Whoa! Who would have thought that Osama Bin Laden was really alive and hid­ing out for all this time? Appar­ently not the U.S. intel­li­gence com­mu­nity which has fer­vently hoped that bin Ladin was toasted in the bomb­ing of Tora Bora. That seems increas­ingly to be wish­ful think­ing on the part of the United States. Aston­ish­ingly, the tape that has come to light, in which some­one who sounds an awful lot like the Napoleon of Ter­ror praises recent attacks and threat­ens more vio­lence against the West if Iraq is attacked, was met with resound­ing indif­fer­ence by the White House and the Pen­ta­gon. Sec. of Defense (and in-house funny man) Don­ald Rums­feld quipped that Bin Laden was “alive or dead” when asked about the ter­ror leader’s con­di­tion. Appar­ently, Schrödinger’s ter­ror­ist is a para­dox they know well at the Defense Depart­ment.
But seri­ously folks, shouldn’t the news of bin Ladin’s sur­vival be taken a lit­tle more, well, seri­ously? Sen­ate Major­ity leader (for the moment) Tom Daschle, D-S.D., thinks so and valiantly ques­tioned whether the U.S. is win­ning the war on ter­ror yes­ter­day, ask­ing, in effect, if we didn’t declare vic­tory in Afghanistan a wee bit early.
So if bin Ladin is alive, as is likely, and al Qa’ida is prepar­ing to strike again, as is likely, the obvi­ous course of action is to focus on … Sad­dam Hus­sein!
Argh. I tear my hair out over this. I’m con­vinced that the rea­son given by the left for the U.S.‘s drive to top­ple Sad­dam — mainly con­trol of Iraq’s oil fields — is much too sim­plis­tic to give the whole pic­ture. And I don’t trust the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion that Iraq poses a clear and present dan­ger, with Sad­dam being this­close to field­ing nukes on magic unmanned drones that could take out Amer­i­can cities. And the Butcher of Bagh­dad isn’t sostu­pid that he would give weapons of mass destruc­tion to an ele­ment that he couldn’t con­trol, such as al Qa’ida. So what gives? Why the push on Iraq when al Qa’ida poses a clear and present threat and Pak­istan has been help­ing North Korea with its nuke pro­gram. (The impli­ca­tion is that if Pak­istan has ele­ments that would help the North Kore­ans, there are likely ele­ments in the gov­ern­ment that would help al Qa’ida in a sim­i­lar man­ner.)
This report from the Insti­tute for National Strate­gic Stud­ies’ National Defense Uni­ver­sity might offer some clues. The main thrust of the report is that Amer­ica has long real­ized the strate­gic value of the Per­sian Gulf, and fully intends to keep a mil­i­tary pres­ence there regard­less of any out­come in Iraq. “The United States will need to diver­sify its depen­dence on regional bas­ing and for­ward pres­ence, as well as reduce the vis­i­bil­ity and pre­dictabil­ity of its forward-deployed forces,” reads the report.
Why is this nec­es­sary? Because way back in 1990, the the Bush White House, part first, announced a defense pos­ture that called for “adult super­vi­sion” of the world. And the most recent iter­a­tion of the National Secu­rity Strat­egy of the United States calls for the globe’s sole super­power to suf­fer no rivals mil­i­tar­ily or eco­nom­i­cally, impos­ing a pax amer­i­cana. So the United States is in the Gulf to guar­an­tee the sup­ply of oil not for itself, but for Europe and Japan, which get most of their oil from the Mid­dle East. (Sur­pris­ingly, the United States gets most of its oil from Canada, Venezuela and Mex­ico; Per­sian Gulf sources sup­plied only 11 per­cent of America’s oil in 2000, accord­ing to the Depart­ment of Energy.) The United States Marines safe­guard the Per­sian Gulf because Europe and Japan might re-arm and secure the oil sources for them­selves if we didn’t. And as I said, the United States does not intend to suf­fer rivals gladly.
So we are going to be in the Gulf for a long time. As the INSS report says, “There is no escap­ing the U.S. role as a guar­an­tor of Gulf sta­bil­ity. Thus, the United States needs a viable con­cept for its future for­ward pres­ence that can be sus­tained over the long haul.” Saudi Ara­bia is not the secure base that we need for such a pres­ence, as the pres­ence of infi­del troops so close to the holy sites of Mecca and Med­ina directly under­mines the legit­i­macy of the House of Saud, which came to power in the 1920s as the fam­ily that would pro­tect Islam’s holi­est shrines. The pres­ence of the troops inflames the faith­ful, such as bin Ladin, and leads the Saudi royal fam­ily to pay off the rad­i­cal cler­ics that wield much influ­ence in the king­dom. In essence this is the rea­son rad­i­cal Islamists with pos­si­ble access to nukes are “funded” by Saudi Ara­bia — the Saudis are buy­ing them off and point­ing a loaded gun away from their own head and toward some­one else’s. If the House of Saud falls, which it could do at any time, a big rea­son will be resent­ment over its invi­ta­tion of Amer­i­can GIs.
The solu­tion is to get the 5,000 or so Amer­i­can off the Ara­bian penin­sula. But the United States can’t pull out with Sad­dam in power; the troops are there to con­tain Sad­dam. So the solu­tion to the solu­tion is to remove Sad­dam from power, in the process diver­si­fy­ing the dis­tri­b­u­tion of Amer­i­can troops in the region and remov­ing a provo­ca­tion to rad­i­cals. (Once they get over being pissed at the sub­ju­ga­tion of Iraq, that is.)
Some would argue that this will just pre­serve Saudi legit­i­macy. Oth­ers may argue that a friendly regime in Iraq would under­cut the Saudis and bring oil prices down as the two coun­tries (which con­trol the largest and second-largest known reserves of oil on the planet) com­pete for mar­kets. There is evi­dence that the Saudis are hew­ing to the sec­ond view, doing every­thing in their power to impede the United States’ war plan­ning, includ­ing a mas­sive loan to Rus­sia — inter­est free! — if the Bear had only vetoed UNSCR 1441. Alas for the Saudis, this didn’t hap­pen, and they are caught between Iraq and a hard place.
So the goal of the United States is to main­tain a pres­ence in the Per­sian Gulf so that Europe and Japan don’t re-arm. In order to main­tain a pres­ence and decrease depen­dency on an unre­li­able ally, Saudi Ara­bia, Wash­ing­ton has to lighten the mil­i­tary foot­print in the region by remov­ing the cause for the heavy foot­print — Sad­dam Hus­sein. Once that is accom­plished, the for­ward forces can be dis­trib­uted out of Saudi Ara­bia and a friendly Iraq can help pres­sure the Saudis to keep oil prices low. As a bonus, Wash­ing­ton would no longer have to easy on the Saudis in its war against al Qa’ida since Iraq would be the bul­wark in the Gulf.
Could this be the strat­egy after all, part an elab­o­rate chess game played on sev­eral boards at once? Win­ning such a game demands cool heads, clear minds and accu­rate intel­li­gence — espe­cially in a shoot­ing war. The fact that bin Ladin has prob­a­bly reëmerged right now means that the lat­ter — since well before Sept. 11, 2001 — has been woe­fully lacking.