Iraq: Wrong time, wrong plan

No one doubts that Saddam Hussein is bad for the Iraqi people. He has squandered his country's relative wealth, and enforced his rule with brutality that mocks any defensible conception of human rights. Perhaps the most startling threat from Saddam Hussein is that his chemical and biological weapons might allow him to blackmail the United States in the future. Clearly, the Bush administration has the right — indeed, the duty — to apply American military power, if that power will quell Saddam's threat.

But we can accept all this, and still believe that war under the current conditions is the wrong option. The essential questions at hand are whether the most serious threat to American security right now emanates from Saddam Hussein, whether displacing him will improve American security, and whether this war will be fought in a humanitarian fashion.

Given the Bush administration's track record and past statements, we have serious doubts about all these questions. An invasion may create an Iraq and a wider Islamic world that pose a greater threat to America, not a lesser threat. And all this would come at a massive cost to the Iraqi people.

The Bush war plan is a 2-day bomb parade. In just 48 hours, the administration is planning to drop as many cruise missiles, and inflict as much structural damage, as in the entire Gulf war. The casualties of this bombing campaign and its aftermath will be tremendous. According to U.N. estimates leaked to the London-based Guardian, the war could kill as many as 160,000 Iraqis, displace two million more, and leave over three million homeless.

That sort of outcome will create a surge in recruits for Osama bin Laden, a man who still poses a potentially devastating threat to Americans, even though President Bush carefully sidestepped mentioning him in his most recent State of the Union address.

And after this war, even Iraq itself may become a more chaotic and dangerous place for America's global interests. The Bush plan is big on invasion, but short on democratic reconstruction. The deaths of some Iraqi civilians might be worth the future democracy of their country. But it's highly unlikely that democracy will result from the Bush plans — or, more accurately, his administration's lack of plans.

That all was apparent last week, when Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith presented their war plans to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. What the two did not say was even more disturbing than what they did say. Neither revealed how much money the U.S. would be willing to devote to reconstruction in Iraq. Neither informed the American people about how many troops the administration would provide for the "nation-building" that Bush mocked during his presidential campaign. And neither gave us any idea what other countries would join us in this reconstruction process.

These issues must be resolved before we invade. Yale economist William Nord-haus has put the cost of attacking and fully reconstructing Iraq as high as $1.9 trillion over the next decade. And our troop commitment will have to be as significant as our financial burden if we are to prevent the country's ethnic divisions from breaking out into chaos that would provide fertile ground for terrorist training.

The evidence from Afghanistan suggests that the Bush administration will not be willing to make sacrifices to rebuild Iraq. The U.S. has refused to move international peacekeeping troops outside of Kabul so that the national government, rather than regional warlords, can control the countryside. We also have underfunded Karzai's government grossly. The Bush administration wants to make war in Iraq out to be a legal case. If Iraq breaks Resolution 1441, the U.S. gets to bomb. But there are tremendous humanitarian concerns that this strictly legalistic case overlooks. And casualties cannot be justified unless the U.S. is willing to help rebuild to Iraq — rather than to bomb it, disarm it, and then leave it in even greater chaos, or under endless American military rule.

So here's what our antiwar case comes down to: The U.S. should not start a war involving massive casualties if it is not going to accept the costs of rebuilding Iraq. And the American people have every reason to doubt our resolve to reconstruct, because the Bush administration has left us in the dark about those plans, if they exist at all. Even in Afghanistan, where a broad international coalition embarked on grand plans of reconstruction, nation-building efforts have lacked force and funds.

If we go it alone with the British in attacking Iraq, with our top priority to disarm, and then leave as soon as possible, what are the chances we'll achieve democracy in Iraq? None. Bush is making conservatives feel good about themselves with his new "doctrine" of applying military force for the "freedom" of the Iraqi people, but real freedom and democracy will only come with serious American investments of time and money. Without that, we'll just have blood on our hands with nothing to show for it. That's the current offer of the Bush administration. The American people should not accept it.

Seth J. Green '01 and Jason H. Wasfy are Marshall scholars at New College, Oxford University. They are co-founders of Americans for Informed Democracy (AID), an organization that seeks to raise awareness in the U.S. about world opinions.