Great Powers Read online

  First, it forces us to focus on bad outcomes to be prevented rather than good ones to be promoted, because in our demonizing of enemies we set the bar on good outcomes far too high. Now, it’s not only that democracy must prevail (and fast, mister!) but that secular democracy must prevail, otherwise we’re offering our enemies at best a partial victory in any vaguely Islamist government we let come to power and at worst a political back door for future radicalization. We presume that they must be adapted to our form of government and not our government adapted to their ways! In my mind, America should be dedicated to the goal of encouraging secular democracy around the world, but committed to forcing its appearance nowhere. Democracy is a dish best served cold.

  And when we obsess over the friction (political radicalization), we tend to underestimate, as well as make too little effort to facilitate, globalization’s larger forces (e.g., the Middle East’s growing financial connectivity with the global economy), preferring to economically isolate our enemies rather than let others—obviously less trustworthy than ourselves for wanting trade and investment connectivity in the first place—step into that void, generating potential political leverage down the road. So if Iran is a member of the “axis of evil,” then any economic connectivity with Iran sought by Russia, India, and China is also inherently evil—no matter what their trade requirements may be (like India and China having their energy demand double in the next generation). What does that get us downstream? A demonized Iran with its finger on the bomb and the only leverage we possess is secondhand, through actors we’ve long chided for such connectivity in the first place. In short, we need to place more faith in markets and realize that there are many possible paths to political pluralism (especially in a Middle Eastern regime where political leaders are actually voted out of office on a regular basis).

  The demonization of enemies lends itself to the hyping of victories, like toppling Saddam’s regime while letting the first few months of the postwar reconstruction pass unnoticed in the celebration, or our subsequent fixation on Saddam’s capture and trial while the insurgency blossomed into a full-fledged civil war. It also leads us down the path of emotional investment in our enemies’ propaganda, allowing them to drive our responses to their latest “outrage.” It encourages such outrages because our enemies justifiably feel empowered by them, like al-Zarqawi’s many atrocities in Iraq or Ahmadinejad’s calculated inflammatory rhetoric. Cede these “demons” enough of your anger and they’ll get to time your missile strikes at their convenience while you play the part of Pavlov’s jerk. And when we match such fiery rhetoric? Well, that gets you statements like “dead or alive” and “axis of evil,” and those declarations often come back to haunt you when the time for deal-making arrives—as it always does.

  Globalization is all about connectivity, and connectivity comes as a result of deals made—not broken. When Bush-Cheney indulged our demonizing tendencies (doesn’t America always go to war against evil?), we at once gave them frightening writ to walk away from past deals that might limit our ability to battle evil (like the ABM Treaty) and to turn down whatever new offers came down the pike from the evildoers themselves (like Iran’s early offers to help us against both the Taliban and Saddam, its two worst regional enemies at the time). Over time, that attitude not only limits our potential pool of allies but raises the price for co-opting current foes as well. Demonization also encourages our general intransigence against socializing any one problem, because in seeking to spread the pain we must inevitably deal with actors we consider evil, like Iran on the question of postwar Iraq. Thus demonization denies our ability to regionalize what must be regionalized and globalize what must be globalized, because when you take on evil, you simply don’t want to risk your enemy escaping through the deal-making of others. Extend that more broadly and you can see why, although Bush often liked to compare himself to Harry Truman, he made no attempts to match that president’s record for establishing new international organizations in response to a dramatically changed security environment and the prospect of persistent conflict with a global foe.

  The most mindless form of demonization across the Bush-Cheney years was the White House’s tendency to conflate radical Shia entities with radical Sunni ones, as if distinguishing between the two had no tactical value. The hubris on that one was simply too monumental to calculate, but alas, several of Bush’s neocons (most notably, Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith) had, in their youth, so internalized the historical lessons of Germany’s Nazi period that Shia Iran and Sunni al Qaeda were casually lumped together in the same demonic stew of “Islamofascism.” The nonnegotiability of such charges was arguably the prime reason why Bush-Cheney never yielded to the many calls for some sort of regional security dialogue on Iraq, preferring the bilateral, shuttle-style diplomacy that kept America’s talking points on the evening news but relegated our secretaries of state to playing a manipulative version of “telephone” as they hopped from capital to capital. Yes, this process kept us in control, but it also kept us tied down in a diplomatic quagmire of our own making.

  Bush-Cheney’s demonization of our enemies also yielded the bitter fruit of intense anti-Americanism not merely throughout the Middle East but to a frightening degree throughout the world. In the summer of 2007 I traveled to Australia to speak at a regional meeting of the World Economic Forum populated primarily by senior officials of the Australian government. Figuring I couldn’t find, even at this late date, a more congenial audience for my message of how to fix America’s institutional approaches to the long war, I nonetheless ran into more anti-American sentiment there than I have subsequently met, several times, in the Middle East! What that told me was this: It’s one thing to disappoint those whom you’ve often disappointed, but quite another to disappoint your closest friends.

