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Problems with a 'painless'
war
By Ahmad Faruqui
While
reflecting on the Napoleonic wars in the 19th century,
the Prussian philosopher-soldier Carl von Clausewitz
penned his famous line that "war is a continuation of
politics by other means". Later in the same century,
having witnessed first-hand the destructive power of
war, American General William Tecumseh Sherman would
assert, war "is all hell".
In one of the last wars of
the 20th century, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan
on Christmas Day in 1979, claiming that the Afghans had
invited them in. Ten years later, a humiliated Red Army
crossed the Salang Pass back into the Soviet Union. The
war claimed 1.5 million lives and pushed 5 million
refugees into Pakistan and Iran.
As the 20th
century drew to a close, it seemed that war would no
longer be used to redraw political boundaries and would
cease to be an instrument of state policy. Iraq's
invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 came as a rude shock
to post-modern analysts, and the subsequent Gulf War of
1991 to eject Iraq out of Kuwait was an even bigger
shock. In December of that year, the breakup of the
Soviet Union into 15 countries transformed the entire
world political situation, and created an air of
optimism that the scourge of war had been finally
lifted.
In his speech last Wednesday to the
American Enterprise Institute, US President George W
Bush not only rehabilitated the Clausewitz definition of
war, but went a step farther by presenting war as a
painless way of accomplishing regime change. By laying
out a Wilsonian vision of what a post-Saddam Iraq would
look like, he sought to give war a justification that it
had lacked previously. In this vision, regime change in
Baghdad would be followed by the implementation of
democracy in Iraq. This would permit the resolution of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, presumably by removing
a fundamental threat to Israeli security. Once this
conflict was resolved, creative forces would be unleashed
that would liberalize the entire Arab world. Almost
parenthetically, the president noted that a major threat
to US (and global) security would be removed by the
elimination of Saddam Hussein.
In the
Bush vision, given America's significant military
advantage over Iraq, war carries no downside for the United States.
Victory is assured, leading the president to aver
repeatedly, "We shall prevail." Against such a backdrop,
war develops an irresistible allure, since it is the
only policy instrument with the potential for bringing
about such great benefits that nobody would question its
costs.
Unfortunately, this vision reflects poor
judgment. As Joe Klein has noted in Time magazine, the
world would have more confidence in Bush's judgment if
"if he weren't always bathed in the blinding glare of
his certainty". David Frum, the president's biographer,
notes that Bush is providing a new kind of leadership to
the United States, "a spiritual leadership". But even
Frum is led to note, "In Iraq, it is about to be put to
its most severe test yet."
Just because the
costs of the war are masked does not mean they don't
exist. A variety of scholars around the globe have
concluded that war with Iraq would result in substantial
costs to the United States, Iraq and the world
community.
Costs to the US
In his
study for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on
the economic consequences of the war, Professor William
Nordhaus of Yale University has quantified the economic
costs of the war based on a detailed analysis of several
best-case and worst-case scenarios. He finds that the
war would cost US$99 billion over the next decade in the
best case and in excess of $1.9 trillion in less
favorable circumstances. The latter figure is 10 times
the estimate provided by the Bush administration. None
of these costs have been included in the US budget,
which even without accounting for these costs is
expected to record a deficit in excess of $300 billion
during the current fiscal year. A deficit of this
magnitude represents 3 percent of the US gross domestic
product (GDP), and has become a major cause for concern
among US policymakers. When the costs of the war are
factored in, deficits of $400 billion to $500 billion
per year are possible. These would represent a threat to
US economic prospects. To place this fiscal threat in
perspective, deficits above 5 percent of GDP would
disqualify developing countries from International
Monetary Fund (IMF) lending.
