Gwynne Dyer has worked as a freelance journalist, columnist, broadcaster and lecturer on international affairs for more than twenty years. His twice-weekly column on international affairs is published by 175 papers in some forty-five countries and is translated into more than a dozen languages.
The United States needs to lose the war in Iraq as soon as possible. Even more urgently, the whole world needs the United States to lose the war in Iraq. It would be nice if Iraq doesn't lose too, but that is a lesser consideration. What is at stake now is the way we run the world for the next generation or more, and really bad things will happen if we get it wrong.
The temptation to take charge of the world was bound to be great when the United States emerged from the Cold War as the only superpower, for it seemed like a goal within easy reach. It was nevertheless resisted, by Republican and Democratic administrations alike, for almost a decade. Then a random event — for 9/11 might easily not have happened — unleashed forces in Washington that were itching to make a takeover bid, and now we live in the middle of a train wreck.
The idea that the United States can remain "the world's sole military superpower until the end of time" is comically over-ambitious, but there it is, embedded in a thirty-four-page document submitted to Congress in September 2002 entitled The National Security Strategy of the United States. "The United States will not hesitate to strike preemptively against its enemies, and will never again allow its military supremacy to be challenged." Never again allow its military supremacy to be challenged? The United States has 4 per cent of the world's population and a larger but declining share (currently about 20 per cent) of the world's economy. It had a budget deficit of more than half a trillion dollars in 2004, and a foreign trade deficit of about the same size. How is it going to do that?
Obviously, it can't. As it becomes clear what the project to turn the United States into the world's policeman (or, more precisely, its judge, jury, and executioner) will cost in American lives and in higher taxes, American voters themselves will pull the plug on it sooner or later. Or maybe the world will pull the plug on the project first, by refusing to go on holding dollars as the gradual collapse in the value of the U.S. currency deepens. The risk is that it will all take too long. If an American defeat in Iraq takes another four or five years, huge and maybe irreparable damage will have been done to the international institutions that are our fragile first line of defence against a return to the great-power wars that could destroy us all. We need the United States back as a leading architect of global order, not a hyperactive vigilante, and we need it back now.
"The French plan, which would somehow transfer sovereignty to an unelected group of people, just isn't workable."
— U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, September 2003
In September 2003, when French president Jacques Chirac urged a high-speed handover of power to Iraqis as the best way of clearing up the huge mess created by the illegal American invasion of Iraq, the U.S. government rejected the idea out of hand. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that ran the occupation regime under pro-consul Paul Bremer would stay in power as long as necessary to ensure the creation of an Iraqi constitution and the election of an Iraqi government that was (a) democratic and (b) pro-American.
