january / f e b r u a r y 2 oo7

The United States, Iraq,

and the War on Terror
A Singaporean Perspective

Lee Kuan Yew

Volume 86 • Number 1

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 The United States, Iraq,
and the War on Terror
A Singaporean Perspective

Lee Kuan Yew

The basic feature of U.S. foreign policy even most European countries have dis-
during the Cold War was inclusiveness— tanced themselves from Washington.
a willingness to embrace any country that The United States did not realize,
opposed communism, whatever its type of moreover, the depth of the fault lines in
government. The United States contested Iraqi society—between Kurds and Arabs,
the Soviet system and held the line militar- Sunnis and Shiites, and the members of
ily, and its consistent and comprehensive diªerent tribes and local religious groups.
approach eventually led to the Soviet These tensions were contained during
Union’s implosion. four centuries of Ottoman rule, and the
After the Cold War came the “war on British, who took over from the Ottomans
terror.” Islamist terrorists tried to bring in 1920, put Iraq under strong Sunni con-
down the World Trade Center in 1993 and trol, centered on Baghdad. Now, because
bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and of the destruction of the old Iraqi society,
Tanzania in 1998. Then came the attacks of for the first time in centuries, power is in
September 11, 2001. In response, the United the hands of the Iraqi Shiites.
States attacked Afghanistan and routed the With Sunni control of Iraq removed,
Taliban. Then, in 2003, the United States Shiite Iran is no longer checked from
invaded Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein extending its influence westward. And by
and establish democracy there. allowing the emergence of the first Shiite-
During the war on terror, however, the dominated Arab state, the United States
United States has not been as inclusive as has stirred the political aspirations of the
it was in its war against communism. Aside 150 million or so Shiites living in Sunni
from those in the “coalition of the willing,” countries elsewhere in the region.

Lee Kuan Yew is Minister Mentor of Singapore. He was Prime Minister of

Singapore from 1959 to 1990. This piece was adapted from a speech he deliv-
ered when accepting the Woodrow Wilson Award for Public Service in Octo-
ber 2006.

[2]
 The United States, Iraq, and the War on Terror
The United States has long relied on its and police and dismissed all Baathists from
traditional Sunni Arab allies, such as the Iraqi government. I feared this would
Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, to keep create a vacuum.
the Arab-Israeli conflict in check. Now the I recalled how when the Japanese
power of the Sunni bloc may no longer captured Singapore in February 1942
be able to counter an Iran that supports and took 90,000 British, Indian, and
militias such as Hezbollah and Hamas Australian troops prisoner, they left the
against Israel. The new Iraqi prime min- police and the civil administration intact
ister, Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, found it and functioning—under the control of
necessary to publicly support the Shiite Japanese military o⁄cers but with British
Hezbollah in Lebanon during the fighting personnel still in charge of the essential
this past summer. services, such as gas and electricity.
I am not among those who say that Except for a small garrison, most of the
it was wrong to have gone into Iraq to 30,000 Japanese invasion forces had left
remove Saddam and who now advocate Singapore and headed to Java within a
that the United States cut its losses and pull fortnight. Had the Japanese disbanded
out. This will not solve the problem. If the police and the civil administration
the United States leaves Iraq prematurely, when they interned the British forces,
jihadists everywhere will be emboldened there would have been chaos.
to take the battle to Washington and its Perceptions of U.S. unilateralism have
friends and allies. Having defeated the triggered an informal countercoalition of
Russians in Afghanistan and the United necessity among those countries that oppose
States in Iraq, they will believe that they the coalition of the willing. Many in this
can change the world. Even worse, if civil countercoalition are not on the side of the
war breaks out in Iraq, the conflict will jihadists. Russia and China, along with
destabilize the whole Middle East, as it some European countries, have come
will draw in Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, together simply to protect their interests
Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey. against what they perceive as U.S.
On Iraq, the Singaporean government encroachment on their respective domains.
has been and is in firm support of President They have no fundamental conflict of
George W. Bush and his team. We have interest with the United States.
helped to train Iraqi police and have thrice To isolate the jihadist groups, there-
deployed a tank landing ship to the Gulf, fore, the United States must be more
each time with about 170 personnel, a multilateral in its approach and rally Eu-
c-130 detachment, and three separate rope, Russia, China, India, and all non-
kc-135 detachments for air-to-air refueling Muslim governments to its cause, along
missions. President Bush was right to with many moderate Muslims. A world-
invade Iraq to depose Saddam and try wide coalition is necessary to fight the
to remove the weapons of mass destruction fires of hatred that the Islamist fanatics
that intelligence agencies in Europe and are fanning. When moderate Muslim
the United States assessed Iraq to have had. governments, such as those in Indonesia,
But I became nervous when the Malaysia, the Persian Gulf states, Egypt,
United States disbanded the Iraqi army and Jordan, feel comfortable associating

fore ign affairs . January / February 2007 [3]

 corbis

Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore

themselves openly with a multilateral preparations, elections simply allow people

