Twilight of the American Century

by Andrew J Bacevich

  To what use would these dominant capabilities be put? Here we come to the RMA’s second bastard child, captured in a single seemingly innocuous word: “shaping.” Put simply, the RMA created expectations of sculpting the international order to suit American preferences. “Shape, respond, prepare”: this was the slogan devised by the Clinton White House to describe the essence of post–Cold War US strategy. By limiting the actionable options available to would-be adversaries, American military preeminence would leave them with little alternative except to conform to Washington’s wishes. If nothing else, “shaping” promised institutional relevance. In 1998, with major land wars nowhere to be seen, the US military was climbing aboard the bandwagon. “In support of our National Security Strategy,” the secretary of the army wrote in his annual report, “America’s Army shapes the international environment in ways favorable for our nation. By promoting democracy and stability around the world, the Army reduces threats the nation could face in the next century.”

  This concept found favor even among neoconservatives, who otherwise disdained Clinton’s approach to policy. In its founding statement of principles, the soon-to-be-famous Project for the New American Century put it this way: “The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire.” Nor were civilians alone susceptible to these expectations. Senior military officers quickly bought in. “‘Shaping’ means creating a security setting such that it is unnecessary to fight to protect one’s interests,” General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained approvingly in a 1997 address at Harvard. “We shape the strategic environment,” General John Shalikashvili, another JCS chairman, wrote “with forward presence, combined exercises, security assistance, and a host of other programs,” thereby helping to “defuse potential conflict.” Just as any cheap knock-off pays tribute to the original, Washington’s enthusiasm for full-spectrum dominance and “shaping” in the interval between the Cold War and the War on Terror represented a sort of unacknowledged—perhaps even unconscious—homage to the Wohlstetter School during the Clinton era. Shaping offered a soft-power approach to anticipatory action specifically intended to reduce risk. If implying the exercise of quasi-imperial prerogatives, it also promised to avoid, or at least minimize, the unseemliness of bombs and bloodshed. After all, given the existence of full-spectrum dominance, resistance to Washington’s dictates and desires would qualify as foolhardy in the extreme.

  Yet during the 1990s US efforts to “shape” the Middle East yielded results other than those intended. Rather than reducing risk, forward presence, combined exercises, security assistance, and the related programs touted by General Shalikashvili enflamed anti-Americanism and played into the hands of those intent on waging violent jihad against the United States. A series of attacks on US forces and installations, targeting the US barracks at Khobar Towers in 1996, US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the destroyer USS Cole in 2000, told the tale. Even before 9/11, the changing of the guard in Washington had brought to power men fully imbued with the tenets of the Wohlstetter School and persuaded that the Clinton approach to shaping had been too tentative and diffident. For Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz the events of September 11, showing that the United States was as vulnerable to surprise as it had been back in December 1941, elicited not second thoughts but a determination to up the ante.15 The exercise of imperial prerogatives was going to entail bombs and bloodshed after all—precise, discriminate force actually employed, rather than merely held in reserve, with Washington seizing opportunities to eradicate danger, rather than merely trying to manage it, and also surprising others, rather than passively waiting to be surprised. In one form or another, these ideas had been circulating for decades. George W. Bush now invested them with the force of policy.

  The sorry tale of all that subsequently ensued need not be retold here. Bush and his advisers wasted little time in identifying Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as the venue in which to give America’s new doctrine of preventive war a trial run. Those making the case for war did so by resurrecting old chestnuts lifted from the Wohlstetter tradition. The nation was once again in deepest peril, Saddam posing a threat that was both global and existential. Contemplating America’s plight, the President and members of his inner circle assessed “the risk of action” to be “smaller than the risk of inaction,” as Wolfowitz explained.16 Benefiting from the close supervision of Donald Rumsfeld, planning for the invasion of Iraq put a premium on the use of precision force. Here was an occasion to use American power discriminately and for worthy ends.

  The Iraq War began with high hopes of “shock and awe,” as journalists and some enthusiastic analysts called it, producing an easy victory. Here, Richard Perle declared, “was the first war that’s been fought in a way that would recognize Albert’s vision of future wars.” Operation Iraqi Freedom reflected “an implementation of his strategy and his vision.” In many respects, the war’s opening phases seemed to validate all that the Wohlstetter School as a whole stood for. Yet only briefly: the real Iraq War—the conflict that began when Baghdad fell—left the Wohlstetter vision in tatters. An admirer once described Albert Wohlstetter as “the tailor who sought to clothe the emperor.”17 In a case of history mimicking fable, the raiment adorning the Emperor Bush turned out to be a figment of imagination. Still, there remained this: the prior assurances of Kennedy and Reagan notwithstanding, starting wars now formed the very cornerstone of US policy.

  ____________

  1. NSC-68, “US Objectives and Programs for National Security” (April 14, 1950).

  2. Paul Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), ix.

  3. Report of Team B, “Intelligence Community Experiment in Competitive Analysis: Soviet Strategic Objectives, An Alternate View,” undated.

