The Assassins' Gate (5 page)

The other significant name on the PNAC letter was Richard Perle. He was as abrasive, incautious, and self-indulgent as his old friend was prudent and industrious. (For all of his French-baiting, Perle has a house in southern France and a living room in Chevy Chase full of French cookbooks.) Perle and Wolfowitz had known each other since the summer of 1969, when they interned together in Washington at the modestly named Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy, under the guidance of two giants of the Cold War, Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze. The two young grad students did research and wrote memos for sympathetic congressmen in defense of the antiballistic missile system, which brought Perle to the attention of Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the Democrat from Washington who was the favorite hawk of the early neoconservatives until Reagan began to ascend in 1976. Perle joined Jackson's staff and never returned to grad school. Through the 1970s he specialized in finding intellectual talent and connecting it to Washington power on behalf of hard-line Cold War policies. One evening, he heard the Princeton professor Bernard Lewis give a brilliant talk on the Middle East; the next day Perle mentioned Lewis to Jackson, and before long the professor was introduced to the world of policy makers and became an adviser on Middle East issues to Jackson as well as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was then ambassador to the UN. Perle also recruited two young unknowns named Douglas Feith and Elliott Abrams to come work for Senators Jackson and Moynihan. When I half jokingly suggested that the Iraq War began in Scoop Jackson's office, Perle said, “There's an element of that.” Richard Perle was its impresario, with one degree of separation from everyone who mattered. More than anyone, he personified the neoconservative insurgent, absolutely certain of himself and his ideas, always drawing new cadres into the cause, staging frequent guerrilla ambushes on the establishment, preparing to seize ultimate power.

The most important contact Perle made came after Jackson's death, when he went to work at the Reagan Pentagon and earned a reputation for clinging to decidedly dour views of the Soviet Union's intentions even as it was palpably weakening and opening up under Gorbachev. (Perle even wrote a novel in which a top arms-control official saves an American president from giving away the whole nuclear arsenal in negotiations with the Soviets—as Perle claimed to have done with Reagan at Reykjavik.) In 1985, at an event in Washington, Albert Wohlstetter—the hawkish Cold War defense theorist, whose daughter Perle had dated in high school in Los Angeles, who had mentored Paul Wolfowitz at Chicago, and who had brought Perle and Wolfowitz together in Washington in the summer of 1969—introduced Perle to an Iraqi exile with a doctorate in theoretical mathematics from Chicago named Ahmad Chalabi.

By the time of the PNAC letter in January 1998, Perle knew exactly how Saddam could be overthrown: Put Ahmad Chalabi at the head of an army of Iraqi insurgents and back him with American military power and cash.

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IN
1996, some of the people in Perle's circle had begun to think about what it would mean for Saddam Hussein to be removed from the Middle East scene. They concluded that it would be very good for Israel. Perle chaired a study group of eight pro-Likud Americans, including Douglas Feith, who had worked under Perle in the Reagan administration, and David Wurmser, who was the author of the paper produced under the group's auspices (Perle lent his own name without ever reading it). Afterward, the group was pleased enough with its work to send the paper to the newly elected Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” called for Israel to free itself from both socialist economic policies and the burdens of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Instead of retreating from occupied lands in exchange for dubious promises of peace, Wurmser wrote, Israel should take the fight to the Palestinians and their Arab backers and create a realignment of forces in the Middle East that would guarantee Israel's security. Iraq played a central, if utterly fanciful, role in this scenario. The paper dreamed of restoring the Hashemite family of Jordan (deposed from the Iraqi throne in 1958, the year of the republican coup and Chalabi's departure) to rule in Baghdad. The monarchy, in turn, despite being Sunni Muslim, would win over Iraq's Shia because “the Shia venerate foremost the Prophet's family, the direct descendant of which—and in whose veins the blood of the Prophet flows—is King Hussein.” With Shiite support, the newly enthroned Hashemites “could use their influence over Najaf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria.” Then the Palestinians, isolated and alone, would have to accept Israeli demands. Thus, a kingdom invented by T. E. Lawrence and other British officials after World War I to sustain colonial rule and defuse the problem of Arab nationalism resurfaced in 1996 as the quasi-mystical key that would unlock almost every stubborn problem of the contemporary Middle East—the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the jihadi terrorism and resistance of Hezbollah, America's reliance on oil from Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, and the secular Baathist tyranny of Saddam Hussein.

