WASHINGTON, 16 March 2004 — When the United States invaded Iraq a year ago this week, the action transformed US foreign policy in the Middle East and around the world — but not always as its strategists intended.
The fall of Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, after only 21 days of combat gave the world a vivid lesson in the enormity of US military might. But the difficulties that followed in Iraq — a year of uphill battles against political chaos, economic collapse and a stubborn insurgency — have provided an equally striking lesson in the boundaries of American power when it comes to waging peace.
“Iraq is about our limits rather than our reach,’’ said Lee Feinstein of the Council on Foreign Relations. The burden of building a new Iraq, said Graham Allison of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, has sapped US resources from other foreign policy priorities — including the pursuit of terrorists elsewhere.
“What has been undertaken (in Iraq) is something hugely ambitious,’’ he said. “Our plate is full, and it’s full for some time. We’re not physically constrained; we’re just constrained in terms of political realities.’’
President Bush and his aides insist that committing thousands of troops and billions of dollars to Iraq hasn’t subtracted from their ability to deal with challenges anywhere else. But the administration, which only a year ago flaunted its right to act without foreign allies, has scrambled recently to win international help not only in Iraq, but also to meet challenges in Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea and Haiti.
The yearlong American experience in Iraq has wrought other far-reaching effects on US foreign policy:
— The war was the first test of what has been called the “Bush doctrine,’’ the assertion that the United States may launch a preventive war against any country thought to hold weapons of mass destruction if it consorts with terrorists. But it also has been the only instance of that rule being invoked; Iran, North Korea and Syria, which all arguably qualify, have not been attacked. As a result, scholars aren’t sure whether Iraq was the beginning of a pattern or, as now appears possible, merely the high-water mark of an assertive policy.
— The war put other countries on notice that they had better shape up — and, Bush aides argue, produced an immediate effect on Libya, whose mercurial leader, Col. Muammar Qaddafi, announced the end of his efforts to build chemical and nuclear weapons. But the hoped-for “demonstration effect’’ doesn’t seem to have worked on North Korea, Iran or Syria — at least, not yet.
— The war ruptured US relationships with Cold War allies such as Germany and France, ties that only now are being repaired. In the eyes of much of the global public, it made US foreign policy appear aggressive and menacing, a dent in America’s image that might take years more to repair.
— The war accelerated a remarkable — and risky — shift in US policy in the Arab world. For half a century, the United States sought stability in the world’s most important oil region by supporting friendly dictators, but now the Bush administration says it has ambitious plans to promote rapid political change leading to democracy.
“If the Middle East is to leave behind stagnation and tyranny and violence for export, then freedom must flourish in every corner of the region,’’ Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser, said in a speech last month.
But some foreign policy experts outside the administration worry that the Bush administration has bitten off more than it can chew — in foreign policy-speak, that the United States might be “overextended.’’
“The idea that we could launch another pre-emptive strike or preventive war along the lines of the Bush doctrine is not impossible, but it would be a stretch,’’ said Joseph S. Nye Jr., dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School and a Pentagon official during the Clinton administration. “We’re not overextended in the sense that we’re about to collapse, but we’d have to increase the size of the army and the defense budget, and in an era of deficits, that would be difficult.’’
Indeed, Nye and other scholars said, the greatest constraint on US power — especially in an election year — is the willingness of Congress and the public to support military expeditions that cost lives as well as money. Dmitri K. Simes, president of the Nixon Center, a largely Republican think tank, warned in a recent essay that the Bush administration is trying to do too much when it makes democracy in the Middle East one of its major goals.
“The pursuit of (a) universal democratic utopia, as attractive as it may seem, is damaging vital US interests,’’ he wrote. “The principal problem is the mistaken belief that democracy is a talisman for all the world’s ills, and that the United States has a responsibility to promote democratic government wherever in the world it is lacking.’’
But Robert Kagan, one of the intellectuals — often dubbed “neoconservatives’’ — who long urged the administration to topple Saddam Hussein, argued that some measure of rhetorical overreach is an American tradition.
“Bush isn’t going to be able to do everything he says he would like to do,’’ said Kagan, a Reagan administration official. “We will be hypocritical in some cases. But we’re like the 650-pound sumo wrestler. We have an effect on things just by getting into the ring.’’
In fact, Kagan complained that Bush isn’t aiming high enough. “You don’t hear much from the administration these days about democracy in Russia or democracy in China,’’ he said. “In those cases, democracy seems to be taking a back seat to the desire for good relations with great powers.’’
Some of the administration’s rhetoric has been aimed at other hostile countries, warning them that they, too, might face US wrath if they don’t abandon efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction.
