Editor’s note: this is the second part of Professor Berger’s analysis of the potential conflict in Iraq. The first part appeared Tuesday and is available on studlife.com.
The appropriate analogy of a possible unilateral, pre-emptive military assault against Iraq is not really Vietnam but rather the 1989 invasion of Panama, launched by George W. Bush’s father.
The strategic objective then was also a regime change: the kidnapping of Panama’s dictator, General Manuel Noriega. Like Saddam, Noriega was once upon a time an American ally and a recipient of U.S. military aid. At the time, then-President George H. W. Bush did not bother to consult Congress or the United Nations and declared that he had ordered the invasion to defend the Panama Canal, protect U.S. citizens, and to interrupt the lucrative drug trade traveling north via Panama. Bush the Elder blamed Noriega for failing to carry out these responsibilities. No one ever found Bush’s reasons convincing. Obsessed with Noriega, Bush believed the Panamanian leader had betrayed his trust when Bush was vice president and Noriega was a CIA informant assisting the Reagan Administration’s covert war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua during the 1980s. By 1989 Noriega, himself enriched by drug profits, had become increasingly resistant to U.S. control and was making unacceptable demands concerning the conditions under which the Panama Canal Zone was to return to Panamanian sovereignty under the terms of a 1978 treaty.
In short, Noriega was defying U.S. interests and power-threatening what Bush had announced was a new world order presided over by the United States in the post Cold War era. In the judgment of the current administration, Saddam Hussein is doing the same. He makes mischief in a region that, since the end of the Cold War, has increasingly become the center stage of American foreign policy concerns and where the strategic, economic, and political stakes are very high indeed. Perceived United States interests, especially access to oil, and premises about the world, unchanged since the Vietnam War, are at the heart of the matter.
If Vietnam “fell” to communism, it was argued, all of Southeast Asia would be imperiled and its millions of people, critical raw materials, and markets would be at risk. America’s global reach would be severely compromised. Such beliefs became convictions elevated to ideological assertions, laced with phrases like “our dominoes,” “our credibility” and the equation of American freedom with American global designs to ensure the nation’s survival.
Vice President Dick Cheney reiterated the continuity of unilateral United States foreign policy in 2002. True to American cultural form, the Vice President personalized the object of a proposed strike against Iraq as Saddam Hussein, “a sworn enemy of our country.” Cheney accused the Iraqi leader of developing weapons of mass destruction, including but not confined to nuclear arms. Seeking to justify U.S. action, the vice president presumed to predict Saddam’s intentions: “Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror and a seat atop 10 percent of the world’s oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world’s energy supplies, directly threaten America’s friends throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail.”
In theory, of course, the same could be said of Iran and of North Korea in Asia-and might yet be. Even so, neither the President nor any of his advisors has said exactly how the proposed regime change in Iraq would be carried out, who would replace Saddam Hussein, and how the United States intends to win the support of the Iraqi population which, it is somehow assumed, will welcome the American invaders with open arms. Nor do we know how long U.S. forces would remain in Iraq or who would pay for the war. The last Gulf War was mostly financed by Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait-but they won’t pay this time. And it’s unclear how the United States intends to “manage” other parties interested in Iraq’s future: Turkey (which has tanks and men in northern Iraq), Syria, Iran, Russia, and the Kurds, among others. Finally, we don’t know who will control Iraq’s oil reserves in the future.
These are major issues. Unfortunately, American foreign policymakers have been long on global hubris, grandiose strategies, and insistent unilateral purposes in the past. They have been noticeably short on thinking through the consequences of their actions or acknowledging the folly of their ideological obsessions. Such an approach got America into serious trouble in Southeast Asia with tragic consequences. It threatens to do so in the Middle East, which, unlike Panama, has never been “manageable,” compliant, or willing to submit to imposed agendas by the United States.
We live in dangerous times.