Of course, the White House always said it would be long. But that was in the days when it was just fighting Al Qaeda, and the shadowy terrorist network was hard to hunt down. After those post-9-11 weeks, the war expanded in two other ways. The first was the shift from Al Qaeda to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The second was what we’ve seen over the last week or so: the shift from Iraq to the broader Middle East.
The war on terror is such an elastic phrase, it can mean almost anything you want. Today, White House officials say the war on terror that began on 9-11 has moved to what they call “three main theaters”–Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Palestinian territories. That shows just how far the Bush administration has traveled since the weeks after 9-11, when it rejected attempts by the Israeli government to wrap its long-standing dispute with the Palestinians into the war on terror. Now the White House is only too ready to draw parallels between Palestinian terrorism in Jerusalem and Iraqi terrorism in Baghdad.
“They hate Christians and Jews and every Muslim who does not share their narrow and violent vision,” Bush said of the Palestinian and Iraqi terrorists on Tuesday. “No nation can be neutral in the struggle between civilization and chaos. Every nation that stands on the side of freedom and the value of human life must condemn terror and act against the few who would destroy the hopes of the many.”
Far from being shaken by recent terrorist attacks in Baghdad, the White House feels vindicated about its mission in the Middle East. Amid reports that jihadi fighters are entering Iraq from other Muslim countries, the president’s advisors seem to relish the idea that the occupation of Iraq is effectively recruiting new fighters to the terrorists’ camp. “Let me be very clear,” said Condoleezza Rice, the president’s national security advisor on Monday, “the terrorists know that a free Iraq can change the face of the Middle East. That is why they, together with the remnants of the old regime, are fighting as if this is a life and death struggle. It is–and the terrorists will lose.”
According to Rice, the war on terror now has one goal. Not the defeat of Al Qaeda or the capture of Osama bin Laden, dead or alive. But something less tangible, and more far-reaching. “The transformation of the Middle East,” she told the Veterans of Foreign Wars at a convention Monday, “is the only guarantee that it will no longer produce ideologies of hatred that lead men to fly airplanes into buildings in New York or Washington.”
It’s not clear what transformation means here. And it’s certainly not clear that you can transform the minds and culture of a country–let alone a region–by going to war. Rice said that the transformation will take many years, but explained that it did not mean “a military presence in Iraq.” That is indeed a strange process of change–one that starts with a war, but does not require troops to keep the change moving.
Yet that is only one challenge to this new, transformational war on terror. The far tougher challenge is the size of the project itself. Because in expanding the war to include the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Bush administration is driving a wedge into what is left of its international coalition.
First, it’s almost impossible to gain any meaningful support from Arab nations for the rebuilding of Iraq if the U.S. has the declared goal of overhauling the region, including those Arab nations. (It’s a bit like fighting the Soviet Union by trying to get the help of Communist Poland.) Second, those same Arab countries do not share the view that Iraq’s problems are the same as those fueling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Third, nor do the European allies who are being asked for both troops and cash in Iraq. In fact, not even the British agree with that world view. The president says nobody can be neutral in the war on terror, but many American allies prefer to be just that in the Middle East.
At the same time as it’s undermining the Iraq project, the Bush administration is weakening its hand in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself. By fighting the same fight as the Sharon government, the White House has given up its role as the honest broker between the two warring parties. That is especially true at a time when it is asking other countries in the region to pressure the Palestinians to crack down on terrorism (those same countries the U.S. is trying to “transform”).
Maybe the White House has good reason to say the war on terror in Iraq is similar to the war in the Palestinian territories. Maybe it has intelligence that the same countries supporting terrorists in one country are supporting terrorists in another. Syria and Iran have once again risen to the top of the list of suspects here, in warnings from senior U.S. officials in recent days.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld singled out Syria once again for allowing “jihadists” to enter Iraq and attack U.S. forces last week. “Syria could be a lot more helpful in terms of border controls,” says one senior White House official. “We have had several tough conversations with Syria about the need for them not to be on the wrong side of this.” Those warning shots to Syria represent something of a return to the war of words in the days after the fall of Saddam’s statue, when the Bush administration rattled Damascus with warnings about its terrorist ties and its safe haven for Saddam’s cronies. In contrast, Iran stands accused of interfering with the politics of southern Iraq, rather than directing attacks or unleashing attackers on U.S. forces. In the first American proposals for a new resolution circulating around the United Nations last week, Syria and Iran are singled out for blame for the influx of jihadi fighters. With Syria currently chairing the U.N.’s Security Council, such tactics are unlikely to win broad support for the administration’s latest attempts to win international support for its occupation of Iraq.
Don’t get me wrong. Bringing democracy and free markets to Arab nations is the right policy for the U.S. But it’s hugely different from fighting terrorists. The biggest advances to date in that fight–in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere–have come through joint operations with local supporters and officials on the ground. The danger of this newly expanded war is that the U.S. is strangling the very support it needs to beat the terrorists themselves.
