by David Milne
In advance of the cease-fire, tens of thousands of Iraqi troops fled Kuwait down the so-called highway of death. Colin Powell urged Schwarzkopf, for reasons of honor and civility, not to destroy these fleeing troops, as easy and as injurious to Saddam Hussein’s rule as that would have been.93 Secretary of State James Baker had a vivid recollection of Powell’s objections to continuing the slaughter: “I remember Colin Powell saying with a trace of emotion, ‘We’re killing literally thousands of people.’”94 Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates remembered “very clearly Colin Powell saying that this thing was turning into a massacre. And that to continue it beyond a certain point would be un-American, and he even used the word ‘unchivalrous.’”95 President Bush heeded Powell’s advice and ordered the coalition forces to stand down.
Wolfowitz was unhappy that the war ended so swiftly, having fewer qualms than Powell—his lack of military experience might have limited his imagination—about strafing the departing Iraqi troops. He was certainly correct to a point in believing that a medium-scale slaughter might have prevented a larger one later. Wolfowitz’s deputy, Scooter Libby, said, “We objected to it. I was floored by the decision. Neither of us liked it.” But neither man was close enough to the action to make a difference. A few days after hostilities ceased, the CIA reported that many of Saddam’s elite fighting forces, the Republican Guard, had escaped Kuwait with significant supplies: at least 365 Soviet T-72 tanks crossed back into Iraq, and an entire division, the Hammurabi, remained intact. General Schwarzkopf also granted a foolish concession to Iraq by permitting its helicopters to transport Iraqi officials across Kuwait and Iraq. Saddam ruthlessly exploited this loophole, ordering helicopter gunships to crush Shiite and Kurdish forces that were assembling to launch a revolution, encouraged by the earlier words of President Bush and Secretary Baker suggesting that they rise in revolt.
Wolfowitz observed, “Simply by delaying the ceasefire agreement—without killing more Iraqi troops or destroying more Iraqi military assets—the United States might have bought time for opposition to Saddam Hussein to build and to act against him.”96 But while delay appeared a savvy option with the benefit of hindsight, it was never actively considered at the time. Scowcroft and Baker believed that civil war in Iraq would have negative unintended consequences, including a substantial strengthening of Iran’s position in the Middle East. Employing a rationale that Kissinger and Kennan would have cheered, Powell explained, “Our practical intention was to leave Baghdad enough power to survive as a threat to an Iran that remained bitterly hostile toward the United States.”97
As for an invasion of Iraq and the ouster of Saddam Hussein, this was viewed at the time as implausible: vexing in design and execution, and unknowable in consequence. As Bush wrote in his memoir, coauthored with Scowcroft, “Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different—and perhaps barren—outcome.”98 Many hawkish Republicans, including the president’s own son, would challenge this classically realist interpretation. Donald Rumsfeld, for example, presents a strong case against Bush-Scowcroft pragmatism: “For his part, Saddam Hussein came to believe that the United States lacked the commitment to follow through on its rhetoric. He saw America as unwilling to take the risks necessary for an invasion of Iraq.”99 But public opinion at the time in the United States and across the world saw things rather differently—the Gulf War was a resounding success for America and the coalition. Clear-cut aggression, the crossing of an established international border, had been met with a resolute response, sanctioned by the United Nations and carrying the crucial support of Moscow, Cairo, and Damascus. It was a remarkable achievement all considered. Rumsfeld’s assessment was not so much written as bloated with hindsight. Nonetheless, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz all learned a lesson that they applied to the Second Iraq War: Colin Powell and similarly risk-averse generals had to be detached from decision making.
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On August 19, 1991, hard-line communists launched a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, placing him under house arrest at his dacha in the Crimea and ordering tanks and infantry to assume strategic positions in Moscow. Boris Yeltsin became the focal point of resistance, famously standing atop a tank across from Russia’s White House in a catalyzing act of defiance. The coup collapsed in the face of popular antipathy and Gorbachev returned to Moscow, though not in triumph. On August 21, Yeltsin requested that Gorbachev read a statement outlining details of the coup against him—a request that was hard to turn down in the circumstances. The following day, Gorbachev resigned as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, though he retained his position as the Soviet Union’s titular president. Over the course of the next few months, Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova moved swiftly to secure their independence from Moscow. On December 8, political leaders from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus met at Belovezh Forest, near Minsk, to form a Commonwealth of Independent States—others would soon join. On December 25, Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Hammer and Sickle was lowered from the Kremlin and the blue, white, and red tricolor of the Russian Federation was raised to take its place. Boris Yeltsin was now assuredly in charge. The once solid Soviet Union had melted into air.
