The Brains Behind Bush's War

Bill St. Clair's Home Page ^ | February 1, 2003 | Todd S. Purdum

[risk]

The Brains Behind Bush's War

WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 — Any history of the Bush administration's march toward war with Iraq will have to take account of long years of determined advocacy by a circle of defense policy intellectuals whose view that Saddam Hussein can no longer be tolerated or contained is now ascendant.

Like the national security experts who were the intellectual architects of the Vietnam War, men like McGeorge Bundy, Walt W. Rostow and others branded "The Best and the Brightest" in David Halberstam's ironic phrase, these theorists seem certain to be remembered, for better or worse, among the authors of the most salient evolution of American foreign policy since the end of the cold war: the pre-emptive attack.

At the center of this group are longtime Iraq hawks, Republicans like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz; Richard Perle, a former Reagan administration defense official who now heads the Defense Policy Board, the Pentagon's advisory panel; and William Kristol, who was chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and now edits the conservative Weekly Standard.

But the war camp also includes more recent and reluctant converts like Kenneth M. Pollack, an Iraq expert in the Clinton White House, who has become a prominent advocate for an attack on Saddam Hussein as the best way to avoid, as he calls his recent book, "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq" (Random House 2002); and Ronald D. Asmus, a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration.

"Saddam Hussein and his regime must go, both because his pursuit of nuclear weapons endangers the vital Persian Gulf region and because a longer-term strategy of promoting democratic change in the Greater Middle East is all but impossible as long as the modern-day Stalin maintains his brutal totalitarian state," the two wrote last year in Policy Review, a journal of the conservative Hoover Institution. "This is going to require a full-scale invasion of Iraq."

Not all of these officials agree with each other on every point. Some have relatively modest aims of disarming Iraq and defusing a threat to stability in the Persian Gulf and the broader Mideast. Some are more concerned about assuring a broad coalition before combat begins, others less so.

Mr. Asmus, for example, now a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Washington, argues that "the democratic transformation of the Greater Middle East should be the next big trans-Atlantic project following the fall of the wall and the consolidation of a peaceful Europe, including the former Eastern bloc." He added that "the Democrats can't leave this project to the Republicans," pointing out that Senators John Kerry, John Edwards and Joseph L. Lieberman have all embraced the general idea.

Mr. Wolfowitz sees a "liberated Iraq" as a vanguard of democracy, the first potential piece in a kind of reverse domino theory in which the United States could help foster the fall of authoritarian regimes in a reshaped Middle East — 50 years after it began fighting to keep pro-Western regimes from falling in Asia.

The big unsettled question, though, is whether these theorists' ideas will someday lead to "perhaps similarly disastrous consequences," as Leon Fuerth, Vice President Al Gore's former national security adviser, wondered aloud, or claim a role in an important military and foreign policy victory.

Robert Kagan, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was the co-author of a Dec. 1, 1997, editorial with Mr. Kristol in The Weekly Standard, to which Mr. Wolfowitz contributed an article. The cover headline: "Saddam Must Go." Mr. Kagan and Mr. Kristol both take pride in their views but also warn against overestimating their influence.

"The Vietnam War was not the brainchild of three or four people," said Mr. Kagan, whose new book "Of Paradise and Power: America vs. Europe in the New World Order," has just been published by Knopf. "It was a product of a whole way of thinking about the world. It was, for better or worse, the logical consequence of the policy of containment. And the breadth and depth of support for American policy in Vietnam, certainly in the elite intellectual class, was enormous: journalists, government, policy. Let's not suggest that this was somehow just the Bundys or Walt Rostow. This was national consensus."

One difference in the current debate over Iraq is that intellectual consensus is not so widespread. Indeed, as Michael O'Hanlon, a defense policy expert at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution, noted, "If you look at nongovernmental experts on Iraq or use of force, what is striking is that pure academics are almost uniformly against the war, but people who have been in government or Washington think tanks tend to be, on average, more supportive."

It was President Bill Clinton who made "regime change" in Baghdad the declaratory policy of the United States, and who came close to war in 1998, settling instead for airstrikes. Virtually all the contenders for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination support the use of force against Iraq, with varying degrees of caveats and reluctance. The essence of all the arguments in favor of war with Iraq is that the cold war doctrine of containment, predicated on rational action by the Soviet Union, has limited effect in a world where the threat is shadowy terrorist organizations and their "rogue state" allies like Iraq, who are not susceptible to traditional notions of deterrence.

