Bush's Grand Strategy
BELL, JEFFREY
Bush's Grand Strategy Iraq is one move in a bigger game. BY JEFFREY BELL THE FOCUS for the past six months on obtaining United Nations approval for the invasion of Iraq has obscured a simple,...
...The decision of the Turkish parliament to reject direct involvement in the invasion of Iraq reflected similar tensions...
...targets in the world war...
...The biggest danger to Russia's neutrality is not the Chechen revolt but the continued existence of thousands of nuclear weapons that could find their way to foreign Islamists...
...And, if President Bush is as determined and implacable as they fear he is, it can keep the Islamist cause alive (Iran) and allow revenge (Iran and North Korea) in the face of the impending overthrow of their governments by military or other means...
...At first glance, the core administration premise—that this is a world war involving a vast internal crisis of Islam—suggests the necessity of long-term American occupation...
...Is it any wonder that the two remaining anti-American rogue states are doing everything in their power to race toward clear-cut possession of nuclear weapons...
...The only longstanding democracy in the Islamic world recently voted in a fundamentalist majority, and the same is likely to happen elsewhere, assuming the United States begins to achieve its long-term goal of democratizing the world of Islam...
...In a nutshell, the argument is between occupiers and democratiz-ers...
...Pervez Musharraf opted for an alliance with the United States, leaving him in an exposed position at home, including with elements of his own military...
...This argues for going slowly, and relying for now on MacArthur-style proconsuls in the wake of favorable regime change...
...The invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 removed one of these four regimes...
...China's rather inscrutable new leadership will have some important decisions coming along much sooner than it would prefer, thanks to the North Korean regime's accurate perception that its own moment of truth is rapidly approaching...
...Early on, with some coercive encouragement from Secretary of State Colin Powell, Pakistan's Gen...
...As politicized by such figures as Osama bin Laden and Iranian strongman Hashemi Rafsanjani, it is also the world's leading political alternative to Western-style democracy...
...adversary, not even every rogue state, is as clearly anti-American as Iran and North Korea...
...The counterargument is a bit counterintuitive, but appears to be gaining ground...
...They were Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea...
...In Turkey, after all, democracy was part of the problem...
...The vengeance they have in mind could be prospective and openly state-sponsored, or carried out later by Islamist terror networks in possession of weapons of mass murder as a last will and testament of the North Korean and/or Iranian regimes...
...As long as this continues to be the case, Syria, Libya, and other states so situated are unlikely to become U.S...
...So do the actions and announcements of our various adversaries and non-well-wishers in this far-flung war...
...Similarly, China's greatest danger of unwanted involvement is not from Uighur unrest but its desire to have it both ways in its relationship to North Korea...
...government as rogue states (or, in the term substituted by the Clinton administration, "states of concern...
...Libya and Syria, for example, have been repeatedly classified by the U.S...
...Economic growth under President Putin has somewhat lessened the purely mercenary motives for Russian-origin proliferation...
...The premise is that the mass civilian killings of 9/11 triggered a world war between the United States and a political wing of Islamic fundamentalism, sometimes called Islamism...
...The most shocking thing about 9/11 was the willingness of Islamists to carry out indiscriminate mass killing of noncombatant Americans...
...We are the only democracy that treats political equality not just as a side effect of modernization, but as a universal moral imperative—one that takes precedence over religious conformity, among other things...
...Possession of nuclear weapons by these rogue states can serve two purposes...
...Post-invasion Iraq will put the issue on our plate in an unavoidable way...
...Eric Shinseki, the Clinton-appointed Army chief of staff, recently told Congress that several hundred thousand American soldiers would be needed for the occupation of Iraq, he was quickly reprimanded by the White House and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld...
...BY JEFFREY BELL THE FOCUS for the past six months on obtaining United Nations approval for the invasion of Iraq has obscured a simple, logical American strategy based on a clear premise...
...But elected fundamentalist governments ultimately will be judged, at least in part, by how well they collect the garbage...
...Instituting democracy might feel like a setback in the short run, especially in terms of political rhetoric...
...Yet at least so far, it is unclear that they are inclined to collaborate with Islamists in the mass murder of Americans...
...It can deter the United States from doing to them what we have done to the Taliban and are about to do to the Baath...
...If this premise is true, then just about everything the Bush administration is doing makes sense...
...Of all the countries in this war's gray area, Pakistan and Turkey are the most complex and important...
...How to deal with such tensions in Islamic countries with governments friendly to Washington is the biggest unanswered question of the Bush strategy...
...This world war would not be happening on the scale it is were it not the case that the rise of Islamism is part and parcel of a convulsive upheaval destabilizing the billion-member world of Islam as well as neighboring countries and—at least potentially—countries with Islamic minorities...
...It was the clearest sign to date that Islamic democratization is close to being adopted as the final remaining piece of the Bush war strategy...
...states, clearly open to helping Islamists achieve the mass murder of Americans...
...Neither are Russia and China, both of whom face unrest from Islamic minorities...
...The fear of what democratization will do to Islam is, in this view, a big source of the rage Islamists feel toward the United States, and not toward France or Germany...
...When Gen...
...Not every U.S...
...The coming invasion of Iraq will remove a second...
...In and of itself, introduction of a democracy that respects free speech and freedom of religion will begin the process of separating religion from politics in Islamic culture...
...The attacks that day laid bare the desire of our enemies to obtain weapons of mass destruction to inflict vastly greater destruction on our country and people...
...The day after 9/11, there existed four deeply anti-American rogue Jeffrey Bell is a principal of Capital City Partners, a Washington consulting firm...
...In this view, Islam is more than the leading rival religion to Christianity...
...In a war of such reach and magnitude, the invasion of Iraq, or the capture of top al Qaeda commanders, should be seen as tactical events in a series of moves and countermoves stretching well into the future...
Vol. 8 • March 2003 • No. 27
