Fair-minded historians will look back and observe that several reasons motivated the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003.  The Bush Administration’s principal public argument for going to war in Iraq was to keep Saddam Hussein from expanding his allegedly existing supply of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), but none was found.   By this crucial standard alone, the war was an utter failure.

However WMD was always more of an excuse to invade Iraq than a primary motivation.  The reflexive Left always said it was really about oil, and oil was certainly a factor, but a secondary one.  Rather, the Iraqi War was ideological.  After 911, so-called “neo-conservatives” convinced Bush that the 911 terror attacks were a result of the anti-democratic and politically backward orientation of the Middle East.  America could only be safe, they argued, if the Muslim world became democratic, like us.  Out of a democratic Muslim world would flow many benefits, including a political swamp drained of terrorists, peace with Israel and, finally, a reliable supply of oil.  The objective was to set up a powerful democracy in the middle of the Middle East, then sit back and watch the democratic dominoes fall as one Muslim people after another learned to emulate Baghdad, Iraq, the new shining city on the Tigris and Euphrates.

There was nothing “conservative” in this “neo-conservatism.”  True Edmund Burke-style conservatives, who were little heard from in 2003, realized that the Middle East was far less prepared culturally for democracy than was even France in 1789.  It was once widely understood by conservatives that the habits of democracy are learned over the course of generations.  Conservatives used to believe that only idealistic liberal fools like Woodrow Wilson thought it possible to impose democracy at the point of a gun.

For traditional conservative realists, there was probably no place on earth less susceptible to democracy than Iraq, since it is at its a base a Muslim society – which is notoriously barren soil for democracies to grow in – overlaid with Saddam’s Stalinist-style totalitarianism.    Nevertheless, President George W. Bush, who had campaigned against “nation building” as a candidate, asserted (rather than reasoned), “The nation of Iraq — with its proud heritage, abundant resources and skilled and educated people — is fully capable of moving toward democracy and living in freedom.”

Bush’s shaky assertion is under ongoing severe testing.  Unquestionably, the so-called “surge” in Iraq led to great progress.  Sectarian violence is down dramatically and, as this balanced perspective from the Washington Post suggests, Iraqi’s are learning to use ballots instead of violence to pursue political ambitions.  The final outcome of March’s elections remains unresolved.  Remarkably, a democratic nationalist with ties to the CIA – Ayad Allawi – narrowly won the most votes, but thus far he has been unable to form a government.  Meanwhile, the would-be Islamist dictator, Moqtada al-Sadr, gathers strength and waits in the wings.  Ominously, his movement aspires to become the Hamas of Iraq.

The Bush Administration used Saddam Hussein’s brutality as a justification for US intervention in Iraq.   Even many liberals acknowledged the desirability of removing this genocidal thug, who murdered  half a million Iraqis, not counting hundreds of thousands more killed in Saddam’s wars with Iran and with the US-led coalition that liberated Kuwait.   But the George W. Bush-led US war in Iraq has left the blood of over 100,000 Iraqis on our hands too, plus the death of 4419 US soldiers.  In any moral calculation, these and future losses must be weighed in the balance against Saddam’s atrocities.

We are also compelled to consider the ethics of attacking a country that never attacked us.  There is cost here too, and its currency is American values and reputation.

The Bush Administration originally estimated the financial costs of the Iraqi invasion at $60-80 billion.   The real number seven years later is heading north of $750 billion.   These numbers matter as the United States continues down the bipartisan road to bankruptcy.

The democratizing of Iraq is supposed to make Islamic peoples rise up in emulation.  Perhaps the Iraqi example played some role in the now-crushed Iranian civil unrest next door.  But the tangible strategic outcome of the US toppling of Saddam is clear.   By removing the regime of Saddam Hussein the United States destroyed the best counterbalance to an ascendant Iran, now poised to develop nuclear weapons.  Whereas Iranian Shiite sympathizers inside Iraq had been ruthlessly suppressed by Saddam, now they operate freely against the interests of the United States and Bush’s wished-for Iraqi democracy.  It may ultimately prove to be Iran that takes over parts of Iraq.  Which dominoes will ultimately fall, and where, remain to be seen.  Foolish or not, we are stuck playing out the neo-conservatives’ high-risk game in Iraq, and hoping for a victory that is still a long way off.

