To Bernard Lewis: the Crisis of Islam

In your otherwise illuminating book The Crisis of Islam, you present some rather less illuminating argumentation in the two middle chapters (“Discovering America” and “Satan and the Soviets”) to support the following proposition: “The Palestine problem has certainly caused great and growing anger, from time to time renewed and aggravated by policies and actions of Israeli governments or parties. But can it really be, as some contend, the prime cause of [Islamic] anti-Western sentiment?” (81) 

Your answer of course is “no.” Your argument begins to fall apart on pp. 61-62. After reviewing the undisputed fact that Arab leaders supported the Nazis during WWII and the Soviets during the Cold War, you say:

But though these foreign sponsors and imported philosophies provided material help and intellectual expression for anti-Westernism and anti-Americanism, they did not cause it, and certainly they do not explain the widespread anti-Westernism that made so many, in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Islamic world, receptive to such ideas. It must surely be that what won support for such totally diverse doctrines was not Nazi race theory, which can have had little appeal for Arabs, or Soviet atheist Communism, which has no appeal for Muslims, but rather their basic anti-Westernism. Nazism and Communism were the main forces opposed to the West, both as a way of life and as a power in the world, and as such they could count on the sympathy or even collaboration of those who saw in the West their principal enemy.

I cannot disagree with a single word. The Islamic world embraced the Nazi and Soviet regimes because these regimes were their enemy’s enemy. But then, oddly, you continue:

But why? If we turn from the general to the specific, there is no lack of individual policies and actions, pursued and taken by individual Western governments, that have aroused the passionate anger of Middle Eastern and other Islamic peoples, expressed in their various struggles—to win independence from foreign rule or domination; to free resources, notably oil, from foreign exploitation; to oust rulers and regimes seen as agents or imitators of the West. Yet all too often, when these policies are abandoned and the problems resolved, there is at best only a local and temporary alleviation. The British left Egypt, the French left Algeria, both left their other Arab possessions, the monarchies were overthrown in Iraq and Egypt, the westernising shah left Iran, the Western oil companies relinquished control of the oil wells that they had discovered and developed, and contented themselves with the best arrangements they could make with the governments of  these countries—yet the generalized resentment of the fundamentalists and other extremists against the West remains and grows and is not appeased.

I wish that, following this paragraph, you had considered the possibility that Israel is the reason why the resentment of the fundamentalists remains and grows, but you don’t. Apparently baffled, you drop the “but why” question and move on to a discussion of the role of the west in the overthrow of the Shah.

It is odd that you fail to consider this possibility because it is such an obvious one. Yes, the western powers removed or were forced to remove all of the grievances you mention. Inexplicably, you don’t mention the one grievance that has not been removed: the partition of Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel.

In the “Satan and Soviets” chapter, you say (79):

Israel is one among many points—Nigeria, Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, etcetera—where the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds meet. Each of these is the central issue for those involved in it, and an annoying digression for the others. Westerners by contrast tend to give the greatest importance to those grievances which they hope can be satisfied at someone else’s expense. The Israel-Palestine conflict has certainly attracted far more attention than the others, for several reasons.

Wait a minute. Are you arguing that only we westerners make such a big deal out of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which is in fact merely an annoying digression to everyone except us and “those involved in it”?  But who is “involved in it”?  At a minimum we would have to say that the list of states involved in this conflict includes Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq since they have gone to war against Israel.  Given that these states include most of the Arab population of the Middle East (only the sparsely populated Gulf sheikdoms are excluded), it seems a bit odd that you then decide you need to look for other reasons why the Israeli-Palestine conflict has attracted more attention than other conflicts between Islamic and non-Islamic peoples.  But off you go:

First, since Israel is a democracy and an open society, it is much easier to report—and misreport—what is going on there. Second, Jews are involved, and this can usually ensure a significant audience among those who for one reason or another are for or against them. A good example of this difference is the Iraq-Iran war, which was waged for eight years from 1980 to 1988. It caused vastly more death and destruction than all the Arab-Israel wars put together, but received far less attention. For one thing, neither Iraq nor Iran is a democracy, and reporting was therefore more difficult and more hazardous. For another Jews were not involved, neither as victims nor as perpetrators, and reporting was therefore less interesting.

A third and ultimately the most important reason for the primacy of the Palestine issue is that it is, so to speak, the licensed grievance—the only one that can be freely and safely expressed in those Muslim countries where the media are either wholly owned or strictly overseen by the government. Indeed, Israel serves as a useful stand-in for complaints about the economic privation and political repression under which most Muslim peoples live, and as a way of deflecting the resulting anger.

In deciphering what is going on here, we need to remind ourselves that you began the paragraph by pointing to a variety of “points where the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds touch each other” and then proceed to explain to us “why the Israeli-Palestine conflict has attracted far more attention than others.” Ignoring the fact that this conflict touches almost every Arab in the Middle East, you give three other reasons why the Arabs pay so much attention to Israel-Palestine: a) there is a free press in Israel; b) Jews are involved; c) Arabs are transferring illicit anger at their own rulers onto a more legitimate target: Israel.

I would not argue that your three reasons are irrelevant in explaining why Arabs are so angry with Israel. However, it is a bit odd for you to argue that these three reasons are more important than the far more obvious one which you studiously avoid: the Arabs have re-established Muslim sovereignty over every square inch of land that was lost to the western powers the day the Ottoman Empire collapsed except those square inches that the western powers deeded over to Israel in 1947.  Freudians may tell the Arabs they’re not really angry about this, that they’re really angry at their father-rulers but can’t express it. It sounds rubbish to me, but then maybe I’m suppressing something, too.

Dan Badger

London

July 23, 2005

To John Lewis Gaddis: Not a Passing Grade

Professor Gaddis,

A fundamental weakness is your paper’s failure to ask whether the administration’s Iraq adventure has served to de-legitimize the doctrine of preventive war.  In the next draft you need to consider whether, by choosing a poor test case (since no-one outside the USA believed that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to anyone other than his own people), the administration has gravely if not fatally compromised any chance of gaining international support for preventive war when a genuine threat does present itself. This result will be all the more upsetting given the international community's near unanimous agreement that preventive war is justified when a genuine threat does present. 

More generally, your paper suffers because you seem to be preaching to the Battell Chapel Choir, without offering non-believers any arguments as to why they should come to church. I know you can do better. Please see my comments below, and make an appointment to discuss with me during office hours.

Dan Badger

Yale College, 1968

Grand Strategy in the Second Term

By John Lewis Gaddis

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2005

Summary: In his first four years, George W. Bush presided over the most sweeping redesign of U.S. strategy since the days of F.D.R. Over the next four, his basic direction should remain the same: restoring security in a more dangerous world. Some midcourse corrections, however, are overdue. Washington should remember the art of speaking softly and the need for international legitimacy.

John Lewis Gaddis is Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale.

RECONSIDERATIONS

Second terms in the White House open the way for second thoughts. They provide the least awkward moment at which to replace or reshuffle key advisers. They lessen, although nothing can remove, the influence of domestic political considerations, since re-elected presidents have no next election to worry about. They enhance authority, as allies and adversaries learn--whether with hope or despair--with whom they will have to deal for the next four years. If there is ever a time for an administration to evaluate its own performance, this is it.

George W. Bush has much to evaluate: he has presided over the most sweeping redesign of U.S. grand strategy since the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The basis for Bush's grand strategy, like Roosevelt's, comes from the shock of surprise attack and will not change. None of F.D.R.'s successors, Democrat or Republican, could escape the lesson he drew from the events of December 7, 1941: that distance alone no longer protected Americans from assaults at the hands of hostile states. Neither Bush nor his successors, whatever their party, can ignore what the events of September 11, 2001, made clear: that deterrence against states affords insufficient protection from attacks by gangs, which can now inflict the kind of damage only states fighting wars used to be able to achieve. In that sense, the course for Bush's second term remains that of his first one: the restoration of security in a suddenly more dangerous world.

