Goalposts Moved

Charles Johnson links to an article by the esteemed Daniel Pipes where Pipes says of the US goal of a "a free and peaceful Iraq," "that such an ambition ultimately is unrealistic." Pipes further writes that:

I hope the Iraqi population benefits from the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and can make a fresh start, while I reject the rehabilitation of Iraq as the standard by which to judge the American venture there.

The American military machine is not an instrument for social work, nor for remaking the world. It is, rather, the primary means by which Americans protect themselves from external violent threats. The U.S. goal cannot be a free Iraq, but an Iraq that does not endanger Americans.

Somewhere down in LGF's comments I wrote:

I hate to say it, considering his writing over the last couple of years, but I agree with those who think Pipes is wrong on this one. What would an Iraq that isn't free but also isn't a threat to the US look like? Egypt? Creating another Egypt would be, in the long run, a very small victory.

Bush and his neo-con cabal have it right. It's only free nations which are not a threat to the US. The US applied this after WWII, as Right Brain (#29) wrote, in contradiction to Pipes' assertion that "The American military machine is not an instrument for social work, nor for remaking the world." But we lost track of that, understandably perhaps, during the Cold War.

9/11 has made us, or many of us, realize again that dictatorships and autocracies anywhere are a threat to the US. The current popularity of Islamism make the threat most urgent in the Islamic world. Iraq was a convenient place to continue rolling back the non-democratic world (after Afghanistan) because of UN resolutions, the violated cease-fire, and because the US and UK never left Iraq.

It was also important that one of the top three oil-producing states ended up on the free side before we took on the other two, Saudi Arabia and Iran, as we must, and as Cowboy Engineer (#22) stated. But that's just global economic logistics.

The main lesson of 9/11, to me, is that until everyone is free, none of us is safe. As Al Qaeda admits, liberal democracy is Islamism's greatest threat. It would be a huge mistake for us not to go on the offensive with our greatest weapon.

Pipes, who has made a living on his knowledge of the Arab world, may know more about the likelihood of the Bush policy's chances for success than I do, yet I doubt that defining success down is helpful at all. As I wrote in my comment, if the result of our actions in Iraq doesn't result in a free Iraq, then it is hardly a success in the larger scheme of things.

A US installation of a Mubarek character in Iraq might be of some use to us in the short term, but in the longer term, this would be harmful to US interests. Yet another autocracy in the Arab world, this time unarguably instituted by the US, would not win us hearts and minds, as the cliche goes. For Arab liberals, with whom we must ally to win this war without committing genocide against the Arabs, such a result would be a tremendous failure of American foreign policy, and thus in the wider WOT. Much of their incentive to side with the US against local despots of one stripe or the other would vanish.

Pipes seems to be basing his assessment of what should constitute American success in Iraq on the WMD argument, in that as long as we removed a Hussein bent on developing WMD, we're better off. But we need only look at Egypt and Saudi Arabia to see that the danger is not weaponry, but rather the political tendencies of despotic societies, and the extemism they produce in their wake. Israel has WMD and we are not concerned at all that those WMDs will be misused. The old NRA slogan reflects a truth that applies to more than mere gun control. Guns don't kill people, people kill people.

There is no hope of preventing the spread of dangerous technology. Our only hope is in halting and rolling back the spread of dangerous ideology. Success in the former can only be temporary. Our long-term success depends upon spreading our own dangerous ideology. A free Iraq would not be a bonus; it's crucial.