  4. Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 20.

  5. Albert Wohlstetter, “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” in Nuclear Heuristics: Selected Writings of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2009), 177–212 (emphasis in original).

  6. Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962).

  7. These were attainment of “a stable, steady-state peacetime operation”; surviving an enemy first-strike; making and disseminating a decision to retaliate; reaching enemy territory with enough fuel to complete the mission; overcoming enemy defenses; and destroying assigned targets.

  8. Roberta Wohlstetter, “Cuba and Pearl Harbor: Hindsight and Foresight,” Foreign Affairs, July 1965.

  9. A partial list of the events creating the conditions for the Pacific War would necessarily include the following: US involvement in negotiating the treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War; blatant and widespread American discrimination against Japanese immigrants; Woodrow Wilson’s rejection of a Japanese-proposed endorsement of racial equality in the Versailles Treaty; the 1921–22 Washington Naval Conference; US condemnation of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931; the Stimson Doctrine refusing to recognize the legitimacy of Japanese conquests; and US support for China in its war against Japan.

  10. Alain Enthoven, “Commentary: On Nuclear Deterrence,” in Nuclear Heuristics, 167.

  11. Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost, 167.

  12. Richard Perle, “Commentary: Arms Race Myths vs. Strategic Competition’s Reality,” in Nuclear Heuristics, 381, 384.

  13. Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), 336; A. Wohlstetter, “On Vietnam and Bureaucracy,” RAND, 17 July 1968.

  14. Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, Discriminate Deterrence (1988), excerpted in Nuclear Heuristics, 607.

  15. In explaining how the United States had been caught unawares on September 11, 2001, the 9/11 Commission made favorable allusions to Roberta Wohlstetter’s book on Pearl Harbor. Once again, past U
S policies escaped examination.

  16. Paul Wolfowitz, “Remarks at International Institute for Strategic Studies,” December 2, 2002.

  17. Stephen Lukasik, “Commentary: Towards Discriminate Deterrence,” in Nuclear Heuristics, 514.

  11

  Fault Lines

  Inside Rumsfeld’s Pentagon

  (2008)

  Setting aside combat memoirs, of which there are a growing number, the literature of the Iraq War divides neatly into two categories. The first category, dominated by journalistic observers, indicts. The second category, accounts authored by insider participants, acquits. The two books reviewed here fall into the second category: They are exercises in self-exculpation.1 Pretending to explain, their actual purpose is to deflect responsibility.

  Douglas Feith and Ricardo Sanchez are not exactly marquee figures. Yet each for a time played an important role in America’s Mesopotamian misadventure. From 2001 to 2005 Feith served in the Pentagon as the third-ranking figure in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) under Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy. From 2003 to 2004 Lieutenant General Sanchez, now retired, served in Baghdad, commanding all coalition forces in Iraq.

  Of the two accounts, Feith’s qualifies as the more sophisticated. It is also far and away the more dishonest. Feith trained as a lawyer, and War and Decision qualifies as a masterpiece of lawyerly, even Nixonian, obfuscation.

  Like a shrewd defense attorney, Feith poses only those questions that will advance his case. As a result, his very long account confines itself to a very narrow range of issues. Although Feith styles himself a strategist, conscientious readers will learn nothing here about, say, the strategic significance of Persian Gulf oil. In War and Decision, oil just does not come up. Readers will be instructed in great detail about Saddam Hussein’s record as a vile and cruel dictator. They will remain oblivious to the record of US support for the Iraqi tyrant during the Reagan era, despite the fact that Feith himself served in the Reagan administration. They will be reminded of the many intelligence failures attributable to the CIA. They will look in vain for any reference to allegations, substantiated at the highest level of the British government, that the Bush administration engaged in “fixing” intelligence to support precooked policy decisions. They will learn that Feith is Jewish and a self-described neoconservative, and that members of his extended family perished in the Holocaust. They will find no mention of Feith’s involvement in right-wing Israeli politics, notably as a participant in the group responsible for “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” prepared in 1996 for Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu. Among that study’s recommendations was one identifying Saddam’s overthrow as a key Israeli national security objective.

  This careful discrimination between convenient and inconvenient facts enables Feith to craft a finely honed version of the Iraq War. The resulting narrative can be summarized in three sentences: Apart from the odd misstep or two, senior officials in OSD, to the man high-minded patriots and sophisticated thinkers, performed their duties brilliantly. Alas, their counterparts at the CIA and State Department, motivated by a combination of spite, prejudice, parochialism, and outright disloyalty to the president, conspired to frustrate or derail OSD’s plans. Abetted by L. Paul Bremer, who headed the Coalition Provisional Authority that governed Iraq during the first year after Saddam’s removal, they succeeded, with terrible consequences.

  In mounting this defense of OSD, Feith concentrates on two themes. In the first, he offers a highly imaginative revisionist account of Operation Iraqi Freedom’s rationale and justification. In the second, he absolves himself and his Pentagon colleagues of any responsibility for the invasion’s catastrophic aftermath.

