After Iraq

A reader takes the long view:

"I agree with some of your points on the order of: suppose we hadn’t gone in? True, Saddam didn’t, and still wouldn’t, have any WMD, but (as we know all too well right now) the WMD issue was only the beginning. The Saddam regime was inherently unstable and some kind of crackup was coming to Iraq eventually anyway.

The lesson can only be: the entire civilized world ("The West", if you will) needs to take more seriously the problem of unstable and/or failed states, and needs to develop and actual functioning machinery for dealing with them, including situations in which Iraq-style "regime change" is the agreed-upon course of action.

While the US had the will and ability to go into Iraq (mistakenly or not), the interesting question is: what if there was no USA? No power with the ability (or belief in its ability) to act unilaterally? Suppose the present situation was not the result of a US invasion, but instead the natural outcome of a post-Saddam Iraqi crackup? What abilities exist under the auspices of organizations like NATO or the UN to deal with it? The answer is clearly, "not much", and this is not going to be adequate for the long term.

Given our financial predicament (exacerbated by the Bush tax cuts), it simply isn’t going to be possible for the US economy to support the kind of gigantic military capability that has been typical of the US since the end of WWII. Once our military has declined to a level more typical of Western democracies such as, say, Great Britain, we won’t be in a position anymore to deal (on our own) with the Iraqs of the future, and a more collaborative mechanism had better be in place before that point is reached."

Agreed. Alas, the Bush administration may have made this harder. But I see signs that they are adjusting. And the Europeans may be beginning to realize that we need to be in this together for the long haul in order to prevail.