Or does "global" instead mean any mortal threat to freedom around the globe?

Any serious threat to what was once known as the "free world" as a whole is "global." In the 1930s and 1940s, that meant fascism. In the second half of the 20th century, that meant communism. Today it means Arab/Islamic radicalism.

Does the fact that an "enemy" poses a mortal threat to another free country, but not to us, qualify it as our "enemy?"

No.

Is Hamas, an Islamist group which clearly poses an existential threat to Israel, our enemy as well?

As it defines itself today, as an enemy of Israel, no. Were it to join the war on the United States, then the answer would be yes.

Is Syria?

Because of its hostility to Israel? No. To the extent, however, that it allies itself with and supports the jihadists in Iraq, it risks joining the enemy camp.

And if these are our enemies, why should we choose to fight them in preference to threats to free countries closer to home like the FARC or ELN, which threaten democracy in Colombia, or Hugo Chavez in Venezuela?

We should not. See above.

What makes something "central" in this global war?

Whether a change in the political direction of a state or territory will have an important, perhaps decisive, effect in defeating Arab/Islamic radicalism. Afghanistan meets that test. So does Iraq.

Legitimacy

This is not terribly complicated. What then is Fukuyama's quarrel with democratic realism? He seems to accept democratic realism as a theory but then condemns it in practice because ... well, because of Iraq. He has enthusiastically joined the crowd seizing upon the difficulties in Iraq as a refutation of any forward-looking policy that might have gotten us there, most specifically, any unilateralist, nation-building policy that got us there. Iraq, he says, is a mess, and the experience proves two things: the importance of "international legitimacy" and the futility of U.S. nation-building among Arabs.

On legitimacy, Fukuyama endorses my view that international support does not confer superior morality upon any action--other nations are acting out of self-interest, not priestly wisdom. He admits that the United Nations has "deep problems with legitimacy", and that Kosovo demonstrated that our European allies themselves do not believe in the necessity of legitimization through the Security Council. Nonetheless, he charges me with being too dismissive of the practical utility of international support and approval.

But no one denies the utility of international support. Of course there are practical advantages to having Security Council approval, NATO assistance or whatever political cover that might induce, say, India or Turkey to offer assistance. You seek whatever approval, assistance, cover you can get. You even make accommodations and concessions to get it. None of this is in dispute. The only serious question is how far you go. Is "legitimacy" a limiting factor? When you fail to get it, do you abandon the policy? Should we have abandoned our policy of regime change in Iraq--military force being the only way to achieve it--because we lacked sufficient cover?

Fukuyama seems to be saying yes, we should have--although he deploys a Kerry-like ambiguity about what he would actually have done. He seems to be saying that we should have deferred to the opposition of our allies and to the absence of an international consensus, and not invaded Iraq--and that our experience in the aftermath of the war supports that prudential judgment.

But this assumes two things:

First, that a lack of legitimacy is the cause of our postwar problems. Our central problem, of course, has been the Sunni insurgency and the Moqtada Sadr rebellion. I hardly think that either of these groups, or the foreign jihadists who have come to join them, are impressed by UN resolutions. Indeed, the Security Council passed a unanimous postwar resolution legitimizing the American occupation. The UN even established a major presence in Baghdad right after the war. The insurgents were unimpressed: They blew the UN headquarters to smithereens. It is possible that we will fail to defeat these insurgencies, but the "legitimacy deficit" will hardly be the reason.

Second, it assumes that the choice in March 2003 was between invasion and postwar difficulties on the one hand and pre-invasion stability on the other. It assumes there were no serious prudential considerations that impelled us towards war. Of course the lack of Franco-German support made things more difficult. Of course the lack of international consensus constituted a prudential reason not to invade. But Fukuyama assumes these were the only prudential considerations, that doing nothing about Iraq had no cost, that the Iraq problem before the war was in some kind of sustainable equilibrium. It was not. The tense post-Gulf War settlement was unstable and created huge and growing liabilities for all concerned, most especially for the United States. First, it caused enormous suffering for the Iraqi people under a cruel and corrupt sanctions regime--suffering and starvation that throughout the Middle East and in much of Europe were blamed squarely on the United States. Second, the standoff with Iraq made it necessary to maintain a large American garrison in Saudi Arabia, land of the Islamic holy places--for many Muslims, a provocative and deeply offensive presence. Indeed, in his 1998 fatwa against the United States, Bin Laden listed these two offenses as crimes numbers one and two justifying jihad against America.

Moreover, the sanctions regime was collapsing. That collapse was temporarily halted by the huge pre-war infusion of American troops into Kuwait that forced the Security Council to reaffirm the sanctions--but only as a way to avert an American invasion. The troop deployment was itself unsustainable. Upon its withdrawal, the collapse of the sanctions regime would have continued, resulting in a re-energized and relegitimized regime headed by Saddam (and ultimately, even worse, by his sons) that was increasingly Islamicizing its Ba'athi ideology, re-arming and renewing WMD programs, and extending its connections with terror groups. As the quintessential realist Henry Kissinger wrote recently--in the full light and awareness of our postwar troubles--of "the calculus for preemption":

"Could the United States wait until weapons were actually produced by a country with the largest army in the region, the second-largest potential oil income, a record of having used these weapons against its own population and neighbors, and--according to the Sept. 11 commission--intelligence contact with Al-Qaeda?"

There is no dispute that a paucity of international support is a prudential consideration in any major decision. But in Iraq, the paucity of international support is not the source of our troubles today, and before the war it was far outweighed by the prudential considerations in favor of removing Saddam. And finally, in any decision, the legitimacy issue is never decisive. In the 1980s, our European allies were almost universally opposed to American support for the Nicaraguan Contras. The common opinion of mankind was that American imperialism was trying to bring back Somozism. The policy had zero "international legitimacy." If Fukuyama's belief in international legitimacy is real, that should have been grounds for abandoning the policy--a policy that was right at the time and that history has decisively vindicated.

Nation-Building

The last of Fukuyama's questions about my "central axiom" was this: Was Iraq central to the war against radical Islamism? I believe it was and is. I argued that before the war, and I believe it is all the more true today. September 11 led to the inexorable conclusion that a half-century of American policy towards the Arab world had failed. Ever since Franklin Roosevelt made alliance with King Ibn Saud, the United States has chosen to leave the Arab world to its own political and social devices, so long as it remained a reasonably friendly petrol station. The arrangement lasted a very long time. Had 9/11 never happened, it would have lasted longer. The policy of Arab exceptionalism was never enunciated, but it was universally understood: America was pursuing democratization in Europe, East Asia, South and Central America--everywhere except the Arab world. Democratization elsewhere was remarkably successful and was the key to stability and pacification. The Arab exception proved costly. On 9/11, we reaped the whirlwind from that policy and finally understood that it was untenable. We could continue to fight Arab/Islamic radicalism by catching a terrorist leader here, rolling up a cell there. Or we could go to the heart of the problem and take the risky but imperative course of trying to reorder the Arab world. Success in Iraq would be a singular victory in the war on radical Islam. Failure in Iraq would be a singular defeat.

I never underestimated the task. I have written before, during and after the war that the task was enormous, the risk great and failure possible--but that the undertaking was necessary.

Fukuyama never addresses the necessity question. Instead, he invokes our difficulties and setbacks to discredit the very idea of nation-building in the Middle East, not just because of local conditions but because Americans are no good at nation-building. Iraq is a fool's errand that was bound to fail:

Essay Types: Essay