A Letter to Paul Wolfowitz

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 fulll- 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 benets 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 ponticate, 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 ofce 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 ofcials responsible to resign, policy. This, in a sense, very accurately—so, too, you took it as an afrmation. For proof was your life’s work. does world order. that averting surprise through preventive 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 efcacy 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 denes 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.

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