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1.
When talking stops and
shooting starts, all the arguments over UN inspections in
Iraq, still the subject of heated debate as I write, will be
filed under ancient history, and new questions will take their
place: How will the war go? After the fighting, then what? The
American war plan for Iraq has gone through three stages over
the last nine months, all discussed with unusual candor in
public. The current plan calls for an initial two or three
days of devastating attacks by powerful and extremely accurate
weapons. The targets of these weapons, according to retired
Air Force Lieutenant General Tom McInerney, who discussed the
strategy with Greta Van Susteren on the Fox News channel
January 20, is to destroy "the centers of gravity"
of the Iraqi military—the "command and control
apparatus" which is difficult to hide. In the first Gulf
War, when only 20 percent of the ordnance was
precision-guided, the bombing campaign devastated the Iraqi
water supply, electricity production, and transportation
system. This time, with precision weapons closer to 80 percent
of the total, it is the Iraqi military, not the national
economic infrastructure, which will be struck in the opening
salvo. Ground forces will follow hard on the heels of the
initial strikes. "In eight or nine days we'll have forces
on the outskirts of Baghdad," McInerney told viewers.
"We'll own 75 percent of that country."
"Shock and Awe" is
the Pentagon's name for the sort of lightning war we intend to
fight, but military history reminds us that no plan survives
contact with the enemy. If this one succeeds within the
"six days, [or] six weeks, I doubt six months"
recently predicted by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, it
will probably not be the plan alone that determines success,
but just as importantly the military machine carrying it out.
That the American military is big, expensive, technically
sophisticated, and wary of casualties everybody knows. The
question now is whether it can fight the sort of bold, quick,
and determined war the planners have drawn up on paper.
Two kinds of answers might
be given to this question. The first would be mainly an
exhaustive list of numbers and descriptors—perhaps 200,000
American troops in all, armed with state-of-the-art weaponry.
Facing them will be a ragtag Iraqi army of about 350,000 men,
a lot of obsolete military hardware, and an unknown ability to
deliver chemical or biological agents. The UN inspectors have
not found any of these weapons since Resolution 1441 was
passed in November, but the Bush administration is clearly
worried about them—worried enough to threaten Iraqi generals
with prosecution as war criminals if they use them, and
possibly, according to air war expert William Arkin, even to
retaliate with nuclear weapons.
+++
What makes American forces
so lethal is spelled out in The New Face of War, a new book by
the military and intelligence analyst Bruce Berkowitz. His
answer is one word—"information," by which he
means the sort of exact, instantly accessible, easily
distributed digital information which goes into computers and
can be used to find and attack military targets with awesome
precision in near-real time. The military machine that crushed
the Iraqis in forty-three days of bombing and four days of
ground attack is now smaller, smarter, quicker, newer, and
more lethal, while the Iraqi military has wasted away to a
third of its size in 1991.The recent Iraqi promise to fight
the Americans with suicide bombers is a tacit confession that
they have little hope of putting up serious resistance, let
alone of winning. The exhaustive list of new gadgets and
"capabilities" is the easily described part of what
Americans buy with the world's biggest military budget—some
$379 billion next year, as requested in President Bush's new
budget proposals.
Harder to describe is the
quality of the American military: What sort of Americans have
chosen military careers? How are they trained? Do they have
energy and initiative? Are they psychologically ready? Are
they well commanded? Do they trust one another? Does the
organization believe in the job it has been asked to do—
"the mission," in military parlance? War is the
ultimate test, but short of war the best way to take the
measure of a military is to watch it, talk to it, travel with
it, and live with it.
This was the approach
followed by the Washington Post reporter Dana Priest over a
four-year period, including one stretch of eighteen months,
much of it spent following two "CinCs" —the
commanders in chief of the European Command, which ran the
American war in Kosovo, and the Central Command, which is
preparing to go to war in Iraq. Few books are as lively,
informed, and intelligently written as Priest's account of the
American military, and I can think of none which has arrived
with better timing. What Priest saw in her time with the
soldiers provides the body of The Mission, but its great
subject, reflected in its title, is the way American
presidents turn increasingly to the military to achieve
political ends.
+++
Most books about the
American military stress doctrine, gadgets, and numbers.
Priest makes the occasional bow in that direction: in a
footnote about the air war in Afghanistan, for example, she
mentions "air tasking orders," "kill
boxes," "emerging targets," and other terms of
art for American high-tech war. But what interests her most is
the culture of the American military, how it looks at the
world, and what policymakers in Washington hope to do with it.
