The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  This strain of national messianism is as alien to the hard-boiled realism of Nixon, Kissinger, and the first Bush as it is to the Wilsonian utopianism of liberals who believe in international law. Though they supported many of the same interventions in the nineties, Kagan dismissed these liberals as “a shrinking camp of internationalists with nothing but airy ‘humanitarianism’ on their side.” Unlike them, he was a nationalist, and he had no faith that the Clinton administration would carry out the call to greatness. “The present generation of Democratic leaders simply does not have the stomach for world leadership,” Kagan wrote. The only hope lay in the Republicans. His mission was to purge the party of realism and restore the higher aims of the great ex-president who was disappearing into the sunset of senescence out on the coast.

  One of Kagan’s articles mentioned the original draft of the Defense Planning Guidance—“unfortunately rejected,” he lamented. The areas of convergence between the internal Pentagon memo and the journal articles are obvious: Top Republican officials and neoconservative foreign-policy thinkers were sketching similarly large plans for the party and the country. But there are differences, perhaps not so obvious at the time, but ones that would prove critical a few years later, when these plans and ideas became the foreign policy of the second President Bush and laid the groundwork for a second war with Iraq. Though the DPG acknowledged that the Cold War was over, it was a document of Cold Warriors—the hard-liners of the 1970s who rejected accommodation with the Soviet Union. Paul Wolfowitz had been a member of the famous Team B, the group of outside experts that was appointed in 1976 by CIA director George Bush to review intelligence on the Soviet Union, and that came to far more dire conclusions about Soviet capabilities and intentions than the pro-détente officials of the Nixon and Ford administrations. The DPG, written in 1992 under Wolfowitz’s guidance (though he claims not to have read the draft before it was leaked), was very much a continuation of the neoconservative thinking that had spawned the Committee on the Present Danger. The skies were always ominous, threats always loomed on the horizon; even though the Soviet Union was no more, the sunlit vistas of the Reagan years had gone dark again. To officials like Wolfowitz, it was always 1979. And what were the new threats? They were everyone and everywhere: European allies, Arab dictatorships, Muslim terrorists, resurgent Russians, Chinese and North Korean communists, weapons proliferators. And what was the remedy? American power, everywhere—but not in the cause of democratic values. The DPG duly advocated “the spread of democratic forms of government and open economic systems,” but only as a gesture. When it came to the Middle East, “our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region’s oil. We also seek to deter further aggression in the region, foster regional stability, protect U.S. nationals and property, and safeguard our access to international air and seaways.” This is the language of realism, not Reaganism. It’s the balance of power without a balance. “With regard to Pakistan,” the document continued, “a constructive U.S.-Pakistani military relationship will be an important element in our strategy to promote stable security conditions in Southwest Asia and Central Asia.” The possibility that continued access to oil and good relations with Muslim dictators might ultimately be the cause of instability or worse didn’t occur to the DPG’s authors. The prospect of democracy in this dangerous region was never mentioned.

  Here, Kagan and the Pentagon hard-liners parted ways. Kagan saw no daylight between security, stability, and democracy. One of his Commentary articles took direct aim at the indulgence Jeane Kirkpatrick had extended to right-wing dictatorships in the same magazine a decade and a half earlier. What good was an international order if it didn’t bring freedom?

  There was another difference between Kagan and the Pentagon hardliners. They had no use for international alliances and institutions if these got in the way of America’s freedom to act. Kagan, though no lover of the UN, didn’t make a point of rejecting internationalism; at times, sounding like a Truman-era Democrat, he even invoked it as an important source of American influence.

  In 1996, Kagan and his friend William Kristol, by then editor of Rupert Murdoch’s new magazine The Weekly Standard, published an essay in Foreign Affairs called “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.” It was a consolidation of the Commentary articles into a stirring manifesto, with Kristol, Dan Quayle’s former chief of staff and a shrewd Republican operative, adding the publicist’s touch to Kagan’s more analytical style. It’s hard to think of a less auspicious moment for a foreign-policy manifesto than the summer of 1996. The Internet and the stock market bubble were expanding fast. The presidential race was a snooze. The Republican candidate Robert Dole was trying to claim, as Kagan and Kristol wrote, “that there really are differences in foreign policy between him and the president, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.” In 1996, as far as most Americans were concerned, the rest of the world disappeared.