It is not a new concept. More than a decade ago, as undersecretary of defense for policy in the first Bush administration, Mr. Wolfowitz was charged by Dick Cheney, then defense secretary, with drafting a new "Defense Planning Guidance," a broad directive that was intended to govern policy in a second Bush term. An early draft proposed that with the demise of the Soviet Union, American doctrine should be to assure that no new superpower arose to rival the United States' enlightened domination of the world.

The United States would be "postured to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated," and the guidance was accompanied by scenarios for hypothetical wars, including one against an Iraq in which Saddam Hussein rebounded from his defeat in the Persian Gulf war. The language was later attacked as too bellicose, and was softened, but it has effectively re-emerged as official policy in the current Bush administration.

"This group kept their ideas and never lost sight of them for almost a decade when they were out of power, and when they returned to government, they added a drop of water and activated it again," said Mr. Fuerth, the Gore adviser.

The attacks of Sept. 11 also played an important role in reviving such concepts. Mr. Kagan likened it to the way North Korea's invasion of South Korea suddenly spurred a big increase in the Truman administration's defense budget and in its willingness to confront the Soviet Union more aggressively, an approach that had been urged by Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze but resisted on budgetary and other grounds until war began.

"Those of us who had argued for many years that we had to do something to get rid of Saddam Hussein were in a stronger position to make the case that we couldn't take these risks any more," Mr. Kagan said.

Mr. Bush himself, at a news conference with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, said today, "After September the 11th, the doctrine of containment just doesn't hold any water as far as I'm concerned."

The hope at the end of the last gulf war was that Mr. Hussein's regime would be so weakened as to collapse of its own weight, or as a result of a coup. As time made those possibilities seem increasingly remote, the drive for harsher action has steadily built.

The drive was often led by a group called the Project for the New American Century, which was started in 1997 by Mr. Kristol and others to promote robust American engagement in the world. In 1998, the group urged Mr. Clinton to adopt a "full complement" of diplomatic and military measures to remove Mr. Hussein, in a letter signed by Mr. Wolfowitz, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others who now hold senior administration jobs.

"The Europeans sometimes make it seem as if we're about to invade Madagascar, and the only way to explain it is that six people have been obsessing about it for a decade," said Mr. Kristol, the author, with Lawrence Kaplan, of a forthcoming book, "The War Over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission" (Encounter Books, 2003). "I'm happy to take some credit for making the argument on this, but a lot of other people are responsible, too, including some liberals. I wouldn't minimize the importance of events on the ground, especially 9/11."

All the same, Mr. Kristol acknowledged in a telephone interview: "I do lie awake at night, worrying. Something could go wrong. Chemical weapons could be used against American troops. A biological weapon could be set off in an American city. I would still argue, I think, that this is a necessary thing to do. But having had some tiny role, I do feel some responsibility. I do."

Mr. Kristol later called back to add: "It's also fair to say that people who advocate doing nothing would also have to take responsibility. To govern is to choose."

[risk]

Today I watched a rerun of an Armistice Day, 2003 interview by Charlie Rose of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and his filmographer, Errol Morris. It aired on the anniversary of the August 9th atomic bombing of Nagasaki. McNamara refused to lobby against the war on Iraq, and argued that WMD proliferation and the danger of nuclear holocaust was the most serious problem the world faced. I write these words partially in response to a troll who attempted to engage me in an argument about the "mistakes" we made in the Vietnam era.

Several topics in Charlie's interview with McNamara caught my attention. First of all, he suggested that human beings should adopt new rules for warfare. This struck me as one of the most unrealistic comments I've ever heard or read about war. Second, he mentioned a debriefing he apparently attended in which he discussed the firebombing of Tokyo with Curtis LeMay. He felt it was tragic that LeMay was only concerned about the orders he had recieved to fly his mission at 5,000 feet instead of 29,000 feet, which he felt was responsible for the deaths of his wingman's crewmembers. McNamara appeared to be revulsed by this contrast in deaths, somewhere 80,000 people or many more depending on your estimates. He did concede the issue of potential troop loss if Americans were to be required to invade the Japanese central islands, and his thoughts were otherwise very coherent (aside from the idea of rewriting the rules of warfare).

