Hawks circling for new targets
Iran, Syria and North Korea are on list of potential marks.
By David Westphal -- Bee Washington Bureau Chief
Published 2:15 a.m. PST Sunday, March 16, 2003
WASHINGTON -- Even as President Bush struggles against robust international opposition to launch a regime-toppling invasion of Iraq, some of the strongest and earliest supporters of military action against Saddam Hussein are already looking ahead to the next target.Some hawks outside the government are beginning to turn up the rhetorical heat against Iran and Syria, both of whom are Iraq's neighbors, and both known to be funneling aid to Middle East terrorist groups. Others are focusing on North Korea and its rapidly mobilized nuclear weapons program, or the North African country of Libya.
"Even after Mr. Hussein is gone, other tyrannies, such as North Korea and Iran, will continue to threaten world peace," said Max Boot, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Such tough talk reflects the fact that, despite Bush's rocky road toward his goal of regime change in Iraq, and despite the many questions about how it will proceed, some in Washington believe the Iraq conflict will mark only the beginning of U.S. resolve to exercise its military muscle.
"It takes little imagination to dream up other scenarios that might call for pre-emptive military action," said Thomas Donnelly, a military analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank that has led the charge for war against Iraq.
Donnelly said one such example might be the imminent overthrow of the Musharraf government in Pakistan, given that country's possession of nuclear weapons.
Few are suggesting that the Pentagon begin preparing a new set of Iraq-like invasion plans. In fact, some foreign policy experts contend that a successful campaign in Iraq might serve as an effective shot across the bow at other would-be targets.
Richard Perle, who heads a Pentagon advisory group and has long been a leading advocate of an Iraq invasion, was making this argument just one month after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
If the United States should topple Saddam, he said in a PBS interview, "I think several of these governments will simply get out of the support-of-terrorism business. It will be too costly; the risks will be too great."
That some are looking beyond Iraq, despite the massive effort and uncertainties that surround the looming conflict, should not be surprising. The administration's new National Security Strategy suggests an activist American military, one more inclined to act pre-emptively if the president concludes U.S. security is threatened.
In the updated strategy, Bush said the United States might unleash its military might even if unprovoked.
"As a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against ... emerging threats before they are fully formed," the president wrote.
Among admirers of the new strategy is John Lewis Gaddis, a professor of military and naval history at Yale University, who says it has the potential to become the most sweeping overhaul of military strategy in half a century.
Yet Gaddis says a successful application in Iraq depends on meeting two critical tests: that the Iraqis greet American troops as liberators, and that the United States retains the high moral ground and international support. On that latter point, Gaddis says, the Bush administration is foundering.
"A nation that sets itself up as an example to the world in most things," Gaddis wrote in Policy Review magazine, "will not achieve that purpose by telling the rest of the world, in some things, to shove it."
One of the champions of the activist-military doctrines is Thomas Barnett, a Naval War College professor who has briefed dozens of groups inside the Pentagon on his theory that the United States must "export security" to parts of the world that have failed to develop modern societies.
Barnett has identified a large swath of countries stretching from Central America across the Atlantic Ocean to Africa, the Middle East and parts of southern Asia, which he said have become disconnected from the developing world, and thus are ripe for sowing unrest.
"There is a good reason why al-Qaida was based first in Sudan and then later in Afghanistan," Barnett wrote in the March issue of Esquire. "These are two of the most disconnected countries in the world."
Military involvement by the United States in parts of these regions, which make up one-third of the world's population, will be necessary until they catch up with the developed countries, he contends.
Some military analysts say the Pentagon can adapt to a new, more activist posture by undergoing a transformation process championed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. By shedding strategies designed for a war among superpowers and moving to lighter, more mobile forces, the military can cast a wider net without needing more resources, they say.
But others suggest the Pentagon will need a bigger slice of the federal budget to take on a wider role.
"Increased force structure ... will be necessary to enhance the Army's ability to fight the war against terrorism while also keeping the peace in other areas," said Conrad Crane, a military expert at the Strategic Studies Institute in Washington.
Regardless of whether the United States carries out the threat of pre-emptive attacks, some think the American military will be kept plenty busy in coming years.
The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism strikes came during a time of growing instability in much of the world -- civil strife in the Balkans, in Africa, in large swaths of Asia. Since 1948, the United Nations has authorized 54 peacekeeping operations, and all but 13 of them were created in the last dozen years.
Eric Schwartz, a National Security Council adviser in the Clinton administration, says this trend of growing conflict in pockets around the globe likely will continue. And because of the newly recognized threat of terrorism, he says, these trouble spots are likely to receive American attention.
"Nobody disagrees with the notion that failed states matter now," said Schwartz. "And the administration would say that where they matter enormously, we need to be engaged."
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