http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?020401fa_FACT1
The New Yorker
THE NEXT WORLD ORDER
by NICHOLAS LEMANN
The Bush Administration may have a brand-new doctrine of power.
Issue of 2002-04-01
Posted 2002-03-25
When there is a change of command-and not just in government-the new people
often persuade themselves that the old people were much worse than anyone
suspected. This feeling seems especially intense in the Bush
Administration, perhaps because Bill Clinton has been bracketed by a
father-son team. It's easy for people in the Administration to believe
that, after an unfortunate eight-year interlude, the Bush family has
resumed its governance-and about time, too.
The Bush Administration's sense that the Clinton years were a waste, or
worse, is strongest in the realms of foreign policy and military affairs.
Republicans tend to regard Democrats as untrustworthy in defense and
foreign policy, anyway, in ways that coincide with what people think of as
Clinton's weak points: an eagerness to please, a lack of discipline.
Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national-security adviser, wrote an article in
Foreign Affairs two years ago in which she contemptuously accused Clinton
of "an extraordinary neglect of the fiduciary responsibilities of the
commander in chief." Most of the top figures in foreign affairs in this
Administration also served under the President's father. They took office
last year, after what they regard as eight years of small-time flyswatting
by Clinton, thinking that they were picking up where they'd left off.
Not long ago, I had lunch with-sorry!-a senior Administration
foreign-policy official, at a restaurant in Washington called the Oval
Room. Early in the lunch, he handed me a twenty-seven- page report, whose
cover bore the seal of the Department of Defense, an outline map of the
world, and these words:
Defense Strategy for the 1990s:
The Regional Defense Strategy
Secretary of Defense
Dick Cheney
January 1993
One of the difficulties of working at the highest level of government is
communicating its drama. Actors, professional athletes, and even elected
politicians train for years, go through a great winnowing, and then perform
publicly. People who have titles like Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense
are just as ambitious and competitive, have worked just as long and hard,
and are often playing for even higher stakes-but what they do all day is go
to meetings and write memos and prepare briefings. How, possibly, to
explain that some of the documents, including the report that the senior
official handed me, which was physically indistinguishable from a
high-school term paper, represent the government version of playing
Carnegie Hall?
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dick Cheney, then the Secretary of
Defense, set up a "shop," as they say, to think about American foreign
policy after the Cold War, at the grand strategic level. The project, whose
existence was kept quiet, included people who are now back in the game, at
a higher level: among them, Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of
Defense; Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff; and Eric Edelman, a senior
foreign-policy adviser to Cheney-generally speaking, a cohesive group of
conservatives who regard themselves as bigger-thinking, tougher-minded, and
intellectually bolder than most other people in Washington. (Donald
Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, shares these characteristics, and has
been closely associated with Cheney for more than thirty years.) Colin
Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, mounted a
competing, and presumably more ideologically moderate, effort to reimagine
American foreign policy and defense. A date was set-May 21, 1990-on which
each team would brief Cheney for an hour; Cheney would then brief President
Bush, after which Bush would make a foreign-policy address unveiling the
new grand strategy.
Everybody worked for months on the "five-twenty-one brief," with a sense
that the shape of the post-Cold War world was at stake. When Wolfowitz and
Powell arrived at Cheney's office on May 21st, Wolfowitz went first, but
his briefing lasted far beyond the allotted hour, and Cheney (a hawk who,
perhaps, liked what he was hearing) did not call time on him. Powell didn't
get to present his alternate version of the future of the United States in
the world until a couple of weeks later. Cheney briefed President Bush,
using material mostly from Wolfowitz, and Bush prepared his major
foreign-policy address. But he delivered it on August 2, 1990, the day that
Iraq invaded Kuwait, so nobody noticed.
The team kept working. In 1992, the Times got its hands on a version of the
material, and published a front-page story saying that the Pentagon
envisioned a future in which the United States could, and should, prevent
any other nation or alliance from becoming a great power. A few weeks of
controversy ensued about the Bush Administration's hawks being
"unilateral"-controversy that Cheney's people put an end to with denials
and the counter-leak of an edited, softer version of the same material.
