The Foreign Service Journal, September 2004

beyond our ability to close. These, more than main military force, are the instruments we will continue to need. As with an international criminal con- spiracy, patience and sustained effort in a variety of areas is key. At the same time, however, too many of our policies toward the region have had the effect of strengthening the recruiting power of the “true believers” in the Arab “street”: Iraq . I am still appalled by the naïveté of so many in the current administration who advocated war as a first step in an American-led “democratization” of the Middle East. As Shakespeare wrote in Henry V , they have “a heavy reckoning to make.” I don’t think you can spread democracy by force in areas where little or no sense of civic commonwealth and harmony exists. Democracy can only grow organ- ically, from the inside, where the cultural soil is hos- pitable and the societal preconditions exist or can be readily developed. These include a modicum of liter- acy and education, absence of extremes of wealth and poverty, a tradition of respect for and protection of minority rights, acceptance of the rule of law, the bal- ance wheel of a stable middle class, a minimum of ethnic and confessional conflict, etc. The fact that we went into Iraq in the face of overwhelming interna- tional opposition and on the basis of exaggerated jus- tifications has only amplified the difficulties arrayed before us. Yet in my view we now have no alternative to trying to fulfill our obligation toward reconstruction and encouraging political reform in Iraq. Although I believe it is a long shot, it is possible that some form of liberalization in Iraq will eventually take root and its people will ultimately be better off. But whether rid- ding Iraq of Saddam Hussein and his sons justified the loss of life and maiming of so many Americans and Iraqis, the awesome economic costs, the damage to important international relations, the enhancing of the attractive power of al-Qaida and other terrorists, and the diminishing of the reputation of the United States, is doubtful at best. If we could contain the threat of a power- ful and nuclear-armed Soviet Union for decades, we could certainly have done so with a weak and debilitated regime in Iraq. In my view, our focus should have remained on Afghanistan, a difficult enough case on its own, but one where action was more justifiable and the threat unquestionable. We have probably sacrificed our potential for success there by turning to Iraq, which repre- sented no real security threat to the United States. Palestine . I am sure nothing would diminish the threat from Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, and improve relations with the billion-plus Muslims around the world, so much as a resolution of the Palestinian problem. This issue has caused intense hostility throughout the Muslim world against the United States, in particular, since 1967. A further damaging setback was President Bush’s recent depar- ture from the traditional U.S. position on Israeli set- tlements (they are illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention) and the Palestinian “right of return” (most of the world believes they should have a nego- tiated but limited right of return and/or compensation for the loss of ancestral property since 1948). This has strengthened the perception that we are hopelessly biased toward Israel and cannot be trusted to support an equitable agreement that protects the interest of both parties. As The Economist recently observed, “In just the way that many Americans see no distinction between the terrorism of al-Qaida and the terrorism of the Palestinian intifada, so many Arabs see no distinction between Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and America’s occupation of Iraq. Both are por- trayed as similar dramas of Islamic resistance.” Economic development . We have made many strategic and tactical mistakes in our counterterrorism policy, but the very worst has been our failure to deal with the swamp of poverty and ignorance that spawns F O C U S S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 49 Nothing would diminish the threat from Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, and improve relations with the billion-plus Muslims around the world, so much as a resolution of the Palestinian problem.