In addition to
these economic costs, the US is likely to experience
casualties among its troops. The director of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), George Tenet, testified
before Congress that Saddam Hussein was likely to use
his biological and chemical weapons if he viewed himself
and his regime in mortal danger, trapped by an invading
force that wanted to effect regime change. His
conventional military capability has deteriorated
substantially since the Gulf War. According to the US
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Iraqi conventional
military capability is down by half from what it was
during the Gulf War. Others have argued it may be as low
as a quarter of that capability, since much military
hardware is obsolete and in poor repair even compared
with that of Iraq's neighboring countries, much less
compared with what the United States has in its
inventory. The Iraqi Air Force is dysfunctional, and
Iraqi air defenses have not been able to shoot down a
single allied plane that has patrolled the no-fly zones
over northern and southern Iraq during the past 12
years. One can assume that troop morale within the Iraqi
military is a tenth of what it was before the Gulf War.
All of this lowers the "redlines" for using biological
and chemical weapons, and raises the probability that
Saddam will resort to using non-conventional weapons
during the conflict.
Even though US forces have
been equipped with various types of protective gear,
many US analysts are skeptical about its workability.
For example, retired US Colonel David Hackworth believes
that US troops are poorly prepared for dealing with
chemical and biological weapons and would suffer high
casualties if they were exposed to such weapons.
Finally, the war would expose the US civilian
population to greater risks at home, by raising the
probability of terrorist attacks being carried out.
These may not happen during the course of the war, but
may come several years later. The damage could be
astronomical. Ironically, a war that is being fought to
eliminate such risks to the US civilian population has a
significant chance of increasing them.
Retired
US General Wesley Clark, the former head of North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces, has called
the war against Iraq an elective rather than necessary
war. According to Clark, this war will "put us in a
colonial position in the Middle East following Britain,
following the Ottomans. It's a huge change for the
American people and for what this country stands for."
It is likely that that the United States would
be no more welcome in Baghdad than the Soviets were in
Kabul in 1979. Notes Christopher Preble of the Cato
Institute in Washington, "We should expect that American
troops would remain in this troubled region for many
years. In the case of Iraq, the American people must
recognize that a benign mission of liberation may become
an obligation of occupation, and we should expect that
those who already hate us will use the excuse of a US
troop presence in the Middle East as a vehicle to
promote their mission of violence against Americans
around the globe."
Cost to Iraq
As
3,000 cruise missiles rain on them within the first 48
hours of the war, the people of Iraq will be the first
to bear the immediate cost of the war. It is useful to
recall what happened during the Gulf War to the Iraqis.
As the war began, John Major, then prime minister of
Britain, declared: "We have no quarrel with the people
of the Iraq." Yet the war took a deadly toll on the
people of Iraq, as sociologist Beth Osborne Daponte at
the Heinz School of Public Policy and Management at
Carnegie Mellon University was to show a year later. It
killed 205,500 Iraqis, including 109,000 men, 23,000
women and 74,000 children. Three-quarters of the dead
were civilians. More than a 100,000 died of postwar
adverse health effects.
The very large number of
casualties in the Gulf War put to rest the myth of
precision bombing and high-tech weaponry. This
hypothesis was rejected once again in the US-Afghan war.
Between October 7 and December 20, 2001, military
operations carried out by the US military killed 3,400
civilians, according to a dossier compiled by Professor
Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire. These
casualties continue to mount with every passing month,
even though they only occasionally make it to the world
news media. The US has indeed installed Hamid Karzai in
Kabul, but his ability to tame the warlords in
Afghanistan is suspect at best. It is questionable
whether Afghanistan has been liberated or moved back in
time to the pre-Taliban period.
After the Gulf
War, the West imposed economic sanctions on Iraq. These
had no impact on Saddam Hussein or his regime, but have
had a devastating impact on the well being of the
civilian population. According to the United Nations
Children's Fund (UNICEF), the sanctions kill 5,000
children under the age of five every month. Says The
Economist, "Even if the truth is half that number it
would still mean that about 360,000 children had died as
a result of 12 years of sanctions."