As it became apparent that Bush was going to lose to Clinton, the Cheney
team's efforts took on the quality of a parting shot. The report that the
senior official handed me at lunch had been issued only a few days before
Clinton took office. It is a somewhat bland, opaque document-a "scrubbed,"
meaning unclassified, version of something more candid-but it contained the
essential ideas of "shaping," rather than reacting to, the rest of the
world, and of preventing the rise of other superpowers. Its tone is one of
skepticism about diplomatic partnerships. A more forthright version of the
same ideas can be found in a short book titled "From Containment to Global
Leadership?," which Zalmay Khalilzad, who joined Cheney's team in 1991 and
is now special envoy to Afghanistan, published a couple of years into the
Clinton Administration, when he was out of government. It recommends that
the United States "preclude the rise of another global rival for the
indefinite future." Khalilzad writes, "It is a vital U.S. interest to
preclude such a development-i.e., to be willing to use force if necessary
for the purpose."
When George W. Bush was campaigning for President, he and the people around
him didn't seem to be proposing a great doctrinal shift, along the lines of
the policy of containment of the Soviet Union's sphere of influence which
the United States maintained during the Cold War. In his first major
foreign-policy speech, delivered in November of 1999, Bush declared that "a
President must be a clear-eyed realist," a formulation that seems to
connote an absence of world-remaking ambition. "Realism" is exactly the
foreign-policy doctrine that Cheney's Pentagon team rejected, partly
because it posits the impossibility of any one country's ever dominating
world affairs for any length of time.
One gets many reminders in Washington these days of how much the terrorist
attacks of September 11th have changed official foreign-policy thinking.
Any chief executive, of either party, would probably have done what Bush
has done so far-made war on the Taliban and Al Qaeda and enhanced domestic
security. It is only now, six months after the attacks, that we are truly
entering the realm of Presidential choice, and all indications are that
Bush is going to use September 11th as the occasion to launch a new,
aggressive American foreign policy that would represent a broad change in
direction rather than a specific war on terrorism. All his rhetoric,
especially in the two addresses he has given to joint sessions of Congress
since September 11th, and all the information about his state of mind which
his aides have leaked, indicate that he sees this as the nation's moment of
destiny-a perception that the people around him seem to be encouraging,
because it enhances Bush's stature and opens the way to more assertive
policymaking.
Inside government, the reason September 11th appears to have been "a
transformative moment," as the senior official I had lunch with put it, is
not so much that it revealed the existence of a threat of which officials
had previously been unaware as that it drastically reduced the American
public's usual resistance to American military involvement overseas, at
least for a while. The Clinton Administration, beginning with the "Black
Hawk Down" operation in Mogadishu, during its first year, operated on the
conviction that Americans were highly averse to casualties; the all-bombing
Kosovo operation, in Clinton's next-to-last year, was the ideal foreign
military adventure. Now that the United States has been attacked, the
options are much broader. The senior official approvingly mentioned a 1999
study of casualty aversion by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies,
which argued that the "mass public" is much less casualty-averse than the
military or the civilian élite believes; for example, the study showed that
the public would tolerate thirty thousand deaths in a military operation to
prevent Iraq from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. (The American
death total in the Vietnam War was about fifty-eight thousand.) September
11th presumably reduced casualty aversion even further.
Recently, I went to the White House to interview Condoleezza Rice. Rice's
Foreign Affairs article from 2000 begins with this declaration: "The United
States has found it exceedingly difficult to define its 'national interest'
in the absence of Soviet power." I asked her whether that is still the
case. "I think the difficulty has passed in defining a role," she said
immediately. "I think September 11th was one of those great earthquakes
that clarify and sharpen. Events are in much sharper relief." Like Bush,
she said that opposing terrorism and preventing the accumulation of weapons
of mass destruction "in the hands of irresponsible states" now define the
national interest. (The latter goal, by the way, is new-in Bush's speech to
Congress on September 20th, America's sole grand purpose was ending
terrorism.) We talked in her West Wing office; its tall windows face the
part of the White House grounds where television reporters do their
standups. In her bearing, Rice seemed less crisply military than she does
in public. She looked a little tired, but she was projecting a kind of
missionary calm, rather than belligerence.
