Up From Ba'athism - The autobiography of an individualist

Yesterday, the UK Guardian newspaper began publishing the ruminations of Salam Pax, the celebrated young Iraqi (real name unknown) whose personal blog from Baghdad allowed many thousands of people to have an inside view of the Iraqi capital before, after and even, for a thrilling few days, during the American assault.

Salam Pax's Dear_Raed website is said to get about 1,000 visitors a day. That may be peanuts when compared to, say, Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit, which receives an average of 55,000 visitors a day, and has tallied well over 15 million hits since it started. However, numbers don't tell the whole story: Salam has become, for better or worse, one of the more influential mediums in the west for following what goes on in Iraq.

It was inevitable and (considering that Salam Pax's opinions and observations were no worse or better than many blog postings out there) unfair that his appeal would hinge largely on acceptance of his personal identity. For months, Salam's sharp comments from Baghdad were a source of heated debate. The skeptics wondered how an obviously Westernized Iraqi could so easily post interesting material on a blog written in totalitarian Baghdad. Surely Salam didn't exist, they insisted, he was an invention of the Iraqi intelligence services or the CIA. More recently he was damned as a Ba'ath princeling. Moreover, Salam admitted to being gay, which seemed too frank for an Arab to be entirely believable.

Salam responded on his site by saying: "I am not anybody's propaganda ploy, well except my own." Throughout much of the war he couldn't update his blog, fueling speculation he had been arrested. Then the Guardian found Salam and convinced him to write a weekly Baghdad blog for the paper, strongly indicating he did indeed exist. On Monday, the journalist Peter Maass added to the mystique by writing in Slate that Salam had been his interpreter, though he withheld his name.

What does one make of the Salam Pax phenomenon, at least in the context of the Arab world's tribulations? Blogger purists might lament Salam's co-optation by the Guardian (he himself humorously likened the move to "selling his soul"), but this introduction into the mainstream was a fitting climax for a supposedly liberal Arab who, while he was not shredded by the Iraqi system, apparently had no sympathy for it. And the metamorphosis came through the use of a simple form of information technology that made it possible to circumvent an autocratic regime in a very small way.

A second thing Salam Pax has done is offer the West, and particularly the United States, what it believes to be a middle class voice from the Arab world that it can understand. This is essential in a post-September 11 environment when American and Arab societies have been thrown together, both politically and culturally, in a way that is entirely new in more than a century of American-Arab relations. How representative is Salam? The question is irrelevant; he reflects a strand in Iraqi society that many Westerners simply didn't know existed, but which they feel they intimately know.

Third, Salam has become that rare thing: an Arab pop icon, one unknown in his own world (where his gayness encourages anonymity), but utterly credible abroad. Surely there is excess in bestowing on Salam the responsibility of grand Iraqi interpreter, one he might not merit and claims not to want. However, it is also hardly surprising when the former interpreters were members of a Middle East academic priesthood that has had relatively little to offer on Iraq's current predicament. Salam and his imitators have almost naturally inherited part of their role.

One might protest that Salam's significance is almost entirely a function of how he is perceived in the West. That's true. But Arab cultural autarky has invariably lined the road to perdition in the Middle East. The value of Salam Pax is that he speaks as an individual, one who has taken a chance on contacting the outside world and dealing with it on its own terms. And this has been his way of reaffirming that he is Iraqi.

Command Performances - The civilian-military conflict over the conduct of war.

Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime, by Eliot A. Cohen, New York: Free Press, 288 pages, $25

"Good morning, good morning!" the General said,
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

Thus begins Siegfried Sassoon's seething 1917 poem "The General," on the bungling bloodletters commanding the British army during World War I.

"He's a cheery old card," grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

In July 1917, Sassoon's bitterness led him to issue a public denunciation of Britain's political authorities, one directed more specifically against "the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed." The rage was perhaps inevitable: In times of war, the quality of the armed forces is -- or is perceived as -- a reflection of the worth of their civilian overseers. And after two injuries and two medals for bravery, Sassoon was entitled to denounce a war whose objectives, he felt, had been distorted.

Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Affairs in Washington, D.C., and member of the Defense Advisory Board, might well understand. He argues in his latest book, Supreme Command, what might seem an obvious point: that during wars civilian leaders have a right, even a duty, to intervene in military affairs. This is opposed to what Cohen calls the "normal theory of civilian-military relations," which, he underlines, pervades thinking on military affairs today. That theory holds that politicians define grand policy in wars, but that it is up to the military to implement policy without civilian interference.

Cohen writes that "political leaders must immerse themselves in the conduct of their wars no less than in their great projects of domestic legislation....They must demand and expect from their military subordinates a candor as bruising as it is necessary....Both groups must expect a running conversation in which, although civilian opinion will not usually dictate, it must dominate....That conversation will cover not only ends and policies, but ways and means."

Cohen then devotes most of his book to laudatory profiles of four statesmen who took an active role in the particulars of war and thus brought about victory: Georges Clemenceau, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-Gurion. Cohen admits that this "great man" approach might open him up to accusations of hero worship. But when he quotes Henry Kissinger (who doubtless was speaking in the first person) saying, "Great men are so rare that they take some getting used to," Cohen unintentionally raises a serious question about his own thesis. If great men are so rare, then how relevant are their performances to defending the principle of civilian control in military affairs? How do their lessons apply to the bevy of less extraordinary leaders, if not downright mediocrities, who generally govern?

Cohen is right that sensible societies shouldn't trust generals to navigate the myriad curvatures of war without civilian oversight. But since he provides no absolute canon to guide ordinary leaders (nor can such a canon really exist), his argument in favor of civilian dominance can easily backfire when politicians fail to grasp their limitations. Cohen effectively leaves his readers with one of two approaches when assessing the wartime legacy of civilian leaders. Readers can either assume that the outcome of a war justified the means used or argue, as Tolstoy did in War and Peace, that since war is a game of infinite variables, leaders are mere cogs in an unfathomable machine. The utilitarian argument is hopelessly biased in favor of the victors; the Tolstoyan outlook explains why strict guidelines of behavior are impossible.

Nor does one get much illumination in a chapter titled "Leadership Without Genius." Cohen uses the sorry outcome in Vietnam to conclude that the Johnson administration's management of that war was an example of how civilian leadership shouldn't have acted. He concludes that the problem in Vietnam was not that the civilians tied the military down -- a spurious indictment resurrected by conservatives to rationalize America's defeat -- but that they didn't tie the military down enough to provide the bewildered armed forces with a clear sense of direction and priorities.

This assessment raises a question: If leaders err when failing adequately to counterbalance their military establishments, might not an uninspired leader's excessive prying also bring a military venture to disaster? It is not just the manner of overseeing war that a leader must consider but also the tactical excellence of his oversight. Despite brief involvement in the Blackhawk War, Lincoln wasn't a military man. But he intuitively grasped that the Union's priority was the destruction of the Confederate army, not the capture of Richmond. In contrast, Hitler's rerouting of two Panzer groups around Moscow in July 1941 delayed a German attack against the Soviet capital, allowing the Red Army to regroup. Cohen provides no overarching rule allowing us to say why Lincoln was right and Hitler wrong, except that one won and the other lost his war.

A civilian leadership that oversees military matters faces another dilemma: how to prevent military officers, in their turn, from playing politics. The innumerable leaks from the Pentagon in the current run-up to war in Iraq made it plain that soldiers were on a policy-shaping rampage. Though their judgment on the desirability of war may have been useful, it was also a flagrant violation of civilian authority to make it public. Still, leaks work: The armed forces are now reportedly preparing for a classic large-scale campaign in Iraq, suggesting they overcame the inclination of Defense Department civilians toward a smaller operation.

Admittedly, it is not easy in a democracy to shut the armed forces up. In open societies the onset of warfare demands a public debate, making it unreasonable to tell the one institution most concerned to keep its peace. But even the armed forces don't necessarily think monolithically when it comes to these issues. For example, when the Clinton administration contemplated intervening in Kosovo in 1999, the NATO commander, Wesley Clark, irritated his more reluctant Pentagon bosses by taking his case for war directly to administration officials. The top brass didn't care for Clark's politicking and later effectively ended his career. That was hypocrisy. Clark's mistake was not in playing politics but in doing so -- and winning -- against his own tribe.

