A perilous crossing to a destination out of sight

A new kind of beginning for a new kind of war. The television cameras scanned the Baghdad skies searching for the starbursts of a massive bombardment - which may yet come. But instead of "shock and awe," there was strike and wait, poke and jab.

To understand the war in Iraq, you have to understand certain convictions of President Bush, according to several of his advisers. It is a new kind of war for a new historical epoch.

"This is not a war against a people. It is not a war against a country. It is most certainly not a war against a religion," Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld said Thursday. "It is a war against a regime."

Beyond regime change in Baghdad, its purpose is to send a message - ultimately, to shake up the way the world thinks. And so, while U.S. bombers carefully calibrate target lists around Iraq, intent on forcing Saddam Hussain from power, other critical targets are spread around the world. American actions in Iraq are desi-gned to hit them right between the ears.

Bush has a different message for different audiences. He wants to intimidate dictators who might consort with terrorists. He hopes to steer the Middle East toward progressive reforms. He aims to catalyse optimism in the Iraqi people, and create a sense throughout the Muslim world that friendship with the U.S. is possible, but to make America an enemy is fatal.

Iraq is, for Bush, not an end in itself, but one battle fraught with implications for a larger, unprecedented war that is being invented step by step.

"The struggle against global terrorism is different from any other war in our history," the Bush administration's new National Security Strategy declared last fall. "It will be fought on many fronts against a particularly elusive enemy over an extended period of time. Progress will come through the persistent accumulation of successes - some seen, some unseen."

War as a mode of persuasion - much less as an advertisement for the United States - is a rather novel idea. Protests and even riots around the world Thursday suggest that it might not work. Victory may require far more bloodshed. But more bloodshed would cloud the message. Greater violence might intimidate dictators effectively, but would do nothing to catalyse optimism in the Arab street.

But if the Iraq war seems unprecedented to some Bush critics, the president answers that precedent collapsed with the twin towers on September 11, 2001. "Americans should not expect one battle," he told a joint session of Congress nine days after the attacks, "but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen."

One Bush watcher in the Senate noted this week that Bush did not have to define Al Qaida attacks as an act of war. "He could have addressed them essentially as a police action: catching and punishing the bad guys."

This would have kept the administration's focus squarely on Osama bin Laden and his followers, and on the Taliban government in Afghanistan that abetted their work.In that case, the thorny questions of rogue states, Middle East democracy and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction might have been addressed on separate tracks using familiar tools, such as containment and deterrence.

From the moment of the attacks, however, Bush fastened on the principle that America is engaged in a new war against a new kind of enemy - and that new tactics and strategies would be necessary.

His conception of that war was far from humble. It was, rather, audacious. Bush targeted not just terrorists but also sovereign nations that "harbour" terrorists. And the mission continued to expand. By September 2002, a year after the attacks, the new security strategy cast the net broadly, declaring that "America will hold to account nations that are compromised by terror," without defining what "compromised" might mean.

As the initial shock of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks has subsided, some Americans - and many more people around the world - have come to question the notion that everything changed that day. Commentators in Europe and elsewhere have noted that terrorism is an old thorn to them, whether it comes in the form of London pub bombings or Parisians killed in Algiers or Spaniards blown up by militant Basques.

None of these led to anything like the war in Iraq, they note. But the terrorists who struck the U.S. were different, according to Bush and his allies, for two reasons. First, as British Prime Minister Tony Blair put it this week, "What was shocking about September 11 was not just the slaughter of the innocent; but the knowledge that had the terrorists been able to, there would have been not 3,000 innocent dead, but 30,000 or 300,000, and the more the suffering, the greater the terrorists' rejoicing."

That leads to the second difference: If the point of this terror is to maximise the body count, then terrorists must be prevented from getting their hands on more lethal weapons. "The greatest danger our nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology," the Bush administration explained in December. "Our enemies have openly declared that they are seeking weapons of mass destruction… The United States will not allow these efforts to succeed."

Thus, the linkage was made between a stateless network like Al Qaida and rogue states such as Iraq. But the goals of the U.S. in its war against terrorism are more complex than just disarming rogue states.

Bush aims, at the same time, to "drain away a certain toxicity, the anti-Americanism" that is rampant in parts of the Middle East, according to one adviser. "Shock and awe" might not be the best way to do that. He wants to expose the gap between the goals of rogue-state tyrants and the more humane aspirations of their people, and what better way to accomplish that than to have Saddam toppled from within with U.S. support?

This is a very thin tightrope to walk, between not enough force and too much. Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace notes that it is not the only tightrope Bush is walking in his new war. He finds himself extolling the healing powers of democracy even as he depends on help from dictators elsewhere. He finds himself promoting liberty abroad and while curtailing certain liberties at home.

But the Cold War was also a tightrope, in which some dictators were allies and others were foes, some countries were urgent priorities and others were simply forgotten. Some critics of Bush say that he has put himself on the tightrope.

He has presented himself as a reluctant warrior, forced into this situation by duty and danger. However he got there, it is a perilous crossing, to a destination well out of sight.

© Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service