Setting a course, however, is only a starting point for strategies: experience always reshapes them as they evolve. Bush has been rethinking his strategy for some time now, despite his reluctance during the campaign to admit mistakes. With a renewed and strengthened electoral mandate, he will find it easier to make midcourse corrections. The best way to predict their extent is to compare what his administration intended with what it has so far accomplished. The differences suggest where changes will--or at least should--take place.

PRE-EMPTION AND PREVENTION

The narrowest gap between Bush's intentions and his accomplishments has to do with preventing another major attack on the United States. Of course, one could occur at any moment, even between the completion of this article and its publication. But the fact that more than three years have passed without such an attack is significant. Few Americans would have thought it likely in the immediate aftermath of September 11. The prevailing view then was that a terrorist offensive was underway, and that the nation would be fortunate to get through the next three months without a similar or more serious blow being struck.

Connecting causes with consequences is always difficult--all the more so when we know so little of Osama bin Laden's intentions or those of his followers. Perhaps al Qaeda planned no further attacks. Perhaps it anticipated that the United States would retaliate by invading Afghanistan and deposing the Taliban. Perhaps it foresaw U.S. military redeployments from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Iraq. Perhaps it expected a worldwide counterterrorist campaign to roll up substantial portions of its network. Perhaps it predicted that the Bush administration would abandon its aversion to nation building and set out to democratize the Middle East. Perhaps bin Laden's strategy allowed for all of this, but that seems unlikely. If it did not, then the first and most fundamental feature of the Bush strategy--taking the offensive against the terrorists and thereby surprising them--has so far accomplished its purposes.  [DB: This ice is very thin.  You should consider two more plausible premises: 1) that OBL had no strategy at all other than to strike the USA or its surrogates whenever an interesting target of opportunity presented itself; or 2) that OBL was hoping to provoke the USA into precisely the kind of action that Cheney/Bush obligingly presented with the Iraq adventure , thereby reconstituting in lraq the great jihadist coalition that the USSR created in Afghanistan in the 1980's.  This may have surprised OBL, but it also delighted him.]

A less obvious point follows concerning pre-emption and prevention, a distinction that arose from hypothetical hot-war planning during the Cold War. "Pre-emption" meant taking military action against a state that was about to launch an attack; international law and practice had long allowed such actions to forestall clear and immediately present dangers. "Prevention" meant starting a war against a state that might, at some future point, pose such risks. In mounting its post-September 11 offensive, the Bush administration conflated these terms, using the word "pre-emption" to justify what turned out to be a "preventive" war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

It did so on the grounds that, in a post-September 11 world, both terrorists and tyrants threatened the security of the United States.  [DB: It is curious that you accept without comment the other conflations at the heart of the administration's post-9/11 foreign policy – that of terrorism and tyranny, and that of terrorism aimed at Israel with terrorism aimed at the USA.]    Al Qaeda could not have acted without the support and sanctuary the Taliban provided. But the traditional warnings governments had used to justify pre-emption--the massing of armed forces in such a way as to confirm aggressive intent--would not have detected the September 11 attacks before they took place. Decisions made, or at least circumstances tolerated, by a shadowy regime in a remote country halfway around the world produced an act of war that killed more Americans than the one committed six decades earlier by Japan, a state known at the time to pose the clearest and most present of dangers.

Pre-emption in its older and narrower sense might have worked against the Japanese fleet as it approached Pearl Harbor--had it been detected in time. Pre-emptive arrests would have stopped Mohammed Atta and his 18 co-conspirators as they approached their respective airports--if it had been possible to read their minds. No nation's safety, however, can depend on such improbable intelligence breakthroughs: as the Pearl Harbor historian Roberta Wohlstetter pointed out years ago and as the 9/11 Commission Report has now confirmed, detecting telltale signals in a world full of noise requires not just skill, but also extraordinary luck.

That is why the Bush administration's strategists broadened "pre-emption" to include the Cold War meaning of "prevention." To wait for terrorist threats to become clear and present was to leave the nation vulnerable to surprise attacks. Instead, the United States would go after states that had harbored, or that might be harboring, terrorist gangs.   It would at first seek to contain or deter such regimes--the familiar means by which the Cold War had been fought--but if those methods failed, it reserved the right to pre-empt perceived dangers by starting a preventive war.

The old distinction between pre-emption and prevention, therefore, was one of the many casualties of September 11. That event revealed a category of threats so difficult to detect and yet so devastating if carried out that the United States had little choice but to use pre-emptive means to prevent their emergence. John Kerry made it clear during the 2004 campaign that he would not have relinquished that option had he won the presidency. His successful opponent certainly will not do so, nor are his successors likely to. This feature of the Bush grand strategy is here to stay.

[DB: You can’t just move on to the next section -- criticizing the Administration for its failure to sell the Iraq policy to traditional allies  (as if the problem were the packaging rather than the policy) -- without answering the major criticisms of the policy.  No thinking person challenges the principle that under certain circumstances, preventive war is justified and necessary.  This is not a new doctrine, and no US administration has ever renounced the right to preventive war.

What all the fuss is about is not the principle of preventive war, but the test case of Iraq. The particulars in this case fail most people’s test by so much that the principle itself has come under attack.  You say “the United States would go after states that had harbored, or that might be harboring, terrorist gangs.”  Iraq was an example of such a state in the eyes of the Administration. Do you agree?  What evidence was there then or now that Saddam’s regime was harboring terrorist gangs? (Some have cited Zarqawi’s pre-war presence in Iraq, but the fact is that his training camps were located in the region of Iraq controlled by our Kurdish allies, not Saddam.)

Do you believe that the possibility that Saddam possessed a WMD capability made Iraq a good test case for the doctrine?  If so, and since your penultimate paragraph of this section states that  pre-emptive war should only be undertaken when containment has failed, you must explain here why you believe the policy of containing Saddam had failed. 

Or do you believe that Saddam’s habit of sending money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers – unquestionably a policy of encouraging terrorism – made Iraq a good test case for the preventive-war doctrine?  If so, you are broadening the doctrine to give the right of attack to any state that has good reason to believe that a terrorist group in any other state is a threat to anyone anywhere. The extension of the principle beyond self-defense would put your argument on some of the same ground occupied by Lee Feinstein and Anne-Marie Slaughter in their Jan-Feb 2004 article in Foreign Affairs, though these authors do not embrace the principle of unilateral preventive war.  If you are doing so, you should say so, and say why.]

 

SPEAKING MORE SOFTLY--AND MORE CLEARLY

Pre-emption defined as prevention, however, runs the risk--amply demonstrated over the past two years--that the United States itself will appear to much of the world as a clear and present danger. Sovereignty has long been a sacrosanct principle in the international system. For the world's most powerful state suddenly to announce that its security requires violating the sovereignty of certain other states whenever it chooses cannot help but make all other states nervous. As the political scientist G. John Ikenberry has pointed out, Washington's policy of pre-emption has created the image of a global policeman who reports to no higher authority and no longer allows locks on citizens' doors. However shocking the September 11 attacks may have been, the international community has not found it easy to endorse the Bush administration's plan for regaining security. [DB: Surely you are you aware that the international community was virtually unanimous in endorsing Bush’s plan for regaining security by means of a war to take out the Taliban.  No-one in the international community has challenged the right of the US to take unilateral action against enemies who threaten the US.  What the international community has choked on is the Bush administration’s assertion that Iraq posed a sizeable enough threat to US security to justify preventive war. ]

Bush and his advisers anticipated this problem. After brushing aside offers of help in Afghanistan from NATO allies, the administration worked hard to win multilateral support for its first act of pre-emption for preventive purposes: the invasion of Iraq. It expected success. After all, who, apart from the United States, could organize the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, a dictator who had abused his people, started wars, flouted UN resolutions, supported terrorists, and, in the view of intelligence agencies everywhere probably possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD)?  The use of U.S. power to depose such a monster, Bush's strategists assumed, would be welcomed, not feared. [DB: This paragraph loses you 5 marks.  Anyone who has read the report of the 9/11 Commission, the report of the Hutton Commission in the UK, Woodward’s Plan of Attack  and  Clark’s Against All Enemies”  has to conclude that it was only at the political level at the top of the CIA and MI5 that anyone took this view. The overwhelming majority of intelligence analysts and operatives at the next level and below knew that they did not have a clue, though most (including all of those closest to the “evidence”) would have said, “probably not” if forced to guess.]