In portraying his four paragons, Cohen mainly sticks to detailing events in the leaders' wartime careers that prove his hypothesis. He insists his purpose is not to defend his subjects, but he sets boundaries to the debate in such a way that their reputations are rarely tarnished. Few deny, for example, that Lincoln was a great man, but is it realistic when using him as a model for civilian authority in wartime to ignore his suspension of habeas corpus and imposition of martial law? These were military decisions that had a significant political impact. Cohen acknowledges this point but lamely uses Lincoln's abuse of civil liberties as an illustration of his "steel."

Similarly, in looking back on Ben-Gurion, who no doubt was crucial in bringing about Israeli statehood, is it legitimate to disregard his sponsorship of the Dalet Plan of April-May 1948? As the Israeli historian Benny Morris writes in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-1949 (1987), "The essence of the plan was the clearing of hostile and potentially hostile forces out of the interior of the prospective territory of the Jewish State, establishing territorial continuity between the major concentrations of the Jewish population and securing the Jewish State's future borders before, and in anticipation of, the Arab invasion." Morris notes that the plan justified the expulsion of Palestinian civilians. In judging Ben-Gurion's wisdom, one must ponder whether, by using his army to expel Palestinians from his future state, he ensured decades of bitter Arab antagonism and helped promote the militarization of Israeli society and an expansionist streak that validated the disastrous occupation and settlement of the West Bank and Gaza.

To be fair, Cohen never assumes infallibility in his subjects. But once one evokes the potential for fallibility, an obvious question arises: How will the book's lessons be applied in the martial age of George W. Bush? In a jacket blurb, William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, recommends the president read Cohen's book. What the neocons want Bush to learn is that it's up to him and his civilian aides, not the brass hats, to set the pace in the Middle East, particularly Iraq.

Fair enough. But the successful civilian wartime leader is the one who has a clear sense of his political objectives. With Bush, the only certainty is his yearning to fight. It's hard to tell what the administration's long-term aims in Iraq might be. Indeed, it is apparent that a possible Iraq war is different things to different officials. Some see it solely as a means of getting rid of Saddam, while others ponder reshaping the entire Middle East. Bush has united his advisers through his vagueness, while also allowing them diverse readings of what should come next in the Gulf, ignoring his own role as the paramount unifier of purpose.

Cohen probably would not accept this abdication as an example of suitable leadership. Bush, in his inability to define persuasive and coherent aims in Iraq for the American public and, perhaps more important, for his own armed forces (who are preparing to elect Tommy Franks as a successor to Saddam), has failed to do what even leaders without genius must.

One is reminded of Ravi Shankar's retort at the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh when the public applauded what they thought was a sitar improvisation: "Thank you. If you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you'll enjoy the playing more." Many are applauding Bush's tuning, confusing it with the performance. Yet nothing indicates he really knows the tune in Iraq.

Destroyed but saved? Three riddles from the second Gulf War

Having been carpet-bombed by CNN, Al-Jazeera, the BBC, and several other weapons of mass media, I've decided to watch the latest Gulf war differently than that of 1991. Rather than trying to figure out what is happening on the ground, where Iraqi resistance has held me up, I found it useful to focus on more arcane, miscellaneous aspects of this war.

Here are some items on my checklist. For example, what happened to Iraq's former military chief-of-staff, Nizar Khazraji? Recently, Khazraji, who fled Baghdad some years ago, was languishing in Denmark while a magistrate investigated his possible war crimes against the Kurds during the 1980s. The general had hoped to use a US invasion of Iraq to resume contact with his onetime comrades and help overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein.

On March 17, Khazraji disappeared from the Danish town of Soroe, and his family put out word that Iraqi agents had possibly kidnapped him. No one, least of all the magistrate investigating Khazraji, truly bought this. It now seems his flight was planned. Several reports, all unconfirmed, suggested Khazraji had made his way to the Gulf to help the American war effort.

Two things are interesting in the affair. First, did the US help Khazraji flee, undermining a judicial inquiry in a sovereign country? There is no evidence it did, but if Khazraji were to appear at the door of American commander Tommy Franks, would he be turned away? And if he were not, how would Denmark (a "coalition of the willing" member) feel about being allied to someone it had placed under house arrest?