That, she found, is increasingly ambitious. The first
President Bush, for example, appointed the US military the
"single lead agency" in the war on drugs. President
Clinton also prepared to use the military for political
ends—up to a point. His secretary of state, Madeline
Albright, wanted to use US troops in Bosnia but General Colin
Powell, then still chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put
up stiff resistance. "What's the point," Albright
asked Powell, "of having this superb military that you're
always talking about if we can't use it?"
"Coercive
diplomacy" was what Albright had in mind. Secretary of
Defense William J. Perry took the notion a step further; the
military, he thought, might be used to "shape" the
world, push it in directions America wanted to go. Under
Clinton the official National Security Strategy gave the CinCs
broad but vague powers which evolved into the current concept
of "engagement" —a practice of intimate contact
with foreign governments and militaries at so many levels,
under so many separate programs, that it becomes difficult to
say where aid and training end and US moral responsibility
begins. The "peacekeeping" methods taught to the
military in Kyrgyzstan in the late 1990s, Priest writes, were
really "a euphemism for lethal tactics," and might
be used to crush democratic opposition as well as terrorists.
In the course of her
research Priest learned two things—that the CinCs are
figures of extraordinary power throughout the territory they
command, far more influential than American ambassadors; and
that "the mission" of the US military has expanded
enormously in the last decade or two. "The US government
had grown increasingly dependent on its military to carry out
its foreign affairs," Priest writes:
The shift was incremental,
little noticed, de facto.... The military simply filled a
vacuum left by an indecisive White House, an atrophied State
Department, and a distracted Congress.
When Priest began her
travels the ballooning of the mission was simply an
interesting fact; if the United States wanted to attempt
something abroad —distribute food in Somalia, stop ethnic
killing in Kosovo, put drug dealers out of business in
Colombia—it asked the military to take on the job. After
September 11 this American dependence on its military
immediately began to drive the Bush administration's response
to the challenge posed by Islamic terror. Priest makes no
attempt to prove which came first—a visceral preference for
military solutions or practical resort to the military tool
that lay readiest to hand. But the result, she says, is a war
on terror that is all war; and a "mission" whose
prospects reflect the strengths and weaknesses of the military
instrument chosen to carry it out.
+++
Since 1980 the American
military has been divided into commands, at the moment ten in
all—five functional commands, like transportation or
strategic weapons, and five regional commands. Most of The
Mission reports on the time Priest spent with units of the
European Command in the former Yugoslavia, and with General
Anthony Zinni during his three years— from 1998 to 2001—as
CinC of the Central Command, which includes Egypt and the Horn
of Africa, the Middle East, South and Central Asia, and
"the stans" of the former Soviet Union, given to
Centcom specifically to acknowledge the importance of the
"Islamic threat." Zinni is currently underemployed
as President Bush's envoy to the peace process between Israel
and the Palestinians, but as CinC his power was equaled only
by heads of state. "Short, burly and camel-nosed,"
as Priest describes him, Zinni traveled constantly throughout
his realm, fifteen times to Saudi Arabia alone, where he
learned to admire the culture and even the ruling family.
Priest has a talent for
capturing the nuances of character and situation; in one
passage she describes a delegation of US senators that Zinni
took to see the Saudi defense minister, Prince Sultan bin
Abdul Aziz. The prince was uncomfortable with all those
strange senators; he called Zinni from the back of the room,
made space for him on a satin couch, took the general's hand
in his own, and held it in the affectionate Arab way for the
rest of the meeting.
After a couple of years of
such attention, Priest tells us, Zinni, a widely read man,
concluded that "he had become a modern-day proconsul,
descendant of the warrior-statesmen who ruled the Roman
Empire's outlying territory, bringing order and ideals from a
legalistic Rome. Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus—they would
have understood. His compatriots, he knew, did not." But
although he embodied American power, and was respected
accordingly, in one way Zinni was not like the proconsuls who
ran the world from Rome. The proconsuls were given
extraordinary authority and latitude, while Zinni, on the
all-important question of using power for political ends, was
kept on a short leash by the Clinton White House, and could do
nothing without authority from Washington.
Zinni liked and understood
the Arabs he dealt with but sometimes chafed under their
caution and restraint. Getting the rulers of the Gulf states
to agree on measures for the common defense, he whispered
during a meeting, was "like watching paint dry."