  Yet here were Kagan and Kristol summoning America to “benevolent global hegemony.” They had the advantage over their neoconservative fathers of having already seen a small, determined grouplet, writing combative articles in obscure journals, influence power in Washington. There was no reason to think it couldn’t happen again, with discipline and persistence and perhaps a bit of luck. The first goal was for their ideas to take over—or take back—the Republican Party. Then, in a few years, the nation. After that, the world. This is the lesson that the American right has fully absorbed and put into practice ever since the 1960s: Ideas matter. The focused efforts of a handful of organized ideologues can win the political war when the opposition is confused and the country distracted. But they have to be willing to fight, and often lose, obscure battles over years and even decades.

  The next year, in 1997, Kagan and Kristol helped found the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, a pressure group of leading foreign-policy conservatives in the spirit of the Committee on the Present Danger. It included Donald Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Abrams, Richard Perle, William Bennett, and James Woolsey; more than half of the founding members would go on to assume high positions in the administration of George W. Bush. On January 26, 1998, PNAC put itself on the map in the form of an open letter to President Clinton urging him to make a change of regime in Iraq the nation’s policy. “The current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate,” the letter’s signers wrote, not hesitating to embarrass the president. After its publication, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, and one or two other signers went to the White House to discuss Iraq with Sandy Berger, Clinton’s national security adviser, and came away “appalled at the feebleness of the Clinton administration,” Perle said. The letter hadn’t specified exactly how Saddam and the Baath Party were to be overthrown; the signers disagreed about the means. But within a few months the Republican Congress overwhelmingly passed, and the Democratic president (besieged by the Monica Lewinsky affair) reluctantly signed, the Iraq Liberation Act. Regime change in Iraq became official American policy.

  * * *

  WHY DID IRAQ become the leading cause of the hawks? It had received no special attention in the Defense Planning Guidance; it was barely mentioned in the writings of Kagan and Kristol. A year after the letter to Clinton, in 1999, Kosovo replaced Iraq as the overriding concern of PNAC. Still, by 1998 Saddam was beginning to slip out of the constraints imposed on him after the Gulf War and get away with it. Economic sanctions were breaking down, and some European countries, especially Iraq’s leading trading partners, France and Russia, were making noises about lifting them altogether. UN weapons inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq for security reasons after Saddam refused to continue cooperating with them; then he denied them reentry. Saddam was increasingly, in foreign-policy jargon, “out of his box”—apparently free to pursue the unconventional weapons that had been his long-standing desire.

  Perhaps t
he most important name on the PNAC letter was Paul Wolfowitz. Iraq had been on Wolfowitz’s mind since the late 1970s, when he was a midlevel official in the Carter Pentagon and was instructed by Secretary of Defense Harold Brown to direct what would become a prophetic project, called the Limited Contingency Study. Wolfowitz set about to review threats to American interests outside Europe, and he ended up focusing on Persian Gulf oil—in particular, on the possibility of an invasion by Iraq to seize the oil fields of Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. Wolfowitz’s thinking took him well beyond conventional Cold War analysis, and it was received without enthusiasm at the Pentagon, where the study was shelved. The Iranian revolution in 1979, and the Iran-Iraq War that followed, turned American policy in the Gulf toward Iraq even as Saddam Hussein consolidated total power and exercised it with extraordinary brutality on his own population as well as on the Iranian enemy. There’s no reason to think that Wolfowitz, serving in several different capacities under Reagan and Bush in the 1980s, dissented from the tilt to Iraq. The concern of the Limited Contingency Study had been strategic threats to Persian Gulf oil, not the nature of Arab totalitarianism.

  But Wolfowitz was cut from finer cloth than Donald Rumsfeld, who on a diplomatic errand in 1983 famously shook Saddam’s hand, or Dick Cheney, who spent the decade in Congress opposing human-rights legislation, or George H. W. Bush, who looked the other way when the Chinese army crushed a popular movement in Tiananmen Square. Wolfowitz was raised on ideals in the household of Jack Wolfowitz, a Cornell mathematics professor whose family had fled anti-Semitism in Poland in 1920; several family members who had stayed behind eventually perished under the Nazis. Paul Wolfowitz grew up reading Orwell, John Hersey’s Hiroshima, and his father’s library of books on war and the Holocaust. The atmosphere in the Wolfowitz home was morally serious, academically ambitious, and, politically, devoted to the midcentury liberalism that worshipped the memory of Roosevelt and supported Truman’s anticommunism.