Afghanistan / Pakistan, on the one hand, and Iran on the other, are the binary-epicenters from which US interests are most threatened.  It is on these focal points and the related areas spreading outward that the Obama Administration has wisely concentrated its attention.  President Obama deserves high marks for creating a foreign policy that moves in a concerted diplomatic fashion, deploys American military power appropriately, and focuses on the objectives most critical to US interests.

The prudence and coherence of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy stand in sharp contrast to that of its predecessor.  The sorry state of American diplomacy during the Bush years cannot be over-emphasized.  It was a time, perhaps like no other in American history, in which arrogance was perceived as the principle characteristic of US foreign policy.  This was diplomatically debilitating, and with US military spread thin in Iraq and Afghanistan, the foreign-policy tool chest was left just about empty.

The mere election of Barack Obama re-inflated American prestige in many parts of the world, especially in Europe, where American political campaigns are followed closely and where Obama’s professorial style and rhetorical skills are highly appreciated.  And of course his message for a more cooperative and less confrontational United States resonated with the European public.

Obama surprisingly won the Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing except win an election with a political message welcomed by Europeans.  Many have argued that the award was a political gesture, which of course it was and always is.  Yes, there are individuals more deserving than Barack Obama, a point the President emphasized in his bully acceptance speech at Oslo.  The prize might better be seen as one awarded to the American people for turning away from a foreign policy too often based on unilateral action, or inaction as the case may be.

The foreign policy of the new administration began with what conservatives derisively called Obama’s international “apology tour.”  While the tour can be nit-picked for some unnecessary contrition  (before Venezuelan strong man Hugo Chavez for example), it was imperative to demonstrate that the United States is now a country willing to listen, negotiate and compromise.

The Obama Administration understood from the outset that a reservoir of international goodwill based on public relations, as well as on traditional deal making, would have to be built up in order to eventually achieve American strategic objectives.  President Obama obviously appreciates the need for meaningful help against our Islamist enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.   On Iran, the Administration has been maneuvering to establish effective international sanctions.

The President deserves credit for his deliberative decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.  European goodwill toward the new administration in Washington paid immediate dividends with the announcement that an additional 7000 non-US NATO forces would be sent to Afghanistan.  To command US forces in Afghanistan Obama chose General Stanley McCrystal to lead a surge-like campaign based on the anti-insurgency doctrine developed since the Viet Nam war, with an emphasis on protecting and serving Afghanistan’s major population centers.  Like the surge in Iraq, the Afghanistan surge seems to be working.

The courting of Pakistan by the Obama Administration is an especially important aspect of the struggle to root out Al Qaeda and its allies.  The Administration has vigorously pursued high-level negotiations and relationship-building with Pakistan’s political and military establishments.  Secretary of State Clinton made a high-profile visit to Pakistan last fall.  From this fascinating piece published in The New Republic, it is clear that US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen has formed a important bond with Pakistan’s most important military figure, Army Chief of Staff, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.  This week’s capture of the Taliban is almost certainly a product of the full-court US diplomatic press on Pakistan.

In related effort, the Administration’s only State dinner was served for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, signaling the importance of India in the scheme of US foreign policy.  India must show a peaceful face to Pakistan, in order to encourage the Pakistani’s to use military resources against the Islamists within their borders.   India is also an important democratic counterweight to China.

In the case of Iran, the world needed to see that the United States was completely open to negotiating with the regime in Tehran.  Before sanctions could have any hope of being established, the Islamic regime’s intransigence needed to be established beyond any reasonable doubt.

In the meantime, the Obama Administration made concessions to Russia on strategic defense in Eastern Europe.  As suggested here, setting the “reset button” with Russia and winning its support against Iran is no easy task, but clearly there will be no Russian cooperation against Iran at all without concessions to perceived Russian interests.  It now seems that Russia may go along with sanctions, though China will be another and still more difficult matter.  Russian cooperation is crucial in the case of Iran, and helpful in addressing the challenges in the Afghanistan / Pakistan theater.

As the diplomacy unfolded about Iran, the formidable domestic unrest within Iran caught the outside world by surprise.  The Obama Administration was criticized for not speaking out forcefully enough, or taking some action, in support of the protesters.  But in fact there was very little the US could do.  Associating too closely with the dissident movement inside Iran would only give credence to the regime’s charges that the opposition was manipulated from abroad by the US, the UK and Israel.  To limit the harm that sanctions may do to ordinary Iranians, the Administration is designing punitive economic weapons targeting the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s substantial business interests.

