Notre Dame News | Notre Dame News | News

(Opinion): An Anxious Anniversary

2004-03-20T19:00:00-05:00

What a difference a year makes. Last year’s Washington consensus about Iraq as a weapons-laden, imminent threat to U.S. security has now given way to a presidentially-appointed investigation of why intelligence about Iraq was wrong. U.S. citizens were told that Iraq was the next battleground for the war on terror. But while winning the war, US war planners failed to anticipate the terror tactics that would cost us the peace. After touting the virtues of a coalition of the willing and condemning the United Nations, we now hope the UN can supervise a political transition in Iraq. This is not the stuff of a celebratory anniversary, but a time for national scrutiny of a policy moving from bad to worse.p. Any critical re-examination must begin with the intelligence debacle. Thus far the pundits have only asked how and why Washington kept seeing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) where there were none. The more relevant question is why politicians, war planners and the press so consistently neglected to calculate the effects of our own extremely successful and sometimes punishingly brutal policy of economic strangulation and weapons embargo that crippled Iraq for more than a decade. The sanctions system, and the UN intrusive inspections which destroyed labs and real materiel from 1991-98, actually worked. But when President Bush was presenting essentially 1990 estimates of Iraqi weapons capabilities, few demanded the Administration to calculate in the reality that we had already cut off Saddam at the knees.

A second dilemma at this one-year mark is the simplistic language and analysis that the administration employs to explain the violence facing our troops. Preferring to label all attacks as ?terrorist,? the administration has obfuscated the scope and nature of the enemy and confused terrorism as a tactic with terrorism as ideology. Without question, much of the Iraqi resistance still comes from remnants of the Baath party. A much smaller minority than the administration would have us believe, comes from outsiders and Jihadists. And it is now probable that some degree of alliance exists between the two groups.

Continually absent from Pentagon presentations, however, is the daily reality that a growing number of Iraqis, some of whom had no love for Saddam, are shooting and bombing American troops. Some do so as revenge violence because of ?excesses? that victimized members of their families or communities have experienced during what they now see as an American occupation. Others, faced with unemployment and a downward life spiral, become temporary mercenaries and accept payment for planting and detonating road side bombs. They are willing to kill their fellow Iraqis as well. And all of this is occurring before, God forbid, one of Iraq’s ethnic or religious groups decide that only violence will accomplish the goals they were not able to realize through some other means in a country still sorting through its political future.

The resiliency and diversity of the resistance one year into Iraq exposes the unwillingness? or the inability ? of the administration to recognize the complex security dilemma that would exist after victory. While some Pentagon personnel tried to raise this issue before the war, they were shouted down by a Secretary of Defense who was more anxious to boast a ?coalition of the willing? and to ridicule European allies, than to recognize the need for an additional 30-40,000 troops on the ground who would subdue murderous gangs, discover bomb factories and secure economic reconstruction projects. The problem we had in attempting to protect museums, libraries, and weapons depots as troops entered Baghdad is still with us one year later. We simply don’t have enough troops on the ground to cope effectively with the security threat. And we rejected both before and after the official war opportunities for engaging either long-time allies or a Security Council which might have provided these.

War anniversaries inevitably come with messages about the lessons of war. One of the more disturbing of those being touted by the Administration involves serious non-proliferation concerns. We are being told that pre-emptive militancy in Iraq has cowed the Libyan and Iranian governments into compliance with WMD controls that they have resisted until now. Similar to the intelligence failure in Iraq, the Administration refuses to accept hard evidence that explains the truth. A combination of long term economic sanctions, political engagement of Europeans, and as the Administration should know -some tough, backroom diplomacy with the US itself produced Libyan and Iranian compliance. Neither the Iraq war, nor the threat of a future war led these nations to more positive behavior.

On this first anniversary of the Iraq war we must reassess our intelligence capabilities, our security needs, and the way we define the character of the enemy during this post-war phase. Any potential for success we may have in Iraq continues to fall victim to rather stubborn illusions and an ideology that we are a great power conducting a war of national liberation. The reality is that we are fighting in a country where confusion and chaos often are the order of the day. This reality demands a sober scrutiny, not a xenophobic celebration.

George A. Lopez is director of policy studies and senior fellow at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace 91��Ƶ at the University of Notre Dame. He writes frequently about ethics and the use of force.

