... No new information about Saddam Hussein's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons and no actions taken by Iraq seem to have precipitated this shift. The Iraqi regime has not changed since early in the Bush administration, when its great priority was building a missile defense shield, nor even since the 2000 election, when Bush said he would emphasize "humility" in foreign policy and opposed nation building.Not bad! (Do you subscribe to this awesome magazine? You should!) That a magazine like the Prospect was saying these things back then is not something you would gather from the claims of Brendan O'Neill or, for that matter, the usually brilliant Tony Judt here.Nor has evidence been disclosed that ties Iraq to al-Qaeda or to the events of September 11. Indeed, war with Iraq is as likely to aggravate the problem of terrorism as it is to reduce it: It threatens to deflect our efforts from the struggle against terrorism, jeopardize cooperation from our allies, intensify hostility in the Arab world, and entangle us in further conflicts in the region ...
When the United States entered the war in Kosovo, Bill Clinton's Republican critics demanded to know what our "exit strategy" was. It's a fair question now. Once American forces defeat Hussein's army and his Baath party, we will have eliminated the Iraqi state's capacity to maintain control of the country and defend itself (against, for example, Iran). Because effective state authority cannot be manufactured overnight, the American military will have to supply it. We will have to install and defend a new government and, in the process, we are likely to enmesh ourselves in Iraq's ethnic and religious conflicts. Even groups that don't like Hussein, such as the Shiites in the south, may not accept the regime we establish.
All this will be happening next door to Iran, another designated member of the "axis of evil," whose forces will be staring at ours across the terrain where Iran and Iraq fought a long and terrible war not that many years ago. Threatened by the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan, Iran may accelerate its own nuclear-arms program in the belief that those are just the weapons it needs to deter a future American attack. And what will we do then -- move on from Baghdad to Tehran in another preemptive war? ...
As Congress debates war with Iraq and the new Bush doctrine, it must look beyond November and beyond Baghdad and ask if the direction the administration wants to take America in actually will bring us the security Bush promises. The administration's unilateral determination to overthrow Hussein is already taking us down a dangerous path. Overthrowing the system of international law and security that has worked for the past half-century is more dangerous still. If Al Gore, who voted for Operation Desert Storm in 1991, can raise his voice against a new war with Iraq, so can others. The members of Congress who feel they are being stampeded into a rush toward war can still separate themselves from the herd.
--Sam Rosenfeld