  When Wolfowitz entered Cornell in the early 1960s, where he lived in an intellectual pressure cooker called Telluride House, he fell into the orbit of Professor Allan Bloom, for whom politics raised and answered the deepest questions about the purpose and value of human life, and whose late-night conversations at the house became legendary. In Saul Bellow’s fictionalized homage to Bloom, Ravelstein, published in 2000, Wolfowitz appears thinly disguised as Philip Gorman, a high government official who likes to phone his former teacher Bloom/ Ravelstein with the latest inside dope from the councils of government, always careful to keep state secrets to himself. Ravelstein has his own classified information—the higher truths of the human soul that date back to the Greeks. “It was essential to fit up-to-the-minute decisions in the Gulf War made by obviously limited pols like Bush and Baker into a true-as-possible picture of the forces at work, into the political history of civilization. When Ravelstein said that young Gorman had a grasp of great politics, something like this was what he had in mind.”

  But at Cornell, Wolfowitz kept some distance from Bloom’s magnetic pull; he was already politic enough to recognize that Bloom was a divisive figure. Throughout his career, Wolfowitz has had a talent for charming powerful people and becoming a protégé without also becoming a threat. He was always a good boy, the kind on whom adults fasten their dreams, with a yeshiva student’s purity about him, though his education was entirely secular. He organized a journey with friends to join the March on Washington in 1963, but when antiwar protest came to Cornell in Wolfowitz’s last semester in 1965, he and two others formed the Committee for Critical Support of the U.S. in Vietnam and held up signs at a tiny counterprotest. (Wolfowitz, like nearly every other architect of the Iraq War, avoided military service in Vietnam, in his case through student deferments. Dick Cheney, who received five deferments, later explained, “I had other priorities in the sixties than military service.” John Bolton, who, like George W. Bush, joined the National Guard, was more straightforward: “I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy.”) “There’s a certain public-spirited prudery about him,” one of Wolfowitz’s Telluride housemates, who would also go on to a career in neoconservative politics, said. “Paul is sort of the good citizen.” When Allan Bloom died of AIDS in 1989 and a colleague at the Pentagon called Wolfowitz with condolences, the undersecretary of defense for policy stayed on the phone for forty-five minutes talking about what it meant to live an upright and purposeful life, as his old professor had.

  His one act of defiance was to pursue graduate studies in political science at Chicago, where Bloom’s master Leo Strauss was teaching, rather than in biophysical chemistry at MIT, as Wolfowitz’s father wanted. The decision set the course of his adult life. But after Wolfowitz left academia for government, and as he moved upward from job to job under Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush, he never allowed his intellectual or moral passions to get too far out ahead of professional prudence. In the first two decades of his career, Wolfowitz was known as a technical and theoretical wizard with decidedly hard-line views, but not as a crusading ideologue. In the mid-1980s, when Ferdinand Marcos was clinging to power in Manila after stealing an election, and the Reagan administration was debating what to do, the New York Times reporter Leslie Gelb interviewed all the key officials, including Wolfowitz, then the assistant secretary of state for East Asia. Gelb wrote that there was an emerging consensus in the administration that Marcos had to go. As soon as the article appeared, Wolfowitz called to complain that he had said no such thing. While they were still talking, Gelb checked his notes and realized that Wolfowitz was right: He had walked up to the line but carefully avoided crossing it. Reagan himself was still hesitating, and if there was a consensus among others, Wolfowitz wasn’t yet prepared to be named as part of it. But a few years later, by which time the wisdom of forcing Marcos out had become a given, Gelb came across an article in The Washington Post that identified Wolfowitz as the force behind Marcos’s ouster. By then Wolfowitz was happy to take credit.