While I was watching this segment, I idly searched for McNamara on the Internet. My eyes happened across a http://kerrycountry.org:

We had nothing with which to shoot back since Secretary of Defense McNamara had prohibited us from carrying any weapons of self-defense (even pistols for our survival vests) in an attempt to appease the enemy and “facilitate the peace talks.” --When John Kerry Slandered Me /blockquote> Putting comments I've ready by David Halberstam and others together with McNamara's, I realized that I was listening to the words of an extremely intelligent person who had let his ability to grasp vast amounts of information get the better of himself. What worries me most just now, is not the horrific notion fought the war in Vietnam to lose it, or the terror I feel when I realize that we nearly destroyed ourselves in nuclear combat during the Missile Crisis, it's the sense that the war on terror is currently restrained by similar thinking, that political correctness and a need for "trying to invent new rules for conflict" may be in play. And I do not doubt for a second that it is our press, activists like Michael Moore, and political pressure from Democratic candidates such as John Kerry which has restrained our hand.

Wars must be fought to be won, or not fought at all. In Vietnam, we took the fight to the enemy, and almost won. The press and the Democratic party checked our resolve and swayed the American people to let go of their grasp on victory. That's one point of view that I will continue to hold. But what of others, that we couldn't win? That we shouldn't have fought it at all? Ask men like McNamara why we didn't win. They are the product of our successes in WWII, the guilt we felt for hurting so many innocent people, the fear we endured of being merciless victors. Why does McNamara fear nuclear holocaust so much, when he was one of the engineers of our decision to scrap missile defense?

America, when you fight a war, fight to win. Fight like it's your last battle. It may well be. But don't put men like McNamara back in charge. Have faith. Know you are right because you fight for freedom and justice. Know that history will be written by the victor. Know that you have every right to win at all cost.

Don't fight any war unless you are sure you will finish it victoriously. But if the enemy brings the war to you, there is no other choice but to crush him, his allies, and anyone who sympathizes with him. This is our fight. Americas, lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way because we're not going to repeat our mistakes in Vietnam. We weren't just attacked in some dark and far away gulf this time. And it wasn't just thousands of sailors who went to their untimely graves because of Pan-Arab fascism. This time it's more personal than any attack in American history. This time we will not rest until our enemies are finished. America, stay with us. We're going to keep taking the war to the enemy until this is a footnote in history.

Are you coming with us? Make up your minds because history will make it for you if you don't. You will either write the rules for this war, or else they will be written for you. Make your choice now.

Peace Statue in Nagasaki: The sculptor, Seibo Kitamura, called it a "symbol of Nagasaki's great passion and resolve and of humanity's highest hope."

[risk]

ping - please read my essay on a McNamara interview I just watched again. I think it explains my thoughts on the Vietnam war. Of course I'm too young to tell you all what happened, and so I welcome your comments.

[LiberalBassTurds]

Risk, have you seen the film about McNamara called "Fog of War?" After watching it the reason for the loss in Vietnam becomes clear. He is clearly a troubled man haunted by his WWII experience. It showed in his approach to Indochina. I won't spoil it if you haven't seen it...but the term "proportional response" is key.

Self-ping for a thorough read of your post tomorrow...

LBT

-=-=-

[risk]

Yes, that's what the interview related to. The film maker for Fog of War was with him. Of course he was a young hippie during the war, and continued to villify McNamara for his "hardliner" positions. What a complex situation it was. Aren't we allowing ourselves to complicate things all over again?

[risk]

President Bush said at a VA town hall today that he realized how significant it was that just a few months ago he was eating Kobe beef with Prime Minister Koizumi in Japan, a freely elected leader of a democratic nation -- that 55 years ago had been considered our enemy. And their topic was how to peacefully address the issue of militarism and "nukular" proliferation in North Korea. He said how important a sign this was: freedom begets peace. The Japanese are now free, and they're helping us defend the free world. He said that 55 years ago one of his predacessors was told that the Japanese could never be trusted. And yet he persisted in encouraging them to offer freedom to the Japanese people.

This can work in Iraq, and by extension inspire Iran to struggle toward freedom, is what President Bush means I think.

[Cannoneer No. 4]

It was President Bill Clinton who made "regime change" in Baghdad the declaratory policy of the United States, and who came close to war in 1998, settling instead for airstrikes.

Are not airstrikes an act of war?

Are not unwelcome armed overflights of a sovereign nation acts of war? How about when these overflights destroy air defense sites?

Desert Storm ended in a cease fire and an armistice, the terms of which were not complied with by Saddam. Bill Clinton was at war his entire time in office.

[risk]

That's part of the truth hidden in the article, which leans to the left anyway.