The US relationship with China rises to the level of importance of the challenges the United States faces in the Middle East.  With China however, there is a certain predictability with regards to the divisive status quo issues that exist from one US Administration to the next:  the inflated Chinese currency pegged to the dollar, inaction over North Korea, human rights, Tibet and Taiwan.   Added to these, the Obama Administration has tried to convince the Chinese, who hold vast amounts of US debt, that the US is serious about getting its fiscal house in order.   It is not an easy sell. In this case, domestic fiscal policy spills over into foreign policy, and threatens American credibility.

Beyond the epicenters of US foreign policy in Afghanistan / Pakistan and Iran, a sideshow opened in Latin America, where the Obama Administration placed the United States on the wrong side of the so-called coup in Honduras.  The Honduran legislative and judicial branches were clearly trying to protect Honduras against leftist dictatorship of the sort found in Cuba and festering in Venezuela when they ordered the removal of President Zelaya.  In the end, official scholars at the Law Library of the US Congress found the actions of the Honduran military consistent with the Honduran Constitution.  The US ultimately backed a compromise endorsing this past autumn’s elections, and the crisis was resolved with no harm done, except maybe to US democratic principles.  As if to acknowledge that the US Administration really does appreciate who its true friends are in Latin America, the President singled out Columbia and Panama in his State of the Union speech in January.

The enormous complexity of the questions facing US foreign policy makers would boggle the minds of Bismark, Metternich and Grotius.   There is danger in expecting too much from any American administration. Fortunately, President Obama has had the wisdom to rely on former rival Hillary Clinton at State, the shrewd Bush-era holdover Robert Gates at Defense, former Marine General James Jones at National Security, and many other competent and even-tempered officials.  In the face of multiple difficulties, President Obama and his Administration are gamely pursuing a realistic foreign policy in pursuit of American interests.  On foreign policy, President Obama has earned high marks, and the overall grade of A-.

*    *    *

Author’s Note:

This is the last in CenterMovement.org’s series grading President Obama’s first year in office (see “Obama’s Foreign Policy and Defense Report Card, Part I: Terrorism” and “Taking Stock: Grading Obama’s Domestic Economic Policies His First Year in Office”). Adele Wick suggested a grade of C- for the President’s performance domestically.  I would have been even tougher and given him a D.

Why the large gap between Obama’s domestic and foreign policy performance?

President Obama’s mode of operation for foreign policy is everything his domestic policy is not:  deliberative, non-partisan, open-minded, far-sighted, flexible, mostly non-ideological, deferential to policy expertise and not politics, well-coordinated and well led.  These qualities have made and are making all of the difference.

Since the end of the Cold War, climate change and other man-made threats to the planet have diluted the focus on nuclear weapons.  Protestors waving anti-nuclear placards no longer fill the streets, and movies and books far less frequently fan popular fears of nuclear apocalypse.    Only occasionally do news headlines, like the recent ones coming out of Iran, inconveniently blow the mushroom cloud back into the public consciousness. Otherwise, the hysteria of the Cold War has been replaced by complacency.

The proliferation of nuclear technology into the hands of messianic Islamists should, in the coming years, push the minute hand on that Doomsday clock closer to midnight than ever before.  Now it is high time to anticipate and plan for any and all eventualities, use every tool available to keep a nuclear weapon from going off, and pray that something works.

A nuclear-armed Iran presents an especially alarming threat because that nation is a theocracy run by religious fanatics.  Iran has a growing missile capacity and, still more worrisome, could put atomic bombs into the hands of its terrorist allies.  The Iranian regime showed so little regard for human life during its war with Iraq in the 1980s that it sent waves of its own children out ahead of Iranian troops to clear enemy mine fields.  Nuclear weapons in the hands of such people is a terrifying prospect, to say the least.

The unhappy truth is that there is little the West can do to prevent a determined Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.  The Obama Administration is right to play all of its diplomatic cards in an attempt to isolate Iran politically and economically.  Biting trade sanctions might add to the pressure currently being applied by a surprisingly large, brave and resilient internal political opposition.  Still, we cannot afford to assume such sanctions will work, or even that they will ever be firmly applied.  While Russia is now possibly prepared to cooperate against Iran, China still seems reluctant.

