US suffers decline in prestige/America's wishful thinking on Iraq/Lessons from the rubble of Iraq

US suffers decline in prestige
By Stephen Fidler in London
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: September 12 2007 20:55 | Last updated: September 12 2007 20:55



The US has suffered a significant loss of power and prestige around the world in the years since George W. Bush came to power, limiting its ability to influence international crises, an annual survey from a well regarded British security think-tank concluded on Tuesday.

The 2007 Strategic Survey of the non-partisan International Institute for Strategic Studies picked the decline of US authority as one of the most important security developments of the past year – but suggested the fading of American prestige began earlier, largely due to its failings in Iraq.

John Chipman, the institute’s director-general, said the “authority, prestige and reputation of the US is not what it might have been four or five years ago”. The deter ioration of American power had led to a “non-polar” world in which other actors, such as Russia, had been able to assert themselves.

The report says the US failure in Iraq had meant the Bush administration suffered from a much-reduced ability to hold sway in both domestic and international affairs. This was evident, it says, from the president’s failure to push through a new immigration bill, to the scant regard paid to US efforts to influence Israeli-Palestinian developments and Mr Bush’s sudden acceptance of the need for action on climate change.

But a more fundamental loss of clout occurred at a strategic level. “It was evident that exercise of military power – in which, on paper, America dominated the world – had not secured its goal,” the survey says. The failings in Iraq created a sense around the world of American power “diminished and demystified”, with adversaries believing they will prevail if they manage to draw the US into a prolonged engagement.

In the Middle East, the survey says, the loss of US influence encouraged some countries – notably Iran – to flex their muscles in the region; it provided ammunition for radical groups seeking to discredit the leaders of countries maintaining solid links with the US; and it encouraged other countries to hedge their diplomatic relations with the US by strengthening their links with other regional powers.

Washington’s ability to act as an honest broker in the world had declined; and Iraq had meant the US had failed to pay as much attention as it should have to other parts of the world.

The report concludes that the “the restoration of American strategic authority seemed bound to take much longer than the mere installation of a new president”.

America's wishful thinking on Iraq
By Clive Crook
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: September 13 2007 03:00 | Last updated: September 13 2007 03:00


When you reflect on the war in Iraq - on the false assumptions, on all the errors of execution, on the price already paid - it is hard to believe that wishful thinking could still be the prevailing mode of analysis. Yet it is, and on both sides. George W. Bush thinks that the US is winning, and will prevail if the country "stays the course". The president's critics are not much less deluded. Their solution is rapid withdrawal of American forces. Just quit, and the US can start to put the whole mess behind it.

If only that were true. Awful as it is to contemplate, things can get much worse in Iraq and in no plausible scenario are they likely any time soon to get better. Success, meaning victory or clean disengagement, is not an option. The question is how to control the damage. The US needs consensus around a strategy not to "win" and not to "bring America home" - the first is impossible, the second very risky - but to dig in for a protracted, limited and hence (with luck) feasible effort to contain the harm. Perhaps by default that is where policy will end up, under either this president or the next. Meanwhile, though, an honest discussion of the issue in those gloomy but realistic terms has barely even begun.

This week's report and congressional testimony of General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, proved to be beside the point. Taking the administration at its word - not to be recommended, on the whole - the "surge" has failed. It is true the evidence suggests that sectarian killing is down somewhat and that the policy of using extra soldiers to hold areas wrested from insurgent control rather than handing them back makes sense. This is hardly a surprise and underlines the fatal error of committing too few forces at the start.

Yet the surge has failed, nonetheless, because a temporary curbing of the violence was not its aim. The president accepted political and security benchmarks to measure the surge and stressed the larger purpose of fostering a political breakthrough. Most of those targets have been missed, civil war still rages and Iraqis are no closer to coming to terms. Judged by the administration's own tests, the game is over.

Gen Petraeus's proposal to unwind the surge next year is a simple matter of military necessity. The US lacks the resources to sustain its deployment in Iraq at present levels. The vastly bigger commitment that would be needed for a surge-like initiative across the whole country is entirely out of the question. And, it goes without saying, this would be politically impossible in any case.

Rapid disengagement, the preferred alternative of many Democrats, looks much more sensible, until you consider the possible consequences: a failed state (Afghanistan pre-9/11, on a much larger scale), a haven for global jihadists, outright ethnic cleansing and a widening regional conflict in a strategically crucial part of the world. All this, if it came to the worst, could fairly be blamed on the Bush administration. But what consolation is that, even to a Democrat? A Democratic president, after all,will most likely have to deal with it.

America needs to plan for a substantial and open-ended military commitment in Iraq, not to achieve victory but to guard against the worst possible outcomes, difficult as even this will be. For military and political reasons, far fewer soldiers will be available: planning has to start acknowledging that constraint, rather than continuing to deny it. The focus must shift towards containing the conflict within Iraq's borders, securing havens for internal refugees, striking jihadist targets and other containment strategies. Hard as it will be for this administration, and maybe impossible, the US should seek allies and renewed international legitimacy in this more limited mission. For their part, the administration's critics need to recognise that America - in good conscience and its own interests - cannot wash its hands of the problem.

Can Democratic and Republican centrists come together around such a strategy - one that limits America's purpose in Iraq, but resolves to stay engaged? This deeply unappealing prospect may be the least of the available evils. For it to happen, though, both parties will need to divide. That is unlikely, but not impossible. Amid the clamour this week there were intimations of a possible new consensus.

Republican support for the administration shows new signs of cracking, notably among senators seeking re-election. A withdrawal of forces that merely unwinds the surge by next summer, as now proposed, is less than they had hoped for and less than their voters are demanding.

