The Second Gulf War

Columnist Ahmad Faruqui2 does an exhaustive analysis about Gulf War-2.

After failing to secure the support of a majority of the UN Security Council (UNSC), the US launched a unilateral attack on Iraq on March 19, 2003. Thus began the Second Gulf War. The US said it had the authority to attack Iraq, because Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction posed a threat to world peace and security. The US also cited UNSC Resolution 1441 as providing additional justification, even though that resolution focused on eliminating weapons of mass destruction and did not authorize regime change.
The US decision to effect regime change in Iraq through military means represents a fundamental shift in American foreign policy, and involves the execution of a doctrine that is built around the notion of preventive war. This new doctrine, and its first implementation in Iraq, will be debated for years to come, and be the subject of many books and articles. However, it has already come in for unusually heavy criticism from governments and people around the globe.
In an unprecedented criticism of a serving US president, former US President Jimmy Carter cautioned the US not to go to war against Iraq without UN backing.3 He said, “American stature will surely decline further if we launch a war in clear defiance of the United Nations.” More discretely, former president George H. W. Bush, who had launched the First Gulf War in 1991, said the case for attacking Iraq was not as strong as it was during his tenure since Iraq had not invaded any other country. He cautioned his son not to act alone.4 Others who spoke out against starting the war included Pope John Paul II, Bishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela.
Within the US, Senator Robert Byrd was a vocal opponent of the war. Speaking to the US Senate about a month before the war began, the “Dean of Congress” bemoaned that the Senate had been “for the most part, silent-ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing.” He assailed the Bush Doctrine of preventive war, and said, “To engage in war is always to pick a wild card. And war must always be a last resort, not a first choice. I truly must question the judgment of any President who can say that a massive unprovoked military attack on a nation which is over 50% children is ‘in the highest moral traditions of our country.’ This war is not necessary at this time. Pressure appears to be having a good result in Iraq. Our mistake was to put ourselves in a corner so quickly. Our challenge is to now find a graceful way out of a box of our own making. Perhaps there is still a way if we allow more time.”5
The decision to go to war has even come under criticism from the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. Its president, Bobby Muller, who is confined to a wheelchair, has come out strongly against the war. Muller says that once again the US has sent its troops into a region that it does not understand well. He noted that a secretive administration had not engaged in significant debate on its broader foreign policy objectives.6
During the months prior to the war, protest marches were held in virtually all major cities around the globe. These have continued as the war has been waged. US cities have been no exception, and marchers have included former service men and women and family members of the victims of 9/11, in addition to school children, teachers, and people from all walks of life. More than 1,600 people were arrested practicing civil disobedience in San Francisco during the first two days of the war, setting an all-time record.
From a political perspective, the war against Iraq does not seem to be serving even the interests of the US. In prosecuting this war, the US has alienated itself from many of its closest NATO allies. It has invited criticism from Russia, the superpower of yesterday, and China, the superpower of tomorrow. In Washington’s backyard, both Canada and Mexico have expressed their opposition to the war. Not just Cuba, but all Latin American countries remain opposed to the war. The 115 countries that belong to the Non-Aligned Movement have opposed this war, as have the members of the Organization of Islamic Countries and the Arab League.
Even in countries where the governments are supporting the war, more than 80% of the people are opposed to the war. A poll released before the start of the war by the Pew Research Centre in Washington, DC pointed toward a rising trend of anti-Americanism in Europe.7 In 1999, 83% of Britons had a favourable view of the US. This had declined to 48% in March of this year. Similar trends were seen in France and Germany, where the favourable ratings dropped from 62% to 31% and 78% to 31% over the same period, respectively.

Why This War?
Given all these adverse factors, this war appears to be another march of folly, in the manner of Vietnam.8 On the day of his State of the Union speech, forty American Nobel Laureates called on President Bush to stop his plans to fight a preventive war in Iraq, because even a victory in such a war would “undermine, not protect, US security and standing in the world.”
Governments around the world are apprehensive at Washington’s desire to pursue a war without just cause against Iraq, since it could use the same rationale to pursue a future war against any nation that the US declared was a threat to its national security. Why then did the US choose to pursue a war that has squandered much of the goodwill that it had garnered in the wake of the terrorist acts of 9/11? Why this war has been waged promises to be one of those enigmas that may never be fully resolved.
