Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other leading lights of peace sat inert last Thursday as they listened to President Bush's latest \stay the course"" foreign policy speech at the National Endowment for Democracy. The message this time around? We have no choice but to do what Bush says or Iraq will become the center of ""a radical Islamic empire""-Allah's dominion from Sheboygan to Jakarta. Really?
We're taught to be skeptical in our classes at the UW, so let's stop being inert ourselves and be skeptical of the president's logic. Maybe we have more rational choices as to the foreign policy of this republic than ""staying the course.""
President Bush's speech boils down to a single blurb: ""There is only one effective response"" to the threat of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. That response is continued war in Iraq. The reasoning behind that assertion flows thus:
If we do not bomb, torture and shoot various Iraqis, Iraq will not become a democracy. If Iraq does not become a democracy, it will become bin Laden's personal back nine. President Bush asks, ""Would the United States ... be more, or less safe, with Zarqawi and bin Laden in control of Iraq, its people and its resources?"" It's not that this might or could possibly happen, Bush says, but that it absolutely will happen if we withdraw from Iraq.
There is no question that this rhetoric is immensely useful to the president. He cuts our foreign policy options down to zero, discouraging debate. Yet, if there is less debate, our government will never see the error of such reasoning.
When President Bush allies Sunni terrorists with the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, he makes a huge mistake. Sunni insurgents and al Qaeda are not nearly synonymous entities. In an intercepted letter released on Oct. 7, al Qaeda's second in command, Zawahiri, complained to Zarqawi that al Qaeda is losing its battle to create an Islamic empire. He did not speak for Sunni Iraqis, who aren't trying to create an Islamic empire. Rather, as commentators like Edward Luttwak have noted, they are trying to assert their supposed ""religious prerogative to rule [predominantly Shiite Iraq].""
Moreover, by lumping foreign jihadists in with Sunni Iraqis, the president distorts the character of the Iraqi conflict. In a Foreign Policy magazine essay, Luttwak says that ""the Shi'a [who constitute the majority] have good reason to be loyal to the new Iraqi state that they can finally govern."" Shiite clerics plan to capture power through the vote. Their large and well-armed militias sit out as the Americans battle the minority Sunnis-even as those Sunnis target Shiites, as in the Oct. 5 bombing of a mosque which killed 25 Shi'a.
The result, according to Luttwak, is that ""American forces continue to suffer casualties in combat [22 dead in 10 days this October] against factions that should be confronting one another instead."" President Bush's rhetoric obscures this. He confuses Iraq with the war on terror, so we are left with this baffling verbiage: ""We're determined to deny the militants [read: al Qaeda] control of any nation ... for this reason, we're fighting the regime remnants and terrorists in Iraq.""
If reality defeats the president's logic and rhetoric, then his conclusion that we have no option but continued war does not hold. The plain fact is that we can withdraw from Iraq without losing the war on terror.
By ""staying the course"" in Iraq, we are, in effect, cooperating with al Qaeda. Military philosopher Michael Walzer aptly notes that ""tyrants taught the method [of terrorism] to soldiers, and soldiers to modern revolutionaries."" The point is that terrorism is a tool of both the powerful and the weak. In the case of al Qaeda, it is clearly a tool of the weak.
Al Qaeda can only ""win"" by terrorizing us sufficiently so that we defeat ourselves. This is not to say we should ignore al Qaeda. But rhetoric such as the president's exaggerates the threat of al Qaeda to justify a needless, harmful policy of foreign adventure and massive expenditure-1,955 U.S. soldiers dead in Iraq to date, $7 to 8 billion a month, an enraged Muslim world, bewilderment from our allies. All of this, from rhetoric to our needless adventure in Mesopotamia, plays into al Qaeda's hands.
opinion@dailycardinal.com
