The Audacity of Hope (37 page)

I had difficulty sleeping that night; instead, I watched the Redskins game, piped in live via satellite to the pool house once reserved for Saddam and his guests. Several times I muted the TV and heard mortar fire pierce the silence. The following morning, we took a Black Hawk to the Marine base in Fallujah, out in the arid, western portion of Iraq called Anbar Province. Some of the fiercest fighting against the insurgency had taken place in Sunni-dominated Anbar, and the atmosphere in the camp was considerably grimmer than in the Green Zone; just the previous day, five Marines on patrol had been killed by roadside bombs or small-arms fire. The troops here looked rawer as well, most of them in their early twenties, many still with pimples and the unformed bodies of teenagers.

The general in charge of the camp had arranged a briefing, and we listened as the camp’s senior officers explained the dilemma facing U.S. forces: With improved capabilities, they were arresting more and more insurgent leaders each day, but like street gangs back in Chicago, for every insurgent they arrested, there seemed to be two ready to take his place. Economics, and not just politics, seemed to be feeding the insurgency—the central government had been neglecting Anbar, and male unemployment hovered around 70 percent.

“For two or three dollars, you can pay some kid to plant a bomb,” one of the officers said. “That’s a lot of money out here.”

By the end of the briefing, a light fog had rolled in, delaying our flight to Kirkuk. While waiting, my foreign policy staffer, Mark Lippert, wandered off to chat with one of the unit’s senior officers, while I struck up a conversation with one of the majors responsible for counterinsurgency strategy in the region. He was a soft-spoken man, short and with glasses; it was easy to imagine him as a high school math teacher. In fact, it turned out that before joining the Marines he had spent several years in the Philippines as a member of the Peace Corps. Many of the lessons he had learned there needed to be applied to the military’s work in Iraq, he told me. He didn’t have anywhere

near the number of Arabic-speakers needed to build trust with the local population. We needed to improve cultural sensitivity within U.S. forces, develop long-term relationships with local leaders, and couple security forces to reconstruction teams, so that Iraqis could see concrete benefits from U.S. efforts. All this would take time, he said, but he could already see changes for the better as the military adopted these practices throughout the country.

Our escort officer signaled that the chopper was ready to take off. I wished the major luck and headed for the van. Mark came up beside me, and I asked him what he’d learned from his conversation with the senior officer.

“I asked him what he thought we needed to do to best deal with the situation.”

“What did he say?”

“Leave.”

THE STORY OF America’s involvement in Iraq will be analyzed and debated for many years to come—indeed, it’s a story that’s still being written. At the moment, the situation there has deteriorated to the point where it appears that a low-grade civil war has begun, and while I believe that all Americans—regardless of their views on the original decision to invade—have an interest in seeing a decent outcome in Iraq, I cannot honestly say that I am optimistic about Iraq’s short-term prospects.

I do know that at this stage it will be politics—the calculations of those hard, unsentimental men with whom I had dinner—and not the application of American force that determines what happens in Iraq. I believe as well that our strategic goals at this point should be well defined: achieving some semblance of stability in Iraq, ensuring that those in power in Iraq are not hostile to the United States, and preventing Iraq from becoming a base for terrorist activity. In pursuit of these goals, I believe it is in the interest of both Americans and Iraqis to begin a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops by the end of 2006, although how quickly a complete withdrawal can be accomplished is a matter of imperfect judgment, based on a series of best guesses—about the ability of the Iraqi government to deliver even basic security and services to its people, the degree to which our presence drives the insurgency, and the odds that in the absence of U.S. troops Iraq would descend into all-out civil war. When battle-hardened Marine officers suggest we pull out and skeptical foreign correspondents suggest that we stay, there are no easy answers to be had.

Still, it’s not too early to draw some conclusions from our actions in Iraq. For our difficulties there don’t just arise as a result of bad execution. They reflect a failure of conception. The fact is, close to five years after 9/11 and fifteen years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the United States still lacks a coherent national security policy. Instead of guiding principles, we have what appear to be a series of ad hoc decisions, with dubious results. Why invade Iraq and not North Korea or Burma? Why intervene in Bosnia and not Darfur? Are our goals in Iran regime change, the dismantling of all Iranian nuclear capability, the prevention of nuclear proliferation, or all three? Are we committed to use force wherever there’s a despotic regime that’s terrorizing its

people—and if so, how long do we stay to ensure democracy takes root? How do we treat countries like China that are liberalizing economically but not politically? Do we work through the United Nations on all issues or only when the UN is willing to ratify decisions we’ve already made?

Perhaps someone inside the White House has clear answers to these questions. But our allies—and for that matter our enemies—certainly don’t know what those answers are. More important, neither do the American people. Without a well-articulated strategy that the public supports and the world understands, America will lack the legitimacy— and ultimately the power—it needs to make the world safer than it is today. We need a revised foreign policy framework that matches the boldness and scope of Truman’s post–World War II policies—one that addresses both the challenges and the opportunities of a new millennium, one that guides our use of force and expresses our deepest ideals and commitments.

I don’t presume to have this grand strategy in my hip pocket. But I know what I believe, and I’d suggest a few things that the American people should be able to agree on, starting points for a new consensus.

To begin with, we should understand that any return to isolationism—or a foreign policy approach that denies the occasional need to deploy U.S. troops—will not work. The impulse to withdraw from the world remains a strong undercurrent in both parties, particularly when U.S. casualties are at stake. After the bodies of U.S. soldiers were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993, for example, Republicans accused President Clinton of squandering U.S. forces on ill-conceived missions; it was partly because of the experience in Somalia that candidate George W. Bush vowed in the 2000 election never again to expend American military resources on “nation building.” Understandably, the Bush Administration’s actions in Iraq have produced a much bigger backlash. According to a Pew Research Center poll, almost five years after the 9/11 attacks, 46 percent of Americans have concluded that the United States should “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.”