Three theories have been advanced to explain the enigma. One theory, popular among the anti-war movement, holds that the motive of the war is to gain access to Iraq’s oil resources. There is no shortage of articles being written by pro-war writers to discredit it. William F. Buckley of the National Review, a leading rightwing hawk, has disparagingly called it “the great myth of our times.”
Another theory, argued persuasively by Professor Shahid Alam of Northeastern University in Outlook India, is that this is Israel’s proxy war. All of Israel’s enemies in the Middle East, beginning with Iraq and including Iran and Syria, will be taken out by the US, one by one. This theory has been attacked as being anti-Semitic.
A final theory holds that the US wants to remake the Muslim Middle East to improve its own national security. This theory is not being attacked as a “conspiracy theory”, since it is laid out in a document published by the White House.9 The Bush Doctrine pledges to support “moderate and modern government, especially in the Muslim world, to ensure that the conditions and ideologies that promote terrorism do not find fertile ground in any nation.” Muslim governments that do not comply with US dictates will be forced out. While the US has not established colonies in the traditional sense of the term, its global military presence is a perceptible indicator of Washington’s ability to effect regime change.
Within five days of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, hawks within the Bush administration led by Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz felt empowered to talk openly about their radical vision of remaking the Muslim world, beginning with Iraq.10 However, they were unable to muster support for their position, since credible evidence connecting Iraq with the 9/11 attacks was lacking. Thus, the administration turned to fighting the Taliban in October 2001. But even though the Taliban was deposed from power in December, the campaign failed to net the ringleaders of al-Qaeda or Mullah Omar.
The rhetoric of war now shifted toward Iraq. Speaking to the graduating class at the West Point military academy in June 2002, Bush unveiled his doctrine of preventive war. The hawks wanted to announce their war plans against Iraq but Karl Rove, the president’s political advisor and a former public relations man, counselled them to wait for September, which he said was the best time to launch new products. The president published his national strategy in September, and launched the “new product” at the UN Security Council on September12. Congress, seeing that the president was working through the UN, passed a resolution on October 11, authorizing him to use all available means against Iraq. On November 8, the UNSC passed Resolution 1441. On March 19, 2003 the US attacked Iraq.
Iraqi Liberation In History
Only future historians will judge whether this war will lead to the liberation of Iraq. However, historians have already judged what happened when Britain tried to liberate Iraq less than a century ago.
After a few months of combat, on March 11, 1917, a British army made largely of Indian recruits under the command of Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude conquered the Mesopotamian provinces of Baghdad and Basra from the Ottoman Empire. As he strode into Baghdad, General Maude read out a proclamation couched in “high-flown phrases of liberation and freedom, of past glory and future greatness,” according to British historian David Fromkin.11 He assured the people of Iraq, “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. O people of Baghdad, remember that for 26 generations you have suffered under strange tyrants who have endeavoured to set one Arab house against another in order that they might profit by your dissensions.”12
It proved difficult to govern Iraq and General Maude was put in the awkward position of having to preach self-rule while discouraging its practice. What General Maude had discovered was that Mesopotamia was a place where 75 percent of the population was tribal with no previous tradition of obedience to any government, and a place with a long history of power struggle between the Shias and the Sunnis. Eventually, vague rumours, constant unrest, and repeated killings took their toll on British nerves.
Three young army officers were killed in Kurdistan in 1919. An experienced official sent by the Government of India to replace them was killed a month later. Six British officers were killed in the spring of 1920. Later, two political officers were abducted and murdered. The Iraqi desert was full of raiding parties, and one British officer was led to believe that the only way to deal with the disaffected tribes was “wholesale slaughter”.
In the summer of 1920, a one-time junior officer in the Arab Bureau in Cairo and now a celebrity, Colonel T. E. Lawrence, commented acridly that the Turks had been better rulers. He said the Turks kept 14,000 local conscripts employed in Iraq and killed an average of 200 Arabs in maintaining the peace. The British had deployed 90,000 men, with airplanes, armoured cars, gunboats and armoured trains, and killed about 10,000 Arabs in the summer uprising.
On August 7, 1920, The Times demanded to know “how much longer are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavour to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?”