Wurmser elaborated the theory in his 1999 book
Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein,
published by the American Enterprise Institute, the right-wing think tank where he was a scholar. The overthrow of Saddam would destabilize both Syria and Iran, isolate Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah, and realign the entire Middle East so that—though this was never spelled out, as if the author feared making himself too clear—Israel would no longer need to negotiate with the Palestinians over the occupied territories.
Tyranny's Ally,
with an introduction by Richard Perle and acknowledgments to Perle, Chalabi, Feith, Lewis, and several other intellectuals of the Iraq War, is a strange and revealing book. It reads as if a graduate student were feverishly trying to apply the half-digested concepts he'd learned in a class with Leo Strauss to subject matter he'd learned in a class with Bernard Lewis. There's an undercurrent of deep distrust of the modern world: Modernity gave us totalitarianism, therefore modernity must be undone. Wurmser wanted to return Iraq to traditional values, especially to Shiite religious tradition (about which he knew almost nothing). “The root of the violence is a century-old radical attack on the Arab world's traditional elite,” he wrote. “Proponents of the secular ideology assumed the prerogative to shape and reshape mankind according to their concept of perfection.” Dostoyevsky's antirevolutionary novel
Demons
is invoked; the political ideas of Wurmser and a few other proponents of American intervention in the Middle East were closer to Dostoyevsky's religious authoritarianism than to John Stuart Mill's secular liberalism. They advocated democracy, but at bottom they were anti-Enlightenment.

A few weeks before the start of the Iraq War, a State Department official described for me what he called the “everybody move over one theory”: Israel would annex the occupied territories, the Palestinians would get Jordan, and the Jordanian Hashemites would be restored to the throne of Iraq. By then, several of the paper's signers, including Feith, Perle, and Wurmser, occupied key policy positions in the administration of George W. Bush, where they were shaping the imminent war to overthrow Saddam.

Does this mean that a pro-Likud cabal insinuated its way into the high councils of the U.S. government and took hold of the apparatus of American foreign policy to serve Israeli interests (as some critics of the war have charged, rather than addressing its merits head on)? Is neoconservative another word for Jewish (as some advocates of the war have complained, rather than addressing their critics head on)? For Feith and Wurmser, the security of Israel was probably the prime mover. But for others, such as Wolfowitz, Iraq stood for different things—an unfinished war, Arab tyranny, weapons proliferation, a strategic threat to oil, American weakness, Democratic fecklessness—and regime change there became the foreign-policy jackpot. A leading Israeli journalist, Ari Shavit, answered the conspiracy theory this way: Jews are drawn to ideas. The idea of realigning the Middle East by overthrowing Saddam Hussein was first proposed by a group of Jewish policy makers and intellectuals who were close to the Likud. And when the second President Bush looked around for a way to think about the uncharted era that began on September 11, 2001, there was one already available.

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MOST AMERICAN LIBERALS
opposed the Gulf War in 1991. The prospect of a ground assault by half a million troops (even if this was desert and not jungle) touched the extremely sensitive place where America's last land war remained as a muscle memory. And this anxiety played no small part in the “no” votes on the war resolution cast by two young Democratic senators who were veterans of that last war, Bob Kerrey and John Kerry. Vietnam turned most Democrats born after World War II—including me—dovish. Still, the footage of grateful Kuwaitis waving at columns of American troops streaming through the liberated capital knocked something ajar in my worldview. American soldiers were the heroes. In northern Iraq, after the Kurdish uprising, militiamen known as
peshmerga
drove around with pictures of George H. W. Bush taped to their windshields. This was something new.

