The Resort to Force

As Colin Powell explained the National Security Strategy (NSS) of September 2002 to a hostile audience at the World Economic Forum, Washington has a “sovereign right to use force to defend ourselves” from nations that possess WMD and cooperate with terrorists, the official pretexts for invading Iraq. The collapse of the pretexts is well known, but there has been insufficient attention to its most important consequence: the NSS was effectively revised to lower the bars to aggression. The need to establish ties to terror was quietly dropped. More significant, Bush and colleagues declared the right to resort to force even if a country does not have WMD or even programs to develop them. It is sufficient that it have the “intent and ability” to do so

. Just about every country has the ability, and intent is in the eye of the beholder. The official doctrine, then, is that anyone is subject to overwhelming attack. Colin Powell carried the revision even a step further. The president was right to attack Iraq because Saddam not only had “intent and capability” but had “actually used such horrible weapons against his enemies in Iran and against his own people”– with continuing support from Powell and his associates, he failed to add, following the usual convention. Condoleezza Rice gave a similar version. With such reasoning as this, who is exempt from attack? Small wonder that, as one Reuters report put it, “if Iraqis ever see Saddam Hussein in the dock, they want his former American allies shackled beside him.”
In the desperate flailing to contrive justifications as one pretext after another collapsed, the obvious reason for the invasion was conspicuously evaded by the administration and commentators: to establish the first secure military bases in a client state right at the heart of the world’s major energy resources, understood since World War II to be a “stupendous source of strategic power” and expected to become even more important in the future. There should have been little surprise at revelations that the administration intended to attack Iraq before 9-11, and downgraded the “war on terror” in favor of this objective. In internal discussion, evasion is unnecessary. Long before they took office, the private club of reactionary statists had recognized that “the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” With all the vacillations of policy since the current incumbents first took office in 1981, one guiding principle remains stable: the Iraqi people must not rule Iraq.
The 2002 National Security Strategy, and its implementation in Iraq, are widely regarded as a watershed in international affairs. “The new approach is revolutionary,” Henry Kissinger wrote, approving of the doctrine but with tactical reservations and a crucial qualification: it cannot be “a universal principle available to every nation.” The right of aggression is to be reserved for the US and perhaps its chosen clients. We must reject the most elementary of moral truisms, the principle of universality — a stand usually concealed in professions of virtuous intent and tortured legalisms.
As Colin Powell explained the National Security Strategy (NSS) of September 2002 to a hostile audience at the World Economic Forum, Washington has a “sovereign right to use force to defend ourselves” from nations that possess WMD and cooperate with terrorists, the official pretexts for invading Iraq. The collapse of the pretexts is well known, but there has been insufficient attention to its most important consequence: the NSS was effectively revised to lower the bars to aggression. The need to establish ties to terror was quietly dropped. More significant, Bush and colleagues declared the right to resort to force even if a country does not have WMD or even programs to develop them. It is sufficient that it have the “intent and ability” to do so. Just about every country has the ability, and intent is in the eye of the beholder. The official doctrine, then, is that anyone is subject to overwhelming attack. Colin Powell carried the revision even a step further. The president was right to attack Iraq because Saddam not only had “intent and capability” but had “actually used such horrible weapons against his enemies in Iran and against his own people”– with continuing support from Powell and his associates, he failed to add, following the usual convention. Condoleezza Rice gave a similar version. With such reasoning as this, who is exempt from attack? Small wonder that, as one Reuters report put it, “if Iraqis ever see Saddam Hussein in the dock, they want his former American allies shackled beside him.”
In the desperate flailing to contrive justifications as one pretext after another collapsed, the obvious reason for the invasion was conspicuously evaded by the administration and commentators: to establish the first secure military bases in a client state right at the heart of the world’s major energy resources, understood since World War II to be a “stupendous source of strategic power” and expected to become even more important in the future. There should have been little surprise at revelations that the administration intended to attack Iraq before 9-11, and downgraded the “war on terror” in favor of this objective. In internal discussion, evasion is unnecessary. Long before they took office, the private club of reactionary statists had recognized that “the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” With all the vacillations of policy since the current incumbents first took office in 1981, one guiding principle remains stable: the Iraqi people must not rule Iraq.
