Also allowing a steady, close-to-relaxed pace of events was the variety of sophisticated detection systems that American industry and the U.S. military and intelligence services designed and implemented to reduce the chance that U.S. political and bureaucratic leaders would be surprised by an entirely unforeseen threat from the Soviet Union or any other nation-state. From human intelligence to satellite imagery to X-15s to instruments for detecting electronic and chemical emissions, U.S. leaders could be confident that they would know if any sudden change in the Soviet threat required their immediate attention. Thus there was a large element of predictability in the Cold War world that allowed time for thought, study, and measured response, not to mention tennis after work, golf on the weekends, and plans for long summer vacations that rarely if ever had to be scrapped at the last moment. Though always fraught with a slim chance of nuclear catastrophe, and punctuated sporadically by periods of high stress, the Cold War environment for U.S. leaders was mostly calm, civil, and unhurried. Very few and far between were the occasions when life-and-death decisions had to be made on issues laid on the table only hours earlier.
The times and their tenor changed with the 1991 collapse of the USSR and the simultaneous ascendance of the United States to the rank of the world’s greatest power. The military capabilities of other nation-states remained of concern to U.S. policymakers and generals, but none posed a threat even faintly resembling that posed by Moscow in its prime. In some ways, the first few years of unchallenged American dominance resembled what the Harvard historian Charles S. Maier described as the “few blissful years” between the annihilation of Imperial Japan and Hitler’s Germany and Russia’s acquisition of nuclear weaponry.4 The latter obviously ended America’s era of bliss and invulnerability, and Washington took notice, responded accordingly, and the Cold War was on.
In retrospect, it is hard to detect a point at which Washington similarly woke up during the period between the end of the Soviet threat and the attacks of 9/11, though such wake-up calls were loud and frequent. The gradual emergence of a set of transnational threats to U.S. security—terrorism, narcotics trafficking, organized crime, and nuclear proliferation—had been recognized even before the Cold War’s end, but in that era they were the cats and dogs of America’s international concerns, regarded as lethal nuisances not national-security threats. While presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton waxed eloquent between 1991 and 9/11 about the New World Order, the positive benefits accruing to all from the progress of globalization, and the irreversible narrowing of differences between peoples of all creeds, cultures, ethnicities, and colors, the United States military was embarrassed by and then driven from Somalia, the World Trade Center was nearly destroyed, two U.S. military facilities were attacked in Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden declared war on America in Islam’s name, two U.S. embassies were simultaneously destroyed in East Africa, bin Laden declared war on the United States for the second time, U.S. interests and citizens at home and abroad were barely saved when al-Qaeda’s millennium-eve plot was foiled, and a billion-dollar U.S. Navy destroyer was nearly sunk in Aden, Yemen. The gap between the glories-of-globalization rhetoric and reality was never bridged in this period: Washington spoke as if the Cold War had been won and no serious threat were on the horizon, and all the while increasing portions of the world’s largest religion were mobilizing to wage or support war against America.
