Everything Looks Like a Nail

Where will we be once the shooting stops?

Tim Cavanaugh | April 4, 2003

"Greatest British tank victory since WWII," read a headline in the UK Daily Express last week, describing a 14-0 shutout by the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards at Basra. An Esquire magazine correspondent, embedded with the 101st Airborne division, described the final assault on Baghdad as being "Like a World War II advance."

These and other Second World War comparisons have been flying fast and furious in the past week or so, as Iraqi resistance to the US/British invasion has proven strong enough to merit a real fight. Whatever awaits soldiers and marines now on the outskirts of Baghdad, the difficulties encountered on the drive to the Iraqi capital have proven to be a left-handed gift to President Bush.

On the plus side, the tough fighting has kept the domestic discussion almost entirely on military affairs. If there's one thing Americans love, it's to feel like we're fighting World War II all over again. On the face of it, any comparison between the lopsided conquest of Iraq and the (also lopsided, but often in doubt) destruction of the Axis is absurd. (To give just one example, consider how relatively harmless this conflict's much-lamented friendly fire incidents have been, compared to the disasters at the Farello Airstrip or Iwo Jima.)

But unbridled combat footage and full-color strategy maps crisscrossed with big arrows have been more than just a sop to kids raised on Time-Life Books' World War II series (about which it was famously said that the subscription lasted longer than the war). They have staved off the political reckoning that ultimately awaits the war's end, when the United States finds itself in custody of a population that is at best not entirely friendly, and faces a host of international challenges. Here are just a few:

What is Blair's reward?

As Jesse Walker noted here recently, British Prime Minister Tony Blair needs, and deserves, to show something for his staunch support of the American-led war. The British contribution in Iraq has been courageous and costly—with a force less than one-fifth the size of the American force in the Gulf region, Britain has already suffered at least half as many casualties as the United States.

British patriotism is comparable to America's, and Blair's diffident public has largely rallied behind the war, but there is another wrinkle to this support: Unlike the Americans, the British are overwhelmingly supportive of a strong United Nations role in Iraq, and consider UN participation one of the necessary outcomes of the war. This support is as widespread among the war's supporters as among its detractors, and Blair will need to deliver a substantial UN role if he wants to avoid looking like an American puppet.

The Bush administration and its various mouthpieces in the press have been openly contemptuous of the UN, and Bush seems to intend a unilateral role in postwar Iraq.

Contempt for the UN may be well-deserved, but if the administration cares about showing any support for Blair (and it may not), it must court the world body, and in particular the many former allies it has infuriated.

The future of regime change

One of the war's more vague selling points was the notion that a free Iraq would inspire neighboring populations, specifically in Iran and Syria, to rise up against their own authoritarian governments. While a free Iraq appears to be a fairly distant goal, it's notable that right now, the popular momentum for regime change is moving in the opposite direction—against American friends like Jordan, Pakistan, and Egypt, all of which have seen large and potentially destabilizing protests.

It's important not to make too much of a mob's whims. Inanition being one of the healthiest and most widely distributed human qualities, it's just as likely that regime change may turn out to have no exportability in either a pro- or anti-western capacity. But the Iraq war's vast unpopularity has so far made the idea of a democratic bloom appear fanciful. The ethics-related downfall of Richard Perle is just one hint that this idea is on the wane even within the administration.

What to do about Syria

The scenario of an indefinitely expanding war that was brilliantly delineated by Josh Marshall recently is an extreme and (one hopes) fantastical view of Bush's ambitions in the Middle East, but on one point it's already proved intriguing: the prediction that the administration may someday use unfound Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for attacking Syria. Last week's war of words between Washington and Damascus was, rhetorically at least, won in a walk by Syrian foreign ministry spokeswoman Buthaina Shaaban. But if the United States does have wider regional ambitions, it will need to find a way to press Syria. How?

Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, is a mixed bag. His presidency has never been viewed as wholly legitimate: His accession was constitutionally dubious, he took no interest in politics during his youth, and he essentially inherited the position from his father. Since taking power, he has surrounded himself with his father's circle of advisors. His rhetoric is coarse and simpleminded. He wasn't even his father's first choice to be a successor—that role having been reserved for his daredevil brother Basil, who died in an automobile "accident" in 1994.