In the Foreign Affairs article, Rice came across as a classic realist,
putting forth "the notions of power politics, great powers, and power
balances" as the proper central concerns of the United States. Now she
sounded as if she had moved closer to the one-power idea that Cheney's
Pentagon team proposed ten years ago-or, at least, to the idea that the
other great powers are now in harmony with the United States, because of
the terrorist attacks, and can be induced to remain so. "Theoretically, the
realists would predict that when you have a great power like the United
States it would not be long before you had other great powers rising to
challenge it or trying to balance against it," Rice said. "And I think what
you're seeing is that there's at least a predilection this time to move to
productive and coöperative relations with the United States, rather than to
try to balance the United States. I actually think that statecraft matters
in how it all comes out. It's not all foreordained."
Rice said that she had called together the senior staff people of the
National Security Council and asked them to think seriously about "how do
you capitalize on these opportunities" to fundamentally change American
doctrine, and the shape of the world, in the wake of September 11th. "I
really think this period is analogous to 1945 to 1947," she said-that is,
the period when the containment doctrine took shape-"in that the events so
clearly demonstrated that there is a big global threat, and that it's a big
global threat to a lot of countries that you would not have normally
thought of as being in the coalition. That has started shifting the
tectonic plates in international politics. And it's important to try to
seize on that and position American interests and institutions and all of
that before they harden again."
The National Security Council is legally required to produce an annual
document called the National Security Strategy, stating the over-all goals
of American policy-another government report whose importance is great but
not obvious. The Bush Administration did not produce one last year, as the
Clinton Administration did not in its first year. Rice said that she is
working on the report now.
"There are two ways to handle this document," she told me. "One is to do it
in a kind of minimalist way and just get it out. But it's our view that,
since this is going to be the first one for the Bush Administration, it's
important. An awful lot has happened since we started this process, prior
to 9/11. I can't give you a certain date when it's going to be out, but I
would think sometime this spring. And it's important that it be a real
statement of what the Bush Administration sees as the strategic direction
that it's going."
It seems clear already that Rice will set forth the hope of a more dominant
American role in the world than she might have a couple of years ago. Some
questions that don't appear to be settled yet, but are obviously being
asked, are how much the United States is willing to operate alone in
foreign affairs, and how much change it is willing to try to engender
inside other countries-and to what end, and with what means. The leak a
couple of weeks ago of a new American nuclear posture, adding offensive
capability against "rogue states," departed from decades of official
adherence to a purely defensive position, and was just one indication of
the scope of the reconsideration that is going on. Is the United States now
in a position to be redrawing regional maps, especially in the Middle East,
and replacing governments by force? Nobody thought that the Bush
Administration would be thinking in such ambitious terms, but plainly it
is, and with the internal debate to the right of where it was only a few
months ago.
Just before the 2000 election, a Republican foreign-policy figure suggested
to me that a good indication of a Bush Administration's direction in
foreign affairs would be who got a higher-ranking job, Paul Wolfowitz or
Richard Haass. Haass is another veteran of the first Bush Administration,
and an intellectual like Wolfowitz, but much more moderate. In 1997, he
published a book titled "The Reluctant Sheriff," in which he poked a little
fun at Wolfowitz's famous strategy briefing of the early nineties (he
called it the "Pentagon Paper") and disagreed with its idea that the United
States should try to be the world's only great power over the long term.
"For better or worse, such a goal is beyond our reach," Haass wrote. "It
simply is not doable." Elsewhere in the book, he disagreed with another of
the Wolfowitz team's main ideas, that of the United States expanding the
"democratic zone of peace": "Primacy is not to be confused with hegemony.