  According to Feith, for all the emphasis that senior US officials prior to March 2003 placed on weapons of mass destruction and Saddam’s alleged ties to al-Qaeda, those issues do not explain why the Bush administration actually opted for war. The truth is that the United States invaded Iraq as an act of self-defense. Saddam’s regime, Feith explains, posed a direct, looming threat to America itself. To permit the Iraqi dictator to remain in power was to give him “a chance to intimidate and hurt the United States”—an intolerable prospect. Viewed from this perspective, the much-ballyhooed failure to find any nuclear or biological weapons or to establish any connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda is simply beside the point. Saddam’s record of misbehavior and his persistent antagonism toward the United States provided more than ample justification for war. Indeed, Feith insists, after 9/11 force had become the only reasonable option. Invading Iraq was not only justified; it was a moral and strategic imperative.

  Although Operation Iraqi Freedom opened on a promising note, President Bush’s declaration of “Mission Accomplished,” televised worldwide on May 1, 2003, proved a trifle premature. Hard on the heels of Saddam’s removal came a protracted, costly, and deeply embarrassing insurgency. Feith’s second theme is an attempt to claim credit for the successful drive on Baghdad while blaming everyone else for the ensuing quagmire. In effect, he constructs a variation on what we might call the Manstein Defense, mimicking German generals like Erich von Manstein who crowned themselves with laurels for the Wehrmacht’s early victories while tagging Hitler with responsibility for the army’s later defeats.

  As Feith tells the tale, he and his Pentagon colleagues insisted from the outset on styling the American invasion as an act of liberation. The idea was to topple Saddam, quickly hand over the reins of government to friendly Iraqis, and get out. “Iraq belonged to the Iraqis,” Feith writes, as if personally uncovering a profound truth. The model was to be Afghanistan, currently a narco-state riven with armed Islamic radicals, which Feith nonetheless depicts as a stupendous success. There, after the invasion of 2001, he observes, the United States “never became an occupying power.” Mere weeks after the fall of Baghdad, however, the United States unwisely jettisoned its strategy of liberation. Largely as a consequence of a series of ill-advised decisions by Bremer, it opted instead to occupy and reconstruct Iraq. This, according to Feith, proved a fateful, yet utterly avoidable “self-inflicted wound.”

  Neither of these arguments stands up to even casual scrutiny. Yet however unwittingly, Feith tells a revealing story that demonstrates above all the astonishing combination of hubris and naiveté that pervaded Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon.

  History—US history included—is a chronicle of great powers waging wars of conquest in “self-defense.” In 1846, for example, a “long-continued series of menaces” that culminated when enemy forces “invaded our territory and shed the blood of our fellow-citizens on our own soil” obliged the United States, ever so reluctantly, to take up arms against Mexico. So, at least, President James K. Polk explained in a message to Congress requesting a declaration of war. The amalgamation of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico territories into the Union followed in short order.

  The case of Iraq after 9/11 is analogous. Small, distant, isolated, underdeveloped, crippled by sanctions, its airspace penetrated daily by Anglo-American combat patrols, its army a shell of the force that the United States and its allies handily defeated in 1991, Saddam’s Iraq posed a negligible threat to the United States. Yet, as with the Polk administration in 1846, the Bush administration by 2003 (especially the upper echelons of OSD) had evolved large ambitions that could only be fulfilled by resorting to the sword.

  The Mexican War worked out nicely for the American people, who soon gave up the pretense that the United States had invaded Mexico out of concern for self-defense. (For subsequent generations of Americans, Manifest Destiny became the preferred explanation for the war’s origins.) Alas, President Bush demonstrated little of President Polk’s acumen as a war manager. The Iraq War has benefited Americans not at all. With the failure to locate WMD or to establish direct Iraqi involvement in terrorism directed at the United States, the Bush administration’s proximate rationale for the war collapsed. So Feith concocts “self-defense
” as a last-ditch, ex post facto substitute. It won’t wash.

  What Feith will not acknowledge outright is that within OSD the prospect of a showdown with Iraq seemed inviting not because Saddam posed an imminent danger, but because he was so obviously weak. For those most keen to invade Iraq, the appeal of war lay in the expectation that an easy win there would give rise to an abundance of second-order benefits. In an appendix to War and Decision, Feith reprints a memo from Rumsfeld to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice dated July 27, 2001, in which the secretary of defense advocates ousting Saddam as a way to “enhance US credibility and influence throughout the region.” Here we find an early hint of the Pentagon’s post-9/11 views: eliminating a bona fide bad guy promised to endow the United States with additional leverage that it could then employ against other ne’er-do-wells, recalcitrants, and false friends. The idea, Feith wrote in a May 2004 memo to Rumsfeld, was to “transform the Middle East and the broader world of Islam politically.” Employing American power to transform the Islamic world would “counter ideological support for terrorism,” which, according to Feith, held “the key to defeating terrorism in the longer term.”