From my perspective, there is no clearer evidence that U.S. policymakers were still operating on Cold War time between 1991 and 2001 than the manner in which they addressed the need to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and destroy his organization. After bin Laden’s summer of 1996 declaration of war on the United States, and even after the clandestine service had definitively established by that year’s end that al-Qaeda had in 1992 established a specific unit to seek weapons of mass destruction,5 the U.S. government’s approach was still characterized by an attitude something akin to: “There is always time to take care of things, and so we can wait until we have better intelligence about the threat.” It was as if Washington were competing with the Soviets in producing a more sophisticated and potent fighter plane, a competition whose outcome could be confidently predicted and whose pace was leisurely. The deadly shortcoming in maintaining this approach after 1991 was that there was no balance of nuclear power vis-à-vis al-Qaeda, no mutually assured destruction if bin Laden’s team acquired and then used a purchased, fabricated, or stolen nuclear device inside the United States.6
Our failure to shake this patient approach can also be seen in the Clinton administration’s refusal to try to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Between May 1998 and May 1999 the CIA presented President Clinton with two chances to capture bin Laden and eight chances to kill him using U.S. military air power. Mr. Clinton and his team decided against action on each occasion.7 This was of course Mr. Clinton’s rightful decision as commander in chief, but it is interesting to note that Mr. Clinton and his colleagues told the Hamilton-Kean 9/11 Commission that the intelligence available on each of these opportunities was not “good enough” to take action.8 Implicit in these decisions was the Cold War notion that there was time to sit and wait for better intelligence and then act with more confidence of accuracy and success, and in any event our massive military will protect us from any unpleasant surprises. Wrong. America had—and has—no dependable deterrent against al-Qaeda and its allies. Our only defenses against al-Qaeda-ism are changes in foreign policy and military or covert-action preemption, a notion that amounts to what was in Cold War thinking the then-morally repugnant idea of the first strike. Because of this reality the most senior U.S. political leaders and policymakers must abandon the leisurely Cold War approach to national security and learn to decide quickly, on less-than-perfect intelligence, and then act to protect Americans. They must accept that this is necessary against the transnational threat and that if they miss and cause other deaths or physical damage—so what? There is no coequal great power from whom we need fear military retaliation, we can endure criticism from the international community and simply prepare to try again to defend America.
Proxies: Beyond the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, the best method the United States and the Soviet Union found to ensure that the red line drawn just in front of nuclear calamity would not be crossed was to make sure that their own forces never directly fought each other. Both Washington and Moscow knew that even a small engagement between the Red Army and U.S. forces or U.S.-led NATO forces had the potential to escalate into cataclysm. From Germany’s Fulda Gap to Korea’s 38th parallel, therefore, the lines of confrontation between the opposing forces were precisely demarcated and intensely monitored so that no unexpected skirmish could erupt that might quickly escalate to a nuclear catastrophe.
But humans are hardwired for war, and so there was still fighting to be done all around the Cold War world. Moscow had to assist those in foreign countries trying to smooth the supposedly inevitable triumph of Marxism-Leninism (a noninevitable inevitability that ought to give pause to the ideologues of democratization and globalization), and the United States was determined to help those trying to resist or roll back that inevitability. The superpowers could not openly use their own forces, for reasons noted above, and found that the next best option was to use proxy forces as the instrument and symbol of their supportive intentions. In places like Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Cambodia, and Namibia, Moscow and Washington squared off against each other, never losing a drop of their own blood and never creating a casus belli for a nuclear exchange. In each of these arenas, the superpowers’ surrogates fought for years on end in wars that did not directly impact genuine U.S. or Soviet national-security interests—excepting Afghanistan, of course, where Afghan courage and Soviet stupidity combined to cause domestic economic and societal damage that contributed marvelously to the USSR’s implosion. The goal of each superpower was simply to bleed the other and, if possible, to extend the sway of its lifestyle, political ideology, and the number of count
ries counted as its allies. If such extension by one side was not possible, blocking the advance of the other was sufficient. In essence, the Cold War’s proxy conflicts resembled the jockeying over slavery extension in 1850s America, and the world was lucky enough to have the bad guys in the struggle collapse before a nuclear Fort Sumter brought calamity.