They were wrong. The war in Iraq gained far less international support than the administration had anticipated. One can debate at length the reasons why: the outdated structure of the UN Security Council, which better reflected the power balance of 1945 than 2003; the appearance Bush gave of having decided to go to war with or without that body's consent; the difficulty of establishing a credible connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda; the absence of incontrovertible evidence [DB: actually it was the absence of any credible evidence whatsoever] that the Iraqi dictator really did have WMD; the distrust that lingered from Bush's unnecessarily harsh rejections of the Kyoto Protocol, the International Criminal Court, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Whatever the explanation, his strategy of pre-emption by consent did not get consent, and this was a major failure.

President Bush's decision to invade Iraq anyway provoked complaints that great power was being wielded without great responsibility, followed by an unprecedented collapse of support for the United States abroad. From nearly universal sympathy in the weeks after September 11, Americans within a year and a half found their country widely regarded as an international pariah.

It is easy to say that this does not matter--that a nation as strong as the United States need not worry about what others think of it. [DB: I would have thought the question is not whether the USA should worry about what others think of it, but whether the preventive war which caused such near-universal revulsion outside the USA was justified or not. Your continuing inattention to this question is a fatal shortcoming in an essay that purports to analyse and recommend foreign policy to the administration.] But that simply is not true. To see why, compare the American and Soviet spheres of influence in Europe during the Cold War. The first operated with the consent of those within it. The second did not, and that made an enormous difference quite unrelated to the military strength each side could bring to bear in the region. The lesson here is clear: influence, to be sustained, requires not just power but also the absence of resistance, or, to use Clausewitz's term, "friction." Anyone who has ever operated a vehicle knows the need for lubrication, without which the vehicle will sooner or later grind to a halt. This is what was missing during the first Bush administration: a proper amount of attention to the equivalent of lubrication in strategy, which is persuasion.

[DB: The international community is convinced that Bush’s Iraq policy was a sow’s ear.  You have said nothing so far to persuade anyone otherwise.  And yet you blame insufficient lubrication for the fact that the international community does not regard the policy as a silk purse.]

The American claim of a broadly conceived right to pre-empt danger is not going to disappear, because no other nation or international organization will be prepared anytime soon to assume that responsibility. But the need to legitimize that strategy is not going to go away, either; otherwise, the friction it generates will ultimately defeat it, even if its enemies do not. What this means is that the second Bush administration will have to try again to gain multilateral support for the pre-emptive use of U.S. military power.  [DB: What this really means is that the second Bush administration will have to try to find a case (since they failed to find it in Iraq) where the facts appear to the international community to justify the use of pre-emptive US military power.] 

Doing so will not involve giving anyone else a veto over what the United States does to ensure its security and to advance its interests. It will, however, require persuading as large a group of states as possible that these actions will also enhance, or at least not degrade, their own interests. The United States did that regularly--and highly successfully--during World War II and the Cold War. It also obtained international consent for the use of predominantly American military force in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, in Bosnia in 1995, in Kosovo in 1999, and in Afghanistan in 2001. Iraq has been the exception, not the rule, and there are lessons to be learned from the anomaly.

One is the need for better manners. It is always a bad idea to confuse power with wisdom: muscles are not brains. It is never a good idea to insult potential allies, however outrageous their behavior may have been. Nor is it wise to regard consultation as the endorsement of a course already set. The Bush administration was hardly the first to commit these errors. It was the first, however, to commit so many so often in a situation in which help from friends could have been so useful.

Another lesson relates to language. The president and his advisers preferred flaunting U.S. power to explaining its purpose. To boast that one possesses and plans to maintain "strengths beyond challenge" may well be accurate, but it mixes arrogance with vagueness, an unsettling combination. Strengths for what purpose? Challenges from what source? Cold War presidents were careful to answer such questions. Bush, during his first term, too often left it to others to guess the answers. In his second, he will have to provide them.  

[DB: The premise of the preceding paragraph is that there was a good explanation of our purpose in invading Iraq, one which the international community would have accepted and endorsed if only that explanation had been properly phrased.  You don’t give that explanation in this paper, so those readers who are not members of the Battell Chapel Choir are left wondering why you think the problem is merely one of phraseology. The non-choir members think the explanation failed simply because it made no sense.]

A final and related lesson concerns vision. The terrorists of September 11 exposed vulnerabilities in the defenses of all states. Unless these are repaired, and unless those who would exploit them are killed, captured, or dissuaded, the survival of the state system itself could be at stake. Here lies common ground, for unless that multinational interest is secured, few other national interests--convergent or divergent--can be. Securing the state will not be possible without the option of pre-emptive military action to prevent terrorism from taking root. It is a failure of both language and vision that the United States has yet to make its case for pre-emption in these terms.

[DB: You are now proposing to extend the pre-emption doctrine to target places where terrorism has not yet buy may soon take root.  Why do we need this?  The terrorist threat of the future, like that of the past and the present, is from places where terrorism has already taken root: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Algeria, Morocco, Spain, Germany, France, the UK, the Netherlands, and so on.  (We can also now add Iraq to the list -- one of the collateral costs of freeing the Iraqi people). You leave your reader  baffled both as to what it would mean to take pre-emptive military action against terrorism where it has not yet taken root, and as to how this could contribute to the defeat of terrorism in this long list of places where it already has. ]

 

IRAQ IS NOT VIETNAM

The Bush administration believed that it could invade Iraq without widespread consent because it expected a replay of the Afghanistan experience: military resistance would quickly evaporate, Iraqis would welcome the Americans and their allies, and the victorious coalition would quickly install an Iraqi regime capable of controlling and rebuilding the country. Success on the ground, together with confirmation that Saddam Hussein did indeed have WMD, would yield the consensus that diplomacy had failed to produce. The occupation of Iraq would become a broadly supported international effort, even if the invasion had not been.

The military campaign proceeded as anticipated, but nothing else did. Enough troops were deployed to defeat the Iraqi army, but not to restore order, suppress looting, and protect critical infrastructure. Iraqis did not step forward to form a new government, however grateful they may have been to have their old one removed. Pentagon planners misjudged how quickly many Iraqis would begin to see their liberators as oppressors. They even hastened that process through a laissez-faire attitude toward the rights of prisoners that produced sickening abuses. WMD were not found. And the expanded multilateral assistance Bush had hoped for in running the occupation never arrived. To note gaps between intentions and accomplishments in Iraq is to understate: they littered the landscape.

The Bush administration has been scrambling ever since to close those gaps. It has done so with an indecisiveness that is quite at odds with its normal method of operation: it has seemed, far too often, simply not to know what to do. As a consequence, it has come close, more than once, to losing the initiative in Iraq. Visions of a Vietnam-like quagmire have begun to loom.

Such visions are, however, premature. After a year and a half of fighting, U.S. casualties in Iraq have yet to exceed what the monthly total in the Vietnam War frequently was. Iraqi losses, although much greater, are nowhere near what the Vietnamese suffered. The insurgents receive far less external aid than the Soviet Union and China provided to the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. There is no Iraqi equivalent to Ho Chi Minh: Iraq's division among Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds has created a balance of antagonisms, not a unified resistance.

It is also the case that the U.S. military tends to learn from its mistakes. Historians now acknowledge that American counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam were succeeding during the final years of that conflict; the problem was that support for the war had long since crumbled at home. Military learning is also taking place in Iraq, but the domestic opposition is not even approaching Vietnam-era proportions: 2004 was nothing like 1968. There is still time, then, to defeat the insurgency--even though the insurgents are no doubt also learning from their own mistakes.

Victory, in the end, will go to the side that can rally the "silent majority" of Iraqis who have so far not taken sides. Here an advantage lies with the Americans and their allies, for they can offer elections. The insurgents cannot. Opportunities to vote in equally dangerous circumstances--in El Salvador, Cambodia, and most recently Afghanistan--have punctured the pretensions of terrorists by diminishing the fears on which they depend. There are, to be sure, no guarantees. Elections could produce governments that are weak, incompetent, unrepresentative, brutal, or even fanatically opposed to the occupiers themselves. The risks of holding them, however, are preferable to the alternatives of swamping Iraq with U.S. troops or abandoning it altogether.

