Hi all; Interesting article. The first paragraph spells out the argument:
Imagine for a moment that you're President George W. Bush. At some point in the next several months you will have to decide whether to overthrow Saddam Hussein--not just to threaten and saber-rattle and hope something gives, but actually to pull the trigger on what could be a very costly and risky military venture. How precisely will you make that decision? It will almost certainly come down to a choice between which of two groups of advisers you choose to believe. One side is comprised of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, most of the career military, nearly every Middle East expert at the State Department, and the vast majority of intelligence analysts and CIA operations officers who know the region. These folks generally think that the idea of attacking Saddam is questionable at best, reckless at worst. On the other side are a few dozen neoconservative think tank scholars and defense policy intellectuals. Few of them have any serious knowledge of the Arab world, the Middle East, or Islam. Fewer still have served in the armed forces. In other words, to give the go-ahead to war with Iraq, you'd have to decide that the experienced hands are all wrong, and throw in your lot with a bunch of hot-headed ideologues. Oh, and one other thing: The last few times, the ideologues have turned out to be right. [Bilow: Cool, the logic is spelled out in the first paragraph.]
To anyone who's followed foreign affairs for the last couple of decades, the names of the neoconservative hawks will be familiar--or, if you're a liberal, chilling. ... Most are acolytes of Perle, and also Jewish, passionately pro-Israel, and pro-Likud. And all are united by a shared idea: that America should be unafraid to use its military power early and often to advance its interests and values. [Bilow: Or is it Israel's interests that they wish to advance?] It is an idea that infuriates most members of the national security establishment at the Pentagon, State, and the CIA, who believe that America's military force should be used rarely and only as a last resort, preferably in concert with allies. [Bilow: You can certainly see how Israel ended up as a pariah nation. Ignore your allies' needs and desires and that's where you end up.]
During the Gulf War, the hawks urged President George H.W. Bush to ignore the limits of his U.N. mandate, roll the tanks into Baghdad, and bring down Saddam Hussein's regime. Bush sided with the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell (the embodiment of the establishment, who had advised Bush against liberating Kuwait), and left Saddam in power. The neocons have been saying I told you so ever since. [This is a case of arm chair quarterbacking. It wasn't possible for the coalition that was assembled to go to Baghdad. If Bush had dumped the coalition and gone alone, he would have ended up without even the partially effective blockade against Iraq now. Since the general public is unaware of what agreements the US had to make in order to get, for instance, Saudi permission to use their territory we really are not in a position to understand what restrictions the Bush administration was operating under. The neocons wouldn't want the US to sully its image by violating its word to an ally, now would they?
...
Richard Perle could not be more different. Dubbed the "Prince of Darkness" during the Reagan years for his hatred of the Soviets and his eagerness to confront them, he radiates a cool, effortless intelligence which is both cocky and oracular. He doesn't know many of the details about Iraq or the Middle East. But, he works you like a used car salesman, avoiding questions he'd prefer not to or cannot answer, responding to uncomfortable queries (what if Saddam's Republican Guards stay loyal to him and fight?) with best case scenarios (don't worry, they won't). When asked what would happen if America encountered an embittered civilian population after fighting a grisly battle for Baghdad, Perle replied with a question: "Suppose the Iraqis are dancing in the streets after Saddam is gone?" His arguments tend to rest on abstractions and mechanistic reasoning: Saddam is bad. Ergo the Iraqis hate Saddam. Ergo they like us. That might be true. But if such arguments were chairs you would hear them creaking beneath you. [Bilow: The only thing worse than letting the professionals run foreign policy is letting the amateurs do it.]
...
This presented a question that most hawks had not seriously considered. Namely, how exactly to bring down Saddam. The war in Afghanistan offered a compelling model. With a combination of precision assault from the air, special forces on the ground, and the aid of local insurgents ready to do some of the heavy lifting, the U.S. broke the Taliban with surprising ease. In fact, the Afghan campaign bore a striking resemblance to a plan that Iraq hawks had been pitching to Washington for several years: Arm the Iraqi opposition and let them advance on Saddam under cover of U.S. air power. This plan no longer seemed so far-fetched. It didn't require the lengthy pre-positioning of forces that the Joint Chiefs demanded. And it allowed for quick action, before the anger and intensity of September 11 faded.
But the closer officials and military experts looked at the plans that the hawks put forward, the more holes they found. For while the hawks possess a real talent for crafting bold theories, the same cannot be said for their ability to execute in the real world. A striking example on the diplomatic front was their strategy, eagerly adopted by the president, of not engaging in peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians. Such efforts, the hawks reasoned, were not worth the political capital and would only detract from bigger priorities like bringing down Saddam. The result, however, is that the U.S. was not there to keep the violence from spinning out of control. The fallout from the bloodletting has almost certainly delayed the war with Iraq that the hawks had hoped to be waging by now. [Bilow: The argument from the neoconservatives is a classic simplification of a complex situation. This is where amateurs make foreign policy into national disasters.]
...