Even more frustrating to Zinni, Priest writes, was
Washington's refusal to see what was behind the "rising
anti-Americanism" of what he called "the Arab
street." Priest must have discussed this with him often.
"Much of this," she writes,
[Zinni] blamed on
Washington's unwillingness to craft a durable peace between
Israel and the Palestinians. He complained time and again that
the United States wasn't doing enough to solve the problem.
After all, it had considerable leverage that it had never even
threatened to use: an annual aid payment of nearly $3 billion
a year to Israel and millions spent on development projects in
the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Washington shrank from that,
but often wanted to challenge Iraq in small ways. In late
1997, for example, the Clinton administration wanted US pilots
to be more aggressive in patrolling Iraq's no-fly zones, to
draw fire and shoot back to prove that the US was still
determined to contain Iraq. It wasn't real punitive action the
Clinton people had in mind, Zinni felt, just muscle-flexing
for PR effect.
Zinni rebelled. To him this
was poking a stick into the tiger's cage, and it frightened
the sheiks. They wanted to know if the United States was
serious and would follow through. "Of course we're not
serious," Zinni thought to himself. "We're just
going to go up there and drop a few bombs and whack the Iraqis
around a little bit. Saddam's still going to be standing at
the end of it."
Small wonder, Priest writes,
that every time the United States wanted to issue a visible
blow against Hussein, Zinni "had to go hat-in-hand to
each country to secure takeoff, landing and overflight
permission for US planes." Zinni didn't really blame the
Saudis for being cautious, and he wasn't about to put his
pilots at risk so the White House could look tough on the
evening news. So in late 1997 Zinni told the Clinton people,
sure, he'd crank up the air war in Iraq if that is what the
government wanted; just send him a written order. That, of
course, nobody in the White House intended to do.
+++
Zinni was often restive with
Washington's half-measures, but in every other way he got what
he wanted. He traveled in his own plane with an entourage of
thirty or more, and he ran his mini-empire from Centcom
headquarters in Tampa, Florida, where he was aided by a staff
of more than a thousand backed by a special CinC budget of
more than $50 million a year. One impression emerges clearly
from Priest's account of the instrument under Zinni's control:
the military is the only generously funded institution in
American public life. Over recent decades just about every
other form of discretionary public spending has been allowed
to lag—for education and health care, for environmental and
social programs, for parks, schools, libraries, museums, and
symphony halls. Only the military seems able to squeeze from
Congress funds for the newest, the most sophisticated, the
most expensive, and the best of everything, in generous
quantity and pretty much on demand.
In a February 16 Washington
Post article, Thomas Ricks and Vernon Loeb reported that even
the military is feeling the strain of aging aircraft and a
soaring "operations tempo" as it prepares for war
with Iraq. But Ricks and Loeb also found that the military is
"highly confident" of defeating Iraq with an
all-professional army using weaponry so advanced that
"the Pentagon...really does not like to fight alongside
its allies—it feels they slow US forces down."
In its new National Security
Strategy, issued in September, the United States openly
embraced the concept of preemptive war, and President Bush has
said he is ready to give the order. After that things might go
well or badly, quickly or slowly, but no one seems to doubt
that an American attack will inevitably be followed by a
regime change in Baghdad. Then what?
2.
"Nation-building,"
once derided by President Bush, is now openly embraced. His
envoy to the new Afghan government and to the Iraqi exile
leaders who hope for a role in postwar Baghdad is Zalmay
Khalilzad, a well-connected defense intellectual and expert on
the Middle East, and a member of the National Security
Council. Afghan-born but American-educated, Khalilzad was a
charter member of a closely knit group in the first Bush
administration, including Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, that
played an important role in the 1991 Gulf War and has
continued to press for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein ever
since. Little known to the general public but watched
carefully by area experts, Khalilzad has a wide writ on the
NSC. He is a member of the inner circle preparing for war, and
his defense of American policy in public forums often makes
explicit what the President himself only implies.
At the Washington Institute
for Near East Policy last October, Khalilzad repeated the
President's determination "to disarm Iraq one way or
another." War might still be avoided, he conceded, but
added that "we are of the view that disarming Iraq is
extremely unlikely without regime change" and
"liberation is the way to do it." In that event, he
said, "our objective for the long term in Iraq would be
to establish a broad-based representative and democratic
government...." About the details, despite many questions
from the audience, Khalilzad was vague, but he insisted that
the old Bush suspicion of the tar-baby perils of
nation-building was history. The United States was not going
to back away. "We will...stay for as long as necessary to
do the job," he said. "This will be a major
strate-gic commitment, and we will see it through...."
