A World of Possibilities: President Bush has an opportunity given to very few

National Review, May 5, 2003 by John O'Sullivan

Not since Winston Churchill redrew the map of the Middle East after World War I has a Western statesman encountered such an opportunity for cartographical and strategic creativity as George W. Bush currently enjoys in the aftermath of the Iraq war. Nor does that opportunity stop with Iraq -- though it certainly starts there.

The broad lines of U.S. policy toward Iraq seem reasonably plain already. Washington has accepted that the United Nations and other "multilateral" institutions will provide humanitarian and reconstruction aid. But it would like to exclude the U.N. from any major role in the political reconstruction of the country. Anything more than that would be highly imprudent. The U.N. is simply unsuited to coping with complex and rapidly changing crises: U.N. involvement in Rwanda and the various Balkan crises resulted in agonizing delays while crucial questions were wired back to New York for final decision. In Rwanda, one such delay resulted in a massacre; in Bosnia and Kosovo, U.N. and other multilateral agencies have produced a bloated and apparently permanent aid bureaucracy rather than functioning economies. And these failures occurred even without the French, Germans, and Russians using "multilateralism" as a diplomatic weapon to frustrate U.S. policy at every turn. If the U.N. were shaping Iraq's political future, there would be endless scope for Europe's "Gang of Three" to obstruct, delay, and distort.

All the same, Washington will need more political cover for its exercise in nation-rebuilding than its acceptance of a humanitarian role for the U.N. The additional camouflage comes in the form of an Iraqi interim authority to draw up a democratic constitution and to govern the country until elections are held. Such an authority rests on the convenient democratic argument that Iraq should be governed by Iraqis rather than by the U.N. or the U.S.; but in the current unsettled climate it will rely on U.S. power and will probably not oppose American priorities. The likely result is a complicated constitution for Iraq -- combining federalism and power-sharing -- under which Iraq is divided into three regions, in each of which the governing authority has to be drawn from all the major ethnic/religious groups. Such constitutions tend to break down eventually, as in Lebanon, but they last long enough for the U.S. to make a graceful exit.

Now, the next step. Will it be Syria? Not unless the usually cautious Syrian government acts with spectacular recklessness. The U.S. has four aims for Syria: It should hand back Saddamite refugees who have taken refuge there; it should dismantle its armory of chemical and biological weapons; it should withdraw its troops from their de facto occupation of Lebanon; and it should abandon its support for terrorism. These aims are tough but they do not strike at the heart of Syrian interests. As Colin Powell has made clear, they will be pursued not by military methods but by economic and diplomatic sanctions (such as the recent announcement that the U.S. has cut off Iraqi oil going through a Syrian pipeline). And the presence of the victorious U.S. armed forces next door may persuade the Syrian Ba'athists to accept a large bribe to go along with U.S. policy.

A second war is only thinkable if the U.S. looks weak and embattled inside Iraq. Some Shiites already oppose the U.S.-sponsored interim authority; Iran is known to be assisting Shiite political groups. In a worst-case scenario, Shiite uprisings might break out, non-Iraqi radical Islamists might join them, and the U.S. might be distracted from its democratic reform program. All these hypotheticals, if realized simultaneously, might tempt Syria's inexperienced president, Bashar Assad, into resisting U.S. demands and aiding the anti-U.S. rebellion. Only in those circumstances is an extension of the Iraq war into Syria possible; and, plainly, U.S. policy does not aim to produce those circumstances.

Outside the special case of Syria, U.S. policy clearly hopes to use a stable and prosperous Iraqi democracy for its "demonstration effect" -- showing that Arab and Islamic culture is ultimately compatible with liberal democracy. This is not without risks: Iraqi democracy could fail spectacularly, as it has failed in the past. Even if democracy does succeed, it will not spread to neighboring autocracies without a political struggle by their peoples. And it might then produce radical anti-American Islamist governments -- which is why elections should be only the final stage of a long process of liberal constitutional reform.

But Bush's policy is nothing like democracy at the point of a gun; why, then, are European elites so nervous about the prospect of a series of neoconservative wars across the Middle East? To some extent, they are frightening themselves with ghosts of their own imagining. European elite opinion is not far behind Middle Eastern opinion in embracing extravagant conspiracy theories about a sinister cabal of neoconservatives dictating a reckless foreign policy to a simple-minded President Bush. Having embraced such theories, they then interpret any official U.S. statement as a step toward this rolling Armageddon. Thus, the diplomatic warnings from the administration that Syria should not harbor Saddamite refugees were treated as virtual declarations of war in the European press.