Colossus (30 page)

CLAUSEWITZ REDIVIVUS

Even before 9/11 the Bush administration made no secret of its impatience with United Nations-sponsored military operations. The new president’s stated intention was to eschew “open-ended deployments and unclear military missions,” to achieve “an orderly and timely withdrawal from places like Kosovo and Bosnia.” His policy was “humbly” to “propose our principles,” not arrogantly to “impose our culture.”
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Yet when, as a candidate for the presidency, George W. Bush had criticized Clinton’s overseas adventures in these ways, it was not the idea of overseas military intervention
per se
he was repudiating, merely the idea that such interventions should be constrained by the UN. As he said during the 2000 campaign, “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for nation-building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war. I think our troops
ought to be used to help overthrow a dictator when it’s in our best interests. But in this case [he was referring to Somalia] it was a nation-building exercise.”
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“Nation-building” was a dirty word because it was associated with the UN. An American-led “regime change” was another matter.

The great significance of this became clear in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 2001. From very early on, President Bush insisted that in its retaliation the United States would “make no distinction between those who planned those acts and those who harbor them” and that if the Taliban regime in Kabul did not hand over bin Laden and other members of al Qa’eda in Afghanistan, then it would be overthrown. It was he of all the senior members of the administration who was most “kinetic” in pressing for swift and decisive regime change in Afghanistan.
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It was he who was most insistent that the war against terror should involve more than “firing a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit[ting] a camel in the butt.”
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It was he who pressed the CIA and the Defense Department to get “boots on the ground” in Afghanistan. It was Bush who wanted to respond to terrorism with outright, full-scale war.

In the most famous line of his masterwork,
On War
, published in 1832, Carl von Clausewitz called war “not merely an act of policy, but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means.” “The political object is the goal,” he argued; “war is the means of reaching it.”
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There is no question that in its readiness to use war to achieve its objectives, the Bush administration after 9/11 was more Clausewitzian than its predecessor. Admittedly, Clausewitz would have found it hard to imagine enemies equipped with hijacked jets, dirty bombs, anthrax and sarin, and capable of striking anywhere from Manhattan to Mombasa. In the words of the “National Security Strategy” published in 2002, the enemy in this new war consisted of “shadowy networks of individuals [who] can bring great chaos and suffering to our shores for less than it costs to purchase a single tank.” The campaign against such a foe could only be unspectacular: an arrest at Frankfurt Airport or in a seedy Pakistani flophouse, an assassination in a Baghdad villa or a Palestinian back street. In some ways, the war against terrorism retained the espionage of the cold war without any of the front-of-the-house hardware: no serried ranks of missiles and tanks, just an ever-wider range of cameras, some hidden in match-
boxes, others orbiting in outer space. But it was also like the old Great Game—once again a game played in the Middle East, Central Asia and Afghanistan, but now a game played with gizmos. The war against terrorism needed to counter the terrorist’s new technological advantages (the power and compactness of modern explosives) with the modern spy’s (the unprecedented power of modern surveillance technology).

What Clausewitz would have had no difficulty in recognizing was the parallel war that the Bush administration embarked on: against states “harboring” or otherwise supporting terrorist organizations. One consequence of 9/11 was to shatter forever the illusion that Americans could retreat to enjoy the fruits of their productivity behind a missile defense shield, leaving the benighted countries of the world to take their own paths to perdition. For terrorism bred in precisely the “rogue” regimes and strife-torn “failed” states that some Republicans had once believed America could ignore. This kind of war—intervention to overthrow bad governments— is not novel, nor is it unrealistic. Indeed, it was precisely what the Victorians excelled at. A typical example was the war against the Sudanese Mahdists, Wahhabist zealots whose killing of General Charles Gordon at Khartoum was (in its public impact) a Victorian 9/11, and who were ultimately brought to book in 1898 by a small but lethally well-armed expeditionary force in the spectacularly asymmetrical battle of Omdurman.
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This was the kind of reckoning Bush had in mind. Though there was no existing plan for a regime change in Afghanistan, the CIA and Central Command scrambled to put one together.
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Airpower was once again used to devastating effect. But what made Operation Enduring Freedom distinctive was the role of more than a hundred CIA operatives and over three hundred Special Forces personnel in galvanizing the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance and persuading other Afghan warlords to defect to their side.
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The first American air strikes took place on October 7, less than a month after the destruction of the World Trade Center. Within two months the Taliban leadership had been driven from Kabul. Hamid Karzai was sworn in as head of an interim government before the year was out.

An Afghan Omdurman was not something the United Nations could object to, least of all in the febrile atmosphere of late 2001. The Taliban regime had given Osama bin Laden shelter since May 1996. Though the
operational details of the September 11 attacks were worked out in Europe and the United States, the mastermind behind them was plainly bin Laden; yet the Taliban declined to extradite him. From the point of view of the UN, it was therefore a legitimate act of self-defense on the part of the United States to act as it had done. Already in July 2001 the Security Council had described the Taliban regime as “a threat to international peace and security in the region” (resolution 1363). The day after the 9/11 attacks, it stressed in a new resolution “that those responsible for aiding, supporting or harboring the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of these acts will be held accountable” (resolution 1368). After the war started the Security Council studiously avoided any reference to the United States, confining itself to anodyne expressions of support for “the efforts of the Afghan people to replace the Taliban regime” (resolution 1378). But since the Bush administration wasted no time in setting up a new Afghan government, there was no reason for the other members of the Security Council to complain. The other NATO members also readily accepted the invitation to assist with the postwar occupation. For all these reasons, the regime change was broadly welcomed by the “international community,” despite the very obvious precedent that had been set.

