey of the immigrant experience that defines our nation’s history: America has long stood as the beacon of liberty to the rest of the world. It has served as the escape hatch for millions upon millions of dreams over the last two-plus centuries: religious freedom, political expression, the right to own property. It has been the place where individuals can connect talent to ambition in ways unthinkable around much of the rest of the planet. But the American dream remains fundamentally linked to a place as much as a concept: to join this party is to live within our borders, to join our citizenry, to become one of us.
Americans have long debated whether our good fortune imparts to us special obligations to share this dream with others beyond our shores. Since so many of us came to this land as a means of escaping freedom’s absence elsewhere, we typically content ourselves with the notion that America’s living example is gift enough to history—we show the way. In this manner, I will argue that America has served quite ably as globalization’s ideological wellspring: each and every day we put on display—for all to see—the almost unlimited utility of broadband economic connectivity, freedom of action within minimal rule sets, and the unbridled ambition afforded by the apparent certainty of long-term peace. Thus, the American experience speaks to globalization’s advance because we have come closest to perfecting its historical equation: the individual pursuit of happiness within free markets protected from destabilizing strife by the rule of law.
But the question remains: Does America owe the world anything more than its example? Over the Cold War we stood up to Communism and all the threats to our good life it represented, and by doing so we successfully encouraged the spread of that good life in the form of a global economy resurrected from the ashes of two world wars and expanded far beyond any previous high-water mark. This effort took several decades, roughly a hundred thousand lives, and trillions in treasure, but it has culminated in half the world’s population being invited to the same good life we have long enjoyed—the same fundamental freedoms, the same sense of security, the same belief in a future full of potential. And yet roughly one-third of humanity—more than two billion souls—remains on the outside, noses pressed to the glass. What more do we owe them?
I believe America owes them nothing more and nothing less than the same basic peace that we have long enjoyed. Not a Pax Americana, because we seek not to extend our rule but merely our rules. We claim no power over others on this basis, because to extend these rule sets is to expand the Core’s membership and enable globalization’s continued advance. It is to issue a standing invitation to all nations currently trapped within the Gap: embrace these rules and join our community. What is so special about the globalization that America has nurtured and p
rotected these seven decades is that it represents the active exportation of the same liberty we have so long enjoyed within these united states—a fundamental connectivity that empowers individual ambition through the provision of choice and thus opportunity. It is our liberty road show, or the promise of freedom made universal. What is sacred about America is not our land, but our union, and that union can and should be extended—first through collective security, then economic connectivity, and finally political community.
But many forces within the Gap are threatened by the rising connectivity engendered by globalization’s creeping advance, because it imperils their ability to control the lives of others. Believing humanity’s paths to happiness are single, and thus enforceable by all-knowing elites, these forces demand that their particular definition of the good life hold sway no matter how much violence is required, how much freedom is repressed, or how many lives are wasted. And they will constantly dangle before our weary eyes the same deceptively seductive bargain that all dictators offer: Just grant me these for my own and I will trouble you no further. It was all the Taliban in Afghanistan asked. It is all Osama bin Laden asks. It is all the forces of disconnectedness will forever ask. And to all such pacts America’s answer should always be no!
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