The revolt was brought to an end in February 1921, but Britain had suffered nearly 2,000 casualties, including 450 dead. Many attempts were made to analyze the mysterious revolt in the Iraqi desert, since the British had been told that the Arabs would appreciate British rule. Confessing total ignorance about the locals, an official argued that the enemy facing the British was “anarchy plus fanaticism, devoid of any political aspect.”
The Mesopotamian provinces of Baghdad and Basra were the first to be conquered by the British from the Ottoman Empire. In the autumn of 1917 General Sir Edmund Allenby invaded Palestine and on December 11, he and his officers entered the holy city of Jerusalem through the Jaffa Gate. Prime Minister Lloyd George regarded it as a Christmas gift, and wrote that Christendom had regained “possession of its sacred shrines.” French General Henri Gouraud entered Damascus in July 1920. After kicking Salahuddin’s tomb, Gouraud exclaimed, “Awake Saladin, we have returned. My presence here consecrates the victory of the Cross over the Crescent.”
In a few years, the Arabs were rioting in Palestine and rebelling in Iraq at a very inconvenient time, when the economy of the Empire was collapsing and when the Crown’s time, energy and resources were needed to revive it. An exasperated Winston Churchill, who had taken over the mantle of Britain’s colonial policies in the Middle East, was to tell the British government that it was spending millions for the privilege of sitting atop a volcano. Lamenting on the British experience in Palestine, the “last lion” was to write, “At first, the steps were wide and shallow, covered with a carpet, but in the end the very stones crumbled under their feet.”

How The War Is Being Fought
The war is being fought with the most asymmetric distribution of forces seen in modern times. One side completely dominates the other side. The US has complete military superiority on land, sea and air, and Iraq has limited land capability with no air or naval power. The US has assembled five of its twelve carrier battle groups in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and is raining an incessant barrage of cruise missiles and bombs on Iraq. In addition, it is flying in B-52s from bases in Britain to pound Iraqi air defences, tank formations and other fixed targets.
Some had argued that the war would be over in less than a week, given this asymmetrical distribution of forces. However, Iraq appears to have learned its lessons from the First Gulf War. It is using irregular forces to conduct hit and run attacks on the convoy of American forces that are stretched for more than 250 miles between Kuwait and Najaf. Armed simply with machine-gun mounted on pickup trucks, these forces can cause much delay in US battle plans. For example, during the key battle for control of An-Najaf, 80 miles south of Baghdad, the 3rd US infantry division armed with state-of-the-art M1 Abrams tank has fought against Iraqi fighters equipped with AK-47 rifles, grenade launchers, anti-tank rockets and mortars. Iraqi anti-tank rocket fire took out two M1 tanks, for the first time in the history of that tank. Nasiriyah was supposed to be a six-hour fight, and it dragged on for days due to determined Iraqi resistance.
Ten days into the campaign, the US Army’s senior ground commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, conceded that overextended supply lines and a combative adversary using unconventional tactics had stalled the US drive toward Baghdad and increased the likelihood of a longer war than many strategists had anticipated. “The enemy we’re fighting is different from the one we’d war-gamed against,” Wallace, commander of V Corps, said during a visit to the 101st Airborne Division headquarters here in central Iraq.13 According to Gerard Baker, US officials had led people to believe that “the enemy would drop his weapons at the first sight of the Stars and Stripes and weepingly embrace his conqueror.14
In the south, British forces were unable to fully secure the city of Basra. Rumours that Iraq’s 51st Mechanized division had surrendered with its commanding general and 8,000 troops during the first few days of the conflict proved untrue. A regiment of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guard, equipped with 14 tanks, found itself engaged in one of the biggest set-piece tank battles since the Second World War. While its Challenger 2 tanks were quickly able to take out Iraq’s 30-year old T-55 tanks, the tenacity of the fight showed that the Iraqis had a lot of fight left in them. In technological terms, a British officer said that the discrepancy between the two sides was like comparing a bicycle to a motorcar.15
As of this writing, reports of an uprising in Basra had not panned out. Faced with significant Iraqi resistance, and rising American casualties, the US defence secretary has ordered another 120,000 troops into Iraq. Once these arrive, fully half of the US military’s ground forces would be deployed in that country.
