MISCELLANY

A LETTER TO PAU L WOLF OW ITZ Occasioned by the tenth anniversary of the Iraq war By Andrew J. Bacevich

ear Paul, seemed to nd pre- DI have been mean- siding over SAIS ing to write to you for more bothersome some time, and the than it was ful ll- tenth anniversary of ing. Given all that the beginning of the running the place Iraq war provides as entails—raising good an occasion as money, catering to any to do so. Distract- various constitu- ed by other, more re- encies, managing cent eruptions of vio- a cantankerous lence, the country and self-important has all but forgotten faculty—I’m not the war. But I won’t sure I blame you. and I expect you SAIS prepares peo- can’t, although our ple to exercise power. reasons for remem- That’s why the bering may differ. school exists. Yet you Twenty years ago, wielded less clout you became dean of the Johns Hopkins excel mostly in recycling bromides. than at any time during your previous School of Advanced International Stud- When it came to sustenance, the sand- two decades of government service. ies and hired me as a minor staff func- wiches were superior to the chitchat. So at Zbig’s luncheons, when you tionary. I never thanked you properly. I You were an exception, however. You riffed on some policy issue—the crisis in needed that job. Included in the bene ts had a knack for framing things cre- the Balkans, the threat posed by North package was the chance to hobnob with atively. No matter how daunting the Korean nukes, the latest provocations of luminaries who gathered at SAIS every problem, you contrived a solution. Saddam Hussein—it was a treat to few weeks to join Zbigniew Brzezinski More important, you grasped the big watch you become so animated. What for an off-the-record discussion of foreign picture. Here, it was apparent, lay your turned you on was playing the game. policy. From ve years of listening to métier. As Saul Bellow wrote of Philip Being at SAIS was riding the bench. these insiders ponti cate, I drew one Gorman, your ctionalized double, in Even during the 1990s, those who conclusion: people said to be smart—the Ravelstein, you possessed an aptitude for disliked your views tagged you as a neo- ones with fancy résumés who get their “Great Politics.” Where others saw conservative. But the label never quite op-eds published in the New York Times complications, you discerned connec- t. You were at most a fellow traveler. and appear on TV—really aren’t. They tions. Where others saw constraints, You never really signed on with the PR you found possibilities for action. rm of Podhoretz, Kristol, and Kagan. Andrew J. Bacevich teaches at Boston Uni- Truthfully, I wouldn’t give you es- Your approach to policy analysis owed versity. He is the author of The New American Militarism: How Americans pecially high marks as dean. You more to Wohlstetter Inc.—a rm less Are Seduced by War, to be republished were, of course, dutiful and never less interested in ideology than in power and next month in an updated edition. than kind to students. Yet you its employment.

48 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2013 Sandstorm in Tikrit, by Steve Mumford. Courtesy Postmasters Gallery, New York City