A second item of attention is the US mania for declaring key Iraqis dead. I have distracted myself in the past days by ascertaining which departed official was later resurrected. Soon after the war began, US sources claimed three Iraqi officials, Taha Yassin Ramadan, Izzat Ibrahim, and Ali Hassan al-Majid, had been killed in the "decapitation attack" of Wednesday.

However, Ramadan later appeared at a press conference, while The New York Times quoted military sources as saying that Ali Hassan al-Majid had been the target of a Friday attack on Baghdad—confirming he had survived his earlier elimination. Only Izzat Ibrahim remains unaccounted for. The real loser, however, is the Bush administration, which again stalwartly tried to dispute assertions that it was Saddam Hussein who addressed Iraqis on Monday.

Lying is fair in war, but losing credibility is silly. While the press corps becomes angrier at the fluff Franks is throwing its way in Qatar, Iraq is winning the public relations battle. When the commander of Iraq's 51st Division told Al-Jazeera that he had not surrendered as coalition officers stated, he did something remarkable: he proved that Iraqi information minister Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, who had denied the story, could tell the truth.

A third item of interest is the fate of the so-called Rumsfeld doctrine. In planning the war, the secretary of defense advocated a strategy of military calibration, whereby his forces would use speed to outmaneuver the Iraqis, while exerting only enough force to ensure victory. His idea was to avoid a massive assault that would kill many Iraqi civilians, make the US unpopular, and so undermine postwar American political objectives.

Lined up against Rumsfeld were supporters of the Powell doctrine. This holds, among other things, that US forces must use overwhelming firepower in war, for their own safety. Epitomizing this doctrine was the massive bombing of Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait in 1991, before ground troops ever entered the fray. The question today is whether the US, as it faces tough Iraqi resistance, will jettison Rumsfeld's style and fall back on Powell's?

If it does, this would splendidly invert roles in Washington: Rumsfeld, who is considered a fire-eater, would emerge as the restrained one—someone who wants to use force sparingly to avoid casualties and reduce Iraqi resentment. The Powell-ites, who are seen as moderates by association with the reluctant warrior, Secretary of State Colin Powell, would, instead, be seen as favoring a strategy that ensures few American, but many Iraqi, casualties.

Each of these three items is fundamental for a deeper understanding of the Bush administration's intentions in Iraq. Khazraji, whatever his checkered past, may well be a linchpin in the strategy to turn the Iraqi army against Saddam. This suggests Washington will be less than discerning when it comes to including former regime figures in a postwar administration.

The fascination with the health of the Iraqi leadership speaks to a noxious administration yearning to resolve the complex Iraqi issue with a single bullet or cruise missile. This approach is absurd given that Iraqis are fighting with abandon, and not just because they believe their leaders to be alive and well. There is nationalism involved, and the US has erred in playing this down.

And finally, the debate between Rumsfeld and Powell may seem esoteric, but it underlines the dilemma the US faces in its efforts to control Iraq. Rumsfeld's method makes sense: you cannot convert Iraq to democracy and pro-Americanism by pounding it into the dust. But if you do not do so, there is a chance the US might not triumph militarily at all.

How the US resolves this dilemma is the real issue today, and that's what I'll be watching for when we next hear a US official declare that Iraq has to be destroyed in order to be saved.

Iraq's New Rulers - Handicapping the postwar administrators

Barring a last-minute flight into exile by Saddam Hussein and his family, the United States will be launching its war on Iraq within the next few days. While the best possible outcome will be a short, decisive and low-casualty war, the question of who will wage the peace remains open.

While the American press has been quiet on the possibilities of a postwar administration, Arab papers are already sketching the outline of Iraq's interim government. Quoting U.S. officials, the London-based Al-Hayat sees an American occupation that divides Iraq into three zones—a northern district that includes Kurdistan, a central one that includes Baghdad, and a predominantly Shiite southern district. The staffing decisions for these districts will be our best early indication of the Bush administration's postwar intentions, as well as its understanding of the situation it is taking on.

Each zone will be run by an administrator reporting to retired army general Jay Garner, according to the London-based Saudi paper Al-Sharq al-Awsat. He heads the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the occupation's civil authority. The person slated to handle the central district is former US ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine, the Bush administration's response to Gertrude Bell, who helped govern Iraq for Britain after the First World War.