Since the demise of the USSR it is has been hard to assess what lessons the former Soviets took from their, on balance, losing experiences in proxy wars.9 Russian premier Vladimir Putin’s continuing wars in the North Caucasus suggest that he and his colleagues have not learned that Russians do not do well fighting Muslims in cold and mountainous lands. It is now, however, obvious that America took the wrong lesson and has yet to unlearn it. As noted, proxy wars were generally undertaken by one superpower to stop the other’s expansion. Neither superpower sought or demanded total victory; as long as the enemy was bleeding and the would-be expansion could not be solidified, both sides judged the game well played. These were not national-security issues in the life-and-death sense, and without some almost unimaginable blunder by one side or the other, the conflicts were not going to trigger superpower war. I recall while working in the CIA’s Afghan covert-action program in the 1980s, for example, that Pakistani president Zia ul-Haqq was eager to carry the Afghan jihad into Soviet Central Asia and began sending the mujahedin there to conduct sabotage operations and disseminate the Koran and other Islamist literature translated into the local languages. Washington was startled at this initiative, fearing Moscow would not tolerate such U.S.-supported activities on its own soil and so sent then-DCI William Casey to Pakistan to persuade Zia to halt the endeavors in the name of preventing Afghanistan from becoming a potential nuclear flashpoint.10
Moving into the post–Cold War period, the fixation of U.S. leaders and policymakers on the use of proxies continued and even intensified. We seemed to forget the most important points about the Cold War use of proxies: first, that the proxies were fighting for issues that were life-and-death matters for themselves as they were not for their superpower-backer, and, second, that proxies were almost exclusively people who needed America to do things that they could not do for themselves.11 The proxies were never our agents or creatures, and we had almost no command-and-control over them. As noted, the U.S. role was heavily logistical and financial, coupled with the provision of diplomatic support at the UN and other multinational fora that sought to mediate these conflicts. For the most part, we made our proxies better trained and more proficient killing machines. At day’s end, however, Washington’s proxies were doing their work first and America’s dirty work secondarily. None of the proxies would have been in the field solely to further U.S. national-security interests.
After 1991, however, the world changed not only in terms of the sudden absence of the superpower rivalry but also in the United States’ justifications for involving itself in other peoples’ wars—there were no Soviets to roll back—and in the need for or even the willingness of foreign armed groups or nation-states to do Washington’s lethal bidding. Nonetheless, right up to and since the 9/11 attacks, U.S. administrations under both parties have looked for others to do our dirty work. Peruvians, Colombians, and Mexicans are to solve our narcotics problems; the IAEA is to handle nuclear proliferation; corrupt incompetents like Ahmed Chalabi were to unseat Saddam; and a galaxy of Arab and Muslim intelligence services, from Morocco to Indonesia, were to defeat the Islamist militants bent on attacking America. This quest for proxies even extends to the domestic front, as Washington allows the self-appointed Minutemen to try to staunch the flow of illegal immigrants across U.S. borders. Even against Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda—the only entity to declare war on the United States since Hitler’s underappreciated folly of December 11, 1941—Washington has relied on the CIA’s human assets, UN conferences, the late Ahmed Shah Masood’s Northern Alliance, reluctant NATO allies, and currently, the Pakistani intelligence and military services. Indeed, so far as we know, voodoo dolls are about the only proxy Washington has not tried to use to kill bin Laden.
