To avert the possibility of a similarly tragic failure, it behooves us now to make the necessary compromises with those of our friends who have the capability and the will to offer armed forces and police support, so that we can begin to internationalize the presence in Iraq. That internationalization will enable us to credibly argue that ours is a global effort to assist the long-suffering Iraqis. It will also encourage the general population to invest in its own future by facilitating the transfer of responsibility and sovereignty back to Iraq.
A failure in Iraq and any consequent instability in the Middle East must be of grave concern in the region and to the rest of the world. The Europeans and the Asians are even more dependent on oil from the Gulf than is the United States, and more at risk in the event of disruption. A civil war would no doubt prompt an exodus of refugees into neighboring countries, which would in turn provoke tension between the Shia and the Sunni throughout the region. The images of Iraq at war with itself could potentially inflame Muslim populations throughout Europe.
Any internationalization of Iraqi reconstruction will necessarily come at some cost. We should also voluntarily relinquish our monopoly position with respect to contracts awarded for rebuilding the Iraqi infrastructure.
Since this is a self-styled “business administration” administration, an analogy from the corporate world may be appropriate. A goal has been articulated by the president, but it has not been achieved by the plan his managers put into place. Therefore, we need to seek outside equity partners to help us realize the leader’s vision. In order to attract those partners, we must be prepared to do what every business does when it goes back into the market: give up seats on the board of directors, give up staff and line positions to the merger partners, and harmonize the vision of the enterprise with that of the outside investors. Moreover, as vulture capitalists well know, the last investor in to save the project takes the largest slice.
None of this means that the United States would sacrifice responsibility or authority to the extent that our interests would be threatened. On the contrary, given the enormous risk of failure, spreading that risk is a good idea. If we succeed, so much the better if that success has a thousand fathers and mothers.
Like a CEO seeking a clean break from a disastrous corporate venture, President Bush should fire Donald Rumsfeld and the entire band of neoconservatives that occupy positions of responsibility under him. This would clear the administration of parasites who are loyal only to their agenda and who have found the Republican party a willing host for more than twenty years.
In the Reagan years, these ideologues pursued a recklessly aggressive arms buildup against an imagined threat from a Soviet Union that most serious analysts understood was a rapidly decaying power, and later they embarrassed us with the arms-for-hostages escapade in Iran and Central America that culminated in the Iran-Contra scandal. They used the same tactics then that they are using to even greater effect now. By creating cells within the government, they maintain direct ties to the political leadership, with the express purpose of circumventing normal reporting channels and undermining the decision-making processes that our government has in place to avoid errors precisely like the ones made in committing our country to war in Iraq. What they have achieved is more than just bringing in fresh eyes to examine the same information base, as some would claim: they have actively subverted the intelligence process by inserting their own ideological biases into the analysis. Greg Thielman, the retired State Department intelligence analyst who had been so critical of Colin Powell after his U.N. speech, was correct when he called it “faith-based intelligence.”
The callous use of the tragedy of 9/11 by this recycled band of neoconservatives to promote a war against Iraq was abhorrent. It was also bad policy, as well as a perversion of traditional Republican approaches to international order—the diametric opposite, in fact, of what then-candidate George W. Bush promised in his 2000 campaign: to implement a foreign policy based on international coalition-building, cooperation among traditional friends and allies, humility in dealing with other countries, and a reluctance to impose our values by force. For what are we now but unilateralists who insult our friends, take an “our way or the highway” approach to negotiations, routinely violate the international laws and conventions that we helped draft many years ago, and invade not for the purpose of self-defense but in order to bring American-style democracy to the natives at gunpoint?
The neoconservatives who have taken us down this path are actually very few in number. It is a small pack of zealots whose dedication has spanned decades, and that through years of selective recruitment has become a government cult with cells in most of the national security system. Among those cells are the secretive Office of Special Plans in the Department of Defense (reportedly now disbanded) and a similar operation in the State Department that is managed in the office of Under Secretary for Disarmament John Bolton.
Pat Lang—with whom I had frequently exchanged views on Iraq policy—served his country first as an army officer, rising to the rank of colonel, then as an intelligence officer in the Defense Intelligence Agency in charge of the Middle East before retiring. He once told me about when he was recruited for possible membership in the group.
He described to me a visit, during the administration of the first George Bush, from an elderly couple who dropped in on him unannounced one afternoon at his Pentagon office. They had come, they said, at the suggestion of Paul Wolfowitz, then the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, who had told them that Colonel Lang was a bright fellow. They introduced themselves as Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter, professors from the University of Chicago, and they made themselves at home for a brief chat.
