From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (154 page)

The new doctrine provoked a varied and often emotional response. Conservatives cheered and insisted that what public intellectual Robert Kagan called a "Behemoth with a conscience" would not abuse its power. John Gaddis hailed a "truly 'grand' strategy" to transform the Middle East by bringing it into the modern world. The "world must be made safe for democracy," he concluded, "because otherwise democracy will not be safe in the world."
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On the other side, the
New York Times
complained that what was already being called the Bush Doctrine struck a tone of arrogance worthy of the Roman Empire or Napoleon. "The boys in Lubbock may want to pause before signing on for the overly aggressive stance Mr. Bush has outlined," it concluded.
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Harvard international relations specialist Stanley Hoffmann branded Cheney and Rumsfeld "High Noon sheriffs" and scored the Bush Doctrine as "Wilsonianism in boots."
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Critics warned that the doctrine of preemption would encourage other nations to do the same, shattering any hope of world order.

Long before releasing the new doctrine, the administration began to contemplate war with Iraq. Dictator Saddam Hussein had somehow survived the crushing defeat of 1991 and a decade of UN sanctions, a glaring irritant to those like Cheney who had hoped to topple him in the Gulf War. Even in the first days of the second Bush administration, there was talk of Iraq. On the night of September 12, 2001, a still-shaken president wandering the White House Situation Room asked Richard Clarke "to go back over everything. See if Saddam did this. . . . I want to know any shred."
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Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz actually pressed for war with Iraq immediately after 9/11, but Powell urged focusing on Afghanistan, and Bush prudently concurred, although he did initiate war planning in November. Once the Afghan conflict appeared won, Iraq immediately resurfaced. Officials dismissed continued diplomatic pressure as too slow, a coup unlikely. Certain that Saddam had or would soon have weapons of mass destruction and fearing he might give them to terrorists, they were set on removing him. "A decision was not made," Haas later observed, "a decision happened, and you can't say when or how."
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"Why Iraq? Why now?" These were questions often asked in the days ahead, and the answers are as complex as the individuals who pushed for war. The easy response, of course, was oil, but the reasons went much deeper. For the neo-conservatives, war satisfied deep philosophical convictions as well as immediate practical concerns. The neo-cons, as they came to be called, included Wolfowitz, Defense Department adviser Richard Perle, and journalist William Kristol. Along with Cheney's chief of staff, Libby, Undersecretary of Defense Feith, and Undersecretary of State John Bolton, they formed a sort of "cabal" under the younger Bush. Utopian in outlook, they believed that the United States had a moral duty to oppose tyranny and spread democracy. In their view, Saddam Hussein was behind world terrorism and would soon have WMD. Many of them had close ties to Israel and insisted that Saddam's overthrow would make that vital ally more secure. They fervently believed that extending democracy to Iraq would set off a reverse domino effect throughout the Middle East, thereby eliminating a major breeding ground for terrorism.
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The neo-con position complemented the views of other top officials. Powell also wanted to get rid of Saddam, although he accepted war only as a last resort and insisted on international backing. By January 2003, he had concluded that war was inevitable and went along. Assertive nationalists Cheney and Rumsfeld saw a chance to complete the unfinished business of 1991, eliminate a nuisance and potential threat, and demonstrate the efficacy of modern, high-technology warfare. Cheney was even more alarmed by an anthrax scare in the United States in the fall of 2001 than by 9/11 and viewed Saddam Hussein's biological weapons as a threat for which the United States was completely unprepared.
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Advocates of war found a receptive audience in the White House. Thinking in mundane but for this administration crucial terms, White House political adviser Karl Rove saw in rallying the nation for war a chance to exploit the Democrats' post-Vietnam vulnerability on defense and national security issues, seal the Republican alliance with the Christian right, win the Jewish vote, help the party in the congressional elections, and build a permanent Republican majority.
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Bush combined the Old West mentality of his native Texas with the missionary spirit of evangelical Christianity. He was neither a deep thinker nor particularly curious and could be remarkably ill-informed. Toppling Hussein would permit him to succeed where his father had failed and avenge the Iraqi dictator's 1993 attempt on his father's life. A born-again Christian, he saw the world in terms of good and evil and was certain he had been "called" to defend his country and extend "God's gift of liberty" to "every human being in the world."
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His faith helped him choose a course. Once he had decided, there was no second-guessing. A war with Iraq would protect the security of the United States and eliminate a force for evil.