And what if the United States, despite its best efforts, ultimately fails in Iraq? It is only prudent to have plans in place in case that happens. The best one will be to keep Iraq in perspective. It seems to be the issue on which everything depends right now, just as Vietnam was in 1968. Over the next several years, however, President Richard Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger showed that it was possible to "lose" Vietnam while "gaining" China. [DB: Of course America lost the war in Vietnam because the American people lost the will to win. But in what conceivable way, even in quotation marks, did the Nixon/Kissinger policies gain China? If this is a reference to China's subsequent turn to capitalism and partial reconciliation with the west under Deng, do you really mean to suggest that this had anything to do with American policy in Vietnam or anywhere else?] What takes place during the second Bush term in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Libya, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, and especially the Israeli-Palestinian relationship may well be as significant for the future of the Middle East as what occurs in Iraq. And what happens in China, India, Russia, Europe, and Africa may well be as important for the future of the international system as what transpires in the Middle East. All of which is only to say that Iraq must not become, as Vietnam once was, the single lens through which the United States views the region or the world.

WINNING THE WAR ON TERRORISM

Grand strategy is as much about psychology as it is facts on the ground. The Bush administration intended that a demonstrated capacity for retaliation, pre-emption, and/or prevention in Afghanistan and Iraq would convince al Qaeda that the United States could not be run out of the Middle East. "Shock and awe" would dry up recruiting for that organization. And it would deter other states in the region and elsewhere from supporting terrorism in the future. The record of accomplishments here is mixed. Not even bin Laden can now expect a diminished U.S. presence in the Middle East: in political, economic, and certainly military terms, the United States is more firmly entrenched there than it was prior to September 11. It is less clear, though, that the Bush strategy has impeded al Qaeda's recruiting. The toppling of Saddam Hussein humiliated at least as many Arabs as it pleased. The occupation of Iraq revealed irresolution and inefficiency as often as the firmness it was meant to convey. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains a festering grievance: military victory in Iraq removed a threat to Israel, but it has yet to speed a settlement. On balance, U.S. power has become more respected in the Middle East. But respect for U.S. culture, institutions, and leadership has significantly declined.

 

Efforts to deter dangerous states have also produced mixed results. Whatever Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi's reasons for abandoning Libya's quest for WMD, his decision was just what the Bush strategists hoped would happen on a wider scale. [DB: Here  I must  take off another 5 marks.  Notwithstanding your coy construction "whatever Qaddafi's reasons" in the previous sentence, by using "also" as the third word in the next sentence, you make it plain to the reader that you believe Qaddafi's turn of heart was indeed a success that Bush can claim for his policy. Are you aware that Qaddafi's approach and offer to the British to rehabilitate himself preceded shock and awe by at least two years.  If you are aware of evidence that supports a causal connection between shock and awe and Qaddafi's turn, you should present it here, or otherwise delete this section.] They can also claim, as a success, Pakistan's dismantling of Abdul Qadeer Khan's network for marketing nuclear weapons components. In Iran and North Korea, however, the picture is bleaker: the invasion of Iraq appears to have convinced leaders in those countries that they must have a nuclear capability of their own. [DB: The leaders of North Korea and Iraq were convinced of the need for a nuclear weapons capability long before the invasion of Iraq. They were convinced of this by the declared hostility of neighbors, some armed with a nuclear capability, others able to rely on that of their allies.] Far from deterring them, the United States may have pushed them into finding ways to deter it.

Grand strategies always have multiple audiences: actions aimed at particular adversaries can (and usually do) make unintended impressions on others. A major priority for the second Bush administration, then, will be to determine the extent to which its aggressive use of U.S. military power in Afghanistan and Iraq has produced results it did not want elsewhere, and to adjust strategy accordingly.

It will be necessary, in doing this, to avoid extremes of pessimism and optimism. The Bush team made the worst of Saddam Hussein's alleged WMD, while making the best of the more credible capabilities Iran and North Korea have been developing. Whatever the reasons behind this disparity, it is not sustainable. For even if the United States should succeed in Iraq, its larger strategy will have failed if it produces a nuclear-capable Iran or North Korea, and those countries behave in an irresponsible way.

This is not to predict that they will. States that have acquired nuclear weapons have so far handled them carefully. To take comfort in this pattern, however, is like trying to find reassurance in an extended game of Russian roulette: sooner or later the odds will turn against you. The same is true of the risk that nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons could make the leap, like some lethal virus, from potentially deterrable states to undeterrable terrorists. It may take the use of such weapons to awaken the world to this danger. That too, however, is a Russian roulette solution, which makes it not worth waiting for.

There are opportunities, then, for a renewed U.S. commitment to the task of keeping WMD out of the hands of tyrants and terrorists--by multilateral means. The prospects for such an effort, like those for the Iraqi occupation, are better than they might at first seem. UN sanctions do appear to have prevented the rebuilding of Saddam Hussein's WMD after the Gulf War. That organization has shown itself effective as well in publicizing, if not resolving, the crisis over Iran's nuclear program. Cooperative initiatives elsewhere have also shown promise: examples include the Nunn-Lugar program to dismantle nuclear stockpiles, the Proliferation Security Initiative to intercept illegal weapons shipments, and the tacit agreement North Korea's neighbors have reached that none has an interest in seeing Pyongyang develop the capacity for mass destruction.

The Bush administration has been proceeding in this direction. Its multilateralism outside of Afghanistan and Iraq is insufficiently acknowledged--probably because it has been inadequately explained. What is needed now is a clear and comprehensive statement of which international organizations and initiatives the United States can cooperate with, which it cannot, and why. It is as bad to promise too much, as the Clinton administration did, as to propose too little, as happened during Bush's first term. But with tact, flexibility, and a willingness to listen--as well as the power to pre-empt if such strategies fail--Americans could by these means regain what they have recently lost: the ability to inspire others to want to follow them.

SOWING THE SEEDS OF CHANGE

President Bush has insisted that the world will not be safe from terrorists until the Middle East is safe for democracy. It should be clear by now that he is serious about this claim: it is neither rhetorical nor a cloak for hidden motives. Democratization, however, is a long-term objective, so it is too early to assess accomplishments. What one can evaluate is the extent to which the Bush strategists have succeeded in a more immediate task they set for themselves: to clear the way for democratization by shattering a status quo in the Middle East that they believed had victimized the people of the region and had become a threat to the rest of the world.

[DB: You cannot introduce the subject of making the Middle East safe for democracy without discussing the following questions: why should we expect democracy to eliminate the seeds of hatred from whichJihadist terrorism springs? Did it do so in Algeria in 1991, when a clear majority voted for the Islamists and their platform of suspending the constitution and imposing Sharia? Has it done so in Turkey, where the Islamist majority has endorsed secularism and human rights only because this is the price of EU membership?  Has it done so in Palestine, where Hamas is now outpolling all other parties? Has it done so in Pakistan, where the last parliamentary elections created a sizeable new block of Islamist parliamentarians. Has it done so in Saudi Arabia, where Islamists won most seats than any other group in the recent municipal elections? Has it done so in Iraq where, but for (and perhaps even with) the two-thirds rule, the elections for the provisional parliament have given control to clerical parties?

And why should we expect democracy to eliminate a nation’s quest for WMD? Surely you don’t think that an Iranian referendum on whether that nation should develop nuclear weapons would produce a “no”.

We all agree that democracy is a good thing  compared to any of the alternatives. But why should we think that democracy in Islamic nations will make the west safer?]

The regimes responsible for this situation had three characteristics. They were authoritarian: liberation from colonialism and its equivalents had left the region in a new kind of bondage to tyrannical or at least unrepresentative rule. Most of them benefited from the geological accident of where oil lay beneath the surface of the earth, so that the need to remain competitive within a global economy did not produce the political liberalization that it did almost everywhere else. And several of these had cut deals with an Islamist religious establishment that had its own reasons for resisting change, thereby reinforcing a long-standing trend toward literal readings of the Koran that left little room for alternative interpretations. This unhealthy combination of authoritarianism, wealth, and religious literalism, the Bush administration maintained, fed frustrations for many and fueled rage in a few: that was enough to bring about September 11. Breaking this status quo would make the world safer in the short run and facilitate democratization in the long run.