There is much talk about eventual attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, but military strikes are unwise.  As noted recently in the Wall Street Journal, air assaults, whether Israeli or American, seem at best capable of setting back Iran’s nuclear program for only a couple of years, if that.  Then these same targets, perhaps hidden and hardened more, would have to be struck again and again.  Meanwhile, what about North Korea?  Does it too get bombed?  And if another state run by madmen starts building nuclear bombs, does the United States strike yet again?

The doctrine of preemption – established under the George W. Bush Administration and used to justify the invasion of Iraq – is not only unworthy of the United States and the community of democratic nations, it is also impractical and counterproductive.  Perpetual bombardment of Muslim nations in particular will fertilize the ground for crop after crop of future Islamist fanatics.

Even the Israelis, who are explicitly threatened, may also have reservations about attacking Iran, at least for now.  They are uncharacteristically advertising a potential assault on Iranian nuclear targets, which in fact may suggest a diplomatic ploy rather than actual military intention.

For now, the Israeli goal is to get the world serious about putting pressure on Iran.  Down the nuclear road, however, Israel may find it untenable to sit idly by.  Israel has a unique set of strategic and political variables with which to contend, as well as a terrible historical burden.  The Jews will never be led to slaughter again.  Iran misreads their history at its own peril.

But where does all of this leave us?  The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, signed in 1968, was supposed to limit those countries with nuclear weapons to the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Great Britain and France.  Three countries – India, Pakistan and Israel — did not sign the Nonproliferation Treaty, and each is now a nuclear power, although in Israel’s case its nuclear status is undeclared.  North Korea signed the treaty, violated it, and withdrew.  Subjecting proliferators like North Korea and Iran to near-complete economic isolation might keep the Treaty relevant for a time, but already Chavez’s Venezuela has positioned itself as Iran’s emergency economic lifeline, perhaps in return for nuclear technology with which it too can build nuclear weapons.  For more on this dismal prospect, see here.

The spread of nuclear weapons is not surprising.  Throughout the history of the world, no technology has ever failed to proliferate.  If North Korea, about the poorest and most isolated nation on earth, can build nuclear weapons, then any banana republic can, and will.    The world of the future seems to bristle with nuclear weapons.

If diplomacy has any chance of containing the nuclear tide, the great powers of the world must get serious about the threat.  The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty also commits the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain and France to eventually eliminating their own nuclear weapons stockpiles. The moral authority of the United States and its European allies is weakened when they deny other countries the very kinds of weapons that they, themselves, possess, and then take no meaningful steps to fulfill their own ultimate obligation under the Treaty.

Fortunately President Obama is now vocalizing the American desire to rid the world completely of nuclear weapons, in compliance with the Treaty.  In doing so, Obama symbolically joins hands with Ronald Reagan, who at Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986 surprised the world (including his own advisors) when he proposed to Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev the idea abolishing all nuclear weapons from the face of the earth.  Here is an idealistic vision embraced by the left and right, and worthy of vigorous promotion.

In spite of the drama of Reagan’s ultimate nuclear disarmament proposal, the Reykjavik summit is most often remembered for the President’s stubborn refusal to let go of his concept for strategic defense.  Here again, the allegedly simple-minded Reagan was far wiser than all of his critics.  He understood the ultimate horror of nuclear holocaust, so while pursuing an idealistic diplomatic approach, he called upon the scientific prowess of the United States to produce a technologically advanced defense for the American public, something far more reassuring than Mutually Assured Destruction.

Twenty-three years later, Reagan’s strategic vision remains sound: a full -throttle diplomatic and effort to uphold the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty including the banning of all nuclear weapons from the planet, and a muscular research and development program for a multi-layered strategic defense.

As Reagan well understood, the two efforts are mutually re-enforcing.   The more effective America’s strategic defense becomes, the more likely that Russia and China will agree to scrap their own nuclear weapons if the United States does likewise.

To Reagan’s strategic defense, it is also vital to add layered port and border security. America’s political leadership has been shockingly irresponsible in failing to shore up these critical vulnerabilities.

The Doomsday clock still ticks.  In hindsight, maybe it wasn’t three minutes to twelve in 1984. Reagan was far more committed to peace than was generally understood.  But in the coming years, as nuclear The Doomsday clock still ticks.  In hindsight, maybe it wasn’t three minutes to twelve in 1984. Reagan was far more committed to peace than was generally understood.  But in the coming years, as nuclear technology almost invariably proliferates, blackest midnight will once again draw nigh.  We must get ready.