Editorial
After the Taliban: What's next for war?

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld keeps reminding us that there's plenty of danger remaining in Afghanistan, but the appearance is that we're witnessing the endgame.

So what's next?

That depends on how the internal battle within the Bush administration turns out.

Some advisers insist that the United States should now turn to finishing some unfinished business from 1991 — that is, overturning the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.

The major hitch in their position is that no one has succeeded in linking Iraq to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States. Thus, if there were no clear legal cause for outright war before Sept. 11, neither is there one now.

According to columnist Robert Kagan, writing in The Washington Post, the argument for making war on Iraq now runs something like this:

"Saddam is building weapons of mass destruction. Terrorists like Osama bin Laden, and whoever takes his place in the future, want to get hold of such weapons to use against the United States and the West. Saddam and his regime have a history of cooperating with these types. Saddam may have provided al-Qaida with anthrax; someday he could provide other terrorists with a nuclear bomb. For this reason, Saddam and his regime pose a direct and unacceptable threat to the United States. And therefore the United States has the right to take pre-emptive action."

While this argument has its logic, it has at least two very real difficulties:

• As things stand now, there's no way the shaky coalition — particularly in the Muslim world — supporting American action in Afghanistan will enthusiastically sign on to a pre-emptive attack on Iraq.

That likely would return the Bush administration to the unilateralist predisposition that so turned off the rest of the world before Sept. 11, and subject Americans to a long, difficult and lonely war.

• The "dove" faction in the Bush administration, if you will, is led by Secretary of State Colin Powell. By all accounts Powell is strongly opposed to taking the fight to Saddam, preferring instead to reinvigorate the Clinton administration's policy of containment of Iraq by reinstituting a regime of U.N. inspections of Iraqi weapons capabilities.

This preference is sure to be favored by such coalition members as France and Russia.

What's unfortunate about this crucial debate within the Bush administration is that so far it's internal, because it's likely to affect, in a fundamental way, the course of world history.