Bodine's résumé suggests she is an old style State Department regionalist. Though she received a degree in political science and Asian studies, she later shifted her attention to the Arabian Peninsula, twice serving in the Office of Arabian Peninsula Affairs at the Bureau of Near East Affairs. Bodine was stationed in Baghdad as Deputy Principal Officer, and in 1990 she was deputy chief of mission in Kuwait when the Iraqis invaded. For once the State Department put an ambassador in the right place when she was dispatched to Yemen, a natural link between Asia and the Arab world.

Bodine was in Yemen during the USS Cole bombing. A dispute with the FBI, which was investigating the attack, hinted that she may be an official with some skill at handling local sensitivities. Bodine barred an FBI special agent from returning to Yemen because she objected to the bureau's heavy-handed presence in the country and its desire to arm agents with rifles and heavy weapons. Press reports suggested she wanted to assuage Yemeni cultural sensibilities, even though she has defended American intervention through counter-terrorism operations.

If Bodine's prospective appointment is designed to reassure the Iraqis of the benign nature of a US occupation, her boss, Jay Garner, will prove a harder sell. Garner famously signed onto an October 12, 2000 statement by the archconservative Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, which praised the Israeli army for having "exercised remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of a Palestinian Authority that deliberately pushes civilians and young people to the front lines."

The statement noted: "What makes the US-Israel security relationship one of mutual benefit is the combination of military capabilities and shared political values—freedom, democracy, personal liberty and the rule of law." That Garner himself benefited from the security relationship is well known: As president of California-based defense contractor SY Technology, he oversaw the company's work on the US-Israeli Arrow missile defense system.

David Lazarus recently reported in the San Francisco Chronicle that Garner's former company is also working on missile systems the US will use against Iraq. Not only does this appear to be a conflict of interest, it also happens to be peculiar politics. As Ben Hermalin, a professor at UC Berkeley who studies professional ethics, told Lazarus: "You have to wonder what the Iraqis will think of this guy and how much trust they'll place in him."

To focus solely on Garner's ties with Israel and US defense contractors might be unfair. The general was also involved in Operation Provide Comfort, the humanitarian effort to help the Kurds after their debacle in 1991, when Iraqi forces swept through Kurdistan.

It is premature to draw too many conclusions from Garner's and Bodine's appointments. Nor is it yet clear what will happen in the northern and southern occupation districts, which are to be administered by two other retired generals—perhaps a sign of US uneasiness with Kurdish and Shiite intentions. However, one cannot help but presume that Bodine will be a comforting but powerless civilian façade for an operation run mainly by the military.

That's because authority will probably be concentrated less in Garner's civil administration than in the US military command under General Tommy Franks. Franks should feel at ease with three former generals working alongside him. The question, however, is whether the Iraqis will.

His master's voice - "Bin Laden" speaks.

Osama bin Laden is back, though ever more spectrally, preferring the anonymity of the audiocassette to the vanity of video. The language is more mystical, the tone wearier; bin Laden may have already begun his heavenly ascent.

That, or maybe video cameras are hard to come by wherever bin Laden presently resides. Or, perhaps, Al-Qaeda's leader is reluctant to flaunt his purported physical ailments, despite the audacious words.

Several aspects of bin Laden's recording—if it was indeed his voice on the tape—merit a mention. The first is that it puts an end to an academic debate within the Bush administration on possible ties between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, while simultaneously exacerbating the political debate on the issue.

The academic debate was mainly between the US defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and part of the intelligence community. While intelligence analysts argued that an Al-Qaeda-Iraq alliance was ideologically unlikely, Rumsfeld held that the two sides could put ideology aside against their common enemy—the United States. Bin Laden's tape confirmed this.

However, this only complicated the political debate, since nothing in what bin Laden said proved that Al-Qaeda and Iraq were collaborating. Indeed, his harsh words for Iraqi president Saddam Hussein suggested the opposite. A more relevant question is how each side can help the other, and the tape demonstrated that bin Laden had only advice to offer.