The shock and awe that accompanied the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were meant to begin this process, but Bush and his advisers did not rely solely on military means to sustain its momentum. They expected that September 11 and other terrorist excesses would cause a majority of Muslims to recoil from the extremists among them. [DB: As well they might have done had we not invaded Iraq.] They anticipated that the United States would be able to plant the seeds of democracy in the countries where it had deposed dictators, and that these would spread. They also assumed that the Middle East could not indefinitely insulate itself from the democratization that had already taken hold in much of the rest of the world.

Divisions have indeed surfaced among Muslims over the morality and effectiveness of terrorism. Saudis have seen the terrorists they financed strike back at them. Well before Yasir Arafat's death, Palestinians were questioning what suicide bombing and a perpetual intifada had accomplished; now there is even more room for second thoughts. Iraqis have begun to speak out, if cautiously, against the hostage-taking and televised beheadings that have afflicted their country. And the Beslan massacre--the taking of a school in southern Russia, with the subsequent slaughter of more than 300 children and teachers--has raised doubts throughout the Middle East that terror directed against innocents can ever be justified when decoupled from any apparent political objective. [DB: Have any terrorist acts ever been decoupled from political objectives?  Not the horrors in Chechnya, whose objective is independence from Russia, and not the horrors in Palestine, whose objective is elimination of the state of Israel. The list is almost endless. Those who carry out or support terror do so precisely because it is coupled with political objectives.]

Whether democracy can be "planted" through military occupation in that part of the world is not yet clear, however, and may not be for some time. Three years after the invasion of Afghanistan, that country still is not secure. Taliban and al Qaeda elements remain, economic recovery is spotty, warlords rule, opium cultivation thrives, and Westerners cannot travel safely much beyond Kabul. And yet, on October 9, 2004, millions of Afghans lined up to vote in an election that had no precedent in their nation's long history. Had anyone predicted this three years ago, the response would have been incredulity--if not doubts about sanity.

What this suggests is that forces of disruption and construction coexist in Afghanistan: their shifting balance is beyond precise measurement. If that is true there, then it is all the more so in Iraq, where the contradictions are greater, the stakes are higher, and the standards for making optimistic or pessimistic judgments are even more opaque. The best one can say at the moment, of both countries, is that they defy generalization. That is less than the Bush administration hoped for. It is far more, however, than any previous American administration has achieved in the Middle East. For better or for worse, the status quo exists no longer.

And what of the region's insulation from the wave of democratization that has swept the globe? According to Freedom House statistics, no countries allowed universal suffrage in 1900. By 1950, 22 did, and by 2000, the number had reached 120, a figure that encompassed 62.5 percent of the world's population. Nor, as the examples of Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Turkey suggest, is there reason to think that representative government and Islam are incompatible. Democratization has indeed been delayed in the Arab world, as Arabs themselves have begun to acknowledge. To conclude that it can never take hold there, however, is to neglect the direction in which the historical winds have been blowing. And the best grand strategies, like the most efficient navigators, keep the winds behind them.   

The second Bush administration will now have the opportunity to reinforce the movement--the shift in the status quo--that the first Bush administration started in the Middle East. A Kerry administration would probably have done the same. What September 11 showed was that the United States can no longer insulate itself from what happens in that part of the world: to do so would be to ignore clear and present danger. A conservative Republican administration responded by embracing a liberal Democratic ideal--making the world safe for democracy--as a national security imperative. If that does not provide the basis for a renewed grand strategic bipartisanship, similar to the one that followed Pearl Harbor so long ago, then one has to wonder what ever would.

WHAT WOULD BISMARCK DO?

Finally, one apparent assumption that runs through the Bush grand strategy deserves careful scrutiny. It has to do with what follows shock and awe. The president and his advisers seem to have concluded that the shock the United States suffered on September 11 required that shocks be administered in return, not just to the part of the world from which the attack came, but to the international system as a whole. Old ways of doing things no longer worked. The status quo everywhere needed shaking up. Once that had happened, the pieces would realign themselves in patterns favorable to U.S. interests.

It was free-market thinking applied to geopolitics: that just as the removal of economic constraints allows the pursuit of self-interest automatically to advance a collective interest, so the breaking up of an old international order would encourage a new one to emerge, more or less spontaneously, based on a universal desire for security, prosperity, and liberty. Shock therapy would produce a safer, saner world.

Some such therapy was probably necessary in the aftermath of September 11, but the assumption that things would fall neatly into place after the shock was administered was the single greatest misjudgment of the first Bush administration. It explains the failure to anticipate multilateral resistance to pre-emption. It accounts for the absence of planning for the occupation of Iraq. It has produced an overstretched military for which no "revolution in military affairs" can compensate. It has left official obligations dangerously unfunded. And it has allowed an inexcusable laxity about legal procedures--at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere--to squander the moral advantage the United States possessed after September 11 and should have retained.

The most skillful practitioner ever of shock and awe, Otto von Bismarck, shattered the post-1815 European settlement in order to unify Germany in 1871. Having done so, however, he did not assume that the pieces would simply fall into place as he wished them to: he made sure that they did through the careful, patient construction of a new European order that offered benefits to all who were included within it. Bismarck's system survived for almost half a century.

The most important question George W. Bush will face in his second term is whether he can follow Bismarck's example. If he can shift from shock and awe to the reassurance--and the attention to detail--that is necessary to sustain any new system, then the prospects for his post-September 11 grand strategy could compare favorably to Bismarck's accomplishments, as well as to those of U.S. presidents from Roosevelt through Clinton. For their post-Pearl Harbor grand strategy, over more than half a century, persuaded the world that it was better off with the United States as its dominant power than with anyone else. Bush must now do the same.

 

Dan Badger

London

February 20, 2005

The Agony and the Clarity -- Iraq is Not Yet Vietnam?

Iraq is not yet Vietnam, but neither was Vietnam when the USA began military operations in 1956. When Americans today use the word “Vietnam,” we are mainly referring to the ideological civil war that erupted ten years later, and finally achieved armistice in 1973 when American troops were withdrawn. Few of the combatants in that ideological war have withdrawn from their positions.

If God is unwilling or we are unlucky, before Americans go to the polling booths on November 2, 2004, we will have to ask and answer again the “Vietnam” questions of means and ends, moral imperatives and appeasement. The similarity between the moral, policy and political issues that are now arising from the invasion of Iraq and the issues as they were framed and fought during 1965-73 is simply too great to ignore.

Rationale Creep

In both Vietnam and Iraq, USA’s rationale for initiating military operations was based on national security. Sooner (Iraq) or later (Vietnam), however, the rationale for sustaining military action shifted to the defense of the American values of freedom and democracy.

Eisenhower sent military “advisors” to Vietnam in the mid-1950’s because his administration saw that country through the Cold War lens of the global confrontation between communism sponsored by Russia and China, and capitalism sponsored by the democracies of the west. Looking into the future through this lens, advocates of military action in Vietnam saw all the nations of Asia falling -- like dominoes -- under the heel of communist dictatorships. This could only be prevented by drawing a line and defending it, as had been done in North Korea a few years earlier.

This rationale won the day in the mid-1950’s, and still prevailed in 1964-65 when LBJ sent 130,000 combat troops to Vietnam. But during the late 1960’s, many of us began to understand that the struggle between the North and South Vietnamese was but the latest outbreak of ancient ethnic warfare in the region, with a post-colonialist twist. More significantly, we began to understand that this struggle had very little geo-political importance. Yes, the North Vietnamese were being supplied by our Cold War enemies, Russia and China, because it was in their interest to exhaust us. However, unlike Fidel Castro, who in 1962 had allowed his patron to use his country to stage a move of staggering geo-political significance, North Vietnam’s leadership gave Russia and China no geo-political advantage whatsoever, apart from dragging us into the quagmire. Vietnam had no oil, no useful ports or air-bases, and offered no offensive missile siting advantages over existing sites in Russian and China.

