Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

  In Iraq, we are helping … to build a decent and democratic society at the center of the Middle East …. The Middle East will become a place of progress and peace or it will be an exporter of violence and terror that takes more lives in America and in other free nations. The triumph of democracy and tolerance in Iraq, in Afghanistan and beyond would be a grave setback for international terrorism. The terrorists thrive on the support of tyrants and the resentments of oppressed peoples. When tyrants fall, and resentment gives way to hope, men and women in every culture reject the ideologies of terror and turn to the pursuits of peace. Everywhere that freedom takes hold, terror will retreat.2

  LID: And what chance of success, in your view, does this crusade to reshape the Middle East really have?

  JR: Leaving aside the inherent perils of making analogies between the hypothetical future experience of Iraq and the Middle East and the past experience of Germany and Europe, the assumption seems to be that democracy is so catching that the establishment of just one big one in the Middle East will trigger a rush to emulate it. The basis on which this democratic domino theory rests has never been explicated, however. Is it hope? Neoconservative ideological conviction? How would democracy spread to the rest of the region?

  LID: Good question. Is the thinking behind the answer credible?

  JR: The problem with this new domino theory is the same as the problem with the old one: it assumes that states and societies are essentially equal in vulnerability to the “threat” (i.e., democracy in the Middle East today, Communism in Southeast Asia in the 1960s). It ignores local circumstance, societal differences, separate national histories, and cultural asymmetries.

  LID: Besides, is America really serious when it talks about wanting a spread of democracy?

  JR: The rhetoric certainly ignores the prospect of those opposed to democracy using the democratic process to seize power, as did Hitler in Germany in 1933. “One man, one vote, one time.” It was this very threat of Islamists using democracy to win power that provoked the suppression of budding democratic institutions in Algeria in the early 1990s. Indeed, fear of an Islamist electorate accounts in no small measure for the persistence of autocracy in Algeria, Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. Are U.S. strategic interests in the Muslim world really better served by hostile democracies than by friendly autocracies?

  Non-proliferation: Cooperative or Coercive

  LID: So in the midst of all this vague and frankly incoherent rhetoric surrounding the GWOT and the Iraq war, what are we really trying to accomplish?

  JR: The conflation of rogue states, terrorism, and WMD, coupled with the administration's preventive war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq for the purpose of disarming that country, make the GWOT as much a war on nuclear proliferators – at least ones the United States does not like-as it is a war against terrorism itself. Because the administration sees a nexus between terrorism and WMD, the GWOT is a global counter-proliferation war, an aggressive supplement to, perhaps even a substitute for, the arms control regime established by the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968.

  LID: What was that regime all about?

  JR: The NPT regime is essentially a bargain between nuclear “haves” and “have-nots.” In exchange for foreswearing development of nuclear weapons, the have-nots obligate the haves to provide the knowledge and assistance to develop nuclear energy for non-military purposes, and in turn the have-nots agree to have their programs inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Inspections are, however, conducted only at sites declared by the host state, thus permitting a determined violator to launch a nuclear weapons program at a secret site.

  LID: Has this approach worked?

  JR: The NPT regime and its associated efforts have been remarkably successful in retarding nuclear weapons proliferation. Since 1968, only five states have acquired nuclear weapons. Of the five, three (Israel, India, and Pakistan) were not signatories to the NPT, and one (South Africa) relinquished its weapons and joined the NPT. The fifth (North Korea) has been twice caught cheating and has now entered negotiations. Additionally, the United States has successfully encouraged several states (Argentina, Brazil, South Korea, and Taiwan) to cease work on suspected nuclear weapons programs and other states (Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine) to give up nuclear weapons they inherited from the Soviet Union. The United States has also extended nuclear deterrence to such key allies as Germany and Japan that might otherwise have felt compelled to develop their own arsenals.

  LID: So why did we depart from this successful approach?

  JR: Well, one can speculate that the 9/11 attacks, which admittedly raised the specter of nuclear-armed terrorism, afforded an already predisposed administration the political opportunity to shift to a new counter-proliferation policy based on threatened and actual preventive military action. “We will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes and terrorists to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons,” declares National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction.1 That document also states: “Effective interdiction is a critical part of the U.S. strategy to combat [proliferation of] WMD and their delivery means. We must enhance [U.S.] capabilities … to prevent the movement of WMD materials, technology, and expertise to hostile states and terrorist organizations.”2The administration is even promoting development of a new generation of small, “bunkerbusting” nuclear weapons designed to threaten or destroy rogue state underground nuclear facilities.

  LID: How successful do you think this new aggressive, military approach to non-proliferation is going to be?

  JR: It seems to me that the value of threatened or actual preventive military action may be limited to target states, like Iraq, that are incapable of either offering effective military resistance or placing at risk assets highly valued by the United States and its allies.

