Obviously, we’re there and all of the criticisms of it have been beaten to death at this point. Like the French and Germans in WWI, critics and proponents of the Iraq war have been chewing up the same ground for several years to no good end. I’m not interested in having the debate so much as I am concerned with thinking about why we are having that debate and where different kinds of people sort themselves out. Let’s set aside the claims and counterclaims about weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda for a moment, and look at the big picture.

One interesting split I’ve noticed in opinions about the war is not so much between realists and neoconservatives – although that is an important divide -- but between the counterterrorism community and the neoconservatives. The counterterrorism folks, being specialists, worry a great deal about terrorism, but they don’t care much about other aspects of foreign policy. This viewpoint is best summarized here by Al Qaeda expert Peter Bergen, author of Holy War, Inc. Joining Bergen are Rohan Gunaratna, author of Inside Al Qaeda and Jason Burke, who wrote Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror. They say that, at a minimum, we ought to have finished the job in Afghanistan and wiped out Al Qaeda and the Taliban before dealing with Saddam Hussein. The attack, they say, lent credence to militant claims that the United States was bent on destroying Islam itself. Most of this crowd seems to agree that the U.S. presence in Iraq is a boon to jihadi recruiting, and they don’t buy the argument that Saddam was tied up with terrorism. They wonder whether a new Shi’ite international, more globally-oriented than Hizb’allah, is in the works. They warn that not only did we fail to defeat Al Qaeda, we have spawned a second generation of violent jihadis, the Afghan Arabs being the first. Terrorist attacks are sharply on the rise worldwide. They are concerned that the success of guerrilla fighters in disrupting oil supplies may be translated to Saudi Arabia, where a cascading series of failures could wreck the world economy. Joining them are Arabists like Juan Cole who are deeply troubled by the radicalization of the region and the potential for a revival of Khomeneism, and the marginalization of Arab moderates and intellectuals.

The neoconservatives, on the other hand, don’t seem to worry so much about the near term. They say that waving our big stick around scared Libya and Pakistan into cooperating and halting proliferation. On the horizon, they see a budding democracy, the rise of Najaf as a counterweight to theocratic Qom, the emergence of Iraq as a U.S.-friendly swing oil producer and insurance against a Saudi collapse, and the potential for the ultimate defeat of the Palestinian intifada. More broadly, they think these issues are not nearly as important in the long run as our upcoming showdown with Iran and/or China. As long as we have basing rights in the region, we’ll be sitting pretty.

As for me, I’ve flipped and flopped, but generally taken the rather delicate position that while the strategic ideas behind the war were sound within a certain set of assumptions about the world, the Bush administration sold the war dishonestly and botched the execution. Good policy badly executed becomes bad policy. Concomitantly, the quality of the assumptions behind the strategy is also debatable to the point of being unknowable. I guess that’s how assumptions work.

For instance, what kind of long-term threat does China represent? Is China truly looking to embrace the world community and build better lives for its citizens, or is it merely boosting its economy in order to build up a military capable of challenging the United States, swallowing Taiwan, and dominating the increasingly important oil and natural gas supplies of Central Asia and Africa? As China’s middle class continues to grow, will it create pressure for political reform, or will China emerge as some kind of quasi-fascist powerhouse? Will China’s integration into the world economy preclude it from military aggression? Will U.S. influence in the region decline as other powers such as Japan and South Korea become increasingly dependent on Chinese markets?

And what about Iran? Assuming diplomacy fails, can the mad mullahs be deterred by traditional nuclear wargaming scenarios? Or will they try to nuke Israel the moment they finish building the nuclear weapons they implausibly claim they have no intention of building? Given the uncertainty, isn’t it a good idea to ring Iran with bases to ensure good behavior and possibly facilitate an American invasion? Will the students revolt and toss out their oppressors? Or will the presence of a looming external threat only strengthen the regime?

People with different worldviews tend to answer these questions with a predictable pattern; the father right you are on the ideological spectrum, the more likely you are to watch regimes like Iran and China with alarm, the more likely you are to believe in military solutions and strident denunciations as tools of diplomacy. Given that all of us here – I think it is pretty much safe to assume – are privy to the same information, worldviews are the only way we can sort through conflicting or confusing information and arrive at conclusions.

And this makes a lot of sense.

Take Paul Wolfowitz, for instance, arguably the architect of the Bush foreign policy. He wrote a paper in either the late 1970s or early 1980s that predicted that Saddam Hussein would invade Kuwait given the nature of the man, Iraq’s historical claim to Kuwait, and most importantly, the resource distribution of the region. This turned out to be a prophetic prediction, and something that no doubt provides Wolfowitz with a sense of infallibility after 1991. Given what we know about how Wolfowitz views the world and how long ahead he thinks, it is likely that he sees China in the same way: regionally ambitious, fundamentally irrational, and in danger of becoming a military competitor. This fear was surely reflected in the famous 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States, which explicitly stated that we would brook no rival and actively dissuade others (hint: China) from challenging our hegemony. The document is eerily similar to a 1992 effort by Wolfowitz and our current Afghanistan proconsul, Zalmay Khalilzad; it’s almost as if a pre-existing grand strategy was suddenly deemed relevant to controlling the spread of terrorism, despite the fact that it was designed for other reasons.

So I will continue to look for signs – and here’s a big one -- that China and to a lesser extent Iran are the real targets of American foreign policy. Stay tuned.