The United States cannot compel others to become more democratic." Haass
argued that the United States is becoming less dominant in the world, not
more, and suggested "a revival of what might be called traditional
great-power politics."
Wolfowitz got a higher-ranking job than Haass: he is Deputy Secretary of
Defense, and Haass is Director of Policy Planning for the State Department-
in effect, Colin Powell's big-think guy. Recently, I went to see him in his
office at the State Department. On the wall of his waiting room was an
array of photographs of every past director of the policy-planning staff,
beginning with George Kennan, the father of the containment doctrine and
the first holder of the office that Haass now occupies.
It's another indication of the way things are moving in Washington that
Haass seems to have become more hawkish. I mentioned the title of his book.
"Using the word 'reluctant' was itself reflective of a period when foreign
policy seemed secondary, and sacrificing for foreign policy was a hard case
to make," he said. "It was written when Bill Clinton was saying, 'It's the
economy, stupid'-not 'It's the world, stupid.' Two things are very
different now. One, the President has a much easier time making the case
that foreign policy matters. Second, at the top of the national-security
charts is this notion of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism."
I asked Haass whether there is a doctrine emerging that is as broad as
Kennan's containment. "I think there is," he said. "What you're seeing from
this Administration is the emergence of a new principle or body of
ideas-I'm not sure it constitutes a doctrine-about what you might call the
limits of sovereignty. Sovereignty entails obligations. One is not to
massacre your own people. Another is not to support terrorism in any way.
If a government fails to meet these obligations, then it forfeits some of
the normal advantages of sovereignty, including the right to be left alone
inside your own territory. Other governments, including the United States,
gain the right to intervene. In the case of terrorism, this can even lead
to a right of preventive, or peremptory, self-defense. You essentially can
act in anticipation if you have grounds to think it's a question of when,
and not if, you're going to be attacked."
Clearly, Haass was thinking of Iraq. "I don't think the American public
needs a lot of persuading about the evil that is Saddam Hussein," he said.
"Also, I'd fully expect the President and his chief lieutenants to make the
case. Public opinion can be changed. We'd be able to make the case that
this isn't a discretionary action but one done in self-defense."
On the larger issue of the American role in the world, Haass was still
maintaining some distance from the hawks. He had made a speech not long
before called "Imperial America," but he told me that there is a big
difference between imperial and imperialist. "I just think that we have to
be a little bit careful," he said. "Great as our advantages are, there are
still limits. We have to have allies. We can't impose our ideas on
everyone. We don't want to be fighting wars alone, so we need others to
join us. American leadership, yes; but not American unilateralism. It has
to be multilateral. We can't win the war against terror alone. We can't
send forces everywhere. It really does have to be a collaborative endeavor."
He stopped for a moment. "Is there a successor idea to containment? I think
there is," he said. "It is the idea of integration. The goal of U.S.
foreign policy should be to persuade the other major powers to sign on to
certain key ideas as to how the world should operate: opposition to
terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, support for free trade,
democracy, markets. Integration is about locking them into these policies
and then building institutions that lock them in even more."
The first, but by no means the last, obvious manifestation of a new
American foreign policy will be the effort to remove Saddam Hussein. What
the United States does in an Iraq operation will very likely dwarf what's
been done so far in Afghanistan, both in terms of the scale of the
operation itself and in terms of its aftermath.
Several weeks ago, Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress,
the Iraqi opposition party, came through Washington with an entourage of
his aides. Chalabi went to the State Department and the White House to ask,
evidently successfully, for more American funding. His main public event
was a panel discussion at the American Enterprise Institute. Chalabi's
leading supporter in town, Richard Perle, the prominent hawk and former
Defense Department official, acted as moderator. Smiling and supremely
confident, Perle opened the discussion by saying, "Evidence is mounting
that the Administration is looking very carefully at strategies for dealing
with Saddam Hussein." The war on terrorism, he said, will not be complete
"until Saddam is successfully dealt with. And that means replacing his
regime. . . . That action will be taken, I have no doubt."