TopicID: 4386

(Editorial/opinion): U.S. repeats past mistakes

2003-11-06T19:00:00-05:00

Iraq, like Vietnam, already has become a quagmire for the United States, with few easy exit options. Driving both Vietnam and Iraq: a set of unquestioned, flawed assumptions held by a president and his policy team. Our latest quagmire is sustained by four familiar, misguided beliefs.p. — Our battle there is about more than this war. Fighting in Vietnam was justified as the key to winning the war against a larger, more ominous enemy: communism. Victory in Iraq is presented as the key to winning the war on terrorism. In reality, in both cases, prolonged military commitment derailed real progress in achieving those wider goals. Worse yet, the military and policing operations confirmed communist — and now terrorist — ideology about our imperial intentions. And it boosted the enemy’s recruitment of new fighters.p. — We know the enemies and their purpose. Just as we first saw only an invading North Vietnam and not until later a home-grown Viet Cong in South Vietnam, we now see only Saddam Hussein’s supporters and foreign terrorists. Both assessments ignore the growing numbers willing to fight the U.S., which they see as an occupying power. Over time, our actions swell their numbers.p. — We remain wedded to the commitment to see the job through. When events on the ground go badly, leaders don’t re-examine their assumptions about goals and means. Instead, they reorganize who is in charge of policy and resolve to remain on course — even as the course is becoming lost in a fog of uncertainty and opposition.p. — This effort is not about politics. As in Vietnam, the military mission in Iraq runs into a presidential campaign. This increases the imperative not to fail, not to withdraw before Iraq is fully stable and to blame failure on others. The result: a quagmire.p. We must replace these dead-end mind-sets with a critical and frank discussion about new options.p. In Iraq, the U.S. needs to turn reconstruction over to the United Nations, reconstitute the Iraqi army and draw down its troops. That’s the only way to prevent an Iraq syndrome from plaguing us for decades.p. George A. Lopez is director of policy studies at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace 91��Ƶ at the University of Notre Dame.

TopicID: 3941

(Opinion): Perils of Bush's pre-emptive war doctrine

2003-10-02T20:00:00-04:00

Another view: George A. Lopezp. In a speech last week before the Air Force Association, Vice President Dick Cheney reasserted the Bush administration’s doctrine of the pre-emptive use of military force against terrorists and those who harbor them. Unlike his remarks earlier in the week linking Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks, this major pronouncement attracted no critical comment. The silence should be dismaying to all concerned about the future of U.S. foreign policy.p. The Bush administration moved the “new” doctrine of pre-emptive war to the center of U.S. security policy in the aftermath of 9/11. With the Iraq war as test case, President Bush summarily rejected the successful deterrent that coercive economic sanctions, intrusive inspections and strangling containment had provided the U.S. Quick military victory reinforced thinking that pre-emptive force is optimal in dealing with tyranny, terrorism, weapons proliferation and other threats to U.S. security.p. Unfortunately, neither pundits, politicians nor journalists are willing to consider the failure to find prohibited weapons in Iraq as sufficient grounds for challenging the credibility of pre-emptive war policy. But beyond this reality, other reasons for questioning pre-emption abound.p. First, pre-emption is neither new nor innovative as a response to 9/11. Rather, it is a once-discredited notion championed by then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz in the last days of the first Bush administration. When excerpts of his draft document outlining plans for an action against Iraq were published in The New York Times, an embarrassed administration shelved the plan.p. Wolfowitz’s resurrection combined with post-9/11 national numbing to result in the re-emergence of pre-emption. Only Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., appears concerned by the constitutional controversy pre-emption begs regarding congressional authority to wage war.p. Second, pre-emption actually imperils U.S. efforts to defeat al-Qaida and like-minded terrorists who threaten our way of life. Its aura has made the U.S. hesitant to use economic and diplomatic means to engage states amenable to change and fuller compliance with antiterrorism mandates. Trapped by prior, tired labels of “rogue” states and relying on the threat of pre-emptive attack, the administration has neither seized nor created opportunities to strike a new relationship with Iran or Syria when openings with each have been possible.p. Similarly, the administration’s ever-expanding definition of terrorism has obfuscated the very different environments from which terrorists emerge and operate. To win a war on terrorism does not require an attack on all terrorist groups everywhere. In fact, the metaphor of an open-ended war has obscured the fact that suppressing terrorism will take years of patient, unspectacular civilian cooperation with other countries in areas such as intelligence sharing, police work, tracing financial flows and border controls.p. U.S. policy needs less grandstanding about pre-emptive military strikes and more analysis that distinguishes among groups whose terror is based on local, historic and negotiable political struggles apart from those aimed at America.p. Instead, the tone in Washington is that those attacking U.S. troops in Iraq, al-Qaida, Hamas and Hezbollah are all one and the same. A successful campaign against the terrorism that most threatens us will require coordinated international efforts to bankrupt terrorist networks and the pursuit of foreign policies that address the grievances that motivate political extremism.p. Finally, a strategy of pre-emption wreaks havoc on the international order, especially when other nations adopt the same principle. In October 2002, Russia declared a policy of pre-emption against Chechen rebels. And on Wednesday, the defense minister stated that Russia would use a pre-emptive strike if its national interests demanded it. In April 2003, India argued that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and support of terrorists in Kashmir made it a more suitable target for pre-emptive attack than Iraq.p. The use of military force is sometimes necessary, especially in dealing with extremist terrorism. But administration strategies of muscular unilateralism and pre-emption have become a stubborn ideology that both skews the meaning of recent events and eschews a variety of proven multilateral means for advancing U.S. security.p. The new strategy has aroused animosity abroad and reduced the trust and cooperation of U.S. allies. In Iraq we see how pre-emption breeds resentment, fosters countervailing coalitions and overburdens resources. Pre-emption’s irony is that the new reliance on unilateral military force makes the United States less, not more, secure.p. p. Lopez is director of policy studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace 91��Ƶ at the University of Notre Dame.