  LID: So what will be the result in the case of the others – i.e., the states that do have the ability, as you say, to “offer effective military resistance or place at risk assets highly valued by the United States and its allies”?

  JR: Those states may instead be deterring the United States rather than being deterred. “What North Korea shows is that deterrence is working,” observed Joseph S. Nye, Jr., in January 2003. “The only problem is that we are the ones being deterred.”1 Iraq, though dwarfed by North Korea as a pro-liferator and by Iran as a sponsor of terrorism, was selected because it was a military pushover. According to Robin Cook, the former British Foreign Minister who resigned over the decision to go to war with Iraq, “The truth is that the U.S. chose to attack Iraq not because it posed a threat but because the U.S. knew Iraq was weak and expected its military to collapse.”2

  LID: So the message that our potential enemies take away from this is that they may as well have weapons of mass destruction, since we ignore those who have them and attack those that don't.

  JR: Well, bear in mind that rogue states want WMD – especially the nuclear variety – for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is self-protection against enemies also armed or seeking to arm themselves with nuclear weapons. The United States is the greatest of those enemies. It is therefore not unreasonable to assume that rogue states view acquisition of nuclear weapons as a deterrent to U.S. military attack on them or at a very minimum as a means of raising the price of an American attack. Take Iran for an example. Iranian interest in nuclear weapons began under the Shah and was stimulated by having a hostile nuclear superpower (the Soviet Union) to the north, an aspiring hostile nuclear power (Iraq) to the west, and yet another nuclear aspirant (Pakistan) to the east. Throw in a nuclear-armed Israel and a history of violence, instability, and war in the region, and later, a U.S. declaration of Iran as “evil,” and you get a perfectly understandable explanation for Iran's nuclear ambitions.

  LID: Understandable indeed. And it would seem that one of the distinctions that our policy fails to deal with is the difference between having WMD and using them.

  JR: Right. The main issue is whether t
he United States can, via threatened preventive military action, deter rogue states from pursuing the acquisition of nuclear weapons and – failing that – whether it can militarily deprive such states of the means of doing so. There is no evidence that successful deterrence of the use of nuclear weapons in wartime can be extended to their acquisition in peacetime. On the contrary, threatened preventive war may actually encourage proliferation. Moreover, considerable disagreement surrounds the potential effectiveness of proposed new nuclear weapons designed to destroy subterranean nuclear weapons facilities. In any event, the development and certainly the use of such weapons could in the long run prove catastrophically counterproductive to the goal of halting proliferation by undermining or demolishing the NPT regime and the now universally respected moratorium on nuclear weapons testing.

  The Sane Approach to Iraq – Deterrence and Non-proliferation Agreements

  LID: So what's the “sane” answer to dealing with regimes that are, in general, hostile to our interests and that might want to obtain mass-casualty-producing weapons?

  JR: Unlike terrorist organizations, rogue states, notwithstanding administration declamations to the contrary, are subject to effective deterrence and therefore do not warrant status as potential objects of preventive war and its associated costs and risks. One does not doubt for a moment that al-Qaeda, had it possessed a deliverable nuclear weapon, would have used it on 9/11. But the record for rogue states is clear: none has ever used WMD against an adversary capable of inflicting unacceptable retaliatory damage.

  Saddam Hussein did use chemical weapons in the 1980s against Iranian infantry; however, he refrained from employing such weapons against either U.S. forces or Israel during the Gulf War in 1991, and he apparently abandoned even possession of such weapons sometime later in the decade.1 For its part, North Korea, far better armed with WMD than Saddam Hussein's Iraq, has for decades repeatedly threatened war against South Korea and the United States but has yet to initiate one.

  LID: So you're saying that these two regimes didn't act because they were being successfully deterred?

  JR: Again, I'll respond with a question. How is their inaction to be explained other than by successful deterrence? There is no way of proving this, of course, but there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein ever intended to initiate hostilities with the United States once he acquired a nuclear weapon; if anything, rogue state regimes see in such weapons a means of deterring American military action against themselves.

  LID: It seems like common sense, but is this just your opinion or do others whose opinions don't seem to run counter to “prevailing wisdom” share this perspective?

  JR: Example: Condolezza Rice, just a year before she became national security advisor, voiced confidence in deterrence as the best means of dealing with Saddam. In January of 2000 she published an article in Foreign Affairs in which she declared, with respect to Iraq, that “the first line of defense should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence – if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration.” She added that rogue states “were living on borrowed time” and that “there should be no sense of panic about them.”1 My gloss on this would be to ask: if statelessness is a terrorist enemy's “most potent protection,” then is not “stateness” a rogue state's most potent strategic liability?

