Last Sunday’s Washington Post included a long opinion piece by David Rothkopf arguing that even if the U.S. pulls out of Iraq soon, we will inevitably return to fight “Gulf War III” in the near future. His implication was that withdrawal is futile, so we might as well stay. Of course, at the same time he was quite clear that “only the Iraqis can solve their political troubles and sectarian violence,” so continuing the American military occupation isn’t really about Iraq at all. According to Rothkop’s last paragraph, it’s about a lot of other stuff:

The United States must contain the complex threats it faces in the region…. Hezbollah and Hamas must know that the United States is present and stands ready to take action. Iran must know that it will not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons, period. Moderates in the region must know that we will stand by them, with economic aid and political support, helping to restore U.S. moral authority in the Middle East. And everyone must know that an attack against Israel will always be considered an attack against America.

How, exactly, continuing the occupation of Iraq would help the U.S. make these various points to regional actors, I’m not sure. And could any marginal increase in our ability to make those points to others in the region really be worth the sad, steady stream of American deaths in Iraq? It seems to me that whether we stay or go in Iraq needs fundamentally to consider whether staying in Iraq is likely to make the situation in Iraq better or worse — most importantly, whether staying in Iraq is going to help achieve American objectives in Iraq.

Iraq is a mess. Some Americans feel guilty and want to keep trying to fix it until it’s stable again. Our inability to stabilize Iraq offends our sense of ingenuity — our “can-do spirit” — and it seems hard to believe, given how good we (rightly) feel about the quality of our military forces and their hard work. All of this effort and capability should get a reward. But it can’t fix Iraq.

On this point, Rothkopf is right: the Iraqis have to fix Iraq. But what Rothkopf ignores is that the Iraqis are unlikely to do so until the U.S. leaves. Partly because they all have confidence in American largesse and ingenuity (the U.S. will fix it for us), and partly because the Iraqi leaders don’t realistically assess their own situation as long as the U.S. military is there to bail them out (or to blame for their weakness).

Most important, though, withdrawing U.S. military forces from Iraq would not only bring to a close the failed occupation (remembering that we really did achieve some good things by invading Iraq: Saddam had been a thorn in our side, and now he’s not in power, and we worried that Iraq would get WMD, and now we know that they won’t). But withdrawing American forces from Iraq would also serve America’s national interest more broadly. And that’s the best argument for withdrawal today: the U.S. should try to improve its situation for the future rather than only looking backward at the past.

I started this blog by talking about David Rothkopf’s argument that the U.S. will have to fight other wars in the Persian Gulf. Perhaps. But the list of reasons that Rothkopf gives — that we will have to serve our national interest by aggressively threatening Hamas and Hezbollah, by considering any Iranian nuclear program inherently to be a reason for war, and by writing big checks to so-called “moderate” regimes in the neighborhood and a blank check to Israel — don’t strike me as reasons closely tied to American interests. These are not actually reasons that the U.S. should fight a “Gulf War III.”

Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist organizations. And the U.S. rightly opposes terrorism. But it seems to me that the U.S. should most vigorously oppose terrorists that kill Americans — like Al Qaeda. Hamas doesn’t attack the U.S., so we should not pick a direct military fiight with them.

Hezbollah has not killed Americans for a long time. How aggressively should we try to punish Hezbollah for past actions? What should the statute of limitations be on the 1983 Marine barracks bombing? How should we think about the links between “Saudi Hezbollah” that probably was responsible for the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing and the other Hezbollah movements? I’m still inclined to consider Hezbollah anti-American, but I’m probably not ready to go to war over it — but Hezbollah is certainly an organization about which Americans can reasonably disagree. Clearly, though, we don’t want to make Hezbollah into an implacable enemy right now, while we are busy with Al Qaeda. Our power is limited, especially against terrorists.

The second American interest that Rothkopf cites as reason we’ll inevitably return to fight in the Persian Gulf is our objection to Iran’s effort to develop nuclear weapons.  But we should ask, under what circumstances would the development of an Iranian nuclear program threaten American interests so seriously that we should contemplate fighting a war to prevent that particular nuclear proliferation? The answer to that question is not obvious. In fact, I’m inclined to agree with Barry Posen that “We Can Live with a Nuclear Iran.” (That was the title of a New York Times op-ed last spring, but Posen has now written a longer, more analytical piece on this theme, too.)

The bigger point here, though, is that fighting Gulf War III is hardly inevitable: if the U.S. chooses to “go back” to the Persian Gulf region for another war, it will be because we choose to go. We certainly have other policy options besides pre-emption to respond to the possibility of Iranian nuclearization. And the real American interests at stake are American security, prosperity, and values. The question is whether launching a Gulf War III would be the best way to defend those interests, and I seriously doubt that.

The other reasons that Rothkopf thinks the U.S. military will inevitably find itself in the Persian Gulf soon have to do with out support for allies over there. I’ve written before that I’m skeptical that U.S. aid to “moderate” regimes really contributes to either economic or political development. But whether or not the U.S. chooses to use economic statecraft in the Persian Gulf, and whether or not our economic statecraft works out to our benefit (or the benefit of the locals over there), it’s a bit step to think that our commitment to “stand by” moderates in the region is worth fighting a war.

Israel is a tougher case. The United States has developed a special relationship with Israel. Israel has a lot of power to take care of itself, but the U.S. also apparently prefers to contribute what we can to helping Israel. Whether the tilt to Israel hurts the U.S. ability to protect our other national interests is a topic that generates extreme controversy (similarly, discussion of whether the relationship actually is in Israel’s interest generates controversy, too). But it’s also probably true that many Americans think any cost of our relationship with Israel is worth it: they have defined Israel’s interests as important, and that choice is not and should not be an “out of bounds” choice in American politics.

But Israel is not in the Persian Gulf. Yes, Gulf states change their policies towards the U.S. because they, too, are interested in the international politics of Israel. But the Gulf states’ policies on Israel are not important enough to involve the U.S. in a war in the Persian Gulf. We neither need to attack nor defend Saudi Arabia because of what the Saudis do with respect Israel (the same goes for Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, etc.).

The bottom line is that the U.S. can choose its level of military engagement in the Persian Gulf. And we can choose to have a much lower level of engagement: withdrawal from Iraq would not be fruitless. In fact, it would be insufficient. As I wrote in the New York Times yesterday with Daryl Press and Ben Valentino, withdrawal from Iraq is insufficient to really serve U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf region. Our traditional national security goals in the Persian Gulf — protecting the flow of oil and preventing conquest of the entire region by a single country — are best served by getting rid of America’s military “footprint” there.

And that points to the way that we should decide on what to do with our military — in Iraq, in the Persian Gulf region, and everywhere else. We should choose our policy based on what will better serve the American national interest in the future. Can we make Iraq a better place by staying? Can our forces in the Persian Gulf make oil flow more smoothly? Can we punish the terrorists who kill Americans and prevent new terrorists from coming after us? Can we do better at getting what we want in the world? We have a lot of choices to make.

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