Page 4 of 10 THE WAR OF THE
IMAGINATION, Part 1 How a war of fantasies
happened By Mark
Danner
and cryptographers set up at
Bletchley Park). Out of these discussions,
Woodward tells us, DeMuth drafted an influential
report, entitled "Delta of Terrorism", which
concluded, in the author's paraphrase, that "the
United States was in for a two-generation battle
with radical Islam":
"The general analysis was that Egypt
and Saudi Arabia, where most of the hijackers
came from, were the key, but the problems there
are
intractable. Iran is more
important, where they were confident and
successful in setting up a radical government."
But Iran was similarly difficult to envision
dealing with, he said.
But Saddam
Hussein was different, weaker, more vulnerable.
DeMuth said they had concluded that "Ba'athism
is an Arab form of fascism transplanted to Iraq"
...
"We concluded that a confrontation
with Saddam was inevitable. He was a gathering
threat - the most menacing, active and
unavoidable threat. We agreed that Saddam would
have to leave the scene before the problem would
be addressed." That was the only way to
transform the region. According to Woodward,
this report had "a strong impact on President
Bush, causing him to focus on the 'malignancy'
of the Middle East" - and the need to act to
excise it, beginning with an attack on Iraq that
would not only serve, in its devastating
rapidity and effectiveness, as a "demonstration
model" to deter anyone thinking to threaten the
United States but would begin a process of
"democratic transformation" that would quickly
spread throughout the region. The geopolitical
thinking animating this "democratic domino
theory" could be plainly discerned before the
war, as I wrote five months before US Army tanks
crossed the border into Iraq:
Behind the notion that an American
intervention will make of Iraq "the first Arab
democracy", as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz put it, lies a project of great
ambition. It envisions a post-Saddam Hussein
Iraq - secular, middle-class, urbanized, rich
with oil - that will replace the autocracy of
Saudi Arabia as the key American ally in the
Persian Gulf, allowing the withdrawal of United
States troops from the kingdom. The presence of
a victorious American Army in Iraq would then
serve as a powerful boost to moderate elements
in neighboring Iran, hastening that critical
country's evolution away from the mullahs and
toward a more moderate course. Such an evolution
in Tehran would lead to a withdrawal of Iranian
support for Hezbollah and other radical groups,
thereby isolating Syria and reducing pressure on
Israel.
This undercutting of radicals on
Israel's northern borders and within the West
Bank and Gaza would spell the definitive end of
Yasser Arafat and lead eventually to a favorable
solution of the Arab-Israeli problem. This is a
vision of great sweep and imagination:
comprehensive, prophetic, evangelical. In its
ambitions, it is wholly foreign to the modesty
of containment, the ideology of a status-quo
power that lay at the heart of American strategy
for half a century. It means to remake the
world, to offer to a political threat a
political answer. It represents a great step on
the road toward President Bush's ultimate vision
of "freedom's triumph over all its age-old
foes".
It represented as well a
breathtaking gamble, for if the victory in Iraq
was to achieve what was expected - which is to
say, "humiliate" the forces of radical Islam and
reestablish American prestige and credibility;
serve as a "demonstration model" to ward off
attacks from any rogue state that might threaten
the United States, either directly or by supplying
weapons of mass destruction to terrorists; and
transform the Middle East by sending a "democratic
tsunami" cascading from Tehran to Gaza - if the
Iraq war was to achieve this, victory must be
rapid, decisive, overwhelming.
Only
Rumsfeld's transformed military - a light, quick,
lean force dependent on overwhelming firepower
directed precisely by high technology and with
very few "boots on the ground" - could make this
happen, or so he and his planners thought. Victory
would be quick and awe-inspiring; in a few months
the Americans, all but a handful of them, would be
gone: only the effect of the "demonstration
model", and the cascading consequences in the
neighboring states, would remain. The use of
devastating military power would begin the process
but once begun the transformation would roll
forward, carried out by forces of the same
thrilling "democratic revolution" that had erupted
on the streets of Prague and Budapest and East
Berlin more than a decade before, and indeed on
the streets of Kabul the previous year. Here was
an evangelical vision of geopolitical redemption.
