Discussion Group Report

"Going to war with Iraq would mean shouldering all the responsibilities of an occupying power the moment victory was achieved. These would include running the economy, keeping domestic peace, and protecting Iraq's borders--and doing it all for years, or perhaps decades. Are we ready for this long-term relationship?" asks James Fallows in his article, "The Fifty-First State?" in the November 2002 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

He says that some of America's wars of the past generation--in Grenada, Haiti, Panama, the Persian Gulf, and Afghanistan--have turned out far better--tactically at least--than many experts predicted. But when fighting, not organized armies, but stateless foes, as in Vietnam and "Black Hawk Down" in Somalia, we have underestimated our vulnerabilities. In the Vietnam War the public couldn't imagine how badly combat would turn out for the United States. Wars change history in ways no one can foresee, as in the1967 Six-Day War between Egypt and Israel. No one who had accurately foreseen what World War I would bring could rationally have decided to let combat begin. Retired Air Force General Merrill McPeak has misgivings about an invasion of Iraq, largely because of how hard it is to imagine the full consequences of America's first purely pre-emptive war--and our first large war since the Spanish-American in which we would have few or no allies.

"The day after a war ended," says Fallows, "Iraq would become America's problem, for practical and political reasons. Because we would have destroyed the political order and done physical damage in the process. The claims on American resources and attention would be comparable to those of any American state. Conquered Iraqis would turn to the U.S. government for emergency relief, civil order, economic reconstruction, and protection of their borders. They wouldn't be able to vote in U.S. elections...But they would be part of us. "

According to dozens of knowledgeable people whom Fallows interviewed before writing his article, America, after defeating Iraq, would face the following problems:

What would Saddam, facing defeat and perhaps death, have decided to do with the stockpiled weapons of mass destruction? All Pentagon battle plans leaked to the media assume Iraq would use chemical weapons against U.S. troops. Both of the chemical weapons thought to be in Iraqi arsenals--"GB" and "VX" can be absorbed through the lungs, the skin or the eyes and can cause death from amounts as small as one drop, GB quickly and VX less quickly. U.S. troops would be equipped with protective suits, which are cumbersome and retain heat, a fact that is used to argue for not attacking in the summer. Also, Saddam might use chemical weapons strategically, not just tactically, to lash out beyond his borders, in particular, against Israel. During the Gulf War Iraq launched 42 SCUDS against Israel, but Israel, under Yitzhak Shamir, did not respond, complying with a U.S. request. Fallows remarks, "nothing in Ariel Sharon's long career suggests he could be similarly constrained. A U.S. occupation of Iraq could begin with the rest of the Middle East at war around it.

Immediately afterward many Iraqis would be desperate. "You are going to start out with a humanitarian crisis," says William Nash, a retired two-star army general, who is on the Council on Foreign Relations and served in Bosnia and Kosovo. "In the drive to Baghdad, you are going to do a lot of damage. Either you will destroy a great deal of infrastructure by trying to isolate the battlefield--or they will destroy it, trying to delay your advance." Postwar commerce and recovery in Iraq will depend, of course, on roads, the rail system, air fields and bridges across the Tigris and the Euphrates--facilities that both sides will have incentives to blow up.

"So you've got to find the village elders and say, 'Let's get things going. Where are the wells? I can bring you food, but bringing you enough water is really hard.' Right away you need food, water, and shelter--these people have to survive. Because you started the war, you have accepted a moral responsibility for them. And you may well have obliterated the social and political structure that had been providing these services." Most of the military and diplomatic figures Fallow interviewed stressed the same thing. It has been estimated that the cost of restoring the infrastructure would be $16 billion dollars for security and $1 billion for reconstruction--presumably all from the United States, because of the lack of allies in the war.

It would be a problem finding both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, both of whom would be out there achieving heroic mythical status in the Arab world just by surviving. McPeak says, "My concern is that he [Saddam] is smarter individually that our bureaucracy is collectively. Bureaucracies tend to dumb things down."

Some other huge problems would be police control, manpower, intelligence, forming a government, territorial integrity, de-Nazification and loya-jirgation. Simply manning a full occupation force would be a challenge requiring 50,000 soldiers. There would be little help from allies. In the short term there would be a need for people trained in setting up courts and police systems, restoring infrastructure, and generally leading a war-recovery effort. The occupying force would face the challenge of understanding politics and rivalries in a country whose language few Americans speak. Inability to communicate could be disastrous. Following the Gulf War there were some near riots among Iraqi prisoners in American camps when it was thought Saddam's agents had infiltrated. Iraq has no obvious sources of new leadership such as Corazon Aquino was in the Philippines, Charles de Gaulle in postwar France, Nelson Mandela in South Africa and Kim dae-Jung in South Korea. The former monarchy is too shallow-rooted to survive reintroduction, and Saddam has had time to eliminate nearly all sources of internal resistance. There appears to be no one of promise from the leadership of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group which survives on money from the U.S. government. The first major test of the occupiers' exercise of power may come in protecting Iraq's territorial integrity. Iraq has grown out of three provinces which existed under the Ottoman Empire. One, Baghdad, is the stronghold of Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority, comprising only 20% of the population, which has dominated the army and government since the Empire collapsed. The second, Mosul, is the stronghold of Kurds, who make up 15-20% of the population. Through the years they have both warred against and sought common cause with other Kurdish tribes across Iraq's borders in Turkey, Iran, and Syria. The third province, Basra, consists mainly of Shiite Moslems, who comprise a majority of the country as a whole but have little political power. Geographic, ethnic and religious forces tend to pull Iraq apart. The strains will be real.

Iraq's missiles cannot reach Europe or America. But, I point out, America has 15,000 operational nuclear missiles. In view of these facts, is Iraq really a clear and present danger to us, as the Bush administration has claimed?

The above information describes the downside of the war with Iraq. Fallows believes there is also a positive theme, which comes from some of the most dedicated members of the war party. They claim that forcing regime change would create the possibility of bringing to Iraq, and eventually the whole Arab world, something it has never known before: stable democracy in an open market system. James Woolsey, a former CIA director, says that in three world wars--two hot and one cold--we've achieved this objective for two thirds of the world. At the beginning of World War I there were eight or ten democracies. Now there are around 120. "An order of magnitude! It is said about the natural world that small disturbances to complex systems can have unpredictably large effects...Merely itemizing the foreseeable effects of a war with Iraq suggests reverberations that would be felt for decades. If we can judge from past wars, the effects we can't imagine when the fighting begins will prove to be the ones that matter most."

By the time you read this article, a definite decision about whether this war will occur may have already been made. I comment that the decision to go to war will begin a new direction in foreign policy that is a radical departure from a policy regarding major wars that we have followed the past. The new path will call for preemptive strikes against other nations when our national Administration deems them a danger. Former President Carter says this posture is dangerous. George Bush may come out of this war hailed as a great visionary. Or he may come out of it as a president who led us into troubled waters that we may wish we hadn't gone into.