  Democracy and human rights might have been the stuff of his moral education, but they didn’t play a central role in his early career in government. A sort of turning point might have come in the last days of the Gulf War in 1991. The decision to end the war before the Iraqi Republican Guard divisions were destroyed, and to allow Saddam’s helicopters to fly after the cease-fire, led directly to the massacres of tens of thousands of Shia and Kurds who had risen up against the regime. Wolfowitz, the undersecretary of defense for policy under Cheney, was appalled and argued strenuously that the United States should resume operations to stop the helicopter attacks. But Cheney, along with everyone else at the top of the administration, didn’t want to undermine General Norman Schwarzkopf’s field authority, or risk the breakup of Iraq; Saddam was gone from Kuwait, and that had been the objective. According to James Mann’s excellent group biography Rise of the Vulcans, a Pentagon official told Cheney, “You know, we could change the government and put in a democracy.” Cheney answered that the Saudis would object. So the Iraqi intifada was allowed to be crushed.

  Richard Perle told me that, at the end of the Gulf War, Wolfowitz “wanted to finish Saddam’s regime, and not only did he want to finish it, he believed that there was a strong basis for doing so.” There’s no evidence that Wolfowitz at the time argued or even held the view that the United States should have overthrown Saddam; what’s clear is that he wanted to give Iraqis themselves the chance to do it. But in the years that followed the defeat of President Bush, when Wolfowitz was finally out of government and serving as dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, he kept returning to the unfinished business in Iraq, as if the terrible events that followed the cease-fire wouldn’t leave him alone. At a private meeting on Capitol Hill, he flatly contradicted the former secretary of state, James Baker (and, incidentally, the future vice president, Dick Cheney), who was claiming that the Saudis had argued at the time against supporting the intifada for fear that Iran would gain a foothold in I
raq. “I was on those trips, and it’s nonsense,” Wolfowitz insisted—but he acknowledged, in the title of one essay, that “Victory Came Too Easily,” that the United States had squandered the chance to help Iraqis free themselves of the dictator. These writings had the fitful, inconclusive quality of a divided mind: Wolfowitz wanted to get rid of Saddam, but he still accepted the rationale for not having done so in 1991. He never came around to the position that the American-led coalition should have seized Baghdad and occupied Iraq. The obvious question would have been: What then? It’s a question that Wolfowitz never managed to answer.

  By 1997, he was arguing that the Clinton administration’s policy of containment was doomed to fail, while sanctions continued to inflict pain on ordinary Iraqis and Saddam was once more becoming a threat. At the end of that year, Wolfowitz and Zalmay Khalilzad coauthored a piece in The Weekly Standard called “Overthrow Him.” Regime change in favor of a democratic Iraq had become Wolfowitz’s official position, and the following month, in the PNAC letter, it was embraced by the leading foreign-policy neoconservatives, for whom the appetite to finish off Saddam was scarcely stronger than the desire to cudgel the Clinton administration. Most of them soon moved on to other concerns, but for Wolfowitz, Iraq was now an obsession, and he never stopped writing and talking about it.

  The other significant name on the PNAC letter was Richard Perle. He was as abrasive, incautious, and self-indulgent as his old friend was prudent and industrious. (For all of his French-baiting, Perle has a house in southern France and a living room in Chevy Chase full of French cookbooks.) Perle and Wolfowitz had known each other since the summer of 1969, when they interned together in Washington at the modestly named Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy, under the guidance of two giants of the Cold War, Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze. The two young grad students did research and wrote memos for sympathetic congressmen in defense of the antiballistic missile system, which brought Perle to the attention of Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the Democrat from Washington who was the favorite hawk of the early neoconservatives until Reagan began to ascend in 1976. Perle joined Jackson’s staff and never returned to grad school. Through the 1970s he specialized in finding intellectual talent and connecting it to Washington power on behalf of hard-line Cold War policies. One evening, he heard the Princeton professor Bernard Lewis give a brilliant talk on the Middle East; the next day Perle mentioned Lewis to Jackson, and before long the professor was introduced to the world of policy makers and became an adviser on Middle East issues to Jackson as well as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was then ambassador to the UN. Perle also recruited two young unknowns named Douglas Feith and Elliott Abrams to come work for Senators Jackson and Moynihan. When I half jokingly suggested that the Iraq War began in Scoop Jackson’s office, Perle said, “There’s an element of that.” Richard Perle was its impresario, with one degree of separation from everyone who mattered. More than anyone, he personified the neoconservative insurgent, absolutely certain of himself and his ideas, always drawing new cadres into the cause, staging frequent guerrilla ambushes on the establishment, preparing to seize ultimate power.