[A-List] US imperialism: Fukuyama despairs

["Michael Keaney" <michael011@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The neocons have learned nothing from five years of catastrophe

Their zealous advocacy of the invasion of Iraq may have been a disaster,
but now they want to do it all over again - in Iran

Francis Fukuyama
Wednesday January 31, 2007
The Guardian

The United States today spends approximately as much as the rest of the
world combined on its military establishment. So it is worth pondering
why it is that, after nearly four years of effort, the loss of thousands
of American lives, and an outlay of perhaps half-a-trillion dollars, the
US has not succeeded in pacifying a small country of some 24 million
people, much less in leading it to anything that looks remotely like a
successful democracy.

One answer is that the nature of global politics in the first decade of
the 21st century has changed in important ways. Today's world, at least
in that band of instability that runs from north Africa and through the
Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and central Asia, is characterised by
numerous weak and sometimes failed states, and by transnational actors
who are able to move fluidly across international borders, abetted by
the same technological capabilities that produced globalisation. States
such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Palestine and a
host of others are not able to exercise sovereign control over their
territory, ceding power and influence to terrorist groups such as
al-Qaida, political parties-cum-militias such as Hizbullah in Lebanon,
or various ethnic and sectarian factions elsewhere.

American military doctrine has emphasised the use of overwhelming force,
applied suddenly and decisively, to defeat the enemy. But in a world
where insurgents and militias deploy invisibly among civilian
populations, overwhelming force is almost always counterproductive: it
alienates precisely those people who have to make a break with the
hardcore fighters and deny them the ability to operate freely. The kind
of counterinsurgency campaign needed to defeat transnational militias
and terrorists puts political goals ahead of military ones, and
emphasises hearts and minds over shock and awe.

A second lesson that should have been drawn from the past five years is
that preventive war cannot be the basis of a long-term US
nonproliferation strategy. The Bush doctrine sought to use preventive
war against Iraq as a means of raising the perceived cost to would-be
proliferators of approaching the nuclear threshold. Unfortunately, the
cost to the US itself was so high that it taught exactly the opposite
lesson: the deterrent effect of American conventional power is low, and
the likelihood of preventive war actually decreases if a country manages
to cross that threshold.

A final lesson that should have been drawn from the Iraq war is that the
current US government has demonstrated great incompetence in its
day-to-day management of policy. One of the striking things about the
performance of the Bush administration is how poorly it has followed
through in accomplishing the ambitious objectives it set for itself. In
Iraq, the administration has acted like a patient with attention-deficit
disorder. The US succeeded in organising efficiently for key events such
as the handover of sovereignty on June 30 2004, or the elections of
January 30 2005. But it failed to train Iraqi forces, failed to appoint
ambassadors, failed to perform due diligence on contractors and, above
all, failed to hold accountable those officials most responsible for
these and other multiple failures.

This lack of operational competence could in theory be fixed over time,
but it has important short-term consequences for American grand
strategy. Neoconservative theorists saw America exercising a benevolent
hegemony over the world, using its enormous power wisely and decisively
to fix problems such as terrorism, proliferation, rogue states, and
human-rights abuses. But even if friends and allies were inclined to
trust America's good intentions, it would be hard for them not to be
dismayed at the actual execution of policy and the amount of broken
china this particular bull left behind.

The failure to absorb Iraq's lessons has been evident in the
neoconservative discussion of how to deal with Iran's growing regional
power, and its nuclear programme. Iran today constitutes a huge
challenge for the US, as well as for America's friends in the Middle
East. Unlike al-Qaida, Iran is a state, deeply rooted historically
(unlike Iraq) and flush with resources as a result of energy price
rises. It is ruled by a radical Islamist regime that - particularly
since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's election in June 2005 - has turned in a
disturbingly intolerant and aggressive direction.

The US unintentionally abetted Iran's regional rise by invading Iraq,
eliminating the Ba'athist regime as a counterweight, and empowering Shia
parties close to Tehran. It seems reasonably clear that Iran wants
nuclear weapons, despite protestations that its nuclear programme is
only for civilian purposes; nuclear energy makes little sense for a
country sitting on some of the world's largest oil reserves, but it
makes sense as the basis for a weapons programme. It is completely
rational for the Iranians to conclude that they will be safer with a
bomb than without one.

It is easy to outline the obstacles to a negotiated end to the Iranian
programme, but much harder to come up with an alternative strategy. Use
of force looks very unappealing. The US is hardly in a position to
invade and occupy yet another country, especially one three times larger
than Iraq. An attack would have to be conducted from the air, and it
would not result in regime change, which is the only long-term means of
stopping the WMD programme. It is hard to have much confidence that US
intelligence on Iranian facilities is any better than it was in the case
of Iraq. An air campaign is much more likely to build support for the
regime than to topple it, and will stimulate terrorism and attacks on
American facilities and friends around the globe. The US would be even
more isolated in such a war than during the Iraqi campaign, with only
Israel as a certain ally.

None of these considerations, nor the debacle in Iraq, has prevented
certain neoconservatives from advocating military action against Iran.
Some insist that Iran poses an even greater threat than Iraq, avoiding
the fact that their zealous advocacy of the Iraq invasion is what has
destroyed America's credibility and undercut its ability to take strong
measures against Iran.

All of this could well be correct. Ahmadinejad may be the new Hitler;
the current negotiations could be our Munich accords; Iran could be in
the grip of undeterrable religious fanatics; and the west might be
facing a "civilisational" danger. I believe that there are reasons for
being less alarmist. Iran is, after all, a state, with equities to
defend - it should be deterrable by other states possessing nuclear
weapons; it is a regional and not a global power; it has in the past
announced extreme ideological goals but has seldom acted on them when
important national interests were at stake; and its decision-making
process appears neither unified nor under the control of the most
radical forces.

What I find remarkable about the neoconservative line of argument on
Iran, however, is how little changed it is in its basic assumptions and
tonalities from that taken on Iraq in 2002, despite the momentous events
of the past five years and the manifest failure of policies that
neoconservatives themselves advocated. What may change is the American
public's willingness to listen to them.

· This is an edited extract from After the Neocons by Francis Fukuyama,
published in paperback by Profile books


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