At the murderous end of these three movements -- Sunni (al Qaeda), Shia
(the dominant clerics in Iran, Hezbollah), or Baathist (those instruments
of the Iraqi state loyal to Saddam) -- there is no problem in forming joint
ventures, and evidence abounds of cooperation and common purpose among
these groups. The Iraqi-al Qaeda tie, for instance, has been clear since
before bin Laden left Sudan in 1996. In addition, Iraq has worked with
al Qaeda in supporting Ansar al-Islam, a terrorist group in northern Iraq,
in its recent efforts to assassinate Kurdish leaders. Bin Laden persuaded
the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and other Sunni terrorist groups to turn their
attention away from "near enemies" such as Egyptian President
Hosni Mubarak and toward us; this dovetails nicely with the objectives
of Saddam and Iran's extremist leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
For his part, Saddam only needs time to add nuclear and longer-range
missile capabilities to his current arsenal of chemical and bacteriological
weapons, and short-range missiles. He will then be able to deter coalitions
from forming against him, to dominate his corner of the world, and to
make it far less likely that we will be able to interrupt his rule and
his dynasty. Terrorist attacks on us serve these ends if they help keep
us away from him.
In Iran, Khamenei and his extremist Shia colleagues badly need us as
an enemy to justify the dictatorial means by which they stay in power.
This is why the Clinton administration's various olive branches to the
Iranian government were so firmly spurned. The mullahs rightly fear that
they are losing the loyalty of the people. Last fall's demonstrations
by hundreds of thousands of young Iranians cheering the United States
and chanting, "Death to the Taliban, in Kabul, and in Tehran,"
are a precursor of what is to come. The mullahs need to provoke hostility
toward us to justify their repression and continued control.
Each of the groups arrayed against us assists the more murderous Palestinians
and takes other steps to create a conflict that will be perceived as one
between Islam, on the one hand, and "the crusaders and the Jews"
(as they term it), on the other. We can prevail only if we can instead
make it a conflict between, on the one hand, people who are free and those
who desire to be -- in the West and the Middle East -- and the tyrants and
oppressors, on the other.
To do this we need to take a leaf from the books of President Woodrow
Wilson and his Fourteen Points; President Franklin Roosevelt and his Atlantic
Charter; and Presidents Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan
and their various formulations of what was at stake in the Cold War. One
major reason we won the three world wars of the 20th century (two hot,
one cold) was because we were perceived to be fighting them not only for
ourselves, but also on behalf of the oppressed people of the countries
whose governments were our enemies. And we have, in fact, been remarkably
successful at spreading democracy around the world during and after these
three wars. According to Freedom House, a respected democracy monitoring
group, three-quarters of the nearly 150 non-Muslim-majority countries
in the world are now democracies. Of the nearly 50 Muslim-majority countries,
about half are non-Arab, and half of these qualify as democracies (some
"free," some "partly free"). These include some of
the world's poorest nations, such as Mali and Bangladesh. Of the remaining
22 Muslim-majority states that are Arab, not a single one is a democracy.
The Middle East's two democracies, Israel and Turkey, thus live in a
rough neighborhood populated by governments that are either pathological
predators such as in Iraq or vulnerable autocracies such as in Saudi Arabia.
We have helped bring this about because for decades we have tilted toward
whichever Middle Eastern autocracy or dictatorship seemed the least undesirable
and the most inclined to sell us oil. The most tragic case of our abandoning
the people of the Middle East was the first Bush administration's decision
to stand back at the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and watch the
Kurds and Shia, who rebelled at our instigation, be massacred by Saddam's
Republican Guard.
In the 85 years since we entered World War I, the United States has been
responsible for bringing democracy, directly and indirectly, to much of
the world. We made our temporary compromises for tactical reasons, supporting
Josef Stalin in World War II and various dictators during the Cold War.
But in time the vast majority of these countries have become democracies
-- most, in one way or another, with our help. At various times the smart
money would have bet that democracy could never be learned by Germans,
Japanese, Chinese, or Russians. But from Berlin to Tokyo to Taipei to
Moscow they seem to have largely figured it out.
For democracies, war is ordinarily their last choice. It is dictatorships
that start wars, often because their rulers need enemies to stay in power.
Many would say of the Arabs that it is foolhardy to try to bring democracy
to their corner of the world, and indeed there are some cultural barriers
(not least of which are the views of the Wahhabis and those Muslims who
see the world through similar eyes). But the substantial majority of the
people of the Middle East are not any less suited to democracy than it
was once thought the Germans and Japanese would be, and they cannot be
that different in their ability to govern themselves decently than their
co-religionists in, say, Mali and Bangladesh. We need to remember what
Wilson and FDR taught us. In the long run, for all of us, peace and political
freedom are inseparable.
It is urgent that we begin this process of bringing democracy to the
Middle East before the region's most dangerous dictator -- Saddam Hussein
-- gets nuclear weapons, extends the range of his ballistic missiles, and
dominates the region. Bernard Lewis of Princeton, a leading expert on
the Muslim world, has recently said that because of its educated population,
history, and oil wealth, Iraq is probably the Arab country best suited
to the introduction of democracy. Saddam's degraded conventional military
capability since 1991, and the proportional growth in our use of smart
weapons by an order of magnitude in the last decade, should make him vulnerable
to a determined attack by American forces if we can obtain assistance
from indigenous groups, such as the Turks, Kuwaitis, and the Kurds of
northern Iraq.
The case for removing Saddam only becomes stronger with the passage of
time. First, there is no reasonable debate about the proposition that
he has chemical and bacteriological weapons and short-range ballistic
missiles. In the May issue of Vanity Fair, for example, writer
David Rose debriefs an Iraqi defector who chronicles the locations of
their production in Iraq -- including the use of mobile laboratories for
making bacteriological agents. Rose also revealed Iraqi work on ballistic
missiles of increasingly longer range that will soon be capable of reaching
Europe. The Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a nonprofit organization,
has published details about the four tons of VX nerve gas and the several
hundred tons of other chemical agents Iraq possesses. In addition to hiding
many tons of growth media for biological agents and pursuing its work
on smallpox and anthrax, Iraq is the only nation in the world to have
weaponized aflatoxin, whose primary purpose is to cause liver cancer in
children.
When Richard Butler, head of the U.N. inspection teams in the late 1990s,
asked Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz the purpose of Iraq's biochemical
weapons programs, Aziz replied, "in order to deal with the Persians
and the Jews." Full candor would, of course, have required him to
add the Americans to the list. Saddam's bomb maker, Khidir Hamza, who
defected in the mid-1990s, has detailed the numerous sites where nuclear
weapons work is taking place, as have other defectors.
Those who counsel delay in dealing with the growing Iraqi threat need
to answer a simple question: How does allowing Saddam more time make it
easier to deal with the problem? And if the (honest) answer is that (of
course) it won't, then the next question the procrastinators must answer
is: Was it wise for Britain and France to delay confronting Adolf Hitler
until 1939, when he was strong, rather than earlier, when he was weaker?