+++
The all-important question
of who would run Iraq after the shooting stops was left vague
until February 11, when spokesmen for the Departments of State
and Defense told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that
it would be the United States, not some provisional government
set up by Iraqi exiles, which would take charge in Baghdad.
Dismantling Iraqi weapons programs ("a huge
undertaking"), securing Iraq's border with Iran, holding
the country together, rebuilding the economy, rooting out
members of the Baath Party tainted by ties with the regime of
Saddam Hussein, writing a new constitution, and restoring oil
production to help pay for reconstruction will all be carried
out under the authority of the Pentagon's Office for
Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), established
by the President on January 20. ORHA's director, retired Army
Lieutenant General Jay M. Garner, will report to the President
through General Tommy Franks of the Central Command and
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, an arrangement which
makes it clear that postwar Iraq will be under American
military occupation until the President decides the time is
ripe to return the country to Iraqi control. This is not a
minor point; every Arab government has now been put on notice
that the Americans are coming to stay.
As described by the two
administration officials who had done the preliminary work of
postwar planning, the undersecretary of state for political
affairs, Marc Grossman, and the undersecretary of defense for
policy, Douglas J. Feith, the reconstruction of Iraq will be
the single biggest effort at "nation-building"
undertaken by the United States since 1945, a plan of
breathtaking scope to change the political landscape of the
Middle East. With the senators Feith limited himself to the
challenges facing occupation authorities on Day One, but he
recently gave a richer description of what the administration
has in mind to The New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann, reported in
the issue of February 17 and 24. A genuinely democratic
government in Baghdad, Feith said, might encourage other
countries in the Middle East to follow suit, with potentially
far-reaching consequences. He told Lemann:
Terrorist organizations
cannot be effective in sustaining themselves over long periods
of time to do large-scale operations if they don't have
support from states. They need a base of operations...and one
of the principal reasons that we are focussed on Iraq...is
because we are focussed on this connection between three
things: terrorist organizations, state sponsors, and weapons
of mass destruction.... [In Afghanistan] you had a regime that
was ousted because of its support for terrorist operations
against the United States. If the Iraq regime gets ousted...I
think that the combination of those two actions will influence
the thinking of other states about how advisable it is for
them to continue to provide safe harbor or other types of
support to terrorist organizations.
But how much money this
ambitious effort would cost, how many troops would be required
to hold Iraq together while the program was put into effect,
and above all how long the job would take were questions the
undersecretaries did not want to pin down for the senators.
Feith promised only that the United States would stay "as
long as required" and leave "as soon as
possible." But Feith's colleague Marc Grossman,
repeatedly pressed by the senators to fill in the blanks, at
last conceded that the many tasks facing ORHA were going to
take time— two years or more before control of the country
could be surrendered entirely to a new Iraqi government.
+++
Those two years tell us a
lot we need to know. Arab governments reluctantly going along
with American plans all want a transition that is short and
sweet; King Abdullah's Jordan hopes for a week of war followed
by American withdrawal in three months.
Two years could as easily be
ten; it means the Americans won't leave until good and ready,
after they've done all they intend to do.
"Disarming" Iraq, the first job on the American
agenda, demands the freedom to go anywhere, speak to anyone,
remove or detain any official, suspend payment of any
contract, and inspect, copy, or carry off any file. The
administration will want to show the world that its fears were
not paranoiac, and it will want to know who helped Saddam
Hussein pursue weapons of mass destruction, and might do the
same for another aspirant.
The paper trail left by
decades of effort to build weapons of mass destruction will
not be the only target of American cleanup teams. "A key
element of US strategy in the global war on terrorism,"
Feith told the senators, "is exploiting the information
about terrorist networks that the coalition acquires through
our military and law enforcement actions." He is
referring to the "information" collected by Iraqi
intelligence services; in other words, the files. The biggest
intelligence bonanzas come at the end of wars, when the very
people who compiled the files hand over the keys and explain
where everything is. Police states are notorious for the
obsessive keeping of files, and dictators with dreams of world
power want to know everything about everybody. Saddam
Hussein's secret police have been collecting information on
political movements, terrorist groups, arms dealers, rich
bankers and businessmen, and rival leaders since he came to
power in 1968. This trove of secret information about the dark
underside of Arab and Islamic politics will not be an
incidental benefit of an American military occupation lasting
two years or more, but will be one of the first targets of
occupation forces.