US secretary of state Colin Powell's efforts to hold the tape up as proof of an Al-Qaeda-Iraq axis were unconvincing. With suspect haste, US officials declared the recording genuine, ignoring passages showing bin Laden only really expressing solidarity with the Iraqi people, not their regime—a view often articulated (if far less virulently) in the Arab world and Europe.

Another interesting feature of the tape was bin Laden's account of the Tora Bora battle in Afghanistan. He explained that 300 militants had succeeded in resisting continuous American air assaults, while "the US forces dared not break into our positions," and asked: "Is there any clearer evidence of their cowardice, fear and lies regarding the legends about their alleged power?"

Bin Laden used the battle both as a strategy lesson for the Iraqis and as a way of casting his own conflict with the US in a heroic light, thanks to Tora Bora's similarities with events from Islamic history.

There was little of value in bin Laden's strategic ruminations. The Al-Qaeda leader offered two stock observations: First, that a motivated group, even when outnumbered, can defeat a larger military force; and that once a new Gulf war starts, the Iraqis, in the words of the Caliph Omar, should "take the ground as a shield" until the enemy runs out of ordnance.

More noteworthy was bin Laden's situating Tora Bora in Islamic history. He mentioned the Battle of Yarmuk of 636, when a Muslim army annihilated the more numerous Byzantines. However, the parallels between Tora Bora and the Battle of Badr, where the prophet Muhammad defeated a superior Meccan force, were more compelling even if inadvertent: Muhammad, too, had 300 men and won thanks to faith, military will, and Meccan cowardice.

It is unclear what this means, if anything, in terms of bin Laden's psychological progression. But one thing is increasingly obvious: He is taking on the persona of a secluded militant guru, a latter day Hassan Sabbah, willing to bless all signs of anti-Western hostility as if they were his own work. While this co-optation is adroit, it also means bin Laden is elevating himself to the level of spiritual guide over conflicts where he actually has no influence.

Has bin Laden kicked himself upstairs to the boardroom, where the prestige is higher but the influence lower than in management? Most likely he doesn't have a choice, though he must be contemplating a comeback. According to Pakistani journalist Ahmad Rashid, writing in the Wall Street Journal, this comeback is scheduled for spring, when the Taliban and Al-Qaeda plan an offensive against allied forces in Afghanistan, to coincide with an Iraq war.

Meanwhile, the FBI director, Robert Mueller, has again described Al-Qaeda as "the most immediate and serious threat" to the US. Even the highest-ranking government officials can't seem to stick to a script that reserves that niche for the Iraqi regime.

Private Terror, Public Errors - To stop Al-Qaeda, anti-terrorist bureaucracies must be as adaptable.

Forgetting for a moment that the international effort to destroy Al-Qaeda is as close as one comes to a good versus evil confrontation, it also happens to be a valuable reminder of the ineptness of large bureaucracies.

A recent Washington Post article noted that Al-Qaeda had been better able to adapt to the U.S. military's tactics in Afghanistan than the other way around. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, was quoted as saying: "I think in a sense we've lost a little momentum there, to be frank. They've made lots of adaptations to our tactics and we've got to continue to think and try to out-think them and to be faster at it." He noted, in particular, that Al-Qaeda had adjusted its electronic communications to prevent intercepts, while also protecting the way it transferred money.

Myers didn't realize that he was making an implicit case for what can be called, somewhat inaccurately, private-sector warfare. He more or less admitted that in the context of the Afghan war, Al-Qaeda, like any good private enterprise, was much more flexible than his military units, which, like most state institutions, tend to be slow, awkward and unimaginative.

Oddly, Myers failed to draw the logical conclusion from his own critique. Having identified the malignancy, he offered an irrelevant cure: The U.S. must downplay military action, he proposed, and put more emphasis on rebuilding Afghanistan. A more prosperous and stable Afghan environment would place Al-Qaeda on the defensive. Where Myers erred was in assuming that the latter affirmation, which might very well be true, followed from, and therefore somehow affected, Al-Qaeda's adaptability.

In fact, nation-building on the model that Myers suggested would merely replace one cumbersome form of U.S. intervention with another. Instead of soldiers Washington would send bureaucrats, thousands of them, who might do wonders for the Afghans, spend billions of dollars as only bureaucrats can, and extend government patronage to unruly rural provinces, allowing tribal leaders to get fat at America's expense.

