Amid the rubble of Iraq, how to save American leadership

Amid the rubble of Iraq, how to save American leadership

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By Philip Stephens

Published: September 14 2007 03:00 | Last updated: September 14 2007 03:00

The lesson of September 11, 2001 was that to be invincible is not to be invulnerable; the moral to be drawn from the quagmire of Iraq is that the ability to conquer does not confer the capacity to control. If post-Bush America is to reclaim global leadership, it must better understand the limits of its power.

The US remains the world's sole superpower, the one nation with the capacity to intervene almost anywhere, at almost any time. It is stronger in every dimension - military, economic, political, cultural - than any potential adversary. Separate out the animus towards the persona and policies of George W. Bush and the US is also still quite liked. Odd though it seems, most Iranians declare themselves pro-American.


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But in the exercise of US power, the present administration has eroded it. For much of the past six years, Washington has preferred to define itself against its handful of enemies instead of with its multitude of friends. The Bush White House has never really understood the need to map the boundaries, as well as test the reach, of US primacy.

The administration presented the invasion of Iraq as vital to the defeat of al-Qaeda. It was a fraudulent prospectus. "Shock and awe" was intended as a demonstration of raw power. As that well-known Francophile Donald Rumsfeld might have put it, Saddam Hussein was removed pour encourager les autres. Instead, the war in Iraq has energised violent Islamism and distracted US attention from the pursuit of al-Qaeda.

You could sense that this week. Tuesday was the sixth anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York. Last year, Mr Bush marked the anniversary at Ground Zero. This year, the president felt the need to stay in Washington to hear General David Petraeus plead his case for staying in Iraq.

After the hyperbole of the advance billing, it was probably inevitable that America's cerebral soldier would disappoint. The commander of the surge could scarcely have told Congress he had failed. Armed with charts and statistics, he made the best of the tactical military successes. Even from such a media-attentive general, it was not enough.

The more interesting testimony came from Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador in Baghdad. Mr Crocker's job was to report on progress towards political reconciliation among Iraq's Shia and Sunni communities. He applied whatever gloss he could find to the long-stalled efforts to bridge the sectarian divides. But the surge has failed in its principal purpose of providing the security in which national politics would take root.

For Mr Bush, though, the testimony had another purpose. At the White House, success is now measured not just by events on the ground, but by whether a final reckoning can be delayed beyond the president's departure from office. From this perspective, Mr Bush can claim a small victory.

The number of US troops in Iraq will probably fall next summer to 130,000. This drawdown to pre-surge levels is more military imperative than political choice. The administration has half-promised another cut - perhaps to 100,000 - as the presidential campaign intensifies in the autumn of 2008. The timetable, though, would still leave Mr Bush's successor with the responsibility for dispatching the helicopters to the roof of the Baghdad embassy.

A cynic might say that Mr Bush wants Iraq to inflict as much damage on his successor - most likely a Democrat - as it has on his own presidency. There must be a fair chance he will get his wish. As long as they are on the campaign trail, the candidates for 2008 can avoid discussion of the consequences of withdrawal. The voters, after all, want the troops home. The reality of disengagement is likely to be very different. The choice facing the new president may be between disaster and catastrophe.

She or he will not be entirely powerless. If there is little prospect of changing the outcome in Iraq itself, Mr Bush's successor can set the context in which the US acknowledges failure. Will the America that eventually leaves Iraq be a sore, sullen superpower resolved to lash out at enemies from behind the walls of its fortress? Or will it be a US intent on understanding the difference between leadership and hegemony?

There is no simple route map for this latter course, but there are some markers. The first is an appreciation of the importance in global affairs of motives - perceived as well as real. Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser to the first President Bush, puts it well. For most of the postwar period, Mr Scowcroft observes, America's many friends gave it the benefit of the doubt. Even when Washington got things wrong, people thought it had meant well. Now the opposite is true. Even when the present administration gets things right - and it occasionally does - it is suspected of hiding a darker agenda.

Linked umbilically to this issue of trust is the one of legitimacy.

There is no need for the next administration to embrace multilateralism with all its warts and weaknesses. But the lesson shared between Iraq and the fight against terrorism is that the absence of legitimacy is as a stone to a knife in its capacity to blunt American power.

Mr Bush's successor will find the United Nations at a crossroads. American indifference alongside Russian obstructionism could well return it to the freezer of the cold war. Or, albeit with some effort, it could become an ally in America's effort to rebuild something from the rubble of its reputation.

A third marker - and one with specific relevance to Iraq - calls for the US to talk to its enemies as well as its friends: to understand, as it did during the stand-off with the Soviet Union, that such engagement can be a source of strength rather than a sign of weakness.

Talking clarifies motives. US efforts to halt Iran's nuclear programme would win wider support if the rest of the world were not suspicious of US intent. A dialogue with Tehran would shine a powerful light on Iran's intentions and reassure doubters about American motives. Curiously, Mr Bush seems to have grasped this point in talking to North Korea.

There are lots of people in Washington, on the Democratic as well as the Republican side of politics, who think multilateralism is for wimps, that international rules are for the weak. The irony, of course, is that the global system thus scorned was made in America - and at a moment when the US had never been stronger. Roosevelt and Truman understood the transmission mechanism between power and leadership.