Controlling Iraq will
require a major military presence and support structure
—that is, a base. The New York Times has recently reported
that the government of Saudi Arabia soon intends to ask
American forces to leave the kingdom, but what Riyadh takes
away a defeated Baghdad can be expected to give—something
like the base at Guan- tánamo, for example, leased from Cuba
at the end of the Spanish-American War. A permanent base would
make it clear to other governments in the
neighborhood—Iran's in particular—that American demands
for an end to WMD programs or support for terrorist groups
like Hezbollah and Hamas were backed by military muscle next
door, planted for the long haul.
3.
A look at a map will suggest
what we might expect after the American defeat and occupation
of Iraq. Across a 730-mile border to the east is Iran, with
twice as many people, three times the territory, and a
twenty-five-year history of conflict with Washington.
President Bush placed Iran in the "axis of evil" a
year ago, and his administration has vigorously protested its
support of terrorist organizations and its effort to build
atomic weapons—a program much bigger and closer to success
than Iraq's. The United States has no diplomatic relations
with Iran, but the two sides have secretly discussed the
coming war. Iran promises to stand aside of the fighting and
to cooperate in the handling of refugees, but there mutual
understanding comes to an end.
Over the last decade the
United States has pushed hard to stop sales of military
hardware and technology to Iran by Russia, China, and North
Korea. In the 1990s it twice managed to buy up fissionable
material in former republics of the Soviet Union to keep it
out of Iranian hands, but despite such efforts the CIA
estimates that Iran may be able to build a bomb by the end of
the decade. It is Iran's desire for a bomb, combined with its
support for Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations, that
puts it on the President's list of problem nations. How the
Islamic world might respond to American occupation of Iraq,
followed by a renewed crisis over American demands of Iran,
can be found in Dilip Hiro's War Without End, a history, first
published a dozen years ago and now extensively revised, of
the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and its growing use of
terrorism—the one a response to Western secular culture, and
the other to rage and humiliation over repeated defeats by
American and Israeli armies.
Hiro was born in India but
has long resided in London, where he has written more than
twenty books about the Middle East and South Asia over the
last thirty years. In another recent book, Iraq: In the Eye of
the Storm, Hiro provides a history of the unfolding American
conflict with Iraq until the moment last fall when the
Security Council of the United Nations passed a new resolution
calling for renewed inspections. War Without End describes the
broader social, political, and religious context of the
struggle that is likely to follow the defeat and occupation of
Iraq. Hiro piles up in careful detail a history of
developments as they unfolded, and thereby gradually builds a
portrait of time, people, places, and the logic of events. He
begins with the Sunni–Shiite split at the heart of Islam,
describes the rise of modern Islamic activism in Saudi Arabia,
Egypt, and Afghanistan, and concludes with a long account of
the way Islamic anger shifted its focus onto the United
States, and of the initially puzzled and faltering American
response.
Hiro believes that Islamic
terrorism was born at the moment when Egypt's Anwar Sadat
abandoned the common Arab position of support for the
Palestinians and made a separate peace with Israel. "A
quarter century after the treaty," he writes, "peace
between the two neighbors remained cold and had not trickled
down even to the level of academics and intellectuals."
It is the continuing American refusal, whether in Pakistan,
Cairo, or Gaza, to recognize the connection between politics
and terror, between grievance and the violence it provokes,
Hiro believes, that sets the United States "on an
inexorable course of war without end."
+++
The question now is whether
an American war to achieve its ambitious goals in Iraq will be
only the first in a series of wars. As always the best
indicator is what officials actually say. Over the last year
Iran has been infrequently mentioned by administration
officials, but always in terms of hostility and suspicion. In
a speech to the American-Iranian Council last March Zalmay
Khalilzad charged Iran with continued support of terrorist
groups like Hamas, Palestine Islamic Jihad, and especially
Hezbollah, which had been caught red-handed using Iranian
funds to finance a shipload of arms to Yasser Arafat's
Palestine Liberation Organization. "Hard-line,
unaccountable elements of the Iranian regime facilitated the
movement of al-Qaeda terrorists escaping from
Afghanistan," he said:
Iran is also aggressively
pursuing weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear
weapons, and the missiles to deliver them.... Considering
Iranian militant support to terrorist organizations, what
check is there that Iran would not transfer even some of its
WMD technology to terrorists?