By the summer of 2002, after virtually no internal debate and apparently little discussion of whether war with Iraq might be counterproductive in terms of Afghanistan or the larger struggle with terrorism, an administration fixated on removing Saddam and carried away with hubris was deeply committed to war. Conflict was "inevitable," a high British official reported to his government; "intelligence and facts were being fixed
around the policy."
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Outmatched in Bush's first term, Rice's NSC did not play its intended role of giving the president a variety of options and questioning proposals from the agencies. Intent on invading as soon as possible, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the neo-cons refused to subject their assumptions to close scrutiny. They were certain of what they knew, even in the face of contrary evidence and inconvenient facts. They dismissed opposing views from what they called "the reality-based community." "We're an empire now," one official boasted, "and when we act we create our own reality."
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They placed more stock in what they learned from the shady Ahmad Chalabi and other Iraqi exiles than in their own intelligence agencies (they also funded Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress to the tune of $36 million in 2002–3). They "cherry-picked" evidence that fit their preconceptions. They put subtle—and sometimes not so subtle—pressure on intelligence providers to come up with the right answers. Sometimes the providers tailored their assessments to fit their bosses' prejudices. CIA director George Tenet once famously called the case for weapons of mass destruction a "slam dunk," but in fact it was quite weak. There was no firm evidence that Saddam Hussein was close to acquiring WMD or indeed that he had anything to do with 9/11. But defeating Iraq seemed the next logical step in the larger war against terrorism, and preemptive war appeared justifiable.
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After Labor Day 2002, the administration mounted an all-out campaign for congressional and popular support. "From a marketing point of view you don't introduce new products in August," a White House aide quipped.
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Bush and Cheney strong-armed Republicans and Democrats in Congress. Top officials kept up a steady drumbeat for war. There was "no doubt" that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, Cheney insisted, even though there was considerable skepticism within the government and no solid evidence to back up the statement. He and Rice issued increasingly ominous (later to be proven false) statements that Saddam would acquire nuclear weapons "fairly soon." In a major speech in Cincinnati on October 7, Bush spoke of a "grave threat," affirmed that Saddam had given "shelter and support to terrorism," and warned that the "Iraqi regime . . . possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons" and was seeking nuclear weapons. Did it make any sense, he asked, concluding
with the administration's favorite scare-line (first used by Rice), "for the world to wait . . . for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud?"
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The campaign provoked no more than scattered opposition, some of it, interestingly, from the elder Bush's top advisers. James Baker urged concerted efforts to gain international support.
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When Brent Scowcroft publicly warned that an invasion of Iraq could divert attention and resources from the more pressing war against terrorism, damage U.S. standing in the Middle East, and provoke an attack on Israel that could set off a regional "Armageddon"—the younger Bush's aides branded him "Neville," an obvious allusion to Chamberlain and Munich.
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Prominent realist scholars questioned whether Iraq was the right war, insisted that Saddam could be contained, and warned of further destabilizing an already volatile Middle East.
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In one of the most fascinating developments of the new century, energetic young activists used the Internet to mobilize liberal opposition to the war. By the end of the year,
MoveOn.org
had 1.3 million members worldwide, 900,000 in the United States. It raised millions of dollars to support liberal congressional candidates. In early 2003, it organized a "virtual" anti-war march on Washington.
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Worldwide, an estimated ten million people protested the U.S. drive to war.

