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The Sunday Times (London) September 6, 2003
Flypaper
A Strategy Unfolds
by Andrew Sullivan
Some time before the
Iraq war, I found myself musing out loud to someone close to the inner
circles of the Bush administration. We were talking about the post-war
scenario, something that even then was a source of some worry even to
gung-ho hawks like myself. I don't recall the precise conversation but I
voiced some worries about what might happen if an occupied Iraq became a
target for international terrorism. Wouldn't U.S. soldiers become sitting
ducks? What was to stop al Qaeda using Iraq as a battleground in the war
against the West? Or Hizbollah? Or even Hamas? Not to mention the Syrians
and Iranians, who would persumably be terrified at the thought of an
actual living, breathing democracy emerging in the monolithically
repressive Arab world.
And what he said surprised me. If the
terrorists leave us alone in Iraq, fine, he said. But if they come and get
us, even better. Far more advantageous to fight terror using trained
soldiers in Iraq than trying to defend civilians in New York or London.
"Think of it as a flytrap," he ventured. Iraq would not simply be a
test-case for Muslim democracy; it would be the first stage in a real and
aggressive war against the terrorists and their sponsors in Ryadh and
Damascus and Tehran. Operation Flytrap had been born.
I
subsequently aired this theory on my blog, and received incredulous
responses. Readers chimed in with objections. Wouldn't that mean
essentially using U.S. soldiers as bait? Isn't this too cynical and
devious a strategy? Isn't there a limitless supply of jihadists just
longing to mix it up with the U.S. in a terrain they know better than we
do? What on earth are you talking about?
But as the weeks and
months have gone by, that conversation has stuck by me. It wasn't a
retroactive justification of the mixture of progress and chaos we now see
in the Sunni regions of Iraq - so I couldn't dismiss it as desperate
post-hoc spin. If it wasn't a central part of the strategy from the
beginning, it was surely a Plan B. And from statements from key Bush
officials in the past couple of months, it's clear that it's now very
close to Plan A.
What else did president Bush mean when he
challenged the terror-masters to "bring 'em on," in Iraq? Those are not
the words of a man seeking merely to pacify a country, but to continue
waging war against terrorism. On August 25, Donald Rumsfeld said to a
group called the veterans of Foreign Wars: "In Iraq moreover wečre dealing
not just with regime remnants but also with tens of thousands of criminals
that were released from the jails by the regime before it fell, as well as
terrorists and foreign fighters who have entered the country over the
borders to try to oppose the Coalition. They pose a challenge to be sure
but they also pose an opportunity because Coalition forces can deal with
the terrorists now in Iraq instead of having to deal with those terrorists
elsewhere, including the United States." Opportunity knocks.
Last
week, Paul Wolfowitz chimed in with a piece in the Wall Street Journal,
specifically citing the occupation of Iraq as a central part of the war
against terror. "Even before the bombing of the U.N. headquarters, if
you'd asked Gen. Mattis and his Marines," Wolfowitz wrote, "there was no
question in their minds that the battle they wage - the battle to secure
the peace in Iraq - is now the central battle in the war on terrorism.
It's the same with the commander of the Army's 1st Armored Division, Brig.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, who recently described that second group as
'international terrorists or extremists who see this as the Super Bowl.'
They're going to Iraq, he said, 'to take part in something they think will
advance their cause.' He added, 'They're wrong, of course.' Among the
hundreds of enemy that we have captured in the last months are more than
200 foreign terrorists who came to Iraq to kill Americans and Iraqis and
to do everything they can to prevent a free and successful Iraq from
emerging. They must be defeated - and they will be."
The reason the
Bush administration went to the U.N. last week to seek more troops from
foreign countries for peace-keeping and security purposes was therefore
not merely an admission that they had goofed in estimating the number of
troops required to pacify the country. It was a move designed to liberate
the U.S. military machine from peace-keeping in order to concentrate on
war-making - against the terror network they had come to destroy. Listen
to U.S. Army Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. ground forces in
Iraq. He just opined on CNN that attacks against U.S. forces have
increased in "sophistication, especially in the improvised explosive
devices that they are using, and we're working to learn from that and to
be able to counter them." He went on, critically: "This is what I would
call a terrorist magnet, where America, being present here in Iraq,
creates a target of opportunity... But this is exactly where we want to
fight them. ...This will prevent the American people from having to go
through their attacks back in the United States." You won't find a better
description of the "flytrap" strategy anywhere - or from a more
authoritative source.
The extra beauty of this strategy is that it
creates a target for Islamist terrorists that is not Israel. A key
objective of the current U.S. strategy is to show that Israel is not the
fundamental cause of instability and mayhem in the Middle East - but a
victim of the same kind of pathological religious extremism that has
destroyed Iran, brutalized Afghanistan and blackmailed Saudi Arabia.
Before the Iraq war, the U.S. could do little to counter these maniacs
directly. Now they have a theater of war - and it isn't the West Bank.
Will this strategy work? Its obvious disadvantage is that it's
tough to fight an escalating terrorist war in the same country you're
trying simultaneously to nudge toward civil order and democracy. Terrorism
undermines civil society even in countries with very advanced traditions
of democracy, let alone a country like Iraq. Certainly, that internal
contradiction helps explain why the U.S. is now desperate for more help in
pacifying Iraq as well as waging war within it. One possibility is that
better and more aggressive policing in urban areas (by Iraqis and foreign
troops) will enable U.S. soldiers to leave the cities and fight a
guerrilla war against al Qaeda and Hezbollah in the Iraqi hinterland,
putting extra pressure on Iran and Syria at the same time. That would be
an elegant solution. But at the moment it's a somewhat optimistic
one.
At some point, I'd argue, the president therefore has to make
this strategy more formal. He has to tell the American people that more
violence in Iraq may not in some circumstances be a bad thing. It may be a
sign that we are flushing out terror and confronting it, rather than
passively waiting for it to attack again. He has to remind people that
this war is far from over, that the mission is still very much
unaccomplished, and that this is not Vietnam. Right now he looks
defensive, reactive and not in full control. That must end. And
articulating the flypaper strategy might just help end it.
September 6, 2003, Sunday Times.
copyright © 2003,
2003 Andrew Sullivan |
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