In August, speaking to the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Khalilzad repeated
these charges in even stronger terms. He reminded his
listeners that "there are still unresolved issues"
about Iran's responsibility for Americans killed in the
bombing of the Khobar Towers, a military barracks in Saudi
Arabia, and he said the regime's pursuit of weapons of mass
destruction and its "continuing support for terrorists is
a threatening mix." This is the specter that haunts
Washington—terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. In
his State of the Union Address President Bush called it
"the gravest danger facing America and the world,"
and he again singled out Iran as a "a government that
represses its people, pursues weapons of mass destruction and
supports terror."
In testimony before the
Senate Intelligence Committee on February 11, the CIA's chief,
George Tenet, said, "We see disturbing signs that Al
Qaeda has established a presence in both Iran and Iraq....
Iran remains a serious concern because of its across-the-board
pursuit of WMD and Missile capabilities," because Iran is
developing ballistic missiles which might reach the US
mainland by 2015, and because of "Iran's support for
terrorism"—all charges of the kind made against Iraq as
justification for war. Argument over these contentious issues
will soon take place while American and Iranian armies face
each other across hundreds of miles of border in both Iraq and
Afghanistan. The American plan to stay for at least two years
would bring us up to March 2005, a few months after the next
presidential election. We might expect the inevitable tensions
over American demands to be rising toward crisis just about
then.
+++
What is most remarkable
about this unfolding crisis is the degree to which it has been
driven by theory—general ideas about things that might or
could happen. The United States and Britain never found any
connection between Iraq and the attacks of September 11, and
recent claims that Baghdad may be conspiring with terrorists
in al-Qaeda are tenuous and weakly supported by evidence.
Three months of UN inspections have found no proof of ongoing
Iraqi programs to create biological, chemical, or nuclear
weapons, and it is obvious that the United States, despite its
conviction that Saddam Hussein must have something underway,
is unable to tell inspectors where to look next. And yet,
instead of supporting continuing and expanded inspections to
resolve these uncertainties, the Bush administration is
planning war to end even the possibility of terror weapons in
al-Qaeda's hands, and it is planning to remove by force at
least one and possibly two legal governments in order to end
state support of terrorist organizations, and it is hoping to
transform the political landscape of the Middle East by
introducing democracy of a kind friendly to the West. The
goals themselves are of an accepted and familiar kind; it is
the willingness to go to war to achieve them that is unusual.
The theory has many authors,
but one of them, we are told by Dana Priest in The Mission,
appears to be Donald Rumsfeld. He arrived at the Pentagon with
plans to build an anti-ballistic missile system (still very
much in the works) and to transform the military—get rid of
the old-think about big armies with thundering tread, and
replace it with new-think about high-tech weaponry,
information warfare, speed, agility. But he wasn't simply
planning to buy new stuff; he wanted a new way to think about
America in the world after the cold war, when American
military power was supreme.
To help Rumsfeld along in
his thinking, Priest writes, his office sponsored a study of
the histories of great empires —a word Washington officials
were beginning to use. These stories all have sad endings but
it wasn't the fall of empires that engaged Rumsfeld; it was
how empires kept themselves in power. The language of this
study is abstract in the extreme and filled with current
military jargon. "Symmetric" and
"asymmetric" are key words. To me a passage from the
study helps to explain the mood in the White House that places
its hope in war:
Military doctrine and forces
are created in the image of the economies that spawn them;
military forces, although multi-purpose by nature, are formed
around a core of threats that they are designed to defeat;
asymmetric confrontations have historically generated decision
outcomes, whereas symmetric confrontations tend to be
exhaustive.
An example of an exhaustive
symmetric confrontation would be the First World War, where
vast but nearly equal armies fought until one collapsed.
Examples of asymmetric confrontations would be the British
army against the Zulus in South Africa, or the American army
against the Sioux Indians in the Dakotas. A "decision
outcome" means that something is settled once and for
all, which is what Rumsfeld and his commander in chief, George
Bush, hope to do with the threat that terrorists will be
provided with weapons of mass destruction by rogue states. The
overwhelming military power of the United States is what makes
a contest with weak armies like Iraq's asymmetric, and what
allows a decision outcome. But a war to overthrow Saddam
Hussein won't by itself provide a "decision outcome"
in the present case, because there are two rogue states with
programs to build nuclear weapons in the Middle East. The
theory says that both have to go, and if President Bush can be
taken at his word, he thinks the same thing. To me the
implication seems clear: Iraq first, Iran next.
--
26 February 2003 © Thomas Mailer - The New York Review of
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