As American fatalities rose (some 25,000 by the time LBJ declined to run for a second term in March of 1968), this national security rationale was crumbling in the eyes of more and more Americans. It was simply too theoretical to justify the rising American body count.

In response, the Johnson administration articulated the “freedom and democracy” rationale. In Fog of War, the recent documentary of Robert McNamara’s career trials and triumphs, there is TV news footage of LBJ leaning towards his audience and declaiming in his Texas drawl, “Make no mistake [sound familiar?], we will never waiver in the defense of freedom and democracy in Vietnam.”

The Johnson Administration’s new message to the American people was, “Even if the North Vietnamese aren’t a threat to our national security, they want to impose their evil dictatorship on South Vietnam and neighboring countries. And even if this is a civil war, it’s a civil war between a side that believes in American ideals, and a side whose only objective is to conquer and rule with the iron fist of Ho Chi Minh’s politburo. The American people have a moral obligation to stand up and fight for what we believe in.”

A problem for the Johnson Administration in making this case was that the institutions of democracy in South Vietnam were pretty unimpressive. For most of the American period in Vietnam, the south was a police state ruled corruptly by a succession of strong men. Given the internal and external security threats, of course, the Administration could hardly protest the absence of democratic institutions. Nevertheless, those of us who started focusing on Vietnam in the late ‘60’s couldn’t help noticing how little we had to show for the ten years we had spent trying to bring democracy to South Vietnam. We had succeeded in keeping the South Vietnamese free from rule by the North, but what it had made them free for was not pretty, and not getting prettier.

As we weighed the “freedom and democracy” rationale against the rising death count, every day more of us decided that the war policy was wrong and should be abandoned, even if that meant surrender. We concluded that the benefit of eventually establishing a free and democratic Vietnam did not justify what it would eventually cost in American lives to achieve it.

The Cheney/Bush administration’s rationale for initiating military operations against Iraq in March 2003 was that our national security was threatened by the “gathering storm” of Saddam’s WMD program, and that “the dangers of inaction exceed the dangers of action.” This argument won the day in the US Congress and with a majority of Americans, though it failed most everywhere else in the world, including with people whose governments had been persuaded to join the Coalition.

After regime elimination came a frantic but fruitless search to prove Cheney/Bush had been right about the “gathering storm,” but what they actually found was that for years Saddam’s WMD programs had been gathering dust. Then, as security began to deteriorate in most parts of the country, the Cheney/Bush team shifted ground to embrace three new rationales for the invasion: two based on national defense, the third being the “freedom and democracy” rationale.

The first new rationale was that the enemy resisting us in Iraq is the same as the enemy we declared war on the day after 9/11: terrorism. At his April 13, 2004 press conference, President Bush said, “the terrorist who takes hostages or plants a roadside bomb near Baghdad is serving the same ideology of murder that kills innocent people on trains in Madrid and murders children on buses in Jerusalem and blows up a nightclub in Bali and cuts the throat of a young reporter for being a Jew. We've seen the same ideology of murder in the killing of 241 marines in Beirut, the first attack on the World Trade Center, in the destruction of two embassies in Africa, in the attack on the U.S.S. Cole and in the merciless horror inflicted upon thousands of innocent men and women and children on September 11, 2001.”

This attempt to equate all Iraqi resistance to American occupation with terrorism improperly conflates two kinds of action which are fundamentally different from a moral standpoint: attacks against my enemy’s armed forces (road-side bombs near Baghdad, the Beirut attack, the attack on the Cole) is military action, while attacks against my own or my enemy’s civilian population (everything else Bush mentioned) is terrorism. It is incorrect to say that both kinds of attack are “serving the same ideology of murder,” because the ideology behind attacks on enemy soldiers is entirely different from the ideology behind attacks on the enemy’s civilian population. When a Palestinian blows himself up while standing next to an armed Israeli soldier, this is military action. When he blows himself up in a bus full of school children, it is terrorism.

There have been a number of terrorist acts (as I have defined them) in Iraq since the invasion. They may be mostly the work of non-Iraqi terrorist actors (i.e. al-Zarqawi) who have been attracted to that country like flies to fly-paper (a Pentagon image, I believe). The fact that terrorists have shown up in Iraq after the invasion is hardly a persuasive rationale for the invasion. The fact that they are now in Iraq is also not a persuasive rationale for us to remain in Iraq, since they will leave if we leave. They don’t care about Iraq. They care about us, and will follow us wherever we go.

Cheney/Bush’s second new rationale rests on a series of propositions that weaves in the third, “freedom and democracy,” rationale as well. It goes like this: a) the American people will not be truly secure until the creed of Jihad is defeated; b) this creed is bred in the streets, mosques and schools of Arab societies whose autocratic rulers frustrate their democratic aspirations; c) the way to defeat the creed is to replace monarchy and one-party rule with freedom and multi-party democracy in the Arab states; d) the way to do this is to establish freedom and democracy in Iraq whence it will spread (domino-like?) to surrounding Arab states.

A very useful thing about this rationale for Cheney/Bush is that it will take years to test it. A year after regime change in Iraq, things still look pretty much the same in matters political and ideological in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Iran. It is a bit worrisome that many more young people in these countries are now wearing Osama bin-Laden T-shirts than before the invasio, but we have to be patient. We’re still a year (or more…) from seeing a proper democracy set up in Iraq. Only after this will it be possible to start testing the validity of this particular domino theory.

Which brings us to the “freedom and democracy” rationale itself. The Weekly Standard and the right-wing core of America now maintain that this is the only rationale that ever really mattered, or was ever needed, to justify regime change. By contrast, the Administration didn’t really step up to this rationale until gathering storm became gathering dust.

The Deputy Secretary of War has offered a candid explanation of how this rationale muddle came about. “Freedom and democracy,” rather than WMD, was always Cheney/Bush’s real reason for the invasion of Iraq, according to Wolfowitz. However, “for bureaucratic reasons,” the White House decided to advance a national security rationale (i.e. WMD) to win Congressional approval for the invasion. We can guess this means that Colin Powell wouldn’t support an invasion based on “freedom and democracy.”

The effort to set up democratic institutions in Iraq began the day hostilities ceased in April, 2003. There have been no elections, and the June 30 transfer of “sovereignty” will not apply to internal security, national defense, foreign policy or the economy (including taxation and the use of oil revenues). An interim constitution has been signed by a number of leaders selected by the US, but key provisions are sharply contested by Ayatollah Sistani, the most influential Shiite in a country that is 60% Shiite. Sistani’s principal demand reportedly is that Islamic law (sharia) and courts should have exclusive jurisdiction over family law and women’s rights. It may turn out that a sovereign Iraqi government cannot succeed without Sistani’s support, and that Sistani will not give his support unless his position on the issue of sharia is accepted.

To most Americans, “freedom and democracy” means “freedom and democracy and a constitution with a bill of rights like ours.” Cheney/Bush are right when they say that most Arabs aspire to freedom and democracy. But they are wrong if they think most Arabs aspire to a bill of rights like ours. So it will surely be interesting to watch what happens to the Iraqi constitution as we go through the transition to Iraqi sovereignty. And if Sistani wins on sharia, it will be interesting to hear Cheney/Bush explain why women’s rights was never really an important of what they meant when they called for “freedom and democracy” in the Arab lands.

A Short Taxonomy of Surrender Monkeys

During the 1965-73 Vietnam War period, the American people could be divided into three groups: the first felt it was good policy for the USA to go to Vietnam in the first place, and good policy to stay there as long as it took to achieve the “freedom and democracy” objective (call this group “whatever it takes.”). The second group felt it had been a mistake to go to Vietnam in the first place, but that we could not leave now because this would be a demonstration of weakness and a betrayal of our allies (call them “quagmire”). The third group felt it was bad policy to stay any longer even if this meant surrender (“cut and run”).

