An Anti-War Movement of One

Alas, then as now and try as we might, we have few reliable or democratic allies. We have maybe half a dozen friends: Britain, Canada, Australia, Israel (sometimes), Turkey (a better friend to us than we've been to them), and, soon enough, Russia. Beyond that, we have relationships and hookups in ever-proliferating quantity and ever more complex and questionable quality.

SO WHAT'S THIS new struggle, these hundred conflicts already melding into yet another world war, about? Put simply: Maybe half the countries on this planet—and many of the poorest and most volatile—have borders that don't make sense politically, militarily, ethnically, culturally, economically, or ecologically. Before the Soviet collapse, borders were considered sacrosanct, virtually immutable, the sine qua non of national sovereignty. Now sovereignty is breaking down and busting up all over, and borders grow ever more unavailing and unreal. No amount of Western-style "nation building" can hold together nations that never should have been nations in the first place and shouldn't be now. And no amount of American muscle can police a world destined for a century of conflict over resources, religions, identities, and whatever else people care to massacre each other about.

Throughout the Cold War, we failed at Third World nation building, failures we could elide courtesy of local thugs and kleptocrats. During a decade that historians may someday call "The Wasted '90s," we blew it in Haiti, Somalia, and, to some extent, in the Balkans.

We're getting our first hard lesson in Afghanistan, whose continued existence as a collection of feuding tribes and warlords isn't worth the bones of an Arkansas grenadier. If we go into Iraq, if we get our "regime change" and then try to build them a country, the lesson will be harsher still. And as we fail, the chaos—and our involvement and implication in that chaos—will spread. It will spread through the Islamic world. It will spread through Africa. And the consequences and the violence will not be confined to those unhappy lands. Not to mention the fact that, from the jihadist point of view—they who recognize no legitimate borders save those of the Umma, the Islamic world under their brand of Islamic law—destabilization is exactly the opportunity they want.

So what's Iraq about? In the end, it's not about that nasty man or the nasty things he's collecting. It's about what the policy wonks call "destabilization." It's about taking the next step into a regional and a global chaos that could wreck this planet.

So what do we do when the government's careening toward disaster, the anti-war movement's comatose, and the media keep us on perpetual spin? For starters, we dare to risk unilateral rationality. Which tells us that we've yet to begin to develop an effective strategy for coping with terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, let alone the imminent fracturing of dozens of nations.

Iraq?

Not now.

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Philip Gold served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Marine Corps before joining the faculty of Georgetown University in 1982. Since 1992, he has served as a senior fellow at Seattle's Discovery Institute, specializing in national security. His latest book, Against All Terrors: The People's Next Defense, is available online at www.discovery.org.