With this war, a new term, “shock and awe”, has entered the diction of military planners. It has been coined to describe an overwhelming display of military force. According to most analysts, the military outcome of this war remains a foregone conclusion. Iraqi forces have no air cover, and there are few precedents for ground forces to be able to fight opposing forces in an open desert setting without air cover. Most of the Iraqi equipment is old and dysfunctional, since the country has been under stringent sanctions for the past 12 years. But, as noted by Harlan Ullman, co-author of Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance, “Few can doubt that the coalition will win the war. The peace that follows is less certain.”
The US will have to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people after the war, in order to make good on its pledge to liberate Iraq. It is not certain how to win the peace, since there is no parallel strategy to shock and awe for implementing the peace. Ullman also notes that the term “shock and awe” has become an object of derision and disgust to anti-war protestors worldwide. Indeed, the overwhelming strength of US arms and the relative absence of organized resistance are playing to the advantage of Saddam Hussein, since he is able to play the role of victim for a change.
Even as a military option, shock and awe does not seem to have panned out, according to Robert A. Pape, a University of Chicago professor and author of “Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War.” Pape says, “The targeting has not broken the back of the leadership and it hasn’t made the majority of forces not fight.”16
Ultimately, by continuing to deploy more firepower and manpower in Iraq, the US will be able to prevail militarily. William A. Arkin, a military analyst for the Los Angeles Times, notes, “The U.S. military is superb at ‘regular’ warfare. It can take out any target within its sights and is superior on the traditional battlefield to any military on the planet. What it doesn’t do well — has never done well — is irregular warfare against a determined opponent embedded within the civilian population. The more the Iraqi regime uses its militias and cities and civilian population to do battle, the more the U.S. advantage diminishes. That probably means fighting in Baghdad, particularly if the regime doesn’t magically crumble. The administration says it is willing to wait weeks or even months to let other strategies play out, but Hussain’s willingness to inflict hardship on his citizens may force the US hand.”17

The Economic Costs Of The War
American’s economy had been ailing since the dot-com bubble burst in the spring of 2001. The tragic events of September 11, 2001 caused it to regress further. Analysts have estimated that the attacks have cost the US economy about $100 billion. During the past year, the economy stayed on the edge of recession. Hopes the recession would be V-shaped and lead to a speedy recovery failed to materialize. As investors and consumers accepted that war with Iraq was increasingly likely, they curtailed spending on “big ticket” items, adding to the economic malaise.18
In December 2002, Professor William Nordhaus of Yale University published a study on the cost of the Second Gulf War.19 He built on studies that had been conducted by the House Budget Committee and the Congressional Budget office by including a protracted war scenario in addition to the quick win scenario. Additionally, while measuring costs, he included not only the budgeted cost of the war, but also the unbudgeted – and often ignored – costs of reconstructing the Iraqi nation and the even bigger costs associated with the macroeconomic impacts of the war on the US.
The duration of the reconstruction programme remains a secret, but if takes the White House at face value, it will last a minimum of five years and may well extend over two decades. The Iraq Reconstruction Plan could resemble one of three plans that the US has implemented at the conclusion of prior wars: (1) the Marshall Plan implemented in post WWII Europe, (2) the Macarthur Plan implemented in post WWII Japan, or (3) the Hamid Karzai plan implemented in post-Taliban Afghanistan.
Nordhaus estimates that a decades’ worth of reconstruction and nation-building activities will cost $25 to $100 billion. In addition, the US will need to provide humanitarian assistance to the people of Iraq, which is likely to cost $1 to $10 billion. To place these figures in perspective, the entire annual US foreign aid budget is $15 billion, a fifth of which goes to Israel.
Given the magnitude of these expenditures in comparison to the foreign aid budget, Nordhaus questions their feasibility. He cites the “hit and run” style that the US has displayed in all post WWII military campaigns. When it went back into Afghanistan in October 2001, President Bush said many times that the US would never again abandon the people of Afghanistan. However, the US seems to be doing exactly that. After spending $13 billion on the Afghan war effort, it has only spent $10 million on civil works or humanitarian aid.20
The impact of the war in Iraq on oil prices is uncertain. Brookings economist George Perry has laid out a worst-case scenario in which oil prices triple to $75 per barrel, and gasoline prices rise by fifty percent to $3 a gallon.
Bush administration strategists had projected that Saddam’s troops will fold quickly, before they can cause any destruction to oil facilities in the Gulf. While US forces have taken the oil facilities quite easily, the regime shows no sign of folding quickly. Nordhaus recognizes that the Bush administration plan assumes that the war would be followed by a period of political stability that would place downward pressure on oil prices. Thus, the war would have no adverse macroeconomic impacts on the US economy.