[evad]

America, when you fight a war, fight to win. Fight like it's your last battle. It may well be. But don't put men like McNamara back in charge

Amen to that.

And don't put people like Johnson in charge either.

[evad]

but the term "proportional response" is key

Yes..."measured response" was the buzz word of the Johnson regime. It literally got thousands killed and many more maimed and injured.

I can only hope that LBJ is roasting on a spit and that Mac will be joining him soon. (I think the bastard's still alive)

[libertylover]

...of Defense McNamara had prohibited us from carrying any weapons of self-defense...

There were other restrictions as well. We weren't allowed to destroy enemy aircraft on the ground or to destroy their runways, etc.-we had to give them a "sporting chance" to kill our guys as well in the air. The VietCong could shoot our guys and then run across the border into Cambodia or Loas and we were supposed to stop at the border. The Ho Chi Ming supply route was not in Vietnam itself, so we couldn't send troops there. We did bomb it but the VietCong just walked around the craters and went on their way.

In WWII, the Japanese had vowed to fight to the last man and the war only ended after we demonstrated to them that we were prepared to kill them down to that last man.

[risk]

You're speaking my language. We won WWII with troops restrained only by their devout Christianity -- when our enemies were lucky -- incindiary bombs, napalm, phosphorous, and nuclear weapons. At the end, the politicians halted our best generals on the Elbe. And so it began. By the Korean war, MacArthur was removed from duty because he wanted to win. And so we called it a draw. By the time we entered Vietnam, the elites were fully in charge. And of course we were called off just as we started to win.

I think napalm is illegal now...

If you've learned how to succeed, don't mess with the formula. Do what it takes to win. We've got everything we need to clean this mess up now. Let's do what it takes and move on. The world may not love us, but at least we'll write the history books.

Lock and load!

[Alamo-Girl]

Great essay, risk! Thank you!

[Valin]

Are not airstrikes an act of war?

It depends on which party is in the Whitehouse.

[Valin]

Any one intrested in more on the Bush foriegn policy team I'd recomend
"The Rise Of The Vulcans"
by James Mann

[AmericanInTokyo]

On the whole, I would agree.

However, I am not wearing rose colored glasses in many respects. I have countless hundreds of stories of friends (and a few stories of my own) being screwed by dishonest Japanese companies/executives in business deals...just as I have stories (including my own) of successes as well. Caveat emptor. Trust, but verify (EVERYTHING).

In terms of dealing with Japan, enter at your own risk. There are lucrative opportunities, but you can also get screwed by two-faced liars if you are not careful. That is what years of experience have taught me at any rate. All things being equal, it forces you to stay intellectually and perceptively on your toes at all times, for your own sake.

[tallhappy]

please read my essay

I did, thanks for the ping. I thought it was well thought and written -- maybe an html typo relating to a blockquote>.

[Eastbound]

"That's part of the truth hidden in the article, which leans to the left anyway."

The header is a lefty. 'Bush's War' indeed. A little honesty would have went a long way. I thought it was the 'Islamofascist War Against America.'

Good essay, risk. Yes, guilt over the bomb is what influences the left. They can't have it both ways. It leads to indecision. Guilt should be the burden of the aggressor, not the victim. Any wise parent knows that.

'Johnny, It is with regret that I must take you to the woodshed for hitting Junior. There you shall pay for your guilt.'

[Eastbound]

Or, 'Islamics, it is with regret that we must banish all of you to the Land of Nod for murdering your hosts and your sisters and brothers. There you shall pay for your guilt.'

[happygrl]

bttt

[VOA]

I'll only briefly chime in on McNamara, seeing how you've gotten plenty of good comments already.

Being a tyke in front of the television during the Vietnam War and keeping my ears
open, about all I can tell you about McNamara is that he was an accomplished executive
(with Ford Motor Co.?) and a brilliant guy who, like a lot of America, got their
wires twisted by the Vietnam War...perhaps because it was an unconventional war,
fought out to a large degree in the press/media.
And that was a factor that the US leaders didn't have to worry about in WWII.

IIRC, he's also made some interesting comment about how close we (and our counterparts)
came to nuclear war during The Cold War. I think this was during some conference
that included Castro (maybe in Havana?).

Some other poster mentioned how the Communists used Cambodia as a strategic sanctuary
in the Vietnam War...IIRC, the movie "We Were Soldiers" shows how that was part
of the Vietnam War from the very start.