In a speech at West Point in June 2002 President Bush revived the old notion of “preemptive” war, the case for which was set forth more fully three months later by the White House in the thirty-three-page “National Security Strategy of the United States” Because (in Vice President Cheney’s words) “weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terror network or murderous dictator … constitute as grave a threat as can be imagined,” the president asserted his right as commander in chief to forestall any “mortal threat” to American security. “As a matter of common sense and self-defense,” America would “act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed.”
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Many critics seized upon this “Bush doctrine” as a dangerous, even revolutionary departure from post-1945 American practice.
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Yet the idea that preemptive action might be necessary in the face of an imminent threat was not a major departure in American policy.
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The radical aspect of the Bush doctrine was not so much the theory as the practice. The point was simply that when President Bush said he was prepared to fight for freedom and against terror in “every corner of the world,” he
really meant to. And if the only way to defeat terrorism was to overthrow regimes that sponsored it, he would not hesitate.

Who would be next? Throughout the 1990s there had been elements within the Republican Party who yearned for a settling of accounts with Saddam Hussein. Almost immediately after 9/11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld began pressing for the planned war against terror to be directed against Iraq as well as Afghanistan, a view echoed by Vice President Dick Cheney. It was Bush who argued against this, insisting that the initial focus must be on the Taliban, who were harboring the perpetrators of the attacks on New York and Washington. But this did not mean that Bush was opposed to regime change in Baghdad at some future date. In his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, he explicitly identified Iraq as one of three prime targets in an “axis of evil,” along with Iran and North Korea. Now the only question was whether he could rely on the established alliances and multilateral institutions—whose importance, incidentally, his “National Security Strategy” had in no way denied.

There were many legitimate reasons for a UN-authorized war against Saddam Hussein—almost too many. Throughout the 1980s the Iraqi government had not only developed biological and chemical weapons (it had used the latter—including mustard gas and sarin—against the Kurds of Halabja) but had also attempted to acquire nuclear weapons. The United Nations Special Commission set up after the Gulf War by Security Council resolution 687 was charged with ensuring that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were removed or rendered harmless; until UNSCOM certified that this had been done, an embargo remained in force, preventing the country from exporting its oil.
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From the outset Saddam frustrated the efforts of the special commission. Time and again Iraqi declarations on what proscribed weapons had been produced turned out to be false. In 1994 the Iraqis ceased to cooperate with UNSCOM and allowed the inspectors to resume work only when faced with the threat of military action. This happened again in 1997, when inspectors were banned from specific sites, prompting a further threat of military action, a step that was averted only when Kofi Annan flew to Baghdad in February 1998 and secured yet another pledge from Saddam that the inspections could resume. Cooperation lasted just a few months. So damning was the
final UNSCOM report that the United States and Britain launched air strikes (Operation Desert Fox) against suspected Iraqi WMD facilities. A new inspections team (UNMOVIC) was set up in 1999, but it was not allowed into Iraq until November 2002.
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Abuses of human rights, if not quite genocide; sponsorship of terrorist organizations, notably Abu Nidal; contravention of the conventions on chemical and biological weapons; attempted acquisition of nuclear weapons—the charge sheet against Saddam’s regime was long indeed by the beginning of the new century. All that was clearly missing from it was any conclusive evidence of involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Considering the list of Saddam’s violations of international law and his manifest contempt for the numerous UN Security Council resolutions he had inspired—seventeen in just four years
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—the only mystery is why Iraq was not invaded before 2003.

The explanation must be sought in the attitude of the other permanent members of the Security Council. It might have been thought that they would have shared the American desire to see Saddam disarmed. Britain did. Yet France, Russia and China all subtly encouraged Iraqi non compliance with the weapons inspection regime. It was the United States and the United Kingdom alone that threatened and carried out military action to enforce the inspection regime. By the end of 1999 the chairman of UNSCOM, Richard Butler, was so incensed by the conduct of the other permanent members that he accused them of trying to “kill” the special commission.
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They certainly showed no great enthusiasm for reviving the apparently defunct inspection program. It was not the last time that the French in particular were to use their power on the Security Council to obstruct not just American foreign policy but the clearly expressed wishes of the Security Council itself.

Much has been written in the past year about the “failure” of American diplomacy in 2003. When the United States went to war against Iraq, leading Democrats lined up to blame the president for his ineptitude. “I am saddened, saddened that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy,” declared Tom Daschle, the Senate minority leader. “Probably the least successful handling of allies that we’ve had in a long period of time,” was the verdict of Congressman Steny Hoyer. “When did we become a nation that ignores and berates our friends and calls them irrelevant?” de
manded Robert Byrd, the venerable Democratic senator. Such views were echoed by more cerebral commentators, notably Stanley Hoffman, as well as members of the previous administration’s foreign policy team.
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Yet it might equally well be argued that President Bush and his advisers were
too
diplomatic in their approach. For it was above all their desire
not
to act unilaterally that led to the fiasco of the entirely superfluous “second resolution” (which would, had it been passed, have been closer to a twenty-second resolution on the subject of Iraq). The core aim of American policy, nevertheless, was consistent and was achieved—namely, to overthrow Saddam Hussein once and for all. The United States also succeeded in doing this with the support of some, though not all, of its traditional allies, building an ad hoc “coalition of the willing” in precisely the way the president’s National Security Strategy had envisaged. It was not American diplomacy that failed. It was the diplomacy of those who believed they could stop the war or at least isolate the United States.