The ideas that died in Iraq

Preemptive wars, unilateralism, regime change, the neoconservative approach to foreign policy: Just a few months ago, powerful government officials and influential commentators presented these ideas as not just desirable but inevitable choices for a superpower confronted by unprecedented threats. With more than 900 American soldiers dead, 10,000 coalition troops wounded, a military price tag of more than $90 billion, and the main reason for going to war dismissed as a "massive intelligence failure," these concepts lie buried in the sands of Iraq.

Some of these ideas will not be missed. The reliance on military solutions alone to confront real or presumed security threats proved to be as defective an idea as deep disdain for diplomacy. Murderous chaos in postwar Iraq exposed the limits of U.S. military force, its technical superiority notwithstanding. Meanwhile, diplomacy opened possibilities embraced by once scornful and now desperate U.S. leaders who were forced to eat their words. Hopefully they learned a lesson.

More fundamental, disappointments in Iraq also dealt a blow to a worldview that, for all its references to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as an epochal event, still hearkens back to the Cold War. Consider the two primary responses to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: Instead of concentrating all energies and resources to fight the strange, stealthy, and stateless network that perpetrated the attacks, the United States launched military assaults against two nation-states. First, it rightly attacked Afghanistan, a country whose government had been the subject of a friendly takeover by such networks. The second was Iraq, a country with a standing army and a dictator evocative of the Cold War era. Iraq offered a target more suited to the mindset of U.S. leaders and military capabilities than the more complicated terrorist networks operating inside powerful states, including the United States itself.

In other words, facing the prospect of waging a new kind of war against a new kind of opponent, the Bush administration chose instead to fight a familiar enemy whose face and address it knew. Yet U.S. troops quickly found themselves fighting not enemy soldiers but what Pentagon lawyers now call "unlawful combatants"--fighters with nationalities as fuzzy as they are irrelevant to determining their leaders, their chains of command, their loyalty, and their lethal willingness to die for their cause.

So much for the certitudes and heroic assumptions about how the United States should deal with the world, as outlined in the Bush administration's 2002 National Security Strategy. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice may have claimed that "September 11 clarified the threats you face in the post-Cold War era." But while September 11 might have clarified post-Cold War threats, revelations about high-level decision making regarding the war on Iraq suggest that the Cold War instincts that shaped U.S. national security strategy survived the fall of the Berlin Wall. Let's now hope that they find their final resting place under the rubble of Iraq.

Unfortunately, the war in Iraq has also damaged valuable ideas. The need to push for a profound transformation of the Middle East is but one. The unspeakable, politically incorrect conclusion creeping into many influential minds in Washington is that the Middle East is "incurable"; peace, prosperity, and political freedom are goals out of reach for at least one or two generations of U.S. policymakers. The region's stubborn economic backwardness, dysfunctional politics, and deeply entrenched social ills are just too much to take on, according to this new post-Iraq realism. Rather than attempting to accelerate progress in the Middle East, the new logic dictates, U.S. policymakers should just try to stop the rut from deepening and, more importantly, keep the region's violence and instability from spreading abroad.

This conclusion is too demoralizing and politically defeatist to be made explicit. Policymakers will undoubtedly hatch and propose new plans. But it will be a long time before another American-led expedition sets sail to boldly "cure" the Middle East from its grave maladies. Yet, while the world is doubtless better off without another huge, ill-conceived venture in the Middle East, forswearing hope and help for profound, positive, and more rapid change in the region is as dangerous and mistaken as trying to deliver democracy from the barrel of a gun.

Closely linked to the new pessimism about the Middle East is growing skepticism about the general enterprise of promoting democracy, another regrettable casualty of the war's aftermath.

Lurid news stories about warlordism in Afghanistan and bloody chaos in Iraq give a daily boost to misgivings about exporting democracy. Of course, U.S. leaders will continue to wax rhapsodic about America's historical commitment to democracy abroad and how entire peoples are waiting for the United States to help them gain political freedoms. Yet the same leaders remain silent about what they will do in the strong likelihood that rabidly anti-American fundamentalists could come to power in free and fair elections in Muslim countries.

Stability and security have become U.S. obsessions. American politicians increasingly see the promotion of democracy abroad as a threat to both of these goals, with the result that it is becoming a cause with a rapidly dwindling constituency. The war in Iraq has certainly weakened support even further. It is a sad irony that the political will to promote democracy abroad was an intellectual casualty of a war whose promoters claimed was waged in democracy's name.