coalition against Islamist terrorism, the tide to vent their frustrations against the cor-
of battle will turn against the extremists. ruption and inadequacies of the incumbents
and vote in the opposition, regardless of its
REMAKING THE MIDDLE EAST characteristics. This is what led to Hamas’
The Bush administration has set out to gaining power in the Palestinian territories.
spread democracy in Iraq and the Middle A better start would be to concen-
East more generally. In the long run, trate on education, the emancipation
democracy can prevail, but the process of women, and the creation of economic
will not be easy. opportunity. Next should come a focus
A free and fair election, moreover, is on implementing the rule of law, strength-
not the best first step toward democracy in ening the independence of the courts,
a country that has no history or tradition and building up the civil-society insti-
of self-government. Without adequate tutions necessary for democracy. Only

[4] fore ign affairs . Volume 86 No. 1

then will free elections lead to a more
democratic order.
To think that Iraq can go from dictator-
ship to democracy via two elections in
three years is to expect too much. Such
a transformation is an eªort for the long
haul, well beyond the two- and four-year
U.S. electoral cycles.
In its struggles today, the United States
should remember the principles and policies
that guided its responses to Cold War
threats and accept that no single power,
religion, or ideology can conquer the world
or remake it in its own image. The world is
too diverse. Diªerent races, cultures,
religions, languages, and histories require
diªerent paths to democracy and the free
market. Societies in a globalized world
will influence and aªect one another. And
what social system best meets the needs
of a people at a particular stage in their
development will be settled internally.
Regarding the rest of the Middle East,
Singapore is much indebted to Israel.
When we became independent in 1965,
Israel was the only country that helped us
build a citizen army. The Israeli colonel
who led a team of ten o⁄cers from 1966
to 1968 revisited Singapore as a brigadier
general a decade later and was surprised
at our economic progress. He lamented
the slower economic progress in Israel.
I told him we had been at peace with our
neighbors and that Singapore’s armed
forces were a deterrent, a weapon of last
resort against adventurism by any country.
Israel, on the other hand, had been engaged
in successive wars.
To solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
there must be two states, one for Israel
and another for the Palestinians. But the
latter must be viable, one for which peace
is worth making. The United States should

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 urge Israel to encourage such a Palestinian
state to emerge and help it prosper—for
the Palestinians will have reason to avoid
DIRECTORY
war if war will destroy the future they are
building for themselves.
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ROSSIA V GLOBALNOI POLITIKE The reason I am so focused on the Middle

(RUSSIAN) East is that my first close interaction with
globalaffairs@mtu-net.ru the United States grew out of the country’s
involvement in a previous painful struggle,
Visit www.foreignaffairs.org that in Vietnam. Between 1966 and 1971,
for more information. American leaders used to stop by Singapore
after visiting South Vietnam to discuss

[6]
 The United States, Iraq, and the War on Terror
the regional situation with me. Washington includes Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkmen,
had sent in some 500,000 troops without and others; and is not manipulated by
su⁄cient knowledge of the history of the any of its neighbors represents an outcome
Vietnamese people and paid a huge price that would accord with the interests of
in blood, treasure, prestige, and confidence the United States, Iraq’s neighbors, and the
as a result. wider world. Washington should there-
Conventional wisdom in the 1970s saw fore bring all of Iraq’s neighbors into the
the war in Vietnam as an unmitigated process of achieving this objective.
disaster. But that has been proved wrong. The next president will face a new world.
The war had collateral benefits, buying the There will be not just Iraq but also Iran
time and creating the conditions that to contend with, and the long-term fight
enabled noncommunist East Asia to follow against Islamist militants will still only
Japan’s path and develop into the four be in its early rounds. But the United
dragons (Hong Kong, Singapore, South States overcame the setbacks of the war
Korea, and Taiwan) and, later, the four in Vietnam, checkmated Soviet expansion,
tigers (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and became the indispensable superpower.
and Thailand). Time brought about the With a wide coalition and a proper attitude,
split between Moscow and Beijing and the United States can prevail now as well.∂
then a split between Beijing and Hanoi.
The influence of the four dragons and the
four tigers, in turn, changed both com-
munist China and communist Vietnam
into open, free-market economies and made
their societies freer.
The conventional wisdom now is that
the war in Iraq is also an unmitigated
disaster. But if the troubles in Iraq are
addressed in a resolute, rather than a
defeatist, manner, today’s conventional
wisdom can be proved wrong as well. A
stabilized, less repressive Iraq, with its
diªerent ethnic and religious communities
accepting one another in some devolved
framework, can be a liberating influence
in the Middle East.
The challenge now, as in the 1970s, is
for the United States to find an honorable
exit from a conflict that developed in an
unexpected way. Once begun, however,
the problem has to be seen through to the
finish so that irreparable damage is not
done to the United States and the world at
large. An Iraq that coheres as one state;

fore ign affairs . January / February 2007 [7]