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Appointment
in Baghdad
The obstacle to moving against Iraq is mostly inertia.
By NR
Editors
From the January 28, 2002, issue, of National
Review
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 ometime
in late 2001, the "Arab street" died. There will surely
be anti-American demonstrations in the Middle East again, but the
utility of such protests as a way of warning off the U.S. from asserting
itself in the region collapsed simultaneously with the Taliban. And
thus did the chief argument against an American offensive against
the Baathist regime in Iraq fall away.
Now, the obstacle
to moving against Iraq is mostly inertia — diplomatic, military,
and intellectual. It will take time and effort to make the anti-Saddam
case to the world so that international resistance is softened up;
to plan, and to position the necessary resources for, the actual
campaign; to overcome the allure that stasis has for the Washington
bureaucracy and parts of the American foreign-policy elite. Old
Bush I hands like Brent Scowcroft, who opposed toppling even the
Taliban, will warn of the dire consequences — instability!
— of regime change in Iraq. But as Afghanistan's new president
Hamid Karzai shows, sometimes the alternative you don't know is
vastly superior to the devil you do.
The intelligence
trail from Afghanistan may be leading elsewhere, to other possible
al Qaeda sanctuaries, such as Yemen and Somalia. The military task
in those places may be less challenging than a war in Iraq, and
the work there necessary to undertake at some point anyway, so that
it makes sense to tackle them right away. (Such work would include
establishing the conditions for a new U.N.-sponsored government
in Somalia.) But the groundwork for the Iraqi campaign must begin
now, starting with the State Department's getting over its contemptuous
neglect of the Iraqi opposition. The administration ultimately cannot
shrink from its challenge in Baghdad.
While the appeal
of bin Laden's radical Islamic challenge to the West has already
been drastically diminished by his defeat in Afghanistan, Saddam
Hussein's radical Arab-nationalist challenge still awaits its final
rebuke. When his regime falls, the political — and perhaps
even literal — map of the Middle East will look different in
ways that may make it possible to consider the war on terrorism
if not won, at least far advanced.
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