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Scholar Assesses U.S. Security Beyond Iraq

New York Times Chief Washington Correspondent David Sanger is writing a security primer for the next president. The book, to be published just before inauguration, examines security hot spots in addition to, and as a result of, the war in Iraq.

Next January, just before inauguration, a book will hit the shelves detailing the major national security challenges facing our next president. To be titled, The Inheritance: The World America Now Faces, the book is the latest effort by David Sanger, a career New York Times staffer and recent Wilson Center public policy scholar. Currently the chief Washington correspondent at the Times, he was twice a member of reporting teams that won the Pulitzer Prize.

Sanger served as the Times White House correspondent for seven years, throughout most of the current Bush administration, putting him in a unique position to delineate the hot spots that will be on the next president's radar, in addition to, and as a result of, the war in Iraq.

"We were distracted by Iraq and didn't allocate needed resources to [realize] opportunities and address threats," he told Centerpoint. "But there are harder problems."

One such hotspot is Afghanistan. "We were winning there and had a tenuous hold on victory," Sanger said. "But we moved assets to the Iraq war. [When we understood the dangers,] we scrambled to move back there." The rhetoric of both presidential candidates includes the need for bigger investments in Afghanistan and Sanger has devoted a chapter of his book to the country, including why the U.S. military mistakenly believed the Taliban had left permanently.

Another national security challenge is Iran, a nation "where we had leverage but lost it before and after the initial phase of the Iraq war," said Sanger. "As we got bogged down in Iraq, we couldn't get our allies to focus on the nuclear issue and blew our credibility on intelligence, then invaded the country that didn't have nuclear weapons while the other country sped ahead."

Three Asian countries present challenges as well. North Korea built the bulk of its arsenal from January to March 2003 as the United States prepared for war. "UN inspectors were thrown out in January after we accused North Korea of cheating on the agreement," recounted Sanger. "[The North Koreans] moved fuel rods and made six to eight nuclear weapons. We have more dialogue with them than with Iran, thanks to the six-party talks, but still we lost our advantage."

Pakistan is another nation to watch. Its nuclear capability makes political stability there an urgent priority. Meanwhile, China has emerged a victor of the Iraq war, said Sanger. "We didn't manage their rise and have missed opportunities—from global warming to China's military influence in Northeast Asia," he said, admitting though that the Bush administration had a slightly better record with China in its second term.

The core of the book argues about the costs of distraction in Iraq, as strategic errors compounded themselves. "The real cost of Iraq went beyond the thousands of American and Iraqi lives tragically lost or the $800 billion spent," said Sanger. "It was the opportunity cost to manage some of the same threats we went to war to cure" such as the merger of terrorist groups and the proliferation of WMDs.

"We could be in a position where the next president pulls us out of Iraq and then we must deal with a world Iraq has made more complex," he said. "This book is a field guide to that world."

by Dana Steinberg, Outreach & Communications