After 1965, as the credibility of the rationales for the war declined while the body count rose, “whatever it takes” folks steadily defected to “quagmire,” then migrated on to “cut and run,” while some folks moved directly from “whatever it takes” to “cut and run.” At the same time, people like me who had started the war in “quagmire” were defecting to “cut and run.” Cheney/Bush are rightly wary of this political history lesson from Vietnam. The vehemence with which they and the core reject the Vietnam = Iraq equation shows just how wary they are.

In the Vietnam days, the “cut and run” crowd were known popularly as “cheeseburger-eating surrender monkeys” (cercopithecus surrendans pax nunc). Recently, to the horror of Cheney/Bush and “whatever it takes,” two new species of c. surrendans have appeared on the scene: cheese-eating surrender monkeys (c. surrendans gallicus) and paella-eating surrender monkeys (c. surrendans hispanensis). Many political taxonomists expect the appearance soon of other new species: green curry-eating surrender monkeys (c. surrendans thaiensis), kielbasa-eating surrender monkeys (c. surrendans polensis) and, most feared of all, borscht-eating surrender monkeys (c. surrendans russus).

The Agony and the Clarity

Ironically, the biggest difference between then and now will almost certainly turn out not to be the difference between Vietnam and Iraq, but the difference between Cheney/Bush and Johnson/Nixon.

The most telling moment for me in Fog of War was the audio replay of a phone conversation between Johnson and McNamara in which Johnson was responding to McNamara’s request for a further troop increase. Johnson says, “My answer is yes, but my judgment says no.” One would have hoped that McNamara would have responded by saying, “Mr. President, if your judgment says no, then your answer should be no, because the American people have a right to expect that the President will not make decisions against his better judgment.” But he didn’t.

The judgment in question, I think, was the judgment that the cost in lives of escalating the conflict was not worth the benefit either in relation to national security or freedom and democracy for the South Vietnamese. I have not read any of the Johnson biographies, but I can guess that by time LBJ decided not to run for re-election, he had realised he should have followed his judgment much earlier.

Cheney/Bush are, or course, determined to stay the course “for as long as it takes” to achieve freedom and democracy in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. While neither of them has publicly said that we should stay the course no matter what the cost in American lives, this is obviously the central question arising from the Vietnam experience. Well-trained politicians “don’t do hypotheticals,” so we shouldn’t expect Cheney/Bush or anyone around them to go there on this question, even or especially when it is posed by journalists or the Kerry campaign.

But if you listen to “whatever it takes,” they clearly do want to go there, and their answer is: “Yes, absolutely, we must stay the course no matter what the cost in American lives, because no cost in blood or treasure is too high to pay to bring freedom and democracy to societies whose rulers subject them to mass murder, rape, torture and mutilation. Along with America’s right to unchallenged, global military supremacy comes the moral obligation for America to use this military power unilaterally to uphold these principles wherever we must.”

So long as Cheney/Bush don’t have to answer the “how-many-lives” question, they can retain the posture of moral clarity on which they pride themselves, and which so delights the core. However, the core will be horrified if cracks appear in the wall of moral clarity and the fog of war begins to seep through. The most feared crack is the one through which it becomes morally legitimate and necessary to weigh means and ends, and worry about achieving the proper balance between the two. Once this genie slips through, moral clarity is shot, moral ambiguity is unleashed, and it will be Vietnam déjà vu all over again.

To this day “whatever it takes” despises LBJ and Nixon equally for cutting and running from Vietnam. They point out correctly that the USA was not defeated militarily by the Vietnamese enemy, but politically by its own failure of will, especially the will of leaders like LBJ and Nixon who, lacking moral clarity, sat in a fog of moral ambiguity and agonised over how many American lives were worth freedom and democracy in Vietnam. (I imagine LBJ agonised more than RMN.)

“Whatever it takes” also despises ordinary “quagmire” types like me who, if things get worse in Iraq, are liable to wobble, weaken, flip-flop, and turn “cut and run” in the same way as LBJ, RMN and the majority of Americans had done by 1973. They despise anyone who believes that no-matter-what-the-cost is an irresponsible approach to public policy, and that leaders who pursue it blindly will eventually put the nation into the kind of morally indefensible position epitomized in Vietnam by the policy of saving villages by destroying them. “Whatever it takes” knows that “quagmire” is out here getting ready to agonise, and that as the body-count rises in Iraq, some of us, and then more and more of us, will demand that our government abandon the cause of freedom and democracy for Iraqis on the grounds because it’s not worth it.

The Dangers of “Inaction”

C. surrendans gallicus is a French species that appeared on the scene in the fall of 2002. The idea of invading Iraq had been mooted by Cheney/Bush, and was taking withering criticism from James Baker and Brent Scowcroft in the op-ed pages. The Vice President chose this decisive moment to utter the clarion credo that “the dangers of inaction exceed the dangers of action” against Saddam Hussein.

Cheney is of course a grand master of straw. No serious critic of his regime-change-by-invasion proposal in the fall of 2002 was advocating a policy of inaction. Not American critics, not French critics, not Patagonian critics. No-one, nowhere was calling for inaction. C. gallicus was advocating a policy of continued containment of Saddam Hussein based on progressively more intrusive UN inspections. What Cheney really meant was that “the dangers of inspection exceed the dangers of invasion,” but to say it that way wouldn’t have had quite the ring he needed. So why not spin a little straw?

It is now clear that the policy of containment-by-inspections was working well, and that if we had continued the policy advocated by c. gallicus, Iraq today would be about as dangerous to Americans and the world as Syria. Furthermore, Iraq tomorrow would be about as dangerous as Libya is today.

Unlike Saddam’s Iraq, which has never instigated any terrorist activity outside its own borders (though it has waged plenty of conventional war across those borders), Moammar Gadhafi’s Libyan regmine carried out the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people aboard. The international response was containment-by-sanctions.

By 2001, after years of defiance, the Colonel had decided to sue for peace, rehabilitation and the lifting of sanctions. Gadhafi negotiated terms with the British, and by the middle of 2002 had agreed to pay the price demanded by the international community: acknowledgment of guilt for Lockerbie, payment of compensation to the families of the victims, and renunciation of WMD. (A message to the core: Gadhafi’s change of heart preceded the invasion of Iraq by at least two years, so please do not claim it as a first fruit of that policy.)

So much for the “dangers of inaction.” As for the “dangers of action,” it is now clear that these included not only the dangers in Iraq: 828 coalition fatalities and thousands of Iraqi fatalities to date, and the growing danger that liberation-turned-occupation will involve American soldiers in urban warfare against an ever-increasing proportion of the Iraqi people for many, many months to come. Cheney’s “dangers of action” also now include many things that have happened outside of Iraq as a consequence of that “action.” These include:

· Madrid commuters experienced one of the dangers of action as they rode to work on March 11, 2004. And if the Vice President believes that London is safer as a result of the invasion, he should spend an afternoon at the recruiting stands that jihadist radicals have set up on Dunstable Road in the suburb of Luton. Business is reportedly brisk, and it takes little imagination to grasp that the same scene is unfolding in thousands of cities throughout Europe and the Middle East.

· The invasion of Iraq has made Afghanistan a more dangerous place than it would have been. If the 130,000 US troops now tied down in Iraq had been deployed to Afghanistan instead, the Taliban would not have regained control over 1/3 of the country’s provinces, and the other 2/3 of the country outside of Kabul would not once again be ruled by warlords.

· The invasion of Iraq has made North Korea a more dangerous place. The diplomatic capital which the Administration spent to keep China on-side in Security Council votes for Iraq invasion would have been better spent pressuring the Chinese to pressure the North Koreans to come to their senses, as would the time and energy of our government’s diplomatic and national security personnel. Since this Administration took office, the North Koreans nuclear weapons count has gone from zero to 4-8, and by 2007 they will be producing six new weapons each year.

· The invasion of Iraq has made the Darfur region of Sudan a more dangerous place than it would have been. It is becoming clear that the (Arab) regime that rules Sudan from Khartoum is in the early stages of a campaign of genocide against the four million blacks who live in Darfur. As a consequence of the Iraq invasion, the USA does not have a spare division to prevent this, and this danger of genocide will therefore have to be ignored.

