America Should Widen Its Oceans, Not Shrink Them.

In the end, Afghanistan may turn out to be a sideshow. UPI political analyst Jim Chapin provides a valuable metaphor, comparing terrorists to mosquitoes. Afghanistan may be where they end up. But while killing them there may be necessary, it is more important to drain the swamps where they breed.

But where are the "swamps"?the regions where most of the economic resources and people are? How do you "drain" them, stopping the creation of people who grow up eager to murder Americans?

Start with Iraq, the most advanced Middle Eastern state, the one with the largest middle class. For the neoconservative hawk chorus, it's long been enemy number one. The Weekly Standard has been trying to restart the American war on Iraq for years. This faction in the Bush administration, spearheaded by Paul Wolfowitz, has sent out former CIA head James Woolsey to look for evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks. Unfortunately for the neocon case, there's scant sign of a Baghdad link.

Officials scrutinizing anthrax assert that Iraq is probably not the source. So the case for Iraqi complicity rests on the fact that Egyptian hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi diplomat/spy in Prague. That's a thin reed to hang a new war on, especially one that would be opposed by every European and Arab country, leaving the United States and Israel isolated against much of the Muslim world. Can one imagine the Arab government whose intelligence service Al Qaeda terrorists have not met with? Indeed, there are more reports of CIA contacts with Al Qaeda than Iraqi ones.

Iraq lacks a plausible motive. Certainly Saddam's thuggish regime has every reason to oppose the United States, to hate both the American president who drove it out of Kuwait and his son, George W. Bush. But why would it risk provoking an American attack now?

By every visible measure, Baghdad was easing its way from the straitjacket that has enshrouded it since 1991. UN weapons inspectors are gone. The sanctions, while still partially in place, have been loosened. During the past spring, Colin Powell and Great Britain were exploring ways to ease them further?at the urging of much of the Arab world. Saddam's regime?canny enough to survive 10 years of isolation and hostility from the West?could not only see light at the end of the tunnel, it had practically reached the open air. Indeed, the anti-Iraq crowd's motives for starting a war now are far more apparent than Saddam Hussein's.

Surprisingly, there may be less "man in the street" hostility to the United States in Baghdad than elsewhere in the Arab world. This emerged in Lesley Stahl's 60 Minutes report that aired the week before last. Warm greetings for an American visitor in the marketplace, an optimistic buzz.

Stahl interviewed Tariq Aziz, the man with the impossible job of making Saddam's regime palatable to the outside world. He came off, I would guess, credible to most viewers with his denials of Iraqi complicity in the 9/11 attacks. Aziz basically said, "We are opposed to fundamentalist Muslims, and if they were in our country, we would arrest and persecute them."

She also interviewed Richard Butler, the former UN official who has been investigating Iraqi weapons programs for years. Butler is a committed foe of Saddam's government, convinced (and to me, persuasively) that Saddam is trying hard to develop weapons of mass destruction. But this usually unflappable man was stumped cold when Stahl asked him whether Israel should be forced to submit to UN inspections of its weapons of mass destruction. Yes, it's a problem, he finally said.

Perhaps it's the root of the problem. While Americans might not be bothered by Israel's regional monopoly of nuclear weapons, Israel's neighbors are, and I can't imagine the editorials in The New Republic or Weekly Standard that would convince them otherwise.

So where does that leave the United States with regard to the "swamps," two months into the war? Allies first. Israel stirs up enormous ill will toward Washington by sending American-made tanks to kill Palestinians on the West Bank, while Sharon tactfully compares George W. Bush to Neville Chamberlain. Saudi Arabia, home to three-fourths of the hijackers, barely cooperates with American investigators. Ditto Egypt, recipient of $2 billion in annual aid.

Now foes. The Palestinian Authority, regularly maligned in the American press and in Congress, makes sober public statements, while Arafat has himself been photographed giving blood to American victims. On the streets of Baghdad, people greet an American visitor warmly. Iran?where there has been no significant American presence for a generation?offers to rescue downed American pilots.

The conclusion is inescapable: the less we are there, the more we are liked, or at least the less motivation there is to kill us. Which suggests that America's long-term goal should be a sort of strategic withdrawal, creating a situation where we have as little as possible to do with the whole arc stretching from Algeria to Afghanistan. We have oceans between us. The purpose of American diplomacy ought to be to widen those oceans, not shrink them.