Many -- including me -- have called what has begun in Iraq a "war." But this is inaccurate, and the maldescription may cause some to fail to understand what's going on, what's at stake and what's likely to happen next.
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| | | Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com). | |
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The United States is at war. We weren't aware we were at war until Sept. 11, 2001, but the war began well before then. Muslim extremists attacked Army Rangers in Somalia in 1993; the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996; our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; the USS Cole in the port of Aden in 2000 -- but we didn't connect the dots. It took a horrible slaughter on our own soil before we paid attention to the gathering danger.
We are at war with Islamic extremists who hate us because we are rich and powerful, because we don't enslave women or murder Jews. We are guilty of no provocation save our mere existence. So this is not a conflict which can be resolved by appeasement or negotiation. We must destroy them, or they will destroy us.
These Islamic extremists are found both in terror groups -- principally, but by no means exclusively al-Qaida -- and in terror-supporting states. There is a symbiotic relationship between the two.
Al-Qaida, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, etc. can exist without state support. But they cannot be very dangerous without it. By themselves, the terror groups can kill dozens, perhaps hundreds. But with the help of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, they could kill tens of thousands.
To win World War II, we had to beat both Germany and Japan, and we had to fight both simultaneously. To win the war on terror, we have to fight both the terror groups and the terror-supporting states, and we have to fight them both at once.
Major wars are a series of campaigns, each of them conducted to gain a vital steppingstone on the road to victory, but none of them sufficient by themselves to achieve victory. Afghanistan was a campaign in the war on terror, the ongoing pursuit of al-Qaida another, Iraq a third. More will follow.
Some campaigns are more important than others. To use a WWII analogy, the Afghan campaign was Guadalcanal or New Guinea -- America fighting back, blunting the enemy's offensive, giving us the momentum. Iraq, I think, will be comparable to the liberation of the Philippines -- a body blow to the enemy, one that virtually guarantees his ultimate defeat.
The disarmament of Iraq and the liberation of its people are terrific ends in themselves. But Iraq is more properly viewed as just another steppingstone.
Iraq is important for three reasons:
First, by removing Saddam, we remove not merely a serious threat to Iraq's neighbors and the world's oil supply, the terror network loses a major source of sanctuary, funding and weapons. I suspect ties between al-Qaida and Iraqi intelligence are much greater than most of us realize, but there is no point in arguing about it. We'll find out soon enough.
Second, if a reasonably democratic, reasonably pro-Western government can take hold in Iraq, it would be a major step toward draining the poisonous swamps in which terrorist "fish" swim. The more autocratic a Muslim state is, the more likely it is to breed and harbor Muslim extremists. There are no democracies in the Arab world. But if democracy takes hold in Iraq, other nations will have to follow. Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar already are making liberalizing noises.
Third, if there is a major U.S. military presence in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran will be surrounded. Iran is the first revolutionary terror state, responsible for the attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, and -- intelligence officials think -- for the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996. And Iran may be the most dangerous of the terror states. It has more than double the population of Iraq, nearly as much oil and is only a year or so away from possessing nuclear weapons.
We may not need to use military force to change Iran. The presence of democracies to the east and west may inspire the Iranian people to do the job themselves. But we will not be safe until there is regime change in Iran as well as in Iraq.
The liberation of Iraq will be neither the beginning nor the end of the war on terror. But it could mark the beginning of the end.
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