EDITORIAL
New battle for Iraq: no room for failure
"If the Americans succeed here," says Barham Saleh, the prime minister of the Kurdish-controlled part of northern Iraq, "this will be a monumental blow to everything the terrorists stand for."
While the Bush administration never succeeded in verifying a meaningful link between the pre-war regime of Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, it appears that, in unexpected ways, Iraq now is becoming a pivotal battleground in the global war against terrorism.
Colossal clashes
"Iraq," Saleh told Neil MacFarquhar of The New York Times, "is the nexus where many issues are coming together — Islam versus democracy, the West versus the axis of evil, Arab nationalism versus some different types of political culture."
MacFarquhar compares an earlier generation of young Muslims rallying to fight the Russian invasion of Afghanistan to the situation now in Iraq, where the American presence "is prompting a rising tide of Muslim militants to slip into the country to fight the foreign occupier." Iraq thus becomes a battle that the United States simply cannot afford to lose.
Worse than Saddam
Just as the Taliban were at least as bad, from the U.S. perspective, as the Russians they replaced in Afghanistan, an American defeat at the hands of radical Islamic fighters in Iraq could produce a result even worse than Saddam.
Many have urged regime change in Iraq as a golden opportunity to create a model of a modern, stable, democratic, secular and prosperous state, whose example might lend itself to quick replication in a benign transformation of the Middle East.
But it is not clear that either the Bush administration or Americans at large — bear in mind Vietnam, Beirut and Mogadishu — have the stomach for the job ahead.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others predicted a quick and simple regime change, with renewed oil production paying to restore Iraqi infrastructure to prewar levels. They are silent in the face of predictions now that pacifying Iraq may take years and cost as much as $600 billion.
Comebacks in Afghanistan
And in the face of those earlier optimistic predictions for Iraq is the gritty example of Afghanistan, where allied control scarcely extends beyond its capital, and where warlords, the Taliban and perhaps al-Qaida are making comebacks.
Afghanistan looms as an example of what happens when regime change is attempted on the cheap.
The future costs of failure now to remake Afghanistan or Iraq will be measured either in terms of even greater amounts of money and American lives eventually required to build real nations there — or in terms of their threat to the world as centers of resurgent terrorism.
The single bright spot in Afghanistan is the takeover by NATO as leader of its peace-keeping force — a minuscule example of the sort of truly international effort that will be required for success there and in Iraq.