However, should the war become protracted, Nordhaus predicts that the US would be hit by a recession comparable to the one that followed the First Gulf War, one that cost the elder President Bush his re-election. In this scenario, the US GDP would fall by two to five percent, or by $200 to $500 billion.
Taking all these factors into consideration, Nordhaus brackets the cost of the war to the US at $120- $1,600 billion over the next decade. These figures do not account for scenarios in which (a) Israel enters the conflict, (b) the war spreads to neighbouring Arab countries, or (c) weapons of mass destruction are used. Nor do they measure the cost of the human suffering and anxiety that would be caused by the war in America. In addition, they do not measure the tangible or intangible costs that the war would impose on the 24 million people of Iraq.
President Bush has submitted a request for about $80 billion to Congress to cover the cost of the ongoing war, and indicated that additional requests may be needed if the war is prolonged. This request comes at a time when the US is facing a fiscal deficit of about $300 billion, before counting the cost of the war. Proponents of the war have argued that the $10 billion US economy is large enough to be able to take such costs in stride. However, citing the experience of Great Britain, which was forced to shed its imperial liabilities in India and the Middle East after the Second World War, Alan Beattie argues that once the American public realizes the cost of fighting a continuous war across the globe, its “willingness to pay for their country’s new security strategy will be tested to the limit.”21

International Consequences Of The War
This war involves intense aerial bombardment of the major cities of Iraq, and the use of the brand new 21,000 lb MOAB bomb along with 5,000 lb bunker buster bombs. In the first week of war, about 7,000 bombs and missiles were dropped on Iraqi forces, more than in the entire First Gulf War. The war may also see the use of untested weapons such as the brand new microwave bomb, designed to take out an enemy’s electronic network. Should Iraq resort to the use of chemical or biological weapons, the war may also see the first-ever battlefield use of tactical nuclear weapons.
Given its massive military superiority over Iraq, the US is likely to prevail over Iraq at some point. Such an outcome will exacerbate the feeling of humiliation in the Arab world, which is already reeling from a bloody Israeli reoccupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan estimates that this new war could swell the number of displaced people in Iraq to 2 million; create a million refugees; and leave as many as 10 million (or 40% of the population of 25 million) dependent on the outside world for food assistance. Another UN document predicts that 30 percent of Iraqi children under five, or 1.26 million, “would be at risk of death from malnutrition” in the event of a war.22
Amr Moussa, the Secretary General of the Arab League, had warned that such a war would “open the gates of hell.” A recent survey by Professor Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland confirms these concerns.23 Telhami, who holds the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development, interviewed 2,620 men and women in five Arab countries: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia. The respondents were asked to state their opinions on major foreign policy hypotheses that have advanced by the Bush administration.
The overwhelming majority of respondents felt that the war with Iraq would worsen the chances for peace in the Middle East. Most pessimistic were the respondents in Saudi Arabia, where 91% concurred with the statement, and least pessimistic were those in Jordan, where the percentage was 60%. When asked if the war would lead to less terrorism, more than three-quarters of the respondents disagreed.24 The Saudis were in greatest disagreement, with 96% saying that the war would lead to more terrorism. The Egyptians had the most positive position on this topic, but even then 75% felt it would lead to more terrorism. When asked if the war would improve the chances for democracy in the region, respondents disagreed strongly, with 95% of Saudis leading the way but even in Jordan, 58% disagreed. The survey uncovered significant negative attitudes towards American foreign policy. Only 4% of the people in Saudi Arabia had a favourable opinion of American foreign policy, followed by 6% in Morocco and Jordan, 13% in Egypt and 32% in Lebanon.
The war has created a feeling of despair throughout the Muslim Middle East. Arabs feel frustrated by their inability to prevent the US from attacking Iraq. The US constitutes an enigma to them, being as hard to accept and as it is to oppose. Notes Mustafa Hamarne, Director of Jordan University’s Centre for Strategic Studies, “The general sense in the region is that the Iraq war is another major defeat in a long series of Arab defeats.”25 On the street, Arabs are beginning to lose patience with their leaders, sensing them to be part of the problem. The leaders have been shown to be hypocrites who opposed US intervention in Iraq but, behind the scenes, provided the US war machine access to their airspace and bases. Some have begun to question why the Arab governments cannot impose another oil embargo, like they did in 1973.26 Others have asked why Egypt allowed US and UK naval vessels to use the Suez Canal in transit to the Gulf.