On the other side, centrist Democrats got a push from the reliably bone-headed leftists of MoveOn.org, which ran a controversial advertisement this week trashing the integrity of "General Betray Us". Aside from firing up the administration's apologists with synthetic outrage, and giving them talking-points they would otherwise have lacked, it drew some centrist Democrats into distancing themselves from the anti-war left, and towards a more accommodating posture.

But these are no more than hints of a bipartisan centre. The administration is unlikely to help and the longer it persists with "we can win", the greater the chances of an abrupt, total and possibly calamitous withdrawal. Whatever happens, Iraq is not going away.

Lessons from the rubble of Iraq
By Philip Stephens
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: September 13 2007 17:51 | Last updated: September 13 2007 17:51


The lesson of September 11 2001 was that to be invincible is not to be invulnerable; the moral to be drawn from the quagmire of Iraq is that the ability to conquer does not confer the capacity to control. If post-Bush America is to reclaim global leadership, it must better understand the limits of its power.

The US remains the world’s sole superpower, the one nation with the capacity to intervene almost anywhere, at almost any time. It is stronger in every dimension – military, economic, political, cultural – than any potential adversary. Separate out the animus towards the persona and policies of George W. Bush and the US is also still quite liked. Odd though it seems, most Iranians declare themselves pro-American.

But in the exercise of US power, the present administration has eroded it. For much of the past six years, Washington has preferred to define itself against its handful of enemies instead of with its multitude of friends. The Bush White House has never really understood the need to map the boundaries, as well as test the reach, of US primacy.

The administration presented the invasion of Iraq as vital to the defeat of al-Qaeda. It was a fraudulent prospectus. “Shock and awe” was intended as a demonstration of raw power. As that well-known Francophile Donald Rumsfeld might have put it, Saddam Hussein was removed pour encourager les autres. Instead, the war in Iraq has energised violent Islamism and distracted US attention from the pursuit of al-Qaeda.

You could sense that this week. Tuesday was the sixth anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York. Last year, Mr Bush marked the anniversary at Ground Zero. This year, the president felt the need to stay in Washington to hear General David Petraeus plead his case for staying in Iraq.

After the hyperbole of the advance billing, it was probably inevitable that America’s cerebral soldier would disappoint. The commander of the surge could scarcely have told Congress he had failed. Armed with charts and statistics, he made the best of the tactical military successes. Even from such a media-attentive general, it was not enough.

The more interesting testimony came from Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador in Baghdad. Mr Crocker’s job was to report on progress towards political reconciliation among Iraq’s Shia and Sunni communities. He applied whatever gloss he could find to the long-stalled efforts to bridge the sectarian divides. But the surge has failed in its principal purpose of providing the security in which national politics would take root.

For Mr Bush, though, the testimony had another purpose. At the White House, success is now measured not just by events on the ground, but by whether a final reckoning can be delayed beyond the president’s departure from office. From this perspective, Mr Bush can claim a small victory.

The number of US troops in Iraq will probably fall next summer to 130,000. This drawdown to pre-surge levels is more military imperative than political choice. The administration has half-promised another cut – perhaps to 100,000 – as the presidential campaign intensifies in the autumn of 2008. The timetable, though, would still leave Mr Bush’s successor with the responsibility for dispatching the helicopters to the roof of the Baghdad embassy.

A cynic might say that Mr Bush wants Iraq to inflict as much damage on his successor – most likely a Democrat – as it has on his own presidency. There must be a fair chance he will get his wish. As long as they are on the campaign trail, the candidates for 2008 can avoid discussion of the consequences of withdrawal. The voters, after all, want the troops home. The reality of disengagement is likely to be very different. The choice facing the new president may be between disaster and catastrophe.

She or he will not be entirely powerless. If there is little prospect of changing the outcome in Iraq itself, Mr Bush’s successor can set the context in which the US acknowledges failure. Will the America that eventually leaves Iraq be a sore, sullen superpower resolved to lash out at enemies from behind the walls of its fortress? Or will it be a US intent on understanding the difference between leadership and hegemony?

There is no simple route map for this latter course, but there are some markers. The first is an appreciation of the importance in global affairs of motives – perceived as well as real. Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser to the first President Bush, puts it well. For most of the postwar period, Mr Scowcroft observes, America’s many friends gave it the benefit of the doubt. Even when Washington got things wrong, people thought it had meant well. Now the opposite is true. Even when the present administration gets things right – and it occasionally does – it is suspected of hiding a darker agenda.

Linked umbilically to this issue of trust is the one of legitimacy.

There is no need for the next administration to embrace multilateralism with all its warts and weaknesses. But the lesson shared between Iraq and the fight against terrorism is that the absence of legitimacy is as a stone to a knife in its capacity to blunt American power.

Mr Bush’s successor will find the United Nations at a crossroads. American indifference alongside Russian obstructionism could well return it to the freezer of the cold war. Or, albeit with some effort, it could become an ally in America’s effort to rebuild something from the rubble of its reputation.

A third marker – and one with specific relevance to Iraq – calls for the US to talk to its enemies as well as its friends: to understand, as it did during the stand-off with the Soviet Union, that such engagement can be a source of strength rather than a sign of weakness.
Talking clarifies motives. US efforts to halt Iran’s nuclear programme would win wider support if the rest of the world were not suspicious of US intent. A dialogue with Tehran would shine a powerful light on Iran’s intentions and reassure doubters about American motives. Curiously, Mr Bush seems to have grasped this point in talking to North Korea.

There are lots of people in Washington, on the Democratic as well as the Republican side of politics, who think multilateralism is for wimps, that international rules are for the weak. The irony, of course, is that the global system thus scorned was made in America – and at a moment when the US had never been stronger. Roosevelt and Truman understood the transmission mechanism between power and leadership.

philip.stephens@ft.com