Bacevich Miscellany CX2.indd_0129 48 1/29/13 12:07 PM I didn’t understand this at the time, an arena in which the United States pointing you to serve as Donald Rums- but I’ve come to appreciate the extent has historically enjoyed a clear edge— feld’s deputy atop the Pentagon hierar- to which your thinking mirrors that of brings outright supremacy within chy. You took of ce as Osama bin Laden the nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstet- reach. Of all the products of Albert was conspiring to attack. Alas, neither ter. Your friend Richard Perle put the Wohlstetter’s fertile brain, this one Rumsfeld nor you nor anyone else in a matter succinctly: “Paul thinks the way impressed you most. The potential im- position of real authority anticipated Albert thinks.” Wohlstetter, the quin- plications were dazzling. According to what was to occur. America’s vaunted tessential “defense intellectual,” had Mao, political power grows out of the defense establishment had left the coun- been your graduate-school mentor. You barrel of a gun. Wohlstetter went fur- try defenseless. Yet instead of seeing this became, in effect, his agent, devoted to ther. Given the right sort of gun— as evidence of gross incompetence re- converting his principles into actual preferably one that res very fast and quiring the of cials responsible to resign, policy. This, in a sense, very accurately—so, too, you took it as an af rmation. For proof was your life’s work. does world order. that averting surprise through preven- tive military action was now priority ost Americans today have ith the passing of the Cold War, number one, Americans needed to look neverM heard of Wohlstetter and globalW hegemony seemed America’s for no further than the damage inicted by wouldn’t know what to make of the the taking. What others saw as an op- nineteen thugs armed with box cutters. guy even if they had. Everything about tion you, Paul, saw as something much You immediately saw the events of him exuded sophistication. He was the more: an obligation that the nation 9/11 as a second and more promising smartest guy in the room before any- needed to seize, for its own good as well opening to assert U.S. supremacy. When one had coined the phrase. Therein as for the world’s. Not long before we riding high a decade earlier, many Amer- lay his appeal. To be admitted to disci- both showed up at SAIS, your rst ef- icans had thought it either unseemly or pleship was to become one of the elect. fort to codify supremacy and preventive unnecessary to lord it over others. Now, Wohlstetter’s perspective (which be- action as a basis for strategy had ended with the populace angry and frightened, came yours) emphasized ve distinct in embarrassing failure. I refer here to the idea was likely to prove an easier sell. propositions. Call them the Wohlstet- the famous (or infamous) Defense Although none of the hijackers were ter Precepts. Planning Guidance of 1992, drafted in Iraqi, within days of 9/11 you were pro- First, liberal internationalism, with the aftermath of Operation Desert moting military action against Iraq. Crit- its optimistic expectation that the Storm by the Pentagon policy shop you ics have chalked this up to your supposed world will embrace a set of common then directed. Before this classified obsession with Saddam. The criticism is norms to achieve peace, is an illusion. document was fully vetted by the misplaced. The scale of your ambitions Of course virtually every president White House, it was leaked to the New was vastly greater. since Franklin Roosevelt has paid lip York Times, which made it front-page In an instant, you grasped that the service to that illusion, and doing so news. The draft DPG announced that attacks provided a fresh opportunity to during the Cold War may even have it had become the “ rst objective” of implement Wohlstetter’s Precepts, and served a certain purpose. But to in- U.S. policy “to prevent the re- Iraq offered a made-to-order venue. “We dulge it further constitutes sheer folly. emergence of a new rival.” With an eye cannot wait to act until the threat is Second, the system that replaces toward “deterring potential competitors imminent,” you said in 2002. Toppling liberal internationalism must address from even aspiring to a larger regional Saddam Hussein would validate the al- the ever-present (and growing) danger or global role,” the United States would ternative to waiting. In Iraq the United posed by catastrophic surprise. Re- maintain unquestioned military superi- States would demonstrate the member Pearl Harbor. Now imagine ority and, if necessary, employ force ef cacy of preventive war. something orders of magnitude unilaterally. As window dressing, allies worse—for instance, a nuclear attack might be nice, but the United States o even conceding a hat tip to Al- from out of the blue. no longer considered them necessary. bertS Wohlstetter, the Bush Doctrine was Third, the key to averting or at least Unfortunately, you and the team largely your handiwork. The urgency of minimizing surprise is to act preven- assigned to draft the DPG had miscal- invading Iraq stemmed from the need to tively. If shrewdly conceived and skill- culated the administration’s support for validate that doctrine before the win- fully executed, action holds some pos- your thinking. This was not the mo- dow of opportunity closed. What made sibility of safety, whereas inaction ment to be unfurling grandiose ambi- it necessary to act immediately was not reduces that possibility to near zero. tions expressed in indelicate language. Saddam’s purported WMD program. It Eliminate the threat before it material- In the ensuing hue and cry, President was not his nearly nonexistent links to izes. In statecraft, that de nes the stan- George H. W. Bush disavowed the Al Qaeda. It was certainly not the way dard of excellence. document. Your reputation took a hit. he abused his own people. No, what Fourth, the ultimate in preventive But you were undeterred. drove events was the imperative of action is dominion. The best insur- The election of George W. Bush as claiming for the United States preroga- ance against unpleasant surprises is to president permitted you to escape from tives allowed no other nation. achieve unquestioned supremacy. academe. You’d done yeoman work tu- I do not doubt the sincerity of your Lastly, by transforming the very na- toring candidate Bush in how the world conviction (shared by President Bush) ture of war, information technology— works, and he repaid the debt by ap- that our country could be counted on to