In this panoply of post–Cold War proxies and surrogates, not a single one’s interests are identical to those of the United States, and unlike the Cold War era, most of the issues against which we are now trying to use proxies are preeminently life-and-death issues for U.S. national security. The Cold War’s end, in short, ushered in an era in which proxies are much less useful and reliable because they are being asked to fight and die for our interests, not their own. We are no longer simply paying them to allow us to hitch a ride along a road they were already traveling for their own purposes; we are asking them to undertake the trip and risk their lives, wealth, and, in the case of nation-states, stability for our sakes. Currently, Pakistan is the best example of this reality. Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf has assisted us in the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in a manner that has weakened his country’s stability and runs counter to its genuine national interests. Musharraf has done about all he can for the United States without risking civil war in his country, and yet U.S. leaders continue pushing him to do more. In February 2007, Vice President Cheney went to Islamabad specifically to press for more Pakistani help against bin Laden, and in fall 2007 Washington pressed Musharraf to allow Benazir Bhutto back in to Pakistan’s political mix, a destabilizing move that caused him to declare a state of emergency. Six years after 9/11 and sixteen-plus after the USSR’s demise, we are still looking for others to do our dirty work; we are, in essence, actively in the market for mercenaries, while forgetting Machiavelli’s warning that mercenaries “are useless and dangerous…and bring nothing but loss.” Machiavelli’s solution? “Experience has shown that only princes and republics achieve solid success.” In other words, use your own military forces to do your own dirty work.12
Antinational Organizations: The Cold War decades gave birth to any number of political, legally oriented, and humanitarian organizations that manifested an abiding dislike of the nation-state and an unwavering belief in a coming age of a true international community in which national identities and nation-specific interests would be increasingly submerged and powerful supranational authorities would proliferate. Helen Caldicott and the unilateral disarmers; Amnesty International, with its hydralike ability to facilitate the proliferation of other human-rights groups; Greenpeace and other environmentalists; the National Organization for Women (NOW) and other women’s rights groups; and host of U.S. and European nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that now clog battlefields worldwide are just a few examples of the antinationalist organizations born during the Cold War. Even such useful international organizations as the International Crisis Group, whose analytic reports on world trouble spots may be without peer in the private sector, become burdens on national governments because of their unquenchable thirst for Western intervention and for telling other countries, cultures, and governments how to improve themselves by secularizing and democratizing. These organizations have three main features: an inability to perceive reality; a dedication to international law administered by supranational authorities that trump national governments; and a belief that carnivores no longer stalk the earth, or rather, that the good guys who won the Cold War are now the only carnivores they need to slay. These features flourish in such organizations because their leaders’ pacifism and anti-Americanism is often expressed through irresponsible rhetoric, equating Western leaders with Bolsheviks, American presidents with Hitler, and U.S. soldiers with the Gestapo.
At day’s end, these antinational organizations are the arrogant and self-righteous engines of Western imperialism and intervention abroad; their power results from their fanatically religious conviction of their right to impose secular values around the world, their ability to win allies in the media and academia, and their talent for pushing cowardly politicians to embark on overseas misadventures rather than risk the votes of the ironically small electoral constituencies that the antinationalists represent. Today one of the best examples of the antinati
onalists’ poisonous influence on U.S. interests can be found in their persuading Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) to champion U.S.-British military intervention in the Darfur region of Sudan, a place where no U.S. interests are involved and where a military action can only waste American lives and money, worsen the civil war, and again validate the Islamists’ contention that Washington intends to destroy the Sudanese and all Muslim regimes that will not do its bidding.13
These antinationalist groups grew in Western societies not only because speech is free but also because the U.S.-led West’s ideological confrontation with the Soviet Union depended in part on constantly juxtaposing Western liberty and the freedom to dissent against the Soviet’s brutal political repression, one-party government, gulags, and comprehensive state censorship. The U.S. government and its NATO allies were therefore forced not only to acquiesce in the existence of these groups but also at times to pretend that unrealistic folks like the unilateral nuclear disarmers had a point of view worth both respect and consideration. Most of the antinationalist organizations wasted the time and energy of any adult with common sense and served as political obstacles to be overcome, but Western governments had to pat them on the head as worthy, thoughtful participants in public debate because of the need to keep the demarcating line between Western liberty and Soviet tyranny as starkly drawn as possible.
Unfortunately, these groups took root in Western societies, survived the Cold War, and now stand as hardy political institutions in their own right, allied with many in the media and especially in academia. Indeed, their enervating and detrimental impact on common sense in the West today is largely due to their hold on the Western professorate, which is now indoctrinating its third generation of students in such nonsense as religion is dead, the nation-state is an anachronism, all conflicts can be settled by negotiation and compromise, and the coming age will be one of denationalized international cooperation. All of this at a time when, as the brilliant Gertrude Himmelfarb clearly has pointed out, the post–Cold War world finds itself at a “bloody crossroads” where it is “confronting a lethal combination of nationalism and religion—and not in one region but all over the globe.”14
Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) Page 9