Will the new
Iraq war, which is postulated to be a war of liberation,
be any kinder to the people of Iraq than the Gulf War?
The United Nations does not believe so. Its secretary
general, Kofi Annan, estimates that this new war could
swell the number of displaced people in Iraq to 2
million; create a million refugees; and leave as many as
10 million (or 40 percent of the population of 25
million) dependent on the outside world for food
assistance.
A recently released UN document
predicts that 30 percent of children under the age of
five in Iraq, or 1.26 million, "would be at risk of
death from malnutrition" in the event of a war. The
draft document, "Integrated Humanitarian Contingency
Plan for Iraq and Neighboring Countries", was produced
by the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs (OCHA) on January 7.
The cost to the
world community
The fallout of a war with Iraq
would not stop with the people of Iraq. There is a
reasonable chance that it would stir up auxiliary
regional conflicts, leading to more casualties and
chaos. In addition, the war would set a dangerous
precedent in international law, and render asunder the
compact of multilaterallism embodied in the UN Charter.
According to Judge Christopher Weeramantry, former vice
president of the International Court of Justice, there
is no provision for a preventive war in the UN Charter.
He argues that the Security Council cannot make
decisions that are contrary to the charter without
consulting the UN General Assembly. The Bush
administration has, of course, no interest in going to
the General Assembly.
For the same reasons,
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder remains opposed to
preemptive strikes because "no realpolitik and no
security doctrine should lead to the fact that,
surreptitiously, we should come to regard war as a
normal instrument of politics".
What is the
probability that the war would achieve its ends? The
neo-conservatives in Washington, who seem to have a lock
on the thinking of the Bush administration, regard this
as a certain outcome. But given their poor understanding
of Arab politics and culture, one cannot give much
weight to their ability to assess probabilities of
events in the Middle East.
A more illuminating
response comes from Yossi Alpher, former director of the
Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv
University, and now co-editor of bitterlemons.org, an
Internet-based Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. Commenting
on the neo-conservative obsession with establishing a
Wilsonian democracy in Baghdad, Alpher says, "this is
wishful thinking that appears to have little basis in
the likely postwar reality. Indeed, the very opposite
scenario - a wave of anti-American radicalism and
terrorism sweeping the Middle East, Iraq engulfed in
ethnic unrest, and millions of refugees destabilizing
neighboring countries - is equally plausible."
The inevitability of war
The millions
who marched in protest against this war on February 15
have been labeled "wimps, appeasers, and lefties" by the
proponents of this war. A new strand of arrogance has
emerged in US political thought, which argues that
France and Germany have no right ever to disagree with
the United States, since it liberated them from Adolf
Hitler's evil regime. President Bush's advisors have
told him to ignore the protesters, as have some leading
pro-war Republicans. Senator John McCain of Arizona said
it was foolish for people to protest on behalf of the
Iraqi people, because the Iraqis live under Saddam
Hussein and they will be far better off when they are
liberated from his oppressive rule. Retired General
Norman Schwarzkopf and former secretary of state James
Baker, who had been opposed to invading Iraq without any
provocation, have withdrawn their opposition to the war.
However, there are still people such as Douglas
Hurd, Britain's foreign secretary during the Gulf War,
who remain opposed to fighting a preemptive war in Iraq.
Writing in the RUSI Journal, he opines, "We might win
the war in six days and then lose it in six months." He
says the Bush administration has made a serious mistake
by swallowing "whole [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel]
Sharon's argument that Israel is a straightforward ally
against terrorism. We run the risk of being viewed not
as liberators but as protectors of an oppressor." Lord
Hurd says a war against Iraq has the risk of turning
"the Middle East into a region of sullen humiliation, a
fertile and almost inexhaustible recruiting ground for
further terrorists".
Oblivious to all these
views, the neo-conservatives are continuing to push
ahead with their agenda. War against Iraq is almost a
certainty now. What is equally certain is that it will
not be an anodyne war.
(©2003 Asia Times Online
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