MISCELLANY 49

Bacevich Miscellany CX2.indd_0129 49 1/29/13 12:07 PM exercise those prerogatives in ways ben- Your imagination led you to foresee been keen to give the Bush Doctrine e cial to all humankind—promoting a brief conict, with Iraqis rather than another go, perhaps in Iran? Or peace, democracy, and human rights. U.S. taxpayers footing the bill for any would he have concluded that pre- But the proximate aim was to unshack- mess left behind. ventive war is both reckless and in- le American power. Saddam Hussein’s After all, preventive war was sup- herently immoral? That, of course, demise would serve as an object lesson posed to solve problems. Eliminating had been the traditional American for all: Here’s what we can do. Here’s threats before they could materialize view prior to 9/11. what we will do. was going to enhance our standing, Would Albert endorse Barack Although you weren’t going to adver- positioning us to call the shots. In- Obama’s variant of preventive war, the tise the point, this unshackling would stead, the result was a train wreck of employing of unmanned aircraft as also contribute to the security of Israel. epic proportions. Granted, as you your- instruments of targeted assassination? To Wohlstetter’s ve precepts you had self have said, “the world is better off” Sending a Hellfire missile through added a silent codicil. According to the with Saddam Hussein having met his some unsuspecting jihadist’s wind- unwritten sixth precept, Israeli interests maker. But taken as a whole, the cost- shield certainly ts the de nition of and U.S. interests must align. You un- bene t ratio is cause for weeping. As being proactive, but where does it lead? derstood that making Israelis feel safer for global hegemony, we As a numbers guy, Albert might won- makes Israel less obstreperous, and that can kiss it goodbye. der how many “terrorists” we’re going removing the sources of Israeli insecu- to have to kill before the  - rity makes the harmonizing of U.S. and hat conclusions should we  banner gets resurrected. Israeli policies easier. Israel’s most effec- drawW from the events that actually And what would Albert make of tive friends are those who work quietly occurred, rather than from those you the war in Afghanistan, now limping to keep the divergent tendencies in hoped for? In a 2003 Boston Globe in- into its second decade? Wohlstetter U.S.-Israeli relations from getting out of terview, Richard Perle called Iraq took from Vietnam the lesson that we hand. You have always been such a “the rst war that’s been fought in a needed new ways “to use our power friend. Preventive war to overthrow an way that would recognize Albert’s vi- discriminately and for worthy ends.” evil dictator was going to elevate the sion for future wars.” So perhaps the In light of Afghanistan, perhaps he United States to the status of Big Ka- problem lies with Albert’s vision. would reconsider that position and huna while also making Israelis feel just One of Wohlstetter’s distinguishing reach the conclusion others took from a little bit safer. This audacious trifecta qualities, you once told an interviewer, Vietnam: Some wars can’t be won and describes your conception. And you was that he “was so insistent on ascer- aren’t worth ghting. almost pulled it off. taining the facts. He had a very fact- Finally, would Albert fail to note Imagine—you must have done so based approach to policy.” Albert’s ap- that U.S. and Israeli security interests many times—if that notorious  proach was ruthlessly pragmatic. “It are now rapidly slipping out of sync?  banner had accurately derived from saying, Here’s the prob- The outcome of the Arab Spring re- portrayed the situation on the ground in lem, look at it factually, see what the mains unknown. But what the United Iraq in May 2003. Imagine if U.S. forces questions are that emerged from the States hopes will emerge from that had achieved a clean, decisive victory. thing itself, so to speak.” Then confront upheaval in the long run differs con- Imagine that the famous (if staged) those questions. siderably from what will serve Israel’s photo of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad’s One of the questions emerging from immediate needs. Al Firdos Square being pulled down had the Iraq debacle must be this one: Why Given the state of things and our actually presaged a rapid transition to a did liberation at gunpoint yield results own standing ten years after the start pro-American liberal democracy, just as that differed so radically from what the of the Iraq war, what would Albert do? your friend Ahmed Chalabi had prom- war’s advocates had expected? Or, to I never met the man (he died in 1997), ised. Imagine if none of the ensuing sharpen the point, How did preventive but my guess is that he wouldn’t inch horrors and disappointments had oc- war undertaken by ostensibly the strongest from taking on these questions, even curred: the insurgency; Fallujah and military in history produce a cataclysm? if the answers threatened to contradict Abu Ghraib; thousands of American Not one of your colleagues from the his own long-held beliefs. Neither lives lost and damaged; at least 125,000 Bush Administration possesses the should you, Paul. To be sure, whatever Iraqis killed, and some 3 million others necessary combination of honesty, you might choose to say, you’ll be exiled or displaced; more than a trillion courage, and wit to answer these ques- vilified, as Robert McNamara was dollars squandered. tions. If you don’t believe me, please vili ed when he broke his long silence You expected something different, sample the tediously self-exculpatory and admitted that he’d been “wrong, of course. Shortly before the war, you memoirs penned by (or on behalf of) terribly wrong” about Vietnam. But told Congress: Bush himself, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, help us learn the lessons of Iraq so that Tenet, Bremer, Feith, and a small we might extract from it something of It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post- squad of eminently for- value in return for all the sacri ces Saddam Iraq than it would take to gettable generals. made there. Forgive me for saying so, conduct the war itself and to secure but you owe it to your country. the surrender of Saddam’s security What would Albert Wohlstetter Give it a shot. forces and his army. Hard to imagine. have done? After Iraq, would he have Andy

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