Part of this difference of opinion stems from the starkly different concepts of warfare held by the hawks and the military. Hawks envision a quicker, more agile, make-it-up-on-the-fly model of warfare--one which actually showed itself rather well in Afghanistan. Simply put, they don't subscribe to the Powell Doctrine. But that's not all that's in play. The hawks' first priority is not how it is done or even that it is done right--it is ensuring that the opportunity to finish off Saddam does not, once again, slip away. More than anything else, they are animated by the desire to get America into the fight and committed, even if that means doing so without the full commitment of manpower and military hardware that may eventually prove necessary or fully apprising the American people of what they may be getting into. [Bilow: The military still remembers Vietnam. Going into a war on the opposite ends of the earth with no allies and with your eyes closed to the real costs is an invitation to a national disaster.] And that is what has the uniformed services nervous: that the civilians at the Pentagon and the White House may bow to the hawks' wishes and attempt to do this on the cheap. "The fear that a lot of us have is that a really honest debate is not being conducted," says a recently retired career officer with experience working the Iraq file. "There's a sense among a number of us that the American public doesn't understand the party they're being invited to. This is going to cost big bucks. There's going to be lots of bad things going to happen. A lot of terrible things you're going to see on TV."
Hope Is Not A Plan
Another terrible thing critics worry about is that attacking Saddam might rattle Arab populations in nearby countries, to the point where regimes in Egypt, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia could fall. The hawks insist that any instability will be fleeting and easily weathered, and that a demonstration of American resolve will firm up wobbly allies. Again, we are in best-case-scenario land here. Press the point further, and the hawks do a clever bit of intellectual jujitsu, insisting that it would be a good thing if the repressive governments of Egypt or Saudi Arabia fell. "Mubarak is no great shakes," says Perle of the Egyptian president. "Surely we can do better than Mubarak." I put the same question to Perle's colleague from the Reagan administration and fellow hawk, Ken Adelman. Did he think wobbly or upended regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia were worth the price of removing Saddam? "All the better if you ask me."
These neoconservatives are not just being glib. They see toppling Saddam as the first domino to fall, with other corrupt Middle Eastern regimes following--just as the fall of the Berlin Wall was followed by the collapse of communism. [Bilow: Eastern Europe fell to Democracy because it had models for Democracy that were visible across state (i.e. East and West Germany) borders between essentially identical nations (i.e. the German people). The people in East Germany damn well knew that Democracy worked and that it was a wonderful thing. They were religiously and culturally European. This is not what is going on in the Middle East. To get the same situation in the Middle East, we have to nurture the Democracies that will eventually grow in places like Egypt. After the Libyans, Syrians and Iraqis see the Egyptians becoming wealthier and more powerful through Democracy, they will want to have the same thing. The younger generations will make the revolutions just as they did in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Eastern Europe was not bombed into becoming Democratic. They were "envied" into doing it. The same applies to Vietnam and China, who's populations envied the Singapore and US Vietnamese. This is how Democracy spreads, not through killing people. When we have to fight, we should fight, but this is not a case where we have to fight.]
....
Here, as in so many other cases, the hawks have an amazing vision, but a deeply flawed grasp of how to act operationally and in the moment. It may not be in our long-term interests to ally ourselves with corrupt authoritarian governments in the Arab world. But it's quite possible that these governments, which are at least nominal allies of the U.S., will be replaced by corrupt authoritarian regimes that hate us. Moreover, the U.S. military understandably does not want Saudi Arabia disintegrating at its rear while it's in the midst of an operation in Iraq. [Bilow: How much of a disaster would it be for the US to have its lines of communications and supply to its forces in Iraq cut by a full scale civil war in Saudi Arabia? The consequences boggle the mind. What would it do for US interests if we had to surrender our forces in Iraq? No, the way to convert the Middle East is not through dangerous and ill thought-out military operations, but instead by simply waiting and letting envy work its invisible magic.
...
It's difficult to imagine that the establishment and national security bureaucracies would have brought us to our current and correct focus on Iraq. But it's even more clear that the hawks' record of breezy planning, reckless prediction, and indifferent fidelity to the truth makes them unfit to be the ones in control of how the job gets done. The hawks have a vision. But as the folks in uniform are so fond of saying, "Hope is not a plan." Getting rid of Saddam really is necessary. But it has to be done right. So, Mr. President, when the time comes for you to make a decision about Iraq, talk with Paul Wolfowitz and let him tell you what the goal should be. Escort him to the door and lock it behind you. Then sit down for a serious talk with Colin Powell.
washingtonmonthly.com
We did not win the cold war through military force. The casualties the Afghans inflicted on the Russians in Afghanistan were 5x smaller than the casualties we took in Vietnam, though we were in Vietnam a lot longer than they were in Afghanistan. No, the way that China and Vietnam were put onto roads that inevitably led and continue to lead to their democratization was through simple human envy of living standards. This same action is happening in the Middle East, but it is happening too slowly for many people to appreciate the changes that have been made. Iran is probably the best example, but there are others.
Our cause is just and therefore time is on our side. Unlike Hitler or Napoleon, these nations that are now our enemies will eventually fall peacefully into our hands like ripe fruit when the time is right. This is what Osama bin Laden saw and knew, and this is why Osama tried to get us in a war against the Arabs.
The primary use of the military during the Cold War was protecting our allies from the Soviet Union's military. The primary use of the military during the "3rd millennium crusades" should be to prevent militaristic states from using military force to take over neighboring states. This is what got Hitler started on the road to disaster, and we nipped the same thing in the bud with Iraq in Kuwait. When Afghanistan got in our face we tipped over there government. These are correct uses of the military.
-- Carl@giveenvyachance.com |