The reaction has been particularly severe among liberals, who see in Iraq a repeat of the mistakes America made in Vietnam. Frustration with Iraq and the questionable tactics the Administration used to make its case for the war has even led many on the left to downplay the threat posed by terrorists and nuclear proliferators; according to a January 2005 poll, self-identified conservatives were 29 points more likely than liberals to identify destroying Al Qaeda as one of their top foreign policy goals, and 26 points more likely to mention denying nuclear weapons to hostile groups or nations. The top three foreign policy objectives among liberals, on the other hand, were withdrawing troops from Iraq, stopping the spread of AIDS, and working more closely with our allies.

The objectives favored by liberals have merit. But they hardly constitute a coherent national security policy. It’s useful to remind ourselves, then, that Osama bin Laden is not Ho Chi Minh, and that the threats facing the United States today are real, multiple, and potentially devastating. Our recent policies have made matters worse, but if we pulled out of Iraq tomorrow, the United States would still be a target, given its dominant position in the existing international order. Of course, conservatives are just as

misguided if they think we can simply eliminate “the evildoers” and then let the world fend for itself. Globalization makes our economy, our health, and our security all captive to events on the other side of the world. And no other nation on earth has a greater capacity to shape that global system, or to build consensus around a new set of international rules that expand the zones of freedom, personal safety, and economic well-being. Like it or not, if we want to make America more secure, we are going to have to help make the world more secure.

The second thing we need to recognize is that the security environment we face today is fundamentally different from the one that existed fifty, twenty-five, or even ten years ago. When Truman, Acheson, Kennan, and Marshall sat down to design the architecture of the post–World War II order, their frame of reference was the competition between the great powers that had dominated the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In that world, America’s greatest threats came from expansionist states like Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, which could deploy large armies and powerful arsenals to invade key territories, restrict our access to critical resources, and dictate the terms of world trade.

That world no longer exists. The integration of Germany and Japan into a world system of liberal democracies and free-market economies effectively eliminated the threat of great-power conflicts inside the free world. The advent of nuclear weapons and “mutual assured destruction” rendered the risk of war between the United States and the Soviet Union fairly remote even before the Berlin Wall fell. Today, the world’s most powerful nations (including, to an ever-increasing extent, China)—and, just as important, the vast majority of the people who live within these nations—are largely committed to a common set of international rules governing trade, economic policy, and the legal and diplomatic resolution of disputes, even if broader notions of liberty and democracy aren’t widely observed within their own borders.

The growing threat, then, comes primarily from those parts of the world on the margins of the global economy where the international “rules of the road” have not taken hold— the realm of weak or failing states, arbitrary rule, corruption, and chronic violence; lands in which an overwhelming majority of the population is poor, uneducated, and cut off from the global information grid; places where the rulers fear globalization will loosen their hold on power, undermine traditional cultures, or displace indigenous institutions.

In the past, there was the perception that America could perhaps safely ignore nations and individuals in these disconnected regions. They might be hostile to our worldview, nationalize a U.S. business, cause a spike in commodity prices, fall into the Soviet or Communist Chinese orbit, or even attack U.S. embassies or military personnel overseas—but they could not strike us where we live. September 11 showed that’s no longer the case. The very interconnectivity that increasingly binds the world together has empowered those who would tear that world down. Terrorist networks can spread their doctrines in the blink of an eye; they can probe the world economic system’s weakest links, knowing that an attack in London or Tokyo will reverberate in New York or Hong Kong; weapons and technology that were once the exclusive province of nation-states can now be purchased on the black market, or their designs downloaded off the Internet; the free travel of people and goods across borders, the lifeblood of the global economy, can be exploited for murderous ends.

If nation-states no longer have a monopoly on mass violence; if in fact nation-states are increasingly less likely to launch a direct attack on us, since they have a fixed address to which we can deliver a response; if instead the fastest-growing threats are transnational—terrorist networks intent on repelling or disrupting the forces of globalization, potential pandemic disease like avian flu, or catastrophic changes in the earth’s climate—then how should our national security strategy adapt?

For starters, our defense spending and the force structure of our military should reflect the new reality. Since the outset of the Cold War, our ability to deter nation-to-nation aggression has to a large extent underwritten security for every country that commits itself to international rules and norms. With the only blue-water navy that patrols the entire globe, it is our ships that keep the sea lanes clear. And it is our nuclear umbrella that prevented Europe and Japan from entering the arms race during the Cold War, and that—until recently, at least—has led most countries to conclude that nukes aren’t worth the trouble. So long as Russia and China retain their own large military forces and haven’t fully rid themselves of the instinct to throw their weight around—and so long as a handful of rogue states are willing to attack other sovereign nations, as Saddam attacked Kuwait in 1991—there will be times when we must again play the role of the world’s reluctant sheriff. This will not change—nor should it.

On the other hand, it’s time we acknowledge that a defense budget and force structure built principally around the prospect of World War III makes little strategic sense. The U.S. military and defense budget in 2005 topped $522 billion—more than that of the next thirty countries combined. The United States’ GDP is greater than that of the two largest countries and fastest-growing economies—China and India—combined. We need to maintain a strategic force posture that allows us to manage threats posed by rogue nations like North Korea and Iran and to meet the challenges presented by potential rivals like China. Indeed, given the depletion of our forces after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we will probably need a somewhat higher budget in the immediate future just to restore readiness and replace equipment.