Chalabi, who lives in London, is a charming, suave middle-aged man with a
twinkle in his eye. He was dressed in a double-breasted pin-striped suit
and a striped shirt with a white spread collar. Although he and his
supporters argue that the Iraqi National Congress, with sufficient American
support, can defeat Saddam just as the Northern Alliance defeated the
Taliban in Afghanistan, this view hasn't won over most people in
Washington. It isn't just that Chalabi doesn't look the part of a rebel
military leader ("He could fight you for the last petit four on the tray
over tea at the Savoy, but that's about it," one skeptical former Pentagon
official told me), or that he isn't in Iraq. It's also that Saddam's
military is perhaps ten times the size that the Taliban's was, and has been
quite successful at putting down revolts over the last decade. The United
States left Iraq in 1991 believing that Saddam might soon fall to an
internal rebellion; Chalabi's supporters believe that Saddam is much weaker
now, and that even signs that a serious operation was in the offing could
finish him off. But non-true believers seem to be coming around to the idea
that a military operation against Saddam would mean the deployment of
anywhere from a hundred thousand to three hundred thousand American ground
troops.
Kenneth Pollack, a former C.I.A. analyst who was the National Security
Council's staff expert on Iraq during the last years of the Clinton
Administration, recently caused a stir in the foreign-policy world by
publishing an article in Foreign Affairs calling for war against Saddam.
This was noteworthy because three years ago Pollack and two co-authors
published an article, also in Foreign Affairs, arguing that the Iraqi
National Congress was incapable of defeating Saddam. Pollack still doesn't
think Chalabi can do the job. He believes that it would require a
substantial American ground, air, and sea force, closer in size to the one
we used in Kuwait in 1990-91 than to the one we are using now in
Afghanistan.
Pollack, who is trim, quick, and crisp, is obviously a man who has given a
briefing or two in his day. When I went to see him at his office in
Washington, with a little encouragement he got out from behind his desk and
walked over to his office wall, where three maps of the Middle East were
hanging. "The only way to do it is a full-scale invasion," he said, using a
pen as a pointer. "We're talking about two grand corps, two to three
hundred thousand people altogether. The population is here, in the
Tigris-Euphrates valley." He pointed to the area between Baghdad and Basra.
"Ideally, you'd have the Saudis on board." He pointed to the Prince Sultan
airbase, near Riyadh. "You could make Kuwait the base, but it's much easier
in Saudi. You need to take western Iraq and southern Iraq"-pointing
again-"because otherwise they'll fire Scuds at Israel and at the Saudi oil
fields. You probably want to prevent Iraq from blowing up its own oil
fields, so troops have to occupy them. And you need troops to defend the
Kurds in northern Iraq." Point, point. "You go in as hard as you can, as
fast as you can." He slapped his hand on the top of his desk. "You get the
enemy to divide his forces, by threatening him in two places at once." His
hand hit the desk again, hard. "Then you crush him." Smack.
That would be a reverberating blow. The United States has already removed
the government of one country, Afghanistan, the new government is obviously
shaky, and American military operations there are not completed. Pakistan,
which before September 11th clearly met the new test of national
unacceptability (it both harbors terrorists and has weapons of mass
destruction), will also require long-term attention, since the country is
not wholly under the control of the government, as the murder of Daniel
Pearl demonstrated, and even parts of the government, like the intelligence
service, may not be entirely under the control of the President. In Iraq,
if America invades and brings down Saddam, a new government must be
established-an enormous long-term task in a country where there is no
obvious, plausible new leader. The prospective Iraq operation has drawn
strong objections from the neighboring nations, one of which, Russia, is a
nuclear superpower. An invasion would have a huge effect on the internal
affairs of all the biggest Middle Eastern nations: Iran, Turkey, Saudi
Arabia, and even Egypt. Events have forced the Administration to become
directly involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as it hadn't wanted
to do. So it's really the entire region that is in play, in much the way
that Europe was immediately after the Second World War.
