Middle East Strategy at Harvard

In November 2002, the Chronicle of Higher Education asked a number of scholars this question: “What will the world be like five years after a war with Iraq?” To mark the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, MESH asked all of the respondents to revisit their predictions. This week, MESH will post the responses it has received.

Joseph S. Nye, Jr. is University Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, where he was formerly Dean. In 2002, he wrote: “When I served as chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which prepares national intelligence estimates for the president, I used to remind my staff that there are many futures, and their probabilities often depend on what we do. I offer two futures that vary by whether the war is unilateral or multilateral.” Read his scenarios here.)

From Joseph Nye

Thanks for this reminder to look back. It is always useful to revisit predictions if the exercise makes us more humble and less dogmatic about our views of the future. As I warned in my Chronicle article, there is never one future and what transpires is partly affected by our own actions. Instead of predictions, I offered two scenarios, one optimistic and one pessimistic, to test the effect of whether our actions were multilateral or not. My policy preference at the time was that we should not go to war without the benefit of multilateral legitimacy. Overall, I still think this was the correct position.

My pessimistic scenario was generally correct but too pessimistic. Fortunately, the Hashemite Kingdom and the Karzai presidency proved more robust than I portrayed. Turkey refused to allow the Fourth Infantry Division to cross its territory, but did not restrict our access to its airspace. We did fall into Bin Laden’s trap and Iraq proved a powerful recruitment device for Al Qaeda. As the CIA and MI-6 have estimated, the number of terrorists have increased, but their major activities have been in the Middle East and Europe rather than inside the United States as the scenario feared. Nonetheless, the overall thrust of the scenario still seems correct and there is ample evidence that we squandered a great deal of our soft power in the Iraq War.

My optimistic scenario was too optimistic, but it is impossible to test since the assumption of multilateral intervention was not fulfilled. It is interesting to reread it, however, and note the widely held assumption that some form of WMD (chemical or biological) would be found. That, of course, turned out to be wrong, and the United States is weaker, not stronger in the region.