However, it is doubtful this would harm Al-Qaeda in any way. One thing it would do is create many more civilian targets among imported aid workers. It would also allow the U.S. military to disengage from a fight that successive setbacks have made it eager to abandon, meaning Al-Qaeda would have breathing space to enhance its Afghan presence. A third thing it would do is prove that when some officials, like Myers, are locked in statist mindsets, their proposed solutions tend to compound the problem.

Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda is doing what resourceful institutions do when under pressure: it is decentralizing decision-making and transferring operational power to shadowy and capable subordinates of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. According to press reports, authority has devolved to six commanders who can independently plan and conduct terrorist attacks, suggesting metastasizing parallel centers of power.

What chance does an anti-terrorist state bureaucracy have when facing such changes? In the long run a good chance, since its resources are immense. However, in the short term, when exploitation of these resources might be inefficient, valuable time can be lost. The lesson of Sept. 11 was less that the Bush administration was gulled by Al-Qaeda, than the fact that it misread, or failed to read, information indicating the possibility of air attacks. Al-Qaeda has repeatedly taken advantage of the gap between its enemies' means and ends. Until this is more rapidly closed, preventable attacks will continue.

Given these circumstances, it is easy to see why George W. Bush's intention to establish an Department of Homeland Security will likely do no more than add another layer of paper and hierarchy to an intelligence and security establishment that, to the contrary, needs reform and streamlining. If anything is to defeat Al-Qaeda, it is institutions that are as agile as it is.

Similarly, if anything is to triumph over Al-Qaeda, it is an anti-terrorist effort that embraces the litheness of the private sector, rather than the stolidity of public institutions. Profit will be measured in human lives saved.

Great Expectations - How can America resist the imperial temptation?

Walk a Levantine street these days and you will bump into a historical irony. As the Bush administration prepares to attack Iraq, Arabs say the U.S. is behaving like a classical imperial power that aims to reshape the Middle East. The only problem is that the system the Arabs want to safeguard was drawn up by European imperialists over eighty years ago.

This is a good time for grand schemes in Washington. Not since the late 1940s, when the Cold War began, have ideologues of global American power been so influential. At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. did not use its status as solitary superpower to engage in vast geopolitical engineering on the old European imperial model. That could soon change in the Middle East.

It wouldn't be the first time for the region. After the First World War, France and Britain carved up much of the Middle East between themselves according to what is known as the Sykes-Picot agreement. In demarcating the territories under their control, they also drew the borders of the modern Middle East. To this day boundary agreements are resolved by referring back to the maps and notes of now-forgotten imperial civil servants.

Although the push for a new American order in the Middle East has been given momentum by the September 11 attacks, some of the Bush administration's most commanding figures have been laying the groundwork for years. In May 1990, then secretary of defense Dick Cheney asked Colin Powell and Paul Wolfowitz, respectively chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and deputy defense secretary, to prepare separate papers on America's foreign policy role after the Cold War. Nicholas Lemann, who has written about the episode, notes that Cheney favored the Wolfowitz recommendations, where, essentially, "the Pentagon envisioned a future in which the United States could, and should, prevent any other nation or alliance from becoming a great power."

In its advocacy of American unilateralism and supremacy, the document sanctioned grand foreign policy scheming on a scale rarely contemplated in United States history. How significant is such a blueprint today? It reflects the worldview of two of the Bush administration's leading decision-makers, Cheney and Wolfowitz, as well as that of the defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, national security advisor Condoleeza Rice, and the numerous officials working under them who run the national security bureaucracy.

For a useful insight into administration thinking on the region, refer back to a 1996 paper entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," prepared for the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, an Israeli think-tank. The paper was written by a group that included Richard Perle, who now heads the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, and Douglas Feith, current under-secretary of policy at the Defense Department.

"Securing the Realm" focused on recommendations to the incoming government of Benjamin Netanyahu, but one theme running throughout the paper was the parallels in Israeli and U.S. interests in the Middle East. The authors called on Israel to "work closely with Turkey and Jordan to contain, destabilize, and roll-back some of its most dangerous threats." Among the new measures Israel should adopt were "containing and even rolling back Syria", backing "the [Jordanian] Hashemites in their efforts to redefine Iraq", and cooperating "with the U.S. to counter real threats to the region and the West's security."