In September, Bush rejected Paul Wolfowitz's recommendation of immediate
moves against Iraq. That the President seems to have changed his mind is an
indication, in part, of the bureaucratic skill of the Administration's
conservatives. "These guys are relentless," one former official, who is
close to the high command at the State Department, told me. "Resistance is
futile." The conservatives' other weapon, besides relentlessness, is
intellectualism. Colin Powell tends to think case by case, and since
September 11th the conservatives have outflanked him by producing at least
the beginning of a coherent, hawkish world view whose acceptance
practically requires invading Iraq. If the United States applies the
doctrines of Cheney's old Pentagon team, "shaping" and expanding "the zone
of democracy," the implications would extend far beyond that one operation.
The outside experts on the Middle East who have the most credibility with
the Administration seem to be Bernard Lewis, of Princeton, and Fouad Ajami,
of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, both of whom
see the Arab Middle East as a region in need of radical remediation. Lewis
was invited to the White House in December to brief the senior
foreign-policy staff. "One point he made is, Look, in that part of the
world, nothing matters more than resolute will and force," the senior
official I had lunch with told me-in other words, the United States needn't
proceed gingerly for fear of inflaming the "Arab street," as long as it is
prepared to be strong. The senior official also recommended as interesting
thinkers on the Middle East Charles Hill, of Yale, who in a recent essay
declared, "Every regime of the Arab-Islamic world has proved a failure,"
and Reuel Marc Gerecht, of the American Enterprise Institute, who published
an article in The Weekly Standard about the need for a change of regime in
Iran and Syria. (Those goals, Gerecht told me when we spoke, could be
accomplished through pressure short of an invasion.)
Several people I spoke with predicted that most, or even all, of the
nations that loudly oppose an invasion of Iraq would privately cheer it on,
if they felt certain that this time the Americans were really going to
finish the job. One purpose of Vice-President Cheney's recent diplomatic
tour of the region was to offer assurances on that matter, while gamely
absorbing all the public criticism of an Iraq operation. In any event, the
Administration appears to be committed to acting forcefully in advance of
the world's approval. When I spoke to Condoleezza Rice, she said that the
United States should assemble "coalitions of the willing" to support its
actions, rather than feel it has to work within the existing infrastructure
of international treaties and organizations. An invasion of Iraq would test
that policy in more ways than one: the Administration would be betting that
it can continue to eliminate Al Qaeda cells in countries that publicly
opposed the Iraq operation.
When the Administration submitted its budget earlier this year, it asked
for a forty-eight-billion-dollar increase in defense spending for fiscal
2003, which begins in October, 2002. Much of that sum would go to improve
military pay and benefits, but ten billion dollars of it is designated as
an unspecified contingency fund for further operations in the war on
terrorism. That's probably at least the initial funding for an invasion of
Iraq.
This spring, the Administration will be talking to other countries about
the invasion, trying to secure basing and overflight privileges, while Bush
builds up a rhetorical case for it by giving speeches about the
unacceptability of developing weapons of mass destruction. A drama
involving weapons inspections in Iraq will play itself out over the spring
and summer, and will end with the United States declaring that the terms
that Saddam offers for the inspections, involving delays and restrictions,
are unacceptable. Then, probably in the late summer or early fall, the
enormous troop positioning, which will take months, will begin. The
Administration obviously feels confident that the United States can
effectively parry whatever aggressive actions Saddam takes during the troop
buildup, and hopes that its moves will destabilize Iraq enough to cause the
Republican Guard, the military key to the country, to turn against Saddam
and topple him on its own. But the chain of events leading inexorably to a
full-scale American invasion, if it hasn't already begun, evidently will
begin soon.