TopicID: 3956

U.S. must accept outside help to secure Iraq

2003-08-26T20:00:00-04:00

The terrible bombings of the UN compound and oil and water facilities in Iraq last week bring home a bitter irony: After winning the war impressively, the United States is in danger of losing the peace. Understanding the increased violence and possible counter-measures is a formidable task.p. Many of the early attacks on U.S. forces came from Baath Party loyalists. But U.S. military sweeps and actions since May have led Iraqis who had no taste for Saddam Hussein to blame Americans for the arrest or death of loved ones. The absence of internal security, electricity, medical care and jobs adds to their willingness to take action against the occupiers. Moreover, the borders have become a sieve as al-Qaida and other Islamic operatives see Iraq as an attractive battleground against America.p. Whatever their prewar disagreements, many nations, and the UN itself, support the same ends as U.S. policy: a safe, democratic and prosperous Iraq. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has reiterated that the UN is poised to take a more pronounced role in bettering the security, political and economic situation within Iraq. Not to take advantage of this option now, in the wake of shared U.S.-UN losses, will be to condemn U.S. efforts to failure.p. The challenge before the Bush administration is to provide the visionary leadership needed to harness this international consensus in a manner that produces real resources for change on the ground in Iraq. This will demand that the president recognize the benefits, if not the necessity, of substantial multilateral commitments in Iraq. Security needs in Baghdad require Indian, German and other army regulars who have training in counterterrorism and internal security, not more U.S. reservists.p. One of the specific steps the United States can undertake with UN and European Union assistance involves the establishment of a major border-monitoring program. The models for such a migration and materiel control system exist within recent U.S. and UN experience. Working with Canada and Mexico, the United States has established a ‘’smart border’’ system that, among other innovations, features electronic readable passes.p. Between 1993 and 1995, French customs agents trained and worked alongside local East Europeans in creating the Sanctions Assistance Missions to stifle contraband and mercenary movements into the former Yugoslavia. To engage the neighboring Arab states and European Union agents alongside Iraqis in such work would be a small but significant step toward security in an increasingly chaotic environment.p. In addition, such a monitoring program can be a first, necessary step to a fuller engagement of UN members in the complex security and development tasks faced in Iraq. The universal empathy for murdered UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and others injured and killed in their humanitarian work can provide the impetus for the great powers to mend fences, minimize past differences and work collaboratively on a shared and effective agenda.p. Nothing in a plan to internationalize the reconstruction of Iraq in this manner smacks of defeatism. Rather, it is a smart and timely policy that chooses to accomplish national objectives via international means. It recognizes that a number of nations stand ready to join a force that is multinational in authority and composition. It acts on the recent 97-0 vote of the U.S. Senate that the president seek NATO and UN support for postwar transition in Iraq.p. No one can claim that an Iraq that was under UN administration could have prevented the bombings of this past week. But only a move now to expand international involvement in the security and rebuilding of the country will guarantee that these attacks wane and a new Iraq emerges.p. p. George A. Lopez is director of Policy 91��Ƶ at the Kroc Institute for International Peace 91��Ƶ at the University of Notre Dame.

TopicID: 3967