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Regime Change - Does our quest for “national security” justify the costs of a U.S. policy of regime change?by Robert ParkerIraq - how long will we be there?As the body count of U.S. military - and some civilian - personnel continues to rise in the conflict in Iraq, the question of why - and for how long - we're going to be there grows ever more hotly debated. The Bush administration now frequently casts the war in Iraq as part - but not all - of its worldwide War on Terror, a war declared in the wake of the 9/11 attacks against the United States. While it is true that our first retaliatory strikes were directed toward elements in Afghanistan, Iraq firmly holds center stage.
The real reason for going inMuch of 2003 was devoted to a mostly futile search for weapons of mass destruction there, a key element of the administration's justification before the world for attacking. National security - our own and our allies' - depended upon eliminating these weapons which could and would conceivably be used by terrorists against us. However, since the failure of such weapons to materialize, the rationale has boiled down to regime change.
Did the administration have its mind made up?According to some sources and political viewpoints, regime change has been on the minds of people who are now in President Bush's cabinet since the Gulf War of 1991, or even longer. A document entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century, written in September 2000 by the think-tank Project for the New American Century for people like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, apparently laid out a plan for America to essentially democratize the Middle East and Persian Gulf. Under this scenario, the conflict in Iraq is simply the first step in changing regimes. It has also been labeled a "dangerous fantasy" by some.
When will we know the consequences?It may take many years to determine if regime change in Iraq has really succeeded in improving our national security, even when the fighting ends there. In the meantime, other global threats continue to emerge. Many think that Iran is a far greater potential threat to us than Iraq. Even impoverished Haiti makes demands upon our resources to make it stable, regardless of who is in charge. And no one seriously believes our borders are now secure, in spite of almost three years of emphasis on "national security" measures at great expense.
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