Albert Wohlstetter, one of the most influential strategists of nuclear weapons policy in the second half of the twentieth century until his death in 1997, was a mentor to Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. In the 1970s he had been an architect of the first effort to bring outside analysts into traditional institutions like the CIA to “reassess” the Soviet threat. This “Team B” effort resulted in the Reagan administration’s use of wildly exaggerated claims about Soviet rearmament to justify huge American defense spending increases. By the end of the decade, Wohlstetter had expanded his definition of America’s strategic role to include the Middle East. He advocated that the U.S. extend its security umbrella to the Persian Gulf on the grounds that even if no Soviet hand could be seen behind the Islamic revolution in Iran of 1979, the situation there still represented a threat to American interests in the Middle East and Pakistan.
During the Wohlstetters’ conversation with Lang, they began to probe the colonel for his views and beliefs. Mrs. Wohlstetter, partner to her husband in academia and in political philosophy as well as in life, pointed out sections in books they had written and asked Lang for his views on the theories espoused in them.
It became apparent to Lang that he was being auditioned—though, as it happened, not to the satisfaction of the Wohlstetters. They soon packed up their books and left.
Lang said that in later conversations with a number of uniformed officers, he learned that many of them had been auditioned as well and, like him, had been found wanting. However, one who did pass the test was former Navy Captain William J. Luti. In the Bush administration he holds the post of Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. Luti also supervised the Office of Special Plans, described in a seminal 2003 New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh as “a separate intelligence unit . . . in the Pentagon’s policy office.”
It was through these special offices that so many of the rumors, gossip, and unsubstantiated intelligence about Iraq were passed directly to senior White House officials, notably Vice President Cheney, and were accepted without first being subjected to the rigorous analysis of the $30-billion-a-year intelligence community. American intelligence, which routinely sees and sifts thousands of bits of information daily, has had years of experience developing an analytical capability that can
assess precisely whether the information we are receiving is fact or fiction.
Short-circuiting this process—or, in the vivid term Hersh adopted for the title of his disturbing article, “stovepiping” information directly into policy-makers’ hands—is dangerous. Addressing his investigation directly to Luti’s enterprise, Hersh added: “This office, which circumvented the usual procedures of vetting and transparency, stovepiped many of its findings to the highest-ranking officials” in the administration.
President Bush could fundamentally change the direction of his administration by firing fewer than fifteen senior officials, beginning with those signatories of the Project for the New American Century and those currently holding government posts who signed a 1998 letter that urged President Clinton to wage war on Iraq. They are clustered at the National Security Council (NSC), in the Defense and State Departments, and within Vice President Cheney’s own parallel national security office. That particular little-known organization—not accountable to Congress and virtually unknown to the American people—should be completely dismantled. Never in the history of our democracy has there been established such an influential and pervasive center of power with the ability to circumvent longstanding and accepted reporting structures and to skew decision-making practices. It has been described to me chillingly by a former senior government official as a coup d’etat within the State. That’s all it would take—firing fewer than fifteen officials, and the scuttling of Cheney’s questionable office—to alter this administration’s radical course.
But President Bush would have to want to make these changes. The fact that he has utterly failed to do so suggests that one popular notion about this president—that he has delegated foreign policy to his “prime minister,” Dick Cheney, and that the president is somehow manipulated by him—is doubtful. Even as the criticism mounts and the failure of the war policy becomes ever more evident with every attack on American interests in Iraq, the president refuses to make changes in his lineup. In fact, as one former intelligence officer suggested to me, President Bush may himself be a neoconservative “recruit,” and now an active leader of the radical movement rather than a passive follower unable to block it.
The president is not powerless and does not need to demonstrate, as Senator Richard Lugar pleaded on Meet the Press in October 2003: “The president has to be president. That means the president over the vice president and over these secretaries [of State and Defense].” On the contrary, he is the president and he is directing his vice president and his cabinet secretaries to do his bidding. He is responsible for what has been wrought in his name.
However our occupation of Iraq plays out over the coming months, a partial list of the significant repercussions coming out of this misadventure can already be drawn up.
The first effect is the increased danger from international terrorism directed at American interests. Terrorist organizations have been able to capitalize on the war in Iraq, with its images of the death and destruction we have dealt out, to enlarge the pool of hard-core recruits—as well as supporters and sympathizers ready to provide cover for the terrorists. In addition to the increased threat of random terrorist attacks on American citizens at home and abroad from already disaffected individuals, we can expect that new and even more determined and diabolically imaginative terrorist groups will emerge from the ashes of the Iraq war and in the aftermath of al Qaeda’s eventual defeat. They will adapt their tactics to what they have learned from our reactions to other terrorist feints and attacks.
The second repercussion is that, regrettably, the next generation of American diplomats and warriors will be forced to sing from the music the neoconservatives composed for this war. It may take us more than a generation to recover from the folly that they have foisted upon our country and its ambassadors and soldiers abroad. They have made this a far more dangerous world for Americans, and a far more hostile one.
