SPECULATION about how close the United States is to a war with Iraq has invariably revolved around how essential the world’s only remaining superpower believes such an undertaking is to its grand strategy for conforming the international order to its perceived global interests. While it is by no means unreasonable to conclude that this is the primary motivating factor, the likelihood is that exclusive emphasis on the grand dimensions of impending American actions is missing an important point. It is that the imminence of a US assault on Iraq is being driven more by domestic than international compulsions.Because the Bush administration itself is trying to play them down, it is easy to underevaluate the extent to which economic and public policy crises at home are threatening the President’s political survival. To such an extent that only a quick and decisive military victory over Saddam Hussein can save his political skin in the not-too-distant 2004 presidential elections. As recession persists. As unemployment rolls increase. As budget deficits escalate. As the gap between rich and poor widens due to taxation policies that obscenely favour the country’s highest income brackets, Bush’s approval ratings in public opinion polls have slipped to the lowest levels since he assumed office and show signs of slipping even further.They are not being helped either by a number of recent actions taken or pledged on the policies front. In the wake of the embarrassment caused by the Trent Lott incident, Bush immediately undermined the political benefits he may have garnered in the African-American community from a quick denunciation of the Senator’s racially charged comments by renominating for a federal judgeship a Southern jurisprudent whom the Senate had previously rejected on the grounds that his decisions were biased against Blacks.Bush has fared no better with American women after he also renominated for the federal bench a Texas judge whom the Senate had rejected the first time around for being insensitive on women’s issues such as abortion rights. Nor are they being helped by overt and covert executive actions whose purpose is to undermine environmental protection ordinances, immunise corporate misconduct and medical malpractice from the full effect of lawsuits, and weaken ‘‘affirmative action’’ policies intended to enable Blacks and other disprivileged minorities to make up for previous prejudicial treatment that for centuries barred their access to higher education and the upper echelons of the class system.As mounting challenges to Bush’s political credibility continue, war with Iraq is increasingly becoming a likelihood not for reasons of political morality but political expediency. War may now be the sole remaining avenue for saving an administration teetering on the brink of political oblivion. Victory over Hussein in a quick surgical operation could very well produce enough short-term public euphoria to hold at bay rising public restiveness over domestic conditions. Long enough, at least, to propel Bush across the finish line ahead of his Democratic challenger in 2004.There are, therefore, compelling and growing motivations to short-circuit the cumbersome, UN-sponsored ransacking of Iraq’s nuclear back alleys in search of smoking guns, and press ahead sooner rather than later with Gulf War II. Accusations that the control of Iraqi oil, or the achievement of overwhelming strategic dominance in West Asia, or aiding and abetting Israel’s desperate attempts to subdue the Palestinians are not without merit. But they may have less to do with the rush to war than with the endlessly quoted Tip O’Neill mantra that, ‘‘All politics are local politics.’’An invasion of Iraq primarily for ‘‘local’’ political reasons will impact on profound and unanticipated ways on the state of the world writ large. But it is becoming ever more apparent, as American troops stream toward the Persian Gulf, that the rhetoric about ‘‘running out of patience’’; that the orchestrated media imagery of US reserve units and regular troops ostentatiously being loaded aboard planes and ships and dispatched off to the Middle East, amidst tearful goodbyes to wives and children, are what the Bush administration wants the American people to stay focussed upon right now. If things go well enough in the Gulf to keep the political wolf from the door a little bit longer, then Bush’s reelection in 2004 will be assured. That, at least, is the gamble.If this scenario holds true, then the rest of the world, and not only the United States, may be in for a pretty bumpy ride down the road. Given the Bush administration’s unimpressive record of diplomatic competence (note, for example, the bungled aftermath of the Afghanistan campaign, the shocking diplomatic fiasco over North Korea, the inept appeasement of the Pakistani military dictatorship, and the failure to broker a just settlement of the Israeli-Arab dance macabre), no matter what form ‘‘victory’’ takes in West Asia, the prognosis for the future is open to serious doubt.It is said, that the war’s cost may range from 100 to 500 billion dollars, a figure that, combined with already soaring deficits arising from massive tax breaks for rich Americans now in the works, could send the US budget deficit spiralling to the vicinity of a trillion dollars per year. This would negatively affect not only the US’s capacity to cope with domestic social programs but to manage effectively its numerous overseas tactical and strategic responsibilities as well. The challenges of the unresolved revitalisation of Afghanistan, the spectre of Pakistan teetering on the brink of political collapse, the threat of North Korean nuclear blackmail, and the endless cycles of murder and mayhem in Palestine lurk in the wings and will become even more challenging if the Bush administration finally decides that saving its domestic political skin can be achieved only at the cost of arbitrarily waging preemptive war against Hussein.With less resources than are currently available, the United States will be compelled to add policing and politically managing a defeated and decimated Iraq to its already formidable list of things to cope with. Even superpowers have their limits, and it is by no means evident that the Bush administration would be either economically or intellectually up to the daunting tasks confronting it. The world community needs to be wary of super powers that act out of political desperation and parochial expediency rather than measured wisdom.Harold A. Gould is Visiting Scholar at the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Virginia
