Factoring fear into strategy

When the late shah of Iran was asked why he did not imitate the Swedish monarchy, he responded: “I will act like the King of Sweden when my subjects behave like Swedes.”

In the end, the shah was persuaded by President Jimmy Carter to act like the king of Sweden — whereupon he ceased to be a king of any kind.

The barbaric murders of four American civilians in Fallujah, followed by the desecration of their corpses before cheering crowds of Iraqis, have left President Bush looking a little like the shah — and Americans in general baffled and frustrated.

Their frustration is understandable. As usual when terrorists commit particularly vile atrocities, the experts have a dozen different explanations but no solutions at all. Their main concern seems to be that the U.S. should not “overreact.”

Yet the main explanation of these continuing atrocities may be that, since its victory in the Iraq war a year ago and until the new offensive now taking place, the U.S. has been so paralyzed by the fear of “overreacting” that it has actually invited resistance. In a word, the problem in Iraq is that our Iraqi enemies are not sufficiently afraid of us.

They know, of course, the U.S. and its allies possess overwhelming military power sufficient to crush any resistance. But they may sense we lack the moral self-confidence to use that power. And if that is their opinion, they can support it with three examples of initial American diffidence:

(1) In the days immediately after the fall of Baghdad, the U.S. failed to shoot looters. Maybe the military authorities thought such a heavy-handed response would alienate Iraqis. Yet the prestige of U.S. troops was so high in the aftermath of their lightning victory that two or three shootings would probably have quelled almost all challenges to law and order.

Law-abiding Iraqis would have been delighted to see looting suppressed. When it was largely ignored, they blamed the increased lawlessness on the U.S. And our failure to crush ordinary crime told potential terrorists they too might challenge us with impunity.

(2) No enemies of the U.S. — or of ordinary Iraqis — have been tried, convicted and executed. When captured, they simply vanish into detention. Yet the execution of high-ranking Ba’athist thugs would both reassure Iraqis their tormentors face just punishment and warn the terrorists they too will end on the gallows. By the same token, interminable interrogations suggest to Middle Easterners some deal is in the works to free Saddam in return for an end to terrorism. And that encourages the terrorists to think the U.S. will eventually scuttle.

(3) Until last week, when the “uprising” of extreme Shi’ite followers of Sheik Moqtada al-Sadr forced action, the U.S. has failed to disarm and disband private armies in Iraq.

Yet private armies are incompatible with democracy or any form of stable government. They allow extremist mullahs to intimidate ordinary Iraqis and political opponents. They force rival political and religious groups to form their own militias. They undermine the rule of the legitimate authorities — in this case the U.S., its allies, and the interim Iraqi governing council. And they foster a growing murderous anarchy exemplified by the murders in Fallujah, the Shi’ite rioting in Baghdad over the weekend, and the “wiping out” (Financial Times) of a gypsy village in central Iraq by militiamen loyal to Sheik al-Sadr.

As a result of these three failures, the U.S. has been feared much less than its objective power warrants.

Lawlessness has spread to previously peaceful areas like Basra despite the many practical successes of the Coalition Provisional Authority in repairing the economy and establishing a liberal constitution. And the U.S. has wondered what actions to take in Fallujah to punish the perpetrators and re-establish its authority without alienating the entire population.

Our dilemma has been made worse by the political truth, known since Machiavelli, that it is much harder to re-establish authority that has been lost than to establish it in the first place. Shooting a handful of criminal looters would have been enough to make us sensibly feared a year ago. Today that would hardly make the evening news.

What, then, can be done?

The most straightforward solution would be a draconian crackdown on all unrest — curfews, house-to-house searches, firing on armed rioters, mass internment, widespread use of capital punishment for terrorists, and so on.

Western democracies only have the stomach for such harsh methods, however, when they believe they are fighting truly radical evil. The Allies in postwar Germany executed large numbers of German resisters because, among other reasons, Belsen and Dachau showed Nazism was utterly bestial and the most brutal methods of suppressing it justified.

Even so, the Allied occupation of Germany was before CNN, nongovernmental organizations, and the “human rights revolution.” It is highly unlikely, even in the aftermath of Fallujah, that either the U.S. government would carry out — or American public opinion support — the execution of terrorists on a similar scale today.

A second solution would be to establish order by bringing in massive numbers of U.S. and allied troops. They would impose a regime of surveillance and supervision widespread and almost totalitarian but not brutal, using both human and technical intelligence to track down and remove the terrorists from society, and settle down to stay in Iraq at least 30 years.

In that way, terrorist resistance might be administratively smothered over time. But since the U.S. has decided to reduce troop levels and hand over power to Iraqis in three months, this option has been foreclosed.

That leaves the third option — which also happens to be the most practicable one in current circumstances — namely, handing over power to a new Iraqi government and supporting its suppression of terrorism. A new Iraqi government will be in an improved version of the U.S. position a year ago. It will be feared by its opponents; it will not have shown any psychological uncertainty in the face of “resistance”; and it will have the advantages of being (a) Iraqi, ( b) at least aspiringly democratic and (c) knowledgeable about local conditions.

That combination will give it the legitimacy and the moral self-confidence to crack down on any unrest either last-ditch Saddamites or foreign jihadists try to mount. And it may well conclude it needs such weapons as internment of suspected terrorists without trial to restore order and prevent civil war.

Of course, U.S. troops still will be needed in force to support the new regime. Nor can Washington give a blank check endorsing any methods, however brutal, it employs. Equally however, we should not seek to impose on Baghdad the kind of constitutional restraints that cripple American police in their everyday battles against conventional crime — and hobble U.S. responses today to the murder of Americans in Fallujah.

We cannot afford another king of Sweden in the Middle East.

John O’Sullivan is editor of the National Interest and a distinguished fellow in international relations at the Nixon Center.