A Danger of Success

The plan to seize two of Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad presidential palaces wasn’t devised by the U.S. high command but rather, as The Times’ David Zucchino reported Tuesday, by Col. David Perkins and his staff in a command field tent in the shadow of a highway overpass. Indeed, the skillful use of troops, first in Afghanistan and now on a greater scale in Iraq, should put to rest a piece of conventional wisdom that emboldened Osama bin Laden and other terrorists: that America won’t send its young men and women into battle.

There’s no disputing that since Vietnam, U.S. presidents have been reluctant to commit ground troops and quick to pull them out. In 1983, President Reagan withdrew U.S. Marines from Lebanon after a suicide truck-bomber killed 241. Reagan’s retreat created the perception that enemies could terrorize the U.S. with little consequence.

Then came U.S. troops’ 1993 encounter with the forces of Somalian warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid in Mogadishu. President Clinton, who was eager to let the United Nations take the lead in Somalia, reduced the number of U.S. fighters in the impoverished African nation. When this force and U.N. troops launched a raid to capture Aidid, Aidid’s henchmen and sympathetic townspeople engaged them in a two-day firefight that killed 18 American soldiers and wounded scores more. A few days later, Clinton ordered the withdrawal of all U.S. troops.

Finally, there was the NATO air war over Kosovo in 1999. At the outset, Clinton ruled out the use of American ground troops for an invasion. After several months of bombing and the threat that ground troops would, in fact, be deployed, then-Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic capitulated.

In Iraq, as in Afghanistan, attacks by air set the course of the war. But the more powerful military message is the decisive invasion by men and women in tanks, trucks, Humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles.

If the United States and British show of force makes aggressive regimes more wary, the world will be safer. If renewed willingness to use ground troops encourages Bush administration hawks to consider more wars in the Middle East and elsewhere, the opposite will be true.

American and British casualties appear to be extremely low in historical terms. (Iraqi casualties, military and civilian, are still uncertain.) But it will take time to sort out the full effects of the invasion -- on Iraq, the region, world affairs and the fragile U.S. economy. Policymakers must not allow their appreciation of the apparent successes so far to translate into a strategy of reckless interventionism.