Preemptive Peace By Harold Meyerson
Tuesday, April 8, 2003; Page A33
>From the folks who brought us preemptive war, here comes preemptive peace.
The Defense Department intellectuals who have emerged as the dominant force in U.S. foreign policy had it all mapped out. While the debate raged over whether to go to war in Iraq, they dispatched a couple of hundred thousand troops to the region, establishing a fact on the ground that ultimately made the war unstoppable. Now, while the debate is just beginning over the nature of the interim government in postwar Iraq, they have dispatched a postwar government of their choosing to the Kuwait Hilton.
With the assistance of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, George W. Bush has emerged as an apt pupil of Nathan Bedford Forrest. In war and now in peace, he gets there first with the most men. Deployment precedes -- and damn near obviates -- debate.
The most narrowly factional administration in modern American history now seeks to impose a narrowly factional authority on postwar Iraq. The United Nations is to be reduced to a bit player. State Department personnel with expertise in the region -- former ambassadors to other Arab nations, for instance, who can actually speak Arabic -- have been vetoed by Donald Rumsfeld. The neoconservatives have their team in place, complete with their opposition group of choice: the Iraqi National Congress.
Never mind that the Iraqi National Congress is one of six opposition coalitions in exile. Never mind that its leader, Ahmed Chalabi, left Iraq the same year the Dodgers left Brooklyn. Never mind that Chalabi is bitterly opposed by the other exile groups, and that his standing in-country is all but undetectable. What matters is that he's a longtime friend and associate of such leading defense neocons as Richard Perle and James Woolsey, who apparently loom large in the Iraqi electoral college being drawn up in the Pentagon.
The White House may not be sold on Chalabi, but the president has signed on to the rest of the grand design. In his decision to hand postwar Iraq to the Pentagon, however, Bush is utterly alone. No member of the coalition of the willing is willing to go along with him on this: Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi want the United Nations to control the interim authority; so does the European Union; so does the pope. Even congressional Republicans -- and not just the moderates -- are emphatic that Iraqi reconstruction should come under Colin Powell's jurisdiction, not Rumsfeld's. And Powell has been arguing for a greater role for the United Nations, too.
Understandably so, for the decision to run postwar Iraq as an adjunct of the Defense Department may prove even more fateful than the decision to go to war. It suggests that conquest alone confers legitimacy; it spurns international efforts to reconstruct a shattered nation; it fairly begs the world to view us as occupiers rather than nation-builders. It could well mean that our forces will be the only authority in postwar Iraq, subject (even if embraced by most of the population) to a steady stream of suicide bombings, mayhem and rage. It could ignite the entire region in a slow-fuse jihad. Yet these all seem matters of relative indifference to the president, the vice president and the guys at Defense.
The emerging debate over the shape of the peace is tracking the debate over going to war in one further and sickening particular: While the State Department, Republicans and foreign nations have taken up arms against the Pentagon's plan, the Democrats have all but disappeared. AWOL in peace as they were in war, the Democrats are both a mystery and disgrace.
During the run-up to war, and since the shooting started, many Democrats feared they'd look squishy on security matters if they voiced their doubts about the wisdom of the war. But opposing the subordination of postwar Iraq to Wolfie's private politburo is different; it would neither undermine the Democrats' bona fides as a party committed to national security nor unduly expose the Democrats at the polls. It's not as if the American people have been clamoring for a U.S. owned and operated occupation, after all.
Indeed, the question of postwar Iraq is one on which two sometimes conflicting Democratic tendencies -- the anti-imperialism of the Vietnam '60s and the nation-building of the Clinton '90s -- can be reconciled. Democrats can and should support generous financial aid for Iraqi reconstruction, even as they can and should support a postwar Iraq administered by the legitimate authority of the United Nations.
Instead, Bush is unveiling earth-shaking changes in fundamental American policy as a series of faits accomplis, and the Democrats are hiding under rocks. And this is a nation that claims the expertise to build a democracy on the other side of the world?
"Who cares what you think" -GWBush quote last year.