Richard Fontaine
92 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬
would likely cause Washington to once again embrace counterterrorism
as its chie national security priority, leaving it more vulnerable to
threats from China and Russia. Unless the United States chooses to
give up its global role and instead focus only on Asia and Europe, it
must engage in great-power competition while attending to other
security challenges in other areas.A SUBTLER STRATEGY
Every possible intervention, past and future, raises dicult what-ifs.
I presented again with a situation like that in Rwanda in 1994—
800,000 lives in peril and the possibility that a modest foreign mili-
tary eort could make a dierence—would the United States once
again avoid acting? Should it have stayed out o the bloodbath in the
Balkans or intervened earlier to prevent greater carnage? Should it
have left QaddaÄ to attack Benghazi? Pursued al Qaeda after the 1998
attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, perhaps obviat-
ing the need to overthrow the Taliban three years later?
In such discussions, the gravitational pull o the Iraq war bends the
light around it, and for obvious reasons. The war there has been so sear-
ing, so badly bungled, and so catastrophically costly that, according to
former Secretary o Defense Robert Gates, anyone thinking o a similar
engagement “should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur
so delicately put it.” Almost everything that could go wrong in Iraq did.
What started as a war to eliminate weapons o mass destruction found
none. The impulse to liberate the Iraqi people from tyranny pushed
them into a civil war. The desire to open another front in the war on
terrorism created far more terrorists than it eliminated. A war that
some U.S. ocials promised would be a “cakewalk” exacted an unbear-
able toll on U.S. troops, their families, and the Iraqi people themselves.
Ironically, many among Washington’s political and national secu-
rity elite, especially on the Republican side, were for years unable to
admit publicly that the invasion was the mistake it so clearly was.
After the 2003 invasion, politics and a resistance to suggesting that
American sacriÄces were in vain kept such observations private. Re-
publican political leaders’ failure to admit that the war’s costs exceeded
its beneÄts undermined their credibility, which was already tarnished
by their general support for the war in the Ärst place. That, in turn,
may have helped usher in the blunt anti-interventionism so prevalent
today. Washington needs a subtler alternative to it.