Shoot First

As the United States creeps toward war with Iraq, there are all kinds of reasons for dread—the prospects of renewed terrorism, heavy casualties, higher gas prices and a double-dip recession. Dread isn’t reason enough to avoid hard choices necessary for the security of the nation and the peace of the world. But there is a tougher question worth considering: Do our leaders know where they are taking us?

It’s difficult to think of anything good to say about Saddam Hussein, which is the primary argument that the Bush administration has on its side in the looming conflict. But decisions of war and peace have to rest on more solid foundations than general distaste, and while there are good reasons to oppose the current regime in Iraq, President Bush has yet to articulate the outcome he wants after the war that may come. That is the same question not thoroughly considered during the Gulf conflict, and the failure to do so at that time represents the cause of the current predicament.

Bush has made it clear that he wants Hussein out of power—or at least that he wants to neutralize Hussein’s power to menace the rest of the world. But like his father during the Gulf conflict, the current president seems ready to start swinging the axe without first thinking about where the tree will fall.

Back during the Gulf crisis, an initially reluctant Bush was bullied into a stern response by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who was eager to prove that she was tougher than Neville Chamberlain. Bush ultimately pursued the war aggressively and masterfully, first deploying troops to stop further Iraqi moves into Saudi Arabia and then unleashing a counteroffensive to drive the Iraqis back out of Kuwait. Then, with victory at hand, Bush and his national security advisors came apart at the realization that events were moving too quickly and too decisively toward a crushing Iraqi defeat.

In quick order, the Bush team called off the U.S. offensive, unilaterally declaring a cease fire before U.S. forces had completed their encirclement of the collapsing Iraqi army, allowing the escape of many Iraqi troops. When the field commander, General Norman Schwarzkopf, expressed mystification at the decision, the White House slurred him as suffering from “camera fatigue” from too many press conferences.

The decision clearly represented a realization that an utterly defeated Iraq would create a power vacuum in the region, leaving Iran, with its radical Islamist regime, as the most powerful nation in the region. National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft has acknowledged that the administration wanted to maintain Iraq as a counterweight to Iran. The question is, why didn’t they think of that before they deployed troops in the Gulf?

The more unforgivable round of administration bumbling followed. Bush then urged the Iraqis to rise up and throw out Saddam Hussein. He hoped that a military coup would take down the Iraqi leader. What happened instead was a series of bloody revolts, which were quashed by the Iraqi military after the U.S. blessed their use of attack helicopters in the no-fly zones. Bush had never wanted a popular revolt, which would have proved destabilizing. The various rebel factions paid the price of believing the American president, although the Kurds at least got some late-arriving protection and some fragile de facto autonomy for their suffering.

The result of it all was the maintenance of an amoral power-politics equilibrium, just barely stable because the balance in the region hinged on Saddam Hussein’s restraint. The new Bush no longer believes in the Iraqi leader’s restraint, and the president’s current policy calls for pulling that key element out of the house of cards left in place after the last war. It would be more reassuring if he could describe an acceptable outcome instead of just dealing out a game of 52 Pickup.

Of course, the president is not really asking any of us for our opinion as he moves forward. He may even have a postwar vision—although his prior comments about nation building and the desultory efforts in Afghanistan don’t offer much basis for optimism.

We may get our best glimpse at where the administration is trying to go when the U.S. finally issues its ultimatum. The term is archaic, although in a prior age, it still represented the “legal” way to go to war—as opposed to the Dec. 7 style popularized by the Japanese. According to traditional diplomacy, a nation believing it had reasons for war would issue a final set of demands to an adversary nation with a firm deadline for compliance. Failure to accept the terms became casus belli.

Bush won’t call it an ultimatum, but there will be a last and final offer when American forces are ready to strike. It may simply call for Hussein’s resignation or for some lesser scheme of armed inspections. Such an approach would suggest that nothing has really changed in our vision of gulf policy—except the names, to protect the guilty. At the other extreme, the U.S. could demand some program for a moderate Democratic Iraqi future—the kind of thing that could make us all proud to be Americans, if it didn’t kill us first.