In a strange, almost surreal way, an administration intent on invading Iraq carried a reluctant nation toward its first preemptive war with remarkably little dissent. The White House equated patriotism with support for its policies. It skillfully exploited the anniversary of 9/11 to rally a still-anxious people. Discussions of war with Iraq were "dominated . . . by images of smoldering buildings in New York and Washington," the
New York Times
reported.
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Surveys revealed that Americans were more worried about a stagnant economy than about Iraq. Some feared a long and costly war. Most seemed resigned to the inevitability of war rather than persuaded by the case for it. Still shaken by 9/11, they fell into line. Polls
indicated solid support, tempered by concern about casualties and insistence on gaining congressional and UN support.
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The administration easily secured congressional backing. Taking aim squarely at neo-cons like Perle—and perhaps by indirection the president—Vietnam veteran and Nebraska Republican senator Chuck Hagel protested that "many of those who want to rush this country into war and think it would be so quick and easy don't know anything about war."
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But even those Republicans with doubts succumbed to White House appeals to "trust us." Divided among themselves, nervous about dissent in wartime, very much on the defensive against an aggressive executive and with midterm elections approaching, the Democrats failed to muster effective opposition. Leading senators such as John Kerry of Massachusetts and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York challenged only the way a war should be fought, not the war itself, insisting that support must be secured from allies and the UN. West Virginia Democratic senator Robert Byrd's lonely and often eloquent dissent drew little attention. After brief discussion and with troops already pouring into the Persian Gulf, Congress in October 2002 gave the president blank-check authority to use U.S. military forces "against the continuing threat posed by Iraq" and to "enforce all relevant" UN Security Council resolutions on Iraq (77–23 in the Senate, 296–133 in the House). In the fall elections, the Republicans regained control of the Senate and increased their majority in the House. A debate mainly about how to go to war produced broad if not deep support for an administration firmly committed to invading Iraq. "There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war," Byrd protested. "We stand passively mute . . . paralyzed by our own uncertainty, seemingly stunned by the sheer turmoil of events."
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The administration could not steamroll the UN as it had Congress. Over Rumsfeld's and Cheney's strenuous objections, Powell persuaded the president to secure UN support, a move he may have hoped would delay or even thwart the headlong rush to war. Bush's pledge to do so mollified critics at home and helped squelch a possibly searching domestic debate on the war, but it also produced major roadblocks. The United
States and its allies brought to the UN sharply divergent perspectives. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the neo-cons preferred to go it alone. Viewing negotiations as a hindrance, top U.S. officials in late 2002 put on one of the most arrogant and inept diplomatic performances in the nation's history. Bush set the tone in a September speech at the UN by pointedly asking: "Will the United Nations serve the purposes of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?"
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Among leading nations, only Britain firmly backed the United States. France initially accepted war as a last resort, Germany openly opposed it, and Russia, China, and Mexico expressed grave doubts. The administration's haughty demeanor squandered much of the international goodwill lavished upon the United States after 9/11. The Europeans were alarmed by Bush's "axis of evil" speech and preemptive war doctrine. They believed the administration was obsessed with Iraq and that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction could be eliminated without resorting to war.

The UN negotiations degenerated into a nasty and highly public spat between the United States on one side and France and Germany on the other. The administration blundered early on by rejecting outright a compromise French proposal for a war resolution that might have averted much of what followed. "Every good reason not to go to war was irrelevant," Rice tartly informed a French diplomat.
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On January 20, 2003, what some U.S. officials called the "Day of Diplomatic Ambush," France issued a surprise announcement that it would not support war. French actions stunned Americans and undercut Powell's efforts to delay the war. They evoked an outburst of ally-bashing in the United States, with France the number one target. Playing to the most parochial of American instincts, Rumsfeld and other administration officials dismissed France and Germany as "old Europe." Long stereotyped by Americans as feminine and "sissy," the French provided a ready-made target.
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To the glee of conservatives, the House of Representatives renamed the French fries on its cafeteria menu "freedom fries."
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