Lewis (Scooter) Libby, who was the principal drafter of Cheney's
future-of-the-world documents during the first Bush Administration, now
works in an office in the Old Executive Office Building, overlooking the
West Wing, where he has a second, smaller office. A packet of
public-relations material prompted by the recent paperback publication of
his 1996 novel, "The Apprentice," quotes the Times' calling him "Dick
Cheney's Dick Cheney," which seems like an apt description: he appears
absolutely sure of himself, and, whether by coincidence or as a result of
the influence of his boss, speaks in a tough, confidential, gravelly
rumble. Like Condoleezza Rice and Bush himself, he gives the impression of
having calmly accepted the idea that the project of war and reconstruction
which the Administration has now taken on may be a little exhausting for
those charged with carrying it out but is unquestionably right, the only
truly prudent course.
When I went to see Libby, not long ago, I asked him whether, before
September 11th, American policy toward terrorism should have been
different. He went to his desk and got out a large black loose-leaf binder,
filled with typewritten sheets interspersed with foldout maps of the Middle
East. He looked through it for a long minute, formulating his answer.
"Let us stack it up," he said at last. "Somalia, 1993; 1994, the discovery
of the Al Qaeda-related plot in the Philippines; 1993, the World Trade
Center, first bombing; 1993, the attempt to assassinate President Bush,
former President Bush, and the lack of response to that, the lack of a
serious response to that; 1995, the Riyadh bombing; 1996, the Khobar
bombing; 1998, the Kenyan embassy bombing and the Tanzanian embassy
bombing; 1999, the plot to launch millennium attacks; 2000, the bombing of
the Cole. Throughout this period, infractions on inspections by the Iraqis,
and eventually the withdrawal of the entire inspection regime; and the
failure to respond significantly to Iraqi incursions in the Kurdish areas.
No one would say these challenges posed easy problems, but if you take that
long list and you ask, 'Did we respond in a way which discouraged people
from supporting terrorist activities, or activities clearly against our
interests? Did we help to shape the environment in a way which discouraged
further aggressions against U.S. interests?,' many observers conclude no,
and ask whether it was then easier for someone like Osama bin Laden to rise
up and say credibly, 'The Americans don't have the stomach to defend
themselves. They won't take casualties to defend their interests. They are
morally weak.' "
Libby insisted that the American response to September 11th has not been
standard or foreordained. "Look at what the President has done in
Afghanistan," he said, "and look at his speech to the joint session of
Congress"-meaning the State of the Union Message, in January. "He made it
clear that it's an important area. He made it clear that we believe in
expanding the zone of democracy even in this difficult part of the world.
He made it clear that we stand by our friends and defend our interests. And
he had the courage to identify those states which present a problem, and to
begin to build consensus for action that would need to be taken if there is
not a change of behavior on their part. Take the Afghan case, for example.
There are many other courses that the President could have taken. He could
have waited for juridical proof before we responded. He could have engaged
in long negotiations with the Taliban. He could have failed to seek a new
relationship with Pakistan, based on its past nuclear tests, or been so
afraid of weakening Pakistan that we didn't seek its help. This list could
go on to twice or three times the length I've mentioned so far. But,
instead, the President saw an opportunity to refashion relations while
standing up for our interests. The problem is complex, and we don't know
yet how it will end, but we have opened new prospects for relations not
only with Afghanistan, as important as it was as a threat, but with the
states of Central Asia, Pakistan, Russia, and, as it may develop, with the
states of Southwest Asia more generally."
We moved on to Iraq, and the question of what makes Saddam Hussein
unacceptable, in the Administration's eyes. "The issue is not inspections,"
Libby said. "The issue is the Iraqis' promise not to have weapons of mass
destruction, their promise to recognize the boundaries of Kuwait, their
promise not to threaten other countries, and other promises that they made
in '91, and a number of U.N. resolutions, including all the other problems
I listed. Whether it was wise or not-and that is the subject of debate-Iraq
was given a second chance to abide by international norms. It failed to
take that chance then, and annually for the next ten years."
"What's your level of confidence," I asked him, "that the current regime
will, in fact, change its behavior in a way that you will be satisfied by?"
He ran his hand over his face and then gave me a direct gaze and spoke
slowly and deliberately. "There is no basis in Iraq's past behavior to have
confidence in good-faith efforts on their part to change their behavior."
--
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'