  LID: It would seem to be. Speaking of our “terrorist enemies,” is there a way to approach them with realism and sanity, much the way you've outlined the approach that could have been taken towards Iraq?

  JR: Sure. We should not allow an insistence on moral clarity to trump strategic discrimination. Even if all terrorism is evil, most terrorist organizations do not threaten the United States. Many pursue local agendas that have little or no bearing on U.S. interests. Should the United States, in addition to fighting al-Qaeda, gratuitously pick fights with the Basque Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna (E.T.A. [Fatherland and Liberty]), the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers, the Provisional Wing of the Irish Republican Army, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Sendero Luminoso, Hamas, and Hezbollah? Do we want to provoke national-and regional-level terrorist organizations that have stayed out of America's way into targeting U.S. interests and even the American homeland?

  LID: Of course not. But the problem in fact lies in the nature of the organizations you just listed, doesn't it? Those groups don't believe in “terror” in the abstract, nor in wreaking havoc and striking fear in the hearts of innocent people for no reason. We've touched on that earlier. In most cases they have a specific, local, and – from their point of view – legitimate grievance, right?

  JR: As I said, most governments in the world today already regard terrorism as illegitimate. The problem is that there are countless millions of people around the world who are, or believe they are, oppressed, and have no other recourse than irregular warfare – including terrorism – to oppose oppression. They do not regard terrorism as illegitimate. Indeed, they do not regard what they are doing as terrorism. “The difference between the revolutionary and the terrorist,” Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat declared before the UN General Assembly in 1974, “lies in the reason for which he fights. For whoever stands by a just cause and fights for the freedom and liberation of his land from the invaders, the settlers and colonialists, cannot possibly be called a terrorist.”1 (Similarly, the recently executed anti-abortion terrorist Paul Hill denied that killing an abortionist was even an act of violence, much less terrorism. “I was totally justified in shooting the abortionist, because he was actually the one perpetrating the violence,” he told Jessica Stern. “I would not characterize force being used to defend the unborn as violence.”2)

  LID: But you've quoted a couple of extremists here. Is there really a coherent logic behind your understanding?

  JR: Bruce Hoffman, the world-class terrorism scholar and RAND Corporation vice president, who holds a doctorate in International Relations from Oxford, observes that “terrorists perceive themselves as reluctant warriors, driven by desperation – and lacking any viable alternative – to violence against a repressive state, a predatory rival ethnic or nationalist group, or an unresponsive international order.”3 Point being, for the Hamas suicide bomber, no Israeli is innocent; all Israelis are enemies, and to blow them up in buses and discos is an heroic act of war against a hated oppressor. As long as irregular warfare, including terrorism, remains the only avenue of action open to the politically despondent and the militarily impotent, it will continue to be practiced regardless of how many governments view it as illegitimate. Terrorism can be a logical strategic choice for those who have no attractive alternatives.1 It is well and good to counsel those with grievances to seek political solutions, but this is hardly useful advice if there is no political process available for doing so.

  Parting Thoughts

  LID: So what does the future hold, in your view?

  JR: If the U.S. insists on continuing to view its effort in Iraq as a component in the GWOT (President Bush, in his September 7, 2003, address to the nation called Iraq “the central front” of the GWOT2), then it is certainly the largest component in terms of monetary cost, military manpower committed, and strategic risk. The sustainability of the GWOT therefore hinges very significantly on the sustainability of present U.S. policy in Iraq. The question then, is the following: will the American people and their elected representatives go the distance in Iraq?

  LID: That indeed is the question. Before we let you go, Professor, give us, in summary, your parting thought on the strategic viability of the “war on terror.”

  JR: Certainly. The global war on terrorism as presently defined and conducted is strategically unfocused, promises much more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate U.S. military and other resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security. The United States may be able to defeat, even destroy, al-Qaeda, but it cannot rid the world of terrorism, much less evil.

  1. Jessica Stern, “How
America Created a Terrorist Haven,” New York Times, August 20, 2003, online.

  2. Quoted in John Walcott, “Some in Administration Uneasy Over Bush Speech,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 19, 2003, online.

  1. See Joint Publication 1–02, DoD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense), April 12, 2002, pp. 333, 336.

  1. National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (Washington, D.C.: The White House), February 2003, p. 15.

  2. Ibid., pp. 23–24.

  3. Nicholas Lemann, “The War on What?” The New Yorker, September 16, 2002, p. 41.

  1. D. Robert Worley, Waging Ancient War: Limits on Preemptive Force (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College), February 2003, p. 8.

  2. Bruce Hoffman, “Defining Terrorism,” in Russell D. Howard and Reid L. Sawyer, eds., Terrorism and Counterterrorism: Understanding the New Security Environment (Guilford, Conn.: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, 2003), pp. 19–20.