The fallout from the Iraq War is likely to cause irreparable damage to the rubric of international law. The war has set a dangerous precedent and renders asunder the compact of multilateralism embodied in the UN Charter. According to Judge Christopher Weeramantry, former vice-president of the International Court of Justice, there is no provision for a preventive war in the UN Charter. He argues that the UNSC cannot make decisions that are contrary to the charter without consulting the UN General Assembly. For the same reasons, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder opposed a preventive war because “No Realpolitik and no security doctrine should lead to the fact that, surreptitiously, we should come to regard war as a normal instrument of politics.”
Eleven days into the war, the key question is whether the US will have the political will to continue the fight in the face of continuing international condemnation and rising Iraqi and US casualties. US troops have yet to receive anything like the resounding welcome from oppressed Iraqis that they were expecting. Victor Mallet, a writer for the Financial Times based in the Middle East, draws a parallel with the 1968 Tet offensive during the Vietnam War. The Americans won that battle but ultimately lost the war because of the political backlash caused by rising civilian casualties among the Vietnamese. Ironically, the government of Vietnam issued a comment ten days into the Iraq war: “With a huge war machine, the US will gain victory in military terms. However, they cannot avoid political failure.”27

End Notes
1Portions of this essay have appeared in the Daily Times (Lahore) and the Asia Times (Hong Kong).
2Ahmad Faruqui, an economist based in San Francisco, writes frequently on national security issues in South Asia and the Middle East. He has authored Rethinking The National Security Of Pakistan, Ashgate Publishing, 2003. He can be reached at Faruqui@pacbell.net.
3“Just War-or a Just War?” New York Times, March 9, 2003.
4“2003 Issam M. Fares Lecture,” Tufts University, February 26, 2003.
5“We stand passively mute,” Remarks to the US Senate, February 12, 2003.
6Stephen Fidler, “US Congress responds to war with a truly resounding silence,” Financial Times, March 24, 2003.
7Cited in Financial Times, March 19, 2003.
8Barbara Tuchman, March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, 1984.
9President George W. Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002, Washington, DC.
10Stephen Fidler and Gerard Baker, “America’s democratic imperialists: how the neo-conservatives rose from humility to empire in two years,” Financial Times, March 6, 2003.
11David Fromkin, A Peace To End All Peace, Avon Books, 1989.
12Quoted in Stephen Fidler, Financial Times, March 14, 2003, p. 4.
13Rick Atkinson, “General: A longer war likely,” Washington Post, March 28, 2003.
14“Invading Iraq by the Queensberry rules,” Financial Times, March 28, 2003.
15Financial Times, March 28, 2003.
16Eric Schmitt, “Air campaign falls short in speed, Pentagon says,”
New York Times, March 26, 2003.
17“Too little shock, not enough awe,” Los Angeles Times, March 30, 2003.
18Ahmad Faruqui,” The anvil of war and the ailing American economy,” Turkish Time, February 2003.
19The study, funded by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, can be found at www.econ.yale.edu/~nordhaus/iraq.html. An abbreviated version appears in The New York Review of Books, December 5, 2002.
20As of this writing, the amount the US has spent in Afghanistan has risen to $37 billion. The bulk of the expenditure has been on military-related items.
21“A muscular foreign policy may be too costly for Americans to bear,” Financial Times, March 15-16, 2003.
22“Integrated Humanitarian Contingency Plan for Iraq and Neighbouring Countries,” UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, January 2003.
23The survey results can be found at www.bsos.umd.edu/sadat/me_survey.htm
24On this point, see Ahmad Faruqui, “Is the USA fighting terrorism with the wrong weapons?” Security Dialogue, Vol. 34(1), March 2003.
25Roula Khalaf, Financial Times, March 25, 2003.
26During the height of Sharon’s incursions into the West Bank last year, the Saudi government came under pressure to consider the use of oil as a weapon against Israel and the countries supporting it. The Saudis immediately ruled this out, saying that oil had long ceased to be a weapon.
27Victor Mallet, “America meets the ghost of the Tet offensive,” Financial Times, March 28, 2003.