My first thought on The Day After—September 12, 2001—was: How is the US Army, which was built to fight tank battles, going to deal with an ephemeral enemy like Al Qaeda? The answer seemed obvious: special forces. No American President would be foolish enough to send a conventional army to fight a swarm of mosquitos, would they? It would be, in Robert Kennedy’s brilliant description of Vietnam, “like sending a lion to fight jungle rot.” So, I went to West Point on September 14, 2001, to interview Lt. Col. Russ Howard—who taught special ops there—about how to train and build an unconventional warfare force equal to the challenge.
To my amazement and utter dismay, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—two of our most disastrous public servants—convinced George W. Bush that the best way to deal with Osama bin Laden was to go after…Saddam Hussein. With a conventional army. It had worked the last time Saddam tried to get feisty, invading Kuwait. But George H.W. Bush had the wisdom to limit the mission to liberating Kuwait. Mission accomplished.
“You’re not actually thinking of occupying Iraq this time, are you?” An Israeli intelligence expert asked me. Alas, we were. And too many Democrats, wrong about the first gulf war, were going along with it as a bizarre excursion in karmic balance. Al Gore—who always knew more about national defense than most Dems—wasn’t buying. In September of 2002, he gave a speech opposing the prospect of a war in Iraq. He was ridiculed, but I defended him with this piece in Slate and set out three questions to be answered by the Bush Administration before we did anything stupid:
Will it increase or decrease the threat of a biological or chemical attack on the United States?
Will it increase or decrease the stability of the region?
Will it increase or decrease the number of young Muslims who believe the prevailing propaganda about America’s moral and spiritual role in the world?
Oh well. Cheney and Rumsfeld were under the strange impression that Iraq was a country. It wasn’t, really. It was three barely-linked Ottoman satrapies, mushed together by Winston Churchill to optimize the oil yield for England. Iraq was Kurdistan, the majority Shi’ite south and the minority Sunni west, with Baghdad a mess in the middle. Without Saddam, a truly awful gorilla, it would become chaos on stilts. The late Brent Scowcroft, who taught me a lot about reality, was adamant about that. (I used to call him Yoda because…well, he seemed that way; some of his staff adopted the moniker.)
A basic rule in the third world: Any time you see a straight line border, chances are the people who actually live there didn’t draw it. Europeans did.
The folly of Iraq fit neatly into my generation’s experience of American foreign policy. All the wars fought in my lifetime were foolhardy (except, maybe Korea, but I was too young to remember that—and the aggressive part of Korea, General MacArthur pushing north of the DMZ, was idiot messianism in a distinctly American sort of way). Actually, these wars were worse than stupid: they were catastrophic. They sapped our resources. They destroyed our moral authority. They caused the American public to lose faith in the federal government. A hundred years from now, it may well be argued that American wars of unnecessary aggression, from Vietnam to Iraq, were a self-inflicted wound from which we never recovered.
So I thought it was smart and gutsy of Donald Trump to liberate the Republican Party from the delusion that Iraq was anything other than a terrible mistake. And I have a certain amount of sympathy for those Republicans now arguing that we should limit our support for Ukraine’s righteous struggle against the Russians. But not too much.
Ukraine is different. For one thing, we’re not sending troops. For another, we’ve been acting in concert with our NATO allies. For a third, Russia has always been an expansionist threat and its appetite for colonizing as much of Europe as it can take is insatiable. In fact, Biden’s foreign policy in Ukraine, and elsewhere, is the most sophisticated by an American president since H.W. Bush. (I will leave a discussion of the Trump-Biden Afghanistan evacuation for another time.)
Furthermore, isolationism—Republicans hate the term, but that’s what it is—is not an option in our internetted and intermarketed world. There are things we must do, because of our strength and authority, to advance the peace and protect the planet. We have to deal with China—which has never been an expansionist power, it is said, but seems to have acquired an exaggerated sense of where China ends and the rest of the world begins. We have to find a creative way to react to the Russian implosion, which could become Europe’s black hole. We need to find a way to help the Iranian people liberate themselves and prevent their authoritarian leaders from acquiring nuclear weapons. We may even need to act more aggressively against the Central American drug gangs that really do pose a threat to our national security. But our actions should be measured, subtle, strategic. That’s not easy for this Right Now country.
Finally, an element of anti-Ukraine sentiment is pro-Putin. That is despicable. It is certainly true of Trump and Tucker and the nutso wing of the party. Therefore, Ron DeSantis, who has taken some flack from the foreign policy establishment for his slapdash comments about limiting aid to Ukraine, has some ‘splaining to do: does he have a strategy or is he just peddling populist bullpucky? Does he have any sympathy for authoritarian illiberal democracy?
There does need to be some serious thought about how the conflict in Ukraine will end. I suspect it won’t be a clear cut victory for either side. I fear that many of our current Ukraine hawks, those who oppose any and all negotiations, are the same people who were so foolish about Iraq. They are extremists, too.
I am not a pacifist. I believe we must defend ourselves when an attack against us is imminent. The Sanity Caucus eschews extremism and overseas adventurism, but it doesn’t eschew the world. The basic question should be: What Would Scowcroft do?
A Really Good Idea
The Washington Post editorialized this week in favor of a plan to locate more Head Start programs on Community College campuses. What a fabulous idea. For one thing, the programs would provide day care for the one in six community college students who are mothers with young children. Second, it would be a wonderful on-site way to train those students seeking an Associate Degree in early education. Third, it would improve Head Start—a program with a great reputation but lousy results. When I asked a high-ranking member of the Obama Administration why the results were so bad, she said, “Because it’s a jobs program.” Which is nice; poor moms need work. But Head Start needs to be an education program, if it’s going to have any long-term impact on the children. This idea has a chance of moving the needle in that direction.
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