The incredible shrinking U.S.

Despite the death of Zarqawi, Bush's huge gamble in Iraq has failed. As a result, the U.S. is weaker everywhere in the world -- and that's not all bad.

By Helena Cobban

Read more: George W. Bush, Iran, Palestine, Terrorism, Iraq, Opinion

June 9, 2006 | The Bush administration has just received two pieces of welcome news from Iraq. It learned first that a U.S. attack plane had killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the long-hunted leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, and then that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was finally able to name designees for the three security posts in his government. The new ministers were sworn in within hours.

However, the longer-term trends within Iraq remain grim for the administration. Zarqawi's killing might dent but certainly promises no quick end to the insurgency among Sunni Arabs in the west and center of Iraq. And though it was good for Maliki to be able -- almost six months after the parliamentary elections of last December -- to complete his government, still, even these new ministers would find it no easier than their colleagues to actually implement policies they might agree on in their offices in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone.

Three years after the beginning of the U.S. project to rebuild a working government in Iraq, this project remains mired in corruption, internecine factionalism, and administrative chaos. Despite the appearance of some intra-Iraqi political agreement, several crucial political decisions -- including those concerning the status of the U.S. forces inside the country -- remain to be addressed. And most worrying of all for U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and his military counterparts: The events of the past six months have shown that they are capable of affecting the important developments in Iraq only slightly, at the margins.

We can see now, indeed, that none of the optimistic scenarios that President Bush and his advisors have spun for Iraq in the past 39 months can be realized within any kind of politically feasible time frame. The White House will likely try to reduce the U.S. troop numbers to below 100,000 before the November midterms, but the tortured security situation inside Iraq is unlikely to improve. (And there are also many scenarios in which developments in Iraq could spin out of control very rapidly indeed.)

Conservatives and liberal hawks like Thomas Friedman and George Packer claim that it is too soon to call Bush's Iraq adventure a failure. Taking the long view, they argue that only history will judge whether Iraq, and the region, will in the end benefit from the forcible removal of Saddam Hussein. I disagree. We have had three years of that "history" already, and what it has brought has been a steady deterioration in the conditions of life for Iraq's citizens in areas such as: the provision of very basic services like public security, electric power and safe drinking water; increasing casualty tolls from political violence and unchecked crime; the flight of massive new waves of Iraqis from homes in unsafe neighborhoods; the proliferation of partisan militias; and the deep rooting of institutional corruption.

And there is currently no prospect that this deterioration can even be slowed, let alone reversed. The last political trick the Bush administration had up its sleeve was the holding of the Iraqi parliamentary election of last December. That election was largely successful at the procedural level, but it completely failed to usher in the promised era of political harmony and governmental competence. Indeed, the worsening of the situation has accelerated sharply since December.

Waiting for any more of this "history" to unfold, as we await some theoretically different "final verdict" on Bush's Iraq project, would only give new force to John Maynard Keynes' famous dictum that "in the long run we are all dead." (Though given the present killing rates inside Iraq, for Iraqis that "run" may not even be particularly long.)

But President Bush's decision to invade Iraq was never just about Iraq, anyway. The intellectual authors of the decision -- Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and his civilian aides in the Pentagon, and the powerful neoconservatives outside government -- intended the invasion of Iraq to send powerful messages throughout the Middle East and the world. For these men, the invasion was a high-stakes roll of the dice in a strategic game of global proportions. In the arenas of the broader Persian Gulf, the Israeli-Arab theater, the campaign against terrorism, and the worldwide relationship with other existing and emerging powers, the invasion of Iraq was intended to decisively reverse what the neocons had seen as a worrying erosion of U.S. power and influence.

Unfortunately for the dice-rollers, they miscalculated their chances of success. They were right about two things, though: the size of the stakes in Iraq and the strategic linkage they had asserted between the situation there and those other theaters around the world. So while it is perhaps possible that if they had "won" inside Iraq, that might indeed have strengthened their position in the other theaters, that proposition will never be tested. For instead of winning in Iraq, the Bushites are now -- as I and others had predicted all along -- losing there, very fast. Accordingly, in terms of Washington's relations with powers as disparate as the mullahs' Iran, Putin's Russia, the rising powers of China and India, or Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, we now see unfolding exactly the kind of erosion of U.S. power that the neocons once warned against.

Let us consider the fallout we can already see in just three non-Iraqi theaters -- Iran, the campaign against al-Qaida and its allies, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- from the failure of Bush's project in Iraq.

Iran

The most evident effects of the administration's failure in Iraq are those on the balance of coercive power between Washington and Tehran. Back in 2002, hard-liners in and close to the Bush administration warned volubly that subduing Iraq would not be sufficient for them; once they had "won" there they intended to use the U.S. military deployment there as a bludgeon with which -- whether through further military action, or through force-backed coercive diplomacy -- they could bend to their will both Iran and Syria. As a senior Bush official infamously said, "Anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran." In May 2003, in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq (with its attendant display of "shock and awe"), the Iranians were apparently terrified they would be next. Iran at that point found itself with large numbers of U.S. troops, weapons and onward power-projection capabilities deployed along its borders with both Iraq, to the west, and Afghanistan, to the east.

Next page: Today, America's 133,000 troops look more like hostages to Iran than threats