"The question is, is this about American power, or is it about democracy?"

The I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a-Hawk Club
What his admirers call the Bush Doctrine is so far a crude edifice built of phrases from speeches and strategy documents, reinforced by a pattern of discarded treaties and military deployment. It consists of a determination to keep America an unchallenged superpower, a willingness to forcibly disarm any country that poses a gathering threat and an unwillingness to be constrained by treaties or international institutions that don't suit us perfectly.

Let's imagine that the regime of Saddam Hussein begins to crumble under the first torrent of cruise missiles. The tank columns rumbling in from Kuwait are not beset by chemical warheads. There is no civilian carnage to rouse the Arab world against us. In fact, Al Jazeera shows American soldiers being welcomed by Iraqis as liberators. The illicit toxins are unearthed and destroyed. Persecuted Kurds and Shiites suppress the urge for clan vengeance.

If all this goes smoothly — and even if it goes a little less smoothly — Mr. Bush will hear a chorus of supporters claiming vindication. I imagine a triumphalist editorial or two in the neoconservative press. Pundits who earlier urged Mr. Bush to ignore Congress and the U.N. will assure him that he can now safely disregard everyone who caviled at the threshold of war, and urge him to get on with the next liberation in the series.

What his admirers call the Bush Doctrine is so far a crude edifice built of phrases from speeches and strategy documents, reinforced by a pattern of discarded treaties and military deployment. It consists of a determination to keep America an unchallenged superpower, a willingness to forcibly disarm any country that poses a gathering threat and an unwillingness to be constrained by treaties or international institutions that don't suit us perfectly.

Let's imagine that the regime of Saddam Hussein begins to crumble under the first torrent of cruise missiles. The tank columns rumbling in from Kuwait are not beset by chemical warheads. There is no civilian carnage to rouse the Arab world against us. In fact, Al Jazeera shows American soldiers being welcomed by Iraqis as liberators. The illicit toxins are unearthed and destroyed. Persecuted Kurds and Shiites suppress the urge for clan vengeance.

If all this goes smoothly — and even if it goes a little less smoothly — Mr. Bush will hear a chorus of supporters claiming vindication. I imagine a triumphalist editorial or two in the neoconservative press. Pundits who earlier urged Mr. Bush to ignore Congress and the U.N. will assure him that he can now safely disregard everyone who caviled at the threshold of war, and urge him to get on with the next liberation in the series.

But in fact a victory in Iraq will not resolve the great questions of what we intend to be in the world. It will lay them wide open, and with them deep divisions within both of our political parties.

The first test we will face upon the conquest of Iraq is whether our aim is mainly to promote democracy, or mainly to promote stability. Some, probably including some in Mr. Bush's cabinet, will argue that it was all about disarmament. Once that is done, they will say, once Saddam's Republican Guard is purged, we can turn the country over to a contingent of Sunni generals and bring our troops home in 18 months.

Others, in both parties, see Iraq as the beginning of the next colossal democracy project after the reformation of Eastern Europe. Fouad Ajami, a scholar with no illusions about the Middle East's capacity for heartbreak, has written that a MacArthur-style occupation of Iraq offers us the prospect of an Arab country "free of the poison of anti-Americanism" and offers the region "a break with the false gods of despotism." Nation-building may be vastly more expensive and difficult than swamp-clearing, but Mr. Ajami dares us to try. Mr. Bush has yet to take up that dare.


A second question will be whether, having used force, we continue to rely on force or lean more heavily on diplomacy. The most ardent think-tank interventionists have already mapped out a string of preventive conquests — Iran, Syria, North Korea, Pakistan if its friendly president is ousted by Islamic militants, perhaps eventually China. They argue for more immense Pentagon budgets to build forces configured for pre-emptive strikes. The reluctant hawks will reply that, having demonstrated our might, we need not be so quick to exercise it again, particularly since (as we seem to have learned in North Korea) not all problems lend themselves to the remedy of airstrikes.

Iraq will also leave us arguing over how fully to enlist international organizations as partners in whatever global renovation we undertake, in Iraq and beyond. Being sole occupiers of an Arab land, as the Israelis have learned to their distress, is not a recipe for good will. Nor is it cheap.

So the war in Iraq does not settle the question of American power, but raises it to a new urgency. I think there is a consensus to be built. It is not the ultrahawk view of an America radiating indifference to everyone who gets in its way, keeping aspiring powers in their place, shunning the clumsy implements of international law and leading with its air force. Nor is it the Vietnam-syndrome reticence about American power that still holds portions of both parties in sway.

"The question is, is this about American power, or is it about democracy?"
The http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/08/opinion/08KELL.html?pagewanted=all&position=top