The 2002 National Security Strategy, and its implementation in Iraq, are widely regarded as a watershed in international affairs. “The new approach is revolutionary,” Henry Kissinger wrote, approving of the doctrine but with tactical reservations and a crucial qualification: it cannot be “a universal principle available to every nation.” The right of aggression is to be reserved for the US and perhaps its chosen clients. We must reject the most elementary of moral truisms, the principle of universality — a stand usually concealed in professions of virtuous intent and tortured legalisms.
Arthur Schlesinger agreed that the doctrine and implementation were “revolutionary,” but from a quite different standpoint. As the first bombs fell on Baghdad, he recalled FDR’s words following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, “a date which will live in infamy.” Now it is Americans who live in infamy, he wrote, as their government adopts the policies of imperial Japan. He added that George Bush had converted a “global wave of sympathy” for the US into a “global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism.” A year later, “discontent with America and its policies had intensified rather than diminished.” Even in Britain support for the war had declined by a third.
As predicted, the war increased the threat of terror. Middle East expert Fawaz Gerges found it “simply unbelievable how the war has revived the appeal of a global jihadi Islam that was in real decline after 9-11.” Recruitment for the Al Qaeda networks increased, while Iraq itself became a “terrorist haven” for the first time. Suicide attacks for the year 2003 reached the highest level in modern times; Iraq suffered its first since the thirteenth century. Substantial specialist opinion concluded that the war also led to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
As the anniversary of the invasion approached, New York’s Grand Central Station was patrolled by police with submachine guns, a reaction to the March 11 Madrid train bombings that killed 200 people in Europe’s worst terrorist crime. A few days later, the Spanish electorate voted out the government that had gone to war despite overwhelming popular opposition. Spaniards were condemned for appeasing terrorism by voting for withdrawing troops from Iraq in the absence of UN authorization — that is, for taking a stand rather like that of 70 percent of Americans, who called for the UN to take the leading role in Iraq.
Bush assured Americans that “The world is safer today because, in Iraq, our coalition ended a regime that cultivated ties to terror while it built weapons of mass destruction.” The president’s handlers know that every word is false, but they also know that lies can become Truth, if repeated insistently enough.
There is broad agreement among specialists on how to reduce the threat of terror –keeping here to the subcategory that is doctrinally acceptable, their terror against us — and also on how to incite terrorist atrocities, which may become truly horrendous. The consensus is well articulated by Jason Burke in his study of the Al Qaeda phenomenon, the most detailed and informed investigation of this loose array of radical Islamists for whom bin Laden is hardly more than a symbol (a more dangerous one after he is killed, perhaps, becoming a martyr who inspires others to join his cause). The role of Washington’s current incumbents, in their Reaganite phase, in creating the radical Islamist networks is well known. Less familiar is their tolerance of Pakistan’s slide toward radical Islamist extremism and its development of nuclear weapons.
As Burke reviews, Clinton’s 1998 bombings of Sudan and Afghanistan created bin Laden as a symbol, forged close relations between him and the Taliban, and led to a sharp increase in support, recruitment, and financing for Al Qaeda, which until then was virtually unknown. The next major contribution to the growth of Al Qaeda and the prominence of bin Laden was Bush’s bombing of Afghanistan following September 11, undertaken without credible pretext as later quietly conceded. As a result, bin Laden’s message “spread among tens of millions of people, particularly the young and angry, around the world,” Burke writes, reviewing the increase in global terror and the creation of “a whole new cadre of terrorists” enlisted in what they see as a “cosmic struggle between good and evil,” a vision shared by bin Laden and Bush. As noted, the invasion of Iraq had the same effect.