The decade that followed the Gulf War scrambled everything and turned many of the old truths on their heads. The combination of the Cold War's end, the outbreak of genocidal wars and ethnic conflicts in Europe and Africa, and a Democratic presidency made it possible for liberals to contemplate and even advocate the use of American force for the first time since the Kennedy years. There was more than a little one-eyed partisanship in this thinking, but there was also idealism, for it drew on a powerful idea that came out of one of the twentieth century's greatest movements, the movement for human rights. The idea was that governments should not be allowed to abuse their own citizens on a massive scale; that sovereignty did not excuse rape, torture, murder, and genocide; that it was the world's interest and obligation to end these crimes. This new kind of war became known as humanitarian intervention, and in this country its advocates acquired the name liberal interventionists or, in shorthand, liberal hawks.

Most liberals' preferred institution for doing the intervening was the United Nations. By 1994, Bosnia and Rwanda, scenes of the decade's two genocides, had shown that the UN wasn't up to the task—its efforts in both places only seemed to perpetuate the slaughter and put innocent civilians at greater risk. Though Franklin Roosevelt envisioned the UN as an antifascist organization, it was founded as a body of sovereign nations; its ultimate function was to resolve disputes between them and preserve the status quo. With Libya taking its turn as chair of the Human Rights Commission, the UN was hardly the ideal instrument for stopping atrocities. Nor was it given the necessary push by the powers that sat on the Security Council, especially the United States. The UN and the Western powers passed responsibility for these tragedies back and forth, like a holding-company scheme. But for many citizens, including many American liberals, the unstopped bleeding in these distant places demanded a response, and if it wasn't going to come from the UN or the European countries, it would have to come from the superpower.

Without a Soviet Union or a Cold War, these interventions didn't carry the odor of “vital strategic interest.” The very thing that disqualified Bosnia, Rwanda, Haiti, and Kosovo from meriting American force in the eyes of conservatives (“We don't have a dog in that fight,” Secretary of State James Baker said of Bosnia) made force more thinkable to liberals. The rare Republican supporters of intervention (including Paul Wolfowitz), who saw national interest and the spread of human rights as inextricable, attacked liberals for their utopian dreams. “Airy humanitarianism” sneered Kagan. The fact that some liberals and conservatives supported the same military policies in the nineties didn't mean that they had started from the same place; nor, a few years later, would they end up together.

The Republican Party—again, partly out of strategic principle and partly out of naked partisanship—did everything it could to tie Clinton's hands and prevent the American military from being used to fight distant, obscure wars or provide security in the inevitably messy aftermaths. Few terms were more reviled by Republicans than “nation building.” As Kagan, one of the rare dissenters, observed in 1995, “In a few short years, America had passed through a looking glass into an upside-down world where (some) liberal Democrats were calling for U.S. military action abroad while conservative Republicans warned of swamps, sand traps, neocolonialism, and ‘another Vietnam.' The result was a timid and uncertain Democratic President whose few halfhearted gestures toward internationalist leadership were attacked and constrained by a Republican opposition in Congress.”

For lifelong doves, the first sip of this drink called humanitarian intervention carried a special thrill. All the drama, the intense heat of argument, was generated in the decision whether or not to go to war. In this moment one's moral credentials were on the line. It was a kind of existential choice, a statement of values, all the more potent for being politically unorthodox and sometimes even brave. None of this made the decisions any less serious or sincere, but the more mundane questions of what would happen later tended to dissolve in a mist of high purpose. And because liberal hawks responded to humanitarian crises, they were less likely to think strategically about the shape of the world in ten or twenty years; the long-range answers they offered, such as international criminal courts, UN resolutions, and regional intervention forces, seemed like noble wishes rather than practical answers. Over and over, they had to fall back on the solution with which they felt least comfortable—American power.