  But we did worse than disappoint our closest friends; we tainted them with our own shame through the atrocities that we, in our confident righteousness, committed against the demons of our naming. By giving in to the demands of so many pundits and strategists that we “see our enemies for who they are,” the Bush administration created the Manichaean atmosphere that encouraged the torture of prisoners in facilities like Abu Ghraib, thus turbocharging the region’s already profound instinct to assume that America’s “evil” knows no bounds and thus deserves no boundaries in reply. This is where indulging our anger creates deadly friction for our troops. In Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Thomas Ricks’s masterful account of America’s difficult occupation of Iraq, there are two quotes from U.S. military personnel that sum up this danger. The first comes from a young Marine who, upon seeing the first news descriptions of the scandal, complained to his general that “some assholes have just lost the war for us.” James Mattis, that Marine general, would state a year later that “when you lose the moral high ground, you lose it all.”

  Greed, Leading to the Concentration of War Powers

  The Bush administration’s connections with the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam administration of Gerald Ford were many, but the two most important ones were Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, both of whom served in that White House as chief of staff, with Rumsfeld later running the Pentagon for the first time. As Charlie Savage notes in his 2008 book Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, their timing was “terrible,” for they had reached the pinnacle of executive power “just as those powers had come under fierce assault.” In subsequent years, Cheney would describe the Ford administration as a “low point” of presidential power, and once he had his chance to correct what he characterized as the “unwise compromises” that had weakened the presidency, he set about in 2001 to reverse this longtime “erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job.” What ensued was an unprecedented power grab by the White House, under the excuse that America is not just a nation at war but a nation at war for its very surv
ival.

  Here’s where we begin to see the interplay of these deadly sins. The lust for primacy requires a strong United States helmed by a supremely empowered president able to forgo reliance on allies unwilling to go all the way. Such a concentration of power is only possible under conditions of war, and not just any war, but one of survival, meaning our enemies can be cast as the most extreme forms of evil. Once these dynamics are set in motion, the president’s greed for power should be encouraged to the greatest extent possible, taking advantage of the nation’s unleashed anger, for who knows when such conditions will once again arise in a long war against violent extremists? Cast in such a light, none of these acts are perceived by their instigators as cardinal sins but rather as cardinal virtues blessed by historical circumstance: We are doing what’s right and what’s good at the only moment when such deeds are permissible. Little wonder this administration remained in constant political campaign mode throughout its first term.

  Of course, all revolutions are justified in this manner by men who perceive their historical vision to be clearer than that of all others in their time. This is how America was born and, on regular occasion, this is how America is renewed. But the greater danger is equally clear. In the pursuit of a critical mass of authority to render great change, these wielders of great power often lose their ability to listen to the criticism of the masses. Their focus on the one danger blinds them to all others—again, especially when the justification is national survival. For once that mantra is invoked, all discipline goes out the window and excess becomes the order of the day. Worse, those who argue for such a free hand in the short run, ostensibly to preserve it over the long run, are often forced to extend the sense of emergency ad infinitum in a vain attempt to codify its use for those times when emergencies are not easily declared. Since such writ is typically retracted during normal times, those who wish to preserve it inevitably turn to secrecy—that killer of transparency. And once that happens, the vicious cycle is set.

  Secrets beget secrets, leaving less and less of the leader’s grand strategy transparent to the public, which is increasingly left to its own imagination to fill in the blanks. Over time, after being force-fed slogans that do not inform and explanations whose “truthiness” is subject to easy parody, the public becomes divided between believers and unbelievers, with rationality both despised and in short supply. There is no surer sign of this regression than when “infotainers”—especially comedians—conduct the most gratifying public discourse on current events, for when Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are among the most trusted names in broadcast news, America has lost its moral center of gravity and conspiracy theorists rank equally with serious grand strategists in the collective public mind. The result? Even what little grand strategy is actually articulated by the secretive leadership is instinctively dismissed by half the population, making it dead on arrival. As for the rest of the world? Forget about it!

  Where this aggressive approach has damaged America’s global leadership most has been in the area of international law—specifically, the Bush administration’s treatment of suspected terrorists. Here again, Bush-Cheney tried to have their cake (insisting America is at war) and eat it too (declaring our enemies to be “unlawful combatants” and therefore undeserving of international legal protections historically afforded prisoners of war). Meanwhile, the condemnations have continuously rolled in from all corners of the globe regarding a host of questionable American practices either pioneered or resurrected by the Bush administration: the suspension of habeas corpus; the holding of ghost detainees who disappeared into the paperwork; the ordering of “extraordinary renditions,” by which suspects are deposited with allies who have long histories of torture; and the extraction of confessions by methods right out of the Spanish Inquisition (as well as U.S. military counterinsurgency operations in the Philippines more than a century ago). Thus, in far too many ways, the Bush administration purposefully kept America mired in its post-9/11, Jack Bauer phase of busting heads and torturing bad guys to get the truth. Until we move beyond that us-against-the-world mindset, we’ll never achieve the us-plus-the-world cooperation—much less competency—to effectively police our common enemies. Our anger never quite sated means that our grand strategy’s higher aspirations will never be fully stated by leaders more interested in preserving their power than in defeating our enemies.

