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Cracks in US security plan begin to widen

By Peter Galbraith
THE GUARDIAN, LONDON
Thursday, Oct 14, 2004, Page 9

The Iraq Survey Group (ISG) has finally reached its conclusions on the search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD): Iraq did not have any, having destroyed its stockpiles years before the war last year. During the 18-month search by more than 1,000 ISG members, North Korea reprocessed plutonium which was previously safeguarded -- apparently making half a dozen nuclear weapons. Iran built gaseous centrifuges and is, reportedly, now enriching uranium.

Not surprisingly, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Australian Prime Minister John Howard say the Iraq war was still worthwhile. (They could hardly say otherwise.) US Vice President Dick Cheney, explained that, in spite of there being no WMD, the ISG report actually justified the invasion. It showed, he told an audience last week, that "delay, defer, wait wasn't an option."

It is easy to dismiss Cheney's comments as the bravado of a candidate whose ticket is sinking over the mismanagement of Iraq. He seized on a portion of the report asserting that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein intended to reconstitute his WMD program once sanctions were lifted. In effect, Cheney is arguing that the US was right to attack a country that posed no threat but whose leader had evil intent and one day might try to become a threat.

In a June 2002 speech to the US army academy at West Point, US President George W. Bush told the graduating cadets: "If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long." This speech articulated what became known as the pre-emption doctrine.

Nine months later, the US and Britain invaded Iraq to disarm Saddam's WMD.

Although the case for invading Iraq depended on the threat from WMD, this single explanation did not make strategic sense last year.

With the inspections regime that was in place on the eve of the war, Iraq could not have had a nuclear weapons program. Building WMD requires large industrial facilities that could not have been hidden from intrusive inspections.

Thus, on the eve of the war, the conceivable threat from Iraqi WMD consisted of previously manufactured chemical weapons that could have been hidden, and some possible production of hard-to-use biological weapons in mobile laboratories. Neither constituted a serious threat to well-equipped western forces, and neither actually existed.

But the Bush doctrine is not just about forward defense. It also involves an American mission to spread freedom and democracy, particularly in the Islamic world. This theme is part of almost every Bush foreign policy speech. The Bush doctrine constitutes an ambitious combination of forward defense and nation building. The invasion of Iraq only makes sense in this context.

Paul Wolfowitz and the Pentagon neo-conservatives, who are the ideological authors of the Bush doctrine, saw Iraq as an opportunity to transform the Middle East. They hoped that, by overthrowing Saddam, the US could establish a democratic Iraq which would have the same ripple effect on the Islamic world that the fall of the Berlin wall had on communism.

Since the American people would never buy such an ambitious (and implausible) agenda, WMD became the justification for the war, but not its reason. Wolfowitz admitted as much when he told Vanity Fair that the administration had settled on Iraqi WMD as the single rationale for war for "bureaucratic reasons."

The question is whether the Bush doctrine makes for sound national security strategy. Devising this strategy entails assessing threats and looking for opportunities. Since no country can do everything, the most important task of a strategist is to set priorities, taking into account available resources, costs and risks. In his West Point speech, Bush rightly identified the most serious danger as coming "at the crossroads of radicalism and technology."

But Bush never prioritized. North Korea with nuclear weapons and Iran acquiring nuclear technology posed far greater threats last year than an Iraq with some hidden chemical and biological weapons. The Clinton administration threatened war to get Pyongyang to freeze its nuclear program in 1994. In 2002, the Bush administration noisily terminated the 1994 agreement because of North Korean cheating, and then did nothing when the country withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and began reprocessing previously safeguarded plutonium into nuclear weapons. All this took place before the start of the Iraq war, but the Bush administration never shifted its focus.

North Korea is the world's leading exporter of missile technology to rogue states, and there is every reason to fear its nuclear weapons will be for sale.

By not setting priorities, the Bush administration lost control of the costs and the risks of its strategy. The Pentagon neo-conservatives planning postwar Iraq had grand ideas for a long occupation, modeled on postwar Germany and Japan, but only sent a minimal number of troops, for domestic political reasons. Because of limited resources, they simply assumed a benign environment, eliminating from their planning the possibilities of resistance and lawlessness.

Similarly, the administration hoped that Saddam's removal would intimidate Iran and North Korea, as well as encourage pro-democracy elements in Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. They apparently never contemplated what might happen if the US got bogged down in Iraq.

With nine out of 10 active duty army divisions in Iraq and Afghanistan -- or preparing to go -- North Korea and Iran understand that there is no spare US capacity to deal with them. And in the Middle East, it is surely the hardliners and the Islamists -- and not the democrats -- who feel emboldened by developments in Iraq.

The Bush doctrine can be criticized on many grounds. Under international law, pre-emption is permitted (if ever) only in the case of imminent attack and not to deal with a hypothetical future threat. Bush's nation building has been ambitious, arrogant and incompetent. But the greatest flaw of the Bush doctrine is that it is poor strategy.

By not distinguishing between serious immediate threats and distant potential ones, Bush ducked the hard choice at the core of all sound national security strategy -- how to ration scarce military and diplomatic assets. As a result, the US invaded Iraq to eliminate a threat posed by non-existent weapons. As for North Korea and Iran, the US is reduced to hoping that others -- China in the case of Pyongyang and the Europeans in the case of Tehran -- can solve the problem. Hope is not a strategy.

Peter Galbraith is a senior diplomatic fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington.
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