"After Baghdad, Beijing."

[Ian Murray]

Decisions, decisions

While we agonise about whether to go to war, the US has moved on to a
different question: what next?

Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday February 26, 2003
The Guardian

Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus. So says the latest hot
polemic exciting transatlantic policy types: Robert Kagan's Paradise and
Power, a meditation on how Europeans have grown soft and idealistic (and
feminine) while the Yanks remain tough, booted and aware (like real men)
of how brutal a place the world can be. According to Kagan, our outlooks
have grown so far apart that it's time we stopped pretending we even
"occupy the same world". We are from different planets.

Maybe that explains why so many Europeans are not just on the opposite
side from the US in the debate over the coming war on Iraq, but why we are
not even having the same conversation. While we still agonise over whether
or not to go to war - forcing our prime minister to make and remake his
case, even if that means taking an hour of questions on MTV, as he will
next Friday - the American conversation moved on long ago. With barely a
peep of congressional opposition to a military attack against Saddam, and
most Democrats reduced to silent compliance, the Washington village has
taken it as read, both that war will happen, and that it is justified.
Their debate is focusing instead on a different question: what next?

It might be a simple function of power. We sit back making abstract, moral
judgments while they, as the nation poised to do the business, concern
themselves with practicalities. We are not quite spectators - 40,000 Brits
will be involved, after all - but nor do we have the prime spot in the
dugout, making the key decisions. Those will be made in Washington.

Whatever the explanation, the gulf between us is real. The op-ed pages of
the American papers have the odd thumb-suck on the rights and wrongs of
prising Saddam out by force, but their more pressing interest (besides
pouring bile on the surrender monkeys of France and Germany) is in the
task that will face the great US Army of Liberation once its initial work
is done.

There is, for example, an argument about personnel. Should the American
governor-general ruling newly free Iraq be a civilian - perhaps the former
nuclear weapons inspector, David Kay, or Bush-friendly lawyer Michael
Mobbs - or a soldier? Surely a man in a suit would smack less of military
occupation, and therefore be the more tactful choice? On the other hand, a
uniformed viceroy might repeat the magic worked when Douglas MacArthur
oversaw Japan. If that's the precedent, then retired lieutenant general
and veteran of the first Gulf war, Jay Garner, would be a frontrunner. Or
would it be smarter-to- name, Arabic-speaking Lebanese-American General
John Abizaid, amusingly known as "Mad Arab" to his colleagues? Such are
the dilemmas preoccupying pre-occupier America.

There are mechanical questions to ponder, too. Which system would work
best? If not a formal military occupation, perhaps a Kosovo-style civilian
administration? Or an interim government made up, à la Afghanistan, of
multiple opposition groups, returned to Iraq after decades of exile? Or
would it be more convenient simply to replace Saddam with a new strongman:
whether a former Ba'athist suitably made over and rebranded as
"pro-western" or an outsider, like Jordan's Prince Hassan, a cousin of
Iraq's last king who was assassinated in 1958?

Decisions, decisions. And the US will, barring the most dramatic change of
heart by either Saddam Hussein or George Bush, be making them soon. What
they will turn on will be more than operational matters of efficiency.
They will go instead to the heart of why America is fighting this war.

For if this conflict's chief aim is what the new, second UN resolution
claims it to be - the simple disarmament of Iraq - then any postwar
settlement would be devised around that objective: perhaps a new,
compliant dictator would do that job best. If the goal is the one touted
by Tony Blair in recent days as the moral case - namely, liberation from
tyranny - then only a fresh, democratic start will do.

If, however, the American victors insist on a much more robust level of US
control - restructuring Iraq entirely, studding it with countless military
bases - then we could start drawing rather different conclusions as to the
true motive of this campaign. We might agree with those who detect in the
Iraq adventure the opening move of a much grander American design: the
establishing of US hegemony for the next 100 years.

This is not just twitchy, anti-war conspiracy talk. An outfit exists on
17th Street in Washington, DC, called the Project for the New American
Century, explicitly committed to US mastery of the globe for the coming
age. Its acolytes speak of "full spectrum dominance", meaning American
invincibility in every field of warfare - land, sea, air and space - and a
world in which no two nations' relationship with each other will be more
important than their relationship with the US. There will be no place on
earth, or the heavens for that matter, where Washington's writ does not
run supreme. To that end, a ring of US military bases should surround
China, with liberation of the People's Republic considered the ultimate
prize. As one enthusiast puts it concisely: "After Baghdad, Beijing."

If this sounds like the harmless delusions of an eccentric fringe, think
again. The founder members of the project, launched in 1997 as a
Republican assault on the Clinton presidency, form a rollcall of today's
Bush inner circle. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush,
Richard Perle - they're all there. So too is Zalmay Khalilzad, now the
White House's "special envoy and ambassador-at-large for free Iraqis".

It will not be the war itself which will reveal these ultras' true intent.
That would be fought the same way whatever the underlying motive:
overwhelming force aimed at a swift decapitation of the Iraqi regime. But
the postwar occupation will reveal plenty. Then we will know if the
hawkish dreamers of the project have indeed taken over US foreign policy.
How they remake free Iraq will tell us whether they plan to remake the
world.

In other words, this is one debate we cannot afford to sit out. As US
commentator Sandra Mackay wrote this month: "Washington's hawks understand
that the real risks ... are not in war, but in the peace that follows."
It's after victory that the most enduring impact will be felt, whether it
be a hated US-led occupation, sparking a fresh round of global terrorism,
or the sudden release of Iraq's lethal, internal tensions which Saddam has
kept pent-up for 35 years. Kurds could fight Turks for their own state in
the north; Shias might team up with Iran for control of the south;
everyone may turn on the hated Saddamite Ba'athists in a frenzy of
revenge. Iraq will not be like 1940s Japan or Germany, the occupations
fondly remembered by the US commentariat. Those were coherent nations;
Iraq is an artificial fusion of antagonistic tribes. Victory may be rapid
and easy - but that's when the real trouble could start.

j.freedland at guardian.co.uk