(Charles Krauthammer article continues)
On 9/11, the United States, with its ally Great Britain,
decided that it would respond in two ways: revenge and
reconstruction. It would retaliate against the enemy, try to
pursue him and his associates in Afghanistan and elsewhere;
but it also decided -- and this was the Bush Doctrine --
that that was not enough of a response; that spending the
next twenty to thirty years hunting cave-to-cave in
Afghanistan was not an adequate response. It was perhaps
necessary, but certainly not sufficient, to deal with this
new ideological enemy. This enemy is not, as some have
pretended, simply a band of terrorists and extremists
numbering in the thousands. It's an idea with many, many
practitioners of different stripes--some *****e, some Sunni-
-and with allies, fifth columns, potential recruits
throughout the world, including large immigrant populations
in the West.
The Bush Doctrine held that besides attacking the immediate
enemy who had perpetrated 9/11, it would have to engage in a
larger enterprise of changing the underlying conditions
which had given birth to this idea of Islamic radicalism,
and to change the conditions that had allowed it to recruit
and breed, particularly in the Arab world.
This meant changing the internal structure of Arab regimes
and in a larger sense the culture of the Arab/Islamic world.
This had been the one area of the world that uniquely had
been untouched by the modernizing and democratizing
influences of the postwar era. East Asia had famously taken
off economically and politically, in Japan, Korea, Taiwan
and elsewhere; Latin America and even some parts of Africa
had democratized; of course, Western Europe had been
democratic ever since World War II, but now Eastern Europe
had joined the march. Only the Arab/Islamic world had been
left out. Unless it was somehow encouraged and brought along
on that march, it would remain recalcitrant, alienated,
oppressed, tyrannical, and the place from which the kind of
atavistic attacks on America and the West that we have seen
on 9/11 and since would continue.
That's why the entire enterprise of changing the culture of
the Arab world was undertaken. It was, as I and others had
said at the time, a radical idea, an arrogant idea, a risky
idea. But it was also the only idea of any coherence and
consistency that anyone has advanced on how to change the
underlying conditions that had led to 9/11 and ultimately to
prevent the kind of conditions that would lead to a second
9/11.
So we have this half decade of American assertion. And it
was an astonishing demonstration. In the mood of despair and
disorientation of today, we forget what happened less than
half a decade ago. The astonishingly swift and decisive
success in Afghanistan, with a few hundred soldiers, some of
them riding horses, directing lasers, organizing a campaign
with indigenous Afghans, and defeating a regime in about a
month and a half in a place that others had said was
impossible to conquer; that the British and the Russians and
others had left in defeat and despair in the past. It was an
event so remarkable that the aforementioned Paul Kennedy now
wrote an article, "The Eagle has Landed" (Financial Times,
Feb. 2, 2002) in which he simply expressed his astonishment
at the primacy, the power, and the unrivalled strength of
the United States as demonstrated in the Afghan campaign.
After that, of course, was the swift initial victory in
Iraq, in which the capital fell within three weeks. After
that was a ripple effect in the region. Libya, seeing what
we had done in Iraq, gave up its nuclear capacity; then the
remarkable revolution in Lebanon in which Syria was
essentially expelled. And that demarks the date that I spoke
of. March 14 is the name of the movement in Lebanon of those
who rose up against the Syrians and essentially created a
new democracy--fragile, as we will see. You have all of
these events happening at once: you have the glimmerings of
democracy in the elections in Egypt, some changes even in
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and of course what we had in
January 2005 was the famous first election in Iraq, which
had an electric effect on the region. That winter-spring of
2005, I think, is the apogee of this assertion of
unipolarity and American power.
What we have seen, however, in the last almost two years now
is what I think historians will write of as the setback.
That is the year and a half between the Iraqi election and
the Lebanese revolution, on the one hand, and the date that
I think is going to live in history as an extremely
important one, November 7, 2006, the American election, in
which it was absolutely clear that the electorate had
expressed its dismay and dissatisfaction with the policies
in Iraq, and more generally, a sense of loss, lack of
direction, and wish to contemplate retreat. As a result , we
are in position now where people are talking about
negotiating, for example, with our enemies Syria and Iran,
which, given the conditions that Iran and Syria would lay
and their objectives, which have been expressed openly and
clearly, would mean very little other than American
surrender of Iraq to an Iran-Syria condominium.
So what happened in this year and a half? What we have seen,
for example, was the collapse in Lebanon of this new
direction; we just heard two days ago that Hezbollah has
pulled its members of the cabinet and is calling for
demonstrations on November 20 in an attempt to actually
destroy and bring down the newly elected and pro-Western
government. What you have is a resurgence of Syrian
influence in Lebanon, Syria being of course an ally of Iran
and the patron of Hezbollah. Syria is doing all this because
the Lebanese government was about to pass a law and actually
did today in which it approved an international court to try
the murderers of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik
Hariri. So you have a power play in Lebanon that would undo
the Lebanese revolution. You have, of course, the Lebanon
war of August 2006, in which Israel had an opportunity to
deliver a huge strategic setback to Iran, Syria, and
Hezbollah but ended up in a relative stalemate. You have
Hamas gaining power in Gaza and chaos descending in Gaza,
with the loss of control of the relatively moderate Abu
Mazen and the Fatah movement. You had of course the rise in
Iran of the very radical, ideological, and quite messianic
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who speaks openly about the
end of days, who speaks privately about its arrival within
two or three years, and who talks about wiping Israel off
the map, who clearly is intent upon achieving a nuclear
capacity, but even more importantly, who defies every
deadline or warning or threat from the West and does it with
impunity. We've had in the last half year a collapse of our
position on Iran. We talk about pressure and sanctions, but
we have allowed deadline after deadline to elapse, and Iran
is openly contemptuous of our attempts to impose sanctions,
knowing correctly that we will not be able to get the
Russians and Chinese to back them, and that ultimately even
the Europeans will be weak and unwilling to join in real
sanctions.
To this constellation we can add one more factor, which is
of course Iraq. The hope that we had through the first
election in 2005 has now been completely lost. That is
because we've had the rise of sectarian violence,
particularly after the Samara bombing, and also because the
Sunni insurgency continues to rage and the *****e militias
continue untamed. You put all of those together and you have
a large strategic setback for the United States, and most
important, for the idea of successfully changing the nature
of the Arab world to one which would be more democratic and
tranquil and accommodationist. As a result, what you have in
this recent American election is essentially a referendum on
that idea, and the notion that it cannot succeed, it has not
been succeeding, and we're going to have to have a change of
course.
Now, the question is, what happened in the two years between
the apogee of our power and this moment of despair which was
registered by the American election. Al Qaeda had a chance
after the first few years to if not recover, at least
reorganize itself enough to be able to make advances,
attacks in Madrid and London, and now of course the
insurgency in Iraq, where it has relatively strengthened
itself in the last several years. But most importantly is
the assertiveness of Iran and its proxies in Syria,
Hezbollah and Hamas. In that sense Iran is something of a
mini-parallel to the Communist International. It is the
leader of the movement. (Al Qaeda is the twin church, the
Sunni version of it, in the same way perhaps that the
Russians and the Chinese had their twin churches of
communism, rivals but allies at times during the Cold War.)
But Iran of course is the central actor now in the rise and
the activity of Islamic fundamentalism, with its proxies, as
I said, in Hamas, Hezbollah, the Mahdi army in Iraq and
elsewhere. And it is determined, pressing its case in Iraq,
and in Lebanon, in Palestine, and elsewhere.