  Pride, Leading to Avoidable Postwar Failures

  Already in print are numerous highly praised journalistic accounts of how the Bush administration systematically thwarted attempts throughout the U.S. government to plan adequately for the postwar occupation of Iraq, even going so far as to ignore—and in a few key instances squelch—the plethora of warnings from across the national security establishment of what would inevitably follow (e.g., looting, insurgency, ethnic cleansing, the attraction of jihadists from abroad, soft partition). In his 2008 political memoir, the much-vilified Douglas Feith makes a convincing case for a more nuanced diagnosis: The Bush administration’s interagency process, by law managed through the National Security Council in the person of the president’s national security adviser (then Condoleezza Rice), was dysfunctional in the extreme, largely because of Rice’s personal management style. Having learned the role as a prized protégée of national security adviser Brent Scowcroft during the earlier presidency of George H. W. Bush, Rice had a strong preference for preventing State- Defense policy clashes from reaching the president, and this was the main problem (Scowcroft had managed the NSC in this manner out of deference to the senior Bush’s distaste for such open conflict during the Reagan administration). By purposefully crafting policy compromises that combined clearly contradictory stances, Rice often presented to President Bush, for his approval, “decisions” so middling in content and so muddled in potential execution that all the major players seated at the policy table were able to walk away from these exercises convinced they could go their own bureaucratic way.

  The result, at least to anyone familiar with the turf-conscious workings of executive branch departments, was painfully predictable: a near-total lack of interagency coordination among departments whose competing agendas often worked—sometimes stunningly so—at cross-purposes to one another. The main beneficiary of such confusion, even as implied by Feith’s often self-serving account, would appear to have been Vice President Cheney’s office, which, by all accounts, did play an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes role in quietly shooting down policies (and policymakers) it did not approve of (more on that point later) and orchestrated much of the administration’s—in the words of former press secretary Scott McClellan—“truth shading” sales job to Congress and the American public on the decision to invade Iraq (a show of propaganda force later matched by the Pentagon’s clever marshaling of retired flag officers for mass media appearances in which they blessed the administration’s apparent progress in stabilizing Iraq in the early postwar months).

  Tragically, virtually all of what subsequently transpired in Iraq was preventable, because policymakers and experts had significant recent historical experience from which to draw, as did the military in charge. Besides our previous experience in Iraq itself (the temporary occupation of Kurdish Iraq and the humanitarian operations there following Desert Storm), there were similar nation-building and postconflict relief efforts in Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. It was therefore inexcusable that anyone involved in planning and executing Saddam’s toppling should have been under the delusion that our responsibility ended with mere liberation.

  Some, like onetime neoconservative Francis Fukuyama, excuse the neocons’ false assumptions of a “cakewalk” on their bad reading of history, specifically the ease with which Eastern Europe threw off Soviet-style tyranny at the end of the Cold War. Other examples cited as influencing their thinking include Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982 (where liberators were indeed welcomed by local Shia with flowers), Kurdish and Shia resistance to Saddam’s rule following the first Gulf war, and
the ease with which the Taliban were ejected from Afghanistan as a result of our coordinated efforts with Northern Alliance forces. Then there is the deeply conflicted role of the Iraqi expatriates who were more than willing to see our decisive victory followed up by an incoherent occupation, because it fit with their own particular plans for Kurdish separatism, Shia domination, and dreams of personal rule. Nor should we be surprised that the most prominent Shia “external,” Ahmed Chalabi, was in cahoots with Tehran, feeding them intelligence and acting as their influencer in our decision-making. To expect Iran not to have a postwar plan for their next-door neighbor was idealistic in the extreme. Our real shame should come in realizing, however, that Tehran’s plans were more comprehensive and realistic than our own.

  While stipulating all these causes, I don’t believe, in the end, that Bush-Cheney or the neocons were under any serious illusions about how hard the occupation would be. They simply chose to ignore the responsibility for the reasons already cited: America’s primacy must be preserved, presidential prerogatives must be protected, and any accommodation of evil must be avoided at all costs. As Thomas Ricks observes, “What Bush did was tear down the goalposts at halftime in the game.” So no, Bush-Cheney would not be submitting their Big Bang strategy for UN approval, nor would they share control of the occupation with other great powers. The White House would deny effective interagency cooperation between Defense and State by favoring the former’s penchant for “overwhelming force” (the Powell Doctrine) at the expense of the latter’s argument for overwhelming responsibility (Colin Powell again, this time with his “Pottery Barn rule,” which says, “If you break it, you own it”). Simply put, it’s not a quagmire if you refuse responsibility. More cynically, it’s not Vietnam if your ultimate goal was to exploit our failures in postwar Iraq as a springboard to follow-on war with Iran—arguably the Cheney “doctrine” all along.