· Health experts have estimated that a $25 billion malaria prevention program in Africa would save five million lives by 2015. If we also include money to fight tuberculosis, measles, dysentery and cholera, we could probably save fifteen million lives for less than the first $87 billion instalment on the cost of Iraqi freedom. Africa is today a far more dangerous place to live in than it would have been if we had spent this money there rather than in Iraq.

The Vice President is now fond of tarring John Kerry with the brush of c. gallicus by saying that if Kerry were President, Saddam would still be ruling the roost in Baghdad. This is a hard hypothetical to do, but since Cheney started it, I will take up the challenge. For purposes of argument, let’s assume that if Kerry had been president instead of Bush from January 2001, Kerry’s policy towards Saddam would have been the one advocated by c. gallicus.

This policy would have been one of progressively more intrusive inspections by Hans Blix’s UNMOVIC team of experts. The policy would have been that Iraqi obstruction or harassment of UNOMOVIC of any kind would have resulted in the immediate introduction into Iraq of a large UN military force to accompany UNMOVIC in its work. The policy would have been that each further incident of Iraqi obstruction or harassment of the UN presence would lead to an immediate further increase in the size of the UN force. The policy would have been that the any use of arms against the UN presence by any Iraqis, uniformed or not, would have triggered an invasion and regime change.

Who knows if Saddam would still be ruling Baghdad if we had pursued this policy? But if he were, he would be ruling on our terms. And if he weren’t, he would have been eliminated by the same UN coalition that threw him out of Kuwait in 1991. And the world would be less dangerous than it is.

Before leaving c. gallicus, a word on genocide. While we have not found WMD in Iraq, we have found mass graves that testify to Saddam’s genocidal/sectarian brutality in suppressing Kurdish and Shiite uprisings in 1991-2. However, I have not read any reports suggesting that since 1992, having suppressed the uprisings, Saddam’s brutality against his own people has exceeded that of other thugs, for example rulers in places like Burma, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Zimbabwe and Cuba, who cling to power with one-party rule, a ruthless state security apparatus, imprisonment and torture of dissenters, and suppression of press freedom.

The core’s assertion that further genocide in Iraq was one of the “dangers of inaction,” and that the Cheney/Bush invasion was a war to prevent genocide, is totally without merit. If anything, the invasion was a war of retribution. The moral basis for these two kinds of war is entirely different. A war to prevent genocide is a moral imperative, whereas a war of retribution is at best a just war, and by no stretch a moral imperative. We must therefore reject the core’s assertion that c. gallicus is morally culpable for turning a blind eye (again) to genocide. And if you think I’m spinning straw, read the Weekly Standard.

Appeasement

The Spanish species c. surrendans hispanensis appeared in March 2004 following the murder of 191 commuters in Madrid by a cell of Moroccan al-Quaeda sympathisers. Following the blasts, the group issued a statement saying their action was retribution for Spain’s support of the Iraq invasion. A few days after the bombings the Aznar government was defeated in a national election. The new Prime Minister immediately announced that Spanish troops would quickly be withdrawn from Iraq.

The core’s outrage at c. hispanensis is founded on a charge of appeasement. But facts are friendly. In the winter of 2002, some 90% of the Spanish people firmly opposed Aznar’s decision to join the US invasion coalition. They thought it was a bad policy, a distraction from the war on jihadist terror, a policy that would make Spain and the world less safe, not safer. When the Spanish rejected Aznar at the polls, they were reaffirming their position that the invasion had been a mistake. No WMD had been found, and the 191 dead and 2000 wounded Spaniards were ample evidence that the policy had not made Spain safer.

My turn for a hypothetical: if a terrorist threatens to blow up a bus full of school children if I don’t stop beating my wife, is it appeasement if I decide to stop beating my wife? The answer is “yes” if I think there’s nothing wrong with beating my wife, but stop beating her because I’m afraid the terrorist will come after me when he’s finished with the school children. But the answer is “no” if I think it is wrong to beat my wife, and decide to stop for that reason. My dictionary defines “appeasement” as “the policy of granting concessions to potential enemies to maintain peace.” If I grant a concession that my enemy is demanding because I decide it is the right thing to do, peace or no peace, this is not appeasement. Conversely, if I refuse to do what I think is right because my enemy is demanding that I do it, I am a fool.

A large majority of the Spanish people always thought the invasion of Iraq was the wrong thing to do, and they still do. The core disagrees with the Spanish majority on this point, but they cannot legitimately level the charge of appeasement against those Spanish who rejected Aznar because they think his policy was wrong. The charge can fairly be levelled at those Spanish who had neutral or supportive views on the Iraq war, but who voted against Aznar in the hope that the Moroccan jihadists would then leave them alone. But this applies to a small minority of the Spanish people.

Questions Before Entering the Polling Booth

In March of 1968, Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election. I think he did this because he no longer believed that the goals of the war were worth the cost. I think he also understood that he could not seek re-election on a new policy – a policy of withdrawal, surrender, “peace-with-honor” or whatever you want to call it – because he had the wisdom and honesty to realise that he could not ask the American people to trust the judgment of those who had gotten the country into this mess to get them out of it.

Since Cheney/Bush show no signs of imitating LBJ’s wobble, Americans have the opportunity to join a new group that was not available in 1968 after LBJ’s withdrawal. It is called “cut and replace” and membership is for those of us who are currently in “quagmire” but not yet ready to join “cut and run.” The credo of “cut and replace” is: “to get us out of this mess, cut the people whose judgment got us into it, and replace them with people in whom we have more trust.”

Between now and Election Day, in addition to hearing a lot more from Cheney/Bush and the Weekly Standard about how Saddam Hussein would still rule Baghdad if Kerry were president, we will hear other nonsense from them:

• A vote for Kerry is a vote for Osama bin Laden. Even if you have no confidence in the team that crafted the war policy, it would be irresponsible to vote them out of office because this will reward terrorism.

This argument will be a lot harder to dismiss if al-Quaeda kills another 3000 Americans in simultaneous poison gas attacks in Grand Central Station, Union Station (Chicago) and Union Station (DC) the week before the election. But even after another such horror, the argument should be rejected, and for the same reason that we reject the core’s charge that c. hispanensis was guilty of appeasement: to those of us who believe that Cheney/Bush’s foreign and anti-terror policy judgment has been hopelessly discredited by the Iraq adventure, the fact that al Quaeda wants Cheney/Bush out of office is no reason to keep them in.

• A vote for Kerry is a vote against our troops in Iraq and against the cause for which they are prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice. Even if you have no confidence in the team that crafted the war policy, it would be irresponsible to vote them out of office, because this will undermine the morale of our troops, and give comfort to our enemy.

The merit of this argument will depend very much on Kerry’s position and on the military situation on Election Day. If the battle of Fallujah is entering the decisive phase, and Kerry is fool enough to say “if I am elected President, I will cut and run from Iraq ASAP,” the argument will be valid. But somehow I don’t think this is what Kerry would say in those circumstances.

Kerry turned c. pax nunc in 1970 after fighting in Vietnam. I imagine he would not have turned if he had believed that victory was within sight. Presumably he believed that victory was nowhere in sight, and that freedom and democracy for the South Vietnamese was not worth the enormous price the American and Vietnamese people would have to pay to stay the course to achieve it. Kerry had participated in the agony of the war, and so had a much clearer understanding of that price than those of us who avoided Vietnam by going to graduate school or serving in the Air National Guard.

On November 2, my vote will go to Kerry because I know he will wobble on Iraq if God forbid the time should come when it is the right thing do so, and because I know that Cheney/Bush will not. If the military situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate after Kerry is elected, and an ever-increasing portion of the population take up arms or rocks or suicide belts against us, Kerry will agonize. He will struggle to weigh means against ends, to get the right balance. His head will hurt.

On the other hand, if Cheney/Bush are re-elected and things go from bad to worse, they will not agonize and their heads will not hurt. They will blindly pursue “whatever it takes” until either they have saved Iraq by destroying it, or a rebellion within the Republican party brings them down.

This will not be moral clarity. It will be dereliction of duty.