The Nuthouse Axis

On Capitol Hill there are only faint glimmers of recognition that President Bush's State of the Union address had a reckless, almost nuthouse quality to it, with its promises to take down the "axis of evil" of Iraq, Iran and North Korea. But American troops have been in combat, the President's approval rating stands at 85 percent and no politician wants to stand up and criticize. Instead we see very quiet demurrals: Nebraska's Chuck Hagel stressing the virtues of "speaking softly" and Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle mildly regretting that Bush lumped together Iran (with its active democratic movement) with Iraq, only to retract his words the next day.

This isn't like the Senate in 1966, when William Fulbright, George Aiken and Wayne Morse raised somber warnings about the Vietnam quagmire President Johnson was then marching into. More like 1963?when criticism of the embryonic Vietnam venture was unheard of.

Apart from the tiny bastions of noninterventionist argument from the old and libertarian right and the perennial "anti-imperialist" left, the American press has been strangely silent. Few have opposed the noisome claque of Sharonite warrior pundits who have been agitating for U.S. military action against Iraq and Iran for years. Last week Michael Kinsley pointed out that Bush was trying to staple an expanded war against nuclear proliferation by "evil" countries onto the widely supported war against terrorists who attacked America?a "bait and switch" operation Kinsley rightly labeled it.

But among the "mainstream" columnists who appear in the major U.S. dailies, only Kinsley seems to have noticed this. The perception is far more widespread in Europe, enough to make clear the war Bush is pointing America toward is one the United States will fight without European allies, and against substantial European political opposition.

Little thought has gone into how the war might end, even if the initial campaigns go well. Assume that the governments of Baghdad and Tehran can be toppled by some combination of American air power, ground troops and armed local factions. Then what?

The inescapable fact is that however much we tell ourselves that the terrorists who struck on Sept. 11 did so because they "hate" America's freedom and virtue (and however much that might be true), they also struck New York because we are present in their societies. They see the U.S. as culturally, politically and economically active in their lands?bolstering governments they see as illegitimate, corroding local mores and underwriting Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory.

The Middle East's anti-Americans exaggerate Washington's role in what they find intolerable about this. But it is hard to see how any victory over the regimes of Iran and Iraq wouldn't increase the American role?committing the United States to (as historian Paul Schroeder writes in an exceptionally lucid essay in the current National Interest) "an even more intrusive and direct hegemony than before."

And American hegemony in the Middle East is unlikely ever to be accepted?the cultural gaps are simply too deep. The international relations theorists explain that hegemony can endure if it is perceived as inevitable and more or less natural by a critical mass of local leaders and states: America's geopolitical hegemony in Western Europe after World War II was thus seen. So was (in different ways) United States hegemony in Latin America.

But hegemony is hard to maintain when lesser powers unite against it. Napoleon's rule in Europe didn't last; nor did Hitler's. Can anyone believe that an American hegemony over the Middle East?a U.S.-installed regime in Tehran, an Iraq split into cantons, divvied up with Turkey?could ever be experienced as a natural, tolerable and benign result by most of the Middle East's rulers and peoples?

Of course it wouldn't. Within years of the "victory over evil" it would be clear that the United States had acquired something like its very own Gaza Strip, albeit on a much grander scale?a mass of tens of millions of resentful people, many willing to take large risks to seek vengeance. The 9/11 terror attacks, horrific as they were, would be only the beginning.

In his National Interest essay (written in October) Schroeder suggests that the U.S. ought to declare victory at the earliest possible moment and go at least part of the way home?his phrasing is surely redolent of the famous quip from Vermont Sen. George Aiken, who urged Lyndon Johnson to do the same about Vietnam in 1966.

By toppling the Taliban and routing bin Laden, Americans have achieved a significant victory?and the task that remains is a difficult long-term police action against the remaining Al Qaeda networks. But if Bush follows through on his "axis of evil" rhetoric and transmutes the war against anti-American terrorism into a war against Middle East regimes that Washington doesn't like (or that Ariel Sharon doesn't like), we are headed for a long and bloody quagmire, with no light at the end of the tunnel.