On September 12, 2001, the world mourned with us and joined us in condemning those who would commit such a horrible crime against humanity. At the United Nations, a decades-old debate on what constituted terrorism was concluded within days of the attack, and nations worldwide stood with us in our grief and anger. Even the French newspaper Le Monde expressed its solidarity; it led with a headline crying “We are all Americans.” Now we are despised for what we are doing in Iraq, with people around the world fearing the United States more than they do Osama bin Laden. That attitude, coupled with our own insulting behavior toward the rest of the world and the United Nations, will make international cooperation much more difficult to encourage and manage over the long term. We need international intelligence exchanges, police support, and worldwide banking agreements in order to stem the terrorist tide before it swells larger. We will regain that cooperation only if we are perceived as a nation engaging in legitimate activities, not undertaking unjustified actions like the war in Iraq.
For all the jealousy that U.S. power and domination generate overseas, I rarely found any antipathy toward Americans in any place I lived or traveled, even on the streets of Baghdad at the height of Desert Shield. On the contrary, Americans were admired for their openness, their friendliness, and the liberty and freedom that they represented, no matter how controversial the policies of our government might have been. Global resentment engendered by the war and America’s current foreign policy has spilled over onto the streets of the world; it has become personal, and our citizens bear the brunt of the anger when they visit foreign countries.
Notwithstanding President Bush’s insistence, we are not safer as a result of the war with Iraq, even with Saddam in custody and facing a trial that may help provide Iraq’s terrorized population with some catharsis. Nor has our position in the world been enhanced. We no longer inhabit that city on the hill to which people in other lands aspire. In fact, anecdotal evidence already suggests that growing disaffection with the United States is having an impact. Businessmen find their welcome overseas to be less warm, while partnerships designed to isolate and constrain American interests emerge.
However quickly we can roll back the negative effects of our misguided policies, it will not be quick enough. And whatever we are able to do to restore ourselves to a position of international leadership, we may never again be seen as a benign superpower to be respected and admired as a beacon of the future. Rather, we will be viewed as an aggressive, sometimes violent power generally to be wary of and, whenever possible, to be weakened. Other countries of the world will be looking not to follow us but to keep us from again unleashing the dogs of war, possibly on them. And with our international financial indebtedness having risen to historic levels, it may not be long before we begin to see restraints in business abroad take their toll on our standard of living.
This debacle has also had significant repercussions for Israel and all of her friends around the world. Inescapably, Israel remains America’s chief ally in the region, and unfortunately it will bear the brunt of the region’s negative reaction to what we have done in Iraq. Consequently, resistance to the policies that the Likud government is pursuing toward the Palestinian population will be further inflamed.
Criticism of Israel is all too often expressed in anti-Semitic terms. While not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, many critics resort to ugly and despicable anti-Semitic behavior. In the six decades since the Holocaust, the civilized world has committed to purging this conduct from its midst. There has been progress in this essential effort throughout much of the world, and I am committed to that work. Now, however, I fear that because of the association in the Arab world between America’s misguided invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the policies of the Likud government in Israel, we may see an upsurge of hate crimes against Israel and against Jewish populations elsewhere. While this result could not have been anticipated by the policy makers who drove us into the invasion of Iraq, it is potentially an outcome of it just the same. A surge in anti-Semitism such as we are already seeing in Europe and elsewhere, such as the
savage synagogue bombings in Istanbul, Turkey, will require a redoubling of our efforts.
The failure of the Camp David process at the end of the Clinton presidency led to a “perfect storm” in the Middle East at the moment George W. Bush took office. Yasser Arafat launched the second intifada with suicide bombers, and the fragile peace between the Palestinians and Israelis that had emerged from the Madrid and Oslo peace processes was shattered. The intifada traumatized Israeli society as well as its friends in America, and it played directly into the hands of radicals on all sides. The moderates were effectively sidelined, and the halting truce that had been generated in the 1990s was lost prior to what, it had been hoped, would be a final agreement. Whatever the controversy over the Madrid-Oslo efforts, the statistics are indisputable: between 1997 and 2000, fewer than 20 Israelis and Palestinians combined died in sectarian violence. In the three years since, more than 600 Israelis and 2,000 Palestinians have perished.
As we learn in The Price of Loyalty, from former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and other administration officials, President Bush downgraded the mediation effort that his father had begun in Madrid after the first Gulf War and that President Clinton had built upon. According to O’Neill, in the new Bush administration’s very first National Security Council meeting, the president said, “We’re going to correct the imbalances of the previous administration on the Mideast conflict. We’re going to tilt it back toward Israel.”
The Politics of Truth_Inside the Lies That Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity Page 44