The Road Better Not Taken
A war against Iraq could be the most
catastrophic blunder in U.S. history
by Jack Beatty
he imminent U.S. attack on Iraq will be the first war in our history
in which success is as fearful a prospect as failure. When we
"win," our troubles will just begin. How we win will
determine their gravity.
According to a recent CBS news report, the Pentagon plans to strike
Bagdhad with 300 cruise missiles in early March, to be followed
twenty-four-hours later by 300 more. American land forces will ring
Bagdhad, holding it under siege while tank detachments probe into the
city to engage Saddam's praetorian guard—this according to informed
military analysts. We reserve the right to use nuclear weapons against
the Iraqis should they attack our forces with chemical weapons, Andrew
Card, the White House chief of staff, recently warned. The Pentagon
says it might use nuclear weapons in any case, to blow up deep Iraqi
bunkers. These leaks and statements may be a form of "psy-ops,"
calculated to foment a military coup to topple Saddam Hussein. If they
do indicate how we will "win," however, then Michael
O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institute may be conservative in estimating
that Gulf War II could inflict from several to twenty-five thousand
Iraqi civilian casualties and from several hundred to five thousand
U.S. casualties. "The nightmare scenario," retired General
Joseph Hoar, the former commander in chief of U.S. Central Command,
told a Senate committee in September, "is that six Iraqi
Republican Guard divisions and six heavy divisions with several
hundred artillery pieces defend the city of Bagdhad. The result would
be high casualties on both sides as well as in the civilian community.
U.S. forces would certainly prevail but at what cost ... as the rest
of the world watches while we bomb and have artillery rounds go off in
densely populated Iraqi neighborhoods?" A leaked UN contingency
planning report predicted that as many as 500,000 Iraqi civilians
could be injured or have their health impaired by city fighting.
This humanitarian disaster will be incalculably worse if Saddam uses
chemical weapons against his own people, either purposely or
inadvertently while trying to use them against us. He has used them on
his people before and, facing death in the Battle of Bagdhad and
wanting to raise the political cost of victory for the U.S., some
strategists fear he might do so again. If the Arab "street"
believes that the Mossad was behind September 11, they will accept the
jihadi propaganda that the U.S., not Saddam, gassed Iraqi
civilians. The U.S. would share moral responsibility for this infamy,
a foreseen result of our attack.
The rubble of "victory" will still be smoking when the
U.S. taxpayer inherits the burdens of occupation. In a comprehensive
analysis of the economic costs of war, William Nordhaus, a Yale
economist, gives a range of bad news, starting from $100 billion, if
all goes well, to as much as $1.9 trillion if nothing goes well and
the occupation drags on. U.S. troops never seem to come home—they
remain in Germany and Japan fifty-seven years after the end of World
War II and ten years after the end of the Cold War; they remain in
Korea fifty years after the end of the Korean War; they remain in
Saudi Arabia ten years after the end of the Gulf War; they remain in
Bosnia five years after the end of the Yugoslav civil war. And they
could remain in Iraq for years, targets of terrorist attack and proof
of "U.S. imperialism."
Pentagon idealists bridle at that characterization. They see the
occupation making Iraq the center of democratic contagion in the
autocratic Middle East. One commentator has termed this
"democratic imperialism." Thomas Friedman of The New York
Times imagines the "seeds" of democracy spreading out
from Iraq and over time ending the jihadi terrorism against the
West produced by the autocratic regimes. The future, then, would seem
to be a race between democracy and imperialism. Which will sprout
first, Friedman's democratic seeds or the seeds of anti-imperialism?
People interpret the present in the light of their past. The Arab
Middle East has no experience of democracy but it has more than a
hundred years' experience of Western imperialism. Friedman's seeds
must push themselves up against the weight of history and memory.
"I doubt you could find one person who would agree that the
Americans are coming just for the sake of the region and they want to
bring democracy," Khaled M. Batarfi, a Saudi Arabian newspaper
editor, told The New York Times last week. "We think it's
oil. We think it's Israel. We think it's control. They want a police
station in Baghdad like they have in Kabul."
While democracy is germinating in Iraq, U.S. forces will be searching
for evidence of weapons of mass destruction to retroactively justify
our attack. What if they don't find any, or only a remnant decaying
supply of no military utility? What if Saddam destroyed them, and his
stonewalling of the UN weapons' inspectors was a bluff that
backfired—by provoking the U.S. attack that the bluff was meant to
deter? What if, as Senator Richard Lugar asked last summer, the
successor Iraqi regime wants to preserve Saddam's weapons and hides
them from us? Or what if, as the CIA predicted last fall, Saddam,
concluding that a U.S. attack was inevitable, gave quantities of
chemical and biological weapons to terrorists to attack the United
States? In that case George W. Bush will have killed who knows how
many human beings for worse than nothing, making his war not only a
crime but a blunder, potentially the most catastrophic in American
history
Copyright © 2003 by The Atlantic Monthly
Group