According to political commentator Brian Whitaker, administration hawks believe "that President Bush has already accepted their plan and made destabilization of 'despotic regimes' a central goal of his foreign policy." Though Whitaker expands on this thesis to claim that it is the pro-Israelis in the administration who are pushing hardest for war in Iraq, mainly to advance Israel's interests, this explanation is insufficient. Absent Bush's personal inclinations, the grand schemers would be left holding their position papers.

The Middle East buries grand regional ambitions. British and French imperialism, couched in a supposedly less venal Mandate system announced at the San Remo Conference in 1920, collapsed ignominiously after the Second World War. Its most enduring legacies were the region's present borders, anti-Western suspicion, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Arab nationalism, another grand scheme, fared no better. In striving for unity, the advocates of a common Arab destiny not only sought to alter a regional state system whose fractiousness, they felt, was provoked by European colonialism; they also sought to amass the political and military strength needed to reverse the defeat of the Palestinians. Today a shuffling phantom, Arab nationalism was mortally injured in the June 1967 war, when Israel defeated Jordan, Syria and Egypt, and occupied their land. Arab frailty, particularly on the Palestinian question, was exposed. By the 1980s, the vacuum left behind by Arab nationalism was being filled by diverse Islamisms, generating, for once, notable victories, whether against the U.S. in Iran or the USSR in Afghanistan.

For the United States to succeed in reshaping a region where others have foundered, it must avoid a metastasizing conflict once troops are in Iraq. This is particularly pertinent with respect to Iran. Yet the logic of American intervention leads in the opposite direction. If possession of nuclear weapons is a reason for going after Saddam, then the same holds for Iran. Nor can the Bush administration disregard the fact that a weakened Iraq will mainly benefit Iran, which would find no major adversary in the Persian Gulf, unless the U.S. fills the gap.

This was the conclusion reached by the author Michael Ledeen, an influential supporter of regime change in the Middle East. He recently argued in the National Review that the administration, would "sooner or later, in one way or another...have to deal with Iran." He concluded by telling the administration: "Faster, please. What the hell are you waiting for?"

Widening the Middle East conflict would mean a long occupation of Iraq, if only as a base for continuing operations. The assumption that undemocratic regimes in Iran and Syria would collapse because of the proximity of U.S. forces seems fanciful. If anything, both regimes will likely be strengthened by the perceived threat from outside, and domestic dissenters will pipe down to avoid violent backlashes. Nor will traditional U.S. allies in the region, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, support a long-term presence in Iraq—particularly when things begin going wrong—if this is seen as a way of imposing a new order that marginalizes them.

The U.S. might be able to buy time if it satisfies a third requirement, namely resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and other outstanding disputes between Israel and the Arab states. As in 1991, a Gulf conflict might lead to advances in regional negotiations. However, a problem the grand schemers will have to resolve is their deep contempt for the Oslo accords and their persistence in seeing the Palestinian problem merely as an Israeli security concern. Ironically, Oslo, in exchanging land for peace, provided the only possible outlet to Palestinians and Israelis. Neither the Israeli right nor American grand schemers have yet offered a viable alternative.

Finally, the U.S. will have to employ its most potent weapon in the region, its liberal ideal. In their appetite for power, the grand schemers have downplayed less martial mechanisms for change in the Middle East. This will be the ultimate U.S. challenge: to resist the temptation of hegemony when everything invites it, and to focus instead on seeking other ways to promote open societies in the region. That will mean, for starters, avoiding turning Iraq into a captive oil market, while also establishing a genuinely democratic yet stable government there. Afghanistan is proving a mouthful; Iraq may be an impossibility.

It would be absurd if the U.S., in order to transform the Middle East and rely less on the outdated despots it sustained for so long, resorts to an outdated imperialism that failed the European powers. Yet that seems to be the favored course of the Bush administration, or at least of the administration's most influential policymakers.

Emperors from Alexander to Julian headed eastwards, into the ancient Middle East and beyond, to fulfill their dreams of becoming Asian princes. They were swallowed up by the vastness ahead of them. The U.S. may want to heed that message as it embarks on its first imperial venture since the end of the Cold War.