As Gorbachev departed office, he warned that something terrible had just happened to the United States—it had been deprived of an enemy.100 A huge vacuum certainly had been created in the enemy column. It fell to Paul Wolfowitz, as undersecretary of defense for policy, to launch an effort to ascertain which nations were most likely to step up and take Moscow’s place as the bad guy. In a speech in early 1992, Wolfowitz vowed to learn from the aftermath of earlier conflicts, when Washington downsized its military capabilities too quickly. “We’ve never done it right in the past,” he complained. After securing victory in 1945, for example, the Truman administration had erred in cutting defense spending—Nitze’s NSC-68 was prescient but arrived too late to swiftly repulse North Korea, resulting in a painful, protracted war: “It only took us five short years to go from having the strongest military establishment in the world, with no challengers, to having a force that was barely able to hang on to the Korean Peninsula against the attack of a fourth-rate country.”101 Wolfowitz’s assessment underestimated the Red Army—enough of a “challenger” for Washington to essentially give up on Eastern Europe—but the gist of his message was clear. The lessons of history teach that the cashing of a “peace dividend” is invariably premature. The United States should remain vigilant by normalizing the high levels of defense spending introduced by Reagan.
Like NSC-68, the Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) document of 1992 was a seminal statement of intent. Wolfowitz directed the study but delegated its drafting to Zalmay Khalilzad, who in turn took advice from Richard Perle, Albert Wohlstetter, and Scooter Libby.102 The DPG resembled NSC-68 in that it was a collective enterprise inspired by the vision of one individual. It also assumed worst-case scenarios, emphasizing the necessity of the United States maintaining an insurmountable lead in military and power-projection capabilities. Someone in the Pentagon, desirous of a wider debate, leaked the document to the foreign-affairs journalist Patrick Tyler, who published excerpts in The New York Times on March 8, 1992. Tyler reported that the forty-six-page document stated, “America’s political and military mission in the post-cold-war-era will be to insure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia, or the territory of the former Soviet Union.”103
The DPG offered a clear-cut repudiation of the collectivist aspirations of the United Nations—“ad hoc assemblies” was the preferred alliance model. This was the principal policy area where Wolfowitz disagreed fundamentally with Woodrow Wilson. The former feared that America’s enemies would use a well-intentioned but dangerous institution like the UN to curtail the nation’s freedom of action. Wilson was more hopeful that the proclivities and interests of nations could harmonize, instilling
vitality and unity of purpose into his cherished League of Nations. He was more optimistic, ultimately, than Wolfowitz that the world could have a peaceable future. The DPG identified a whole series of threats to American interests: “European allies, Arab dictatorships, Muslim terrorists, resurgent Russians, Chinese and North Korean Communists, weapons proliferators,” as George Packer described them.104
In reference to the ominous threat posed by hostile nations with weapons of mass destruction, the DPG detailed the potential necessity of “preempting an impending attack with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.” The report jarred with Colin Powell’s more sanguine state of mind—he joked during a contemporaneous interview with the Army Times: “I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains, I’m down to Castro and Kim Il-Sung … I would be very surprised if another Iraq occurred.”105
Tyler’s article provoked outrage among America’s allies, who were not thrilled at the vassal status bestowed on them by Wolfowitz and his colleagues. The reaction from old-school Republicans and mainstream Democrats was similarly hostile. Pat Buchanan, a retrenchment-inclined Republican who struggled to identify many “good” wars in American history, observed that the DPG was “a formula for endless American intervention in quarrels and war when no vital interest of the United States is remotely engaged.” He urged Bush, whom he was challenging for the GOP presidential nomination, to disown it. George Stephanopoulos, an influential adviser to the fast-rising Democrat Bill Clinton, described the draft as “one more attempt to find an excuse for big budgets instead of downsizing.” Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, later remarked of the DPG: “That was just nutty. I read a draft of it. I thought, ‘Cheney, this is just kooky.’ It didn’t go anywhere. It was never formally reviewed.”106 Scowcroft is correct on the absence of presidential imprimatur but wrong to observe that it “didn’t go anywhere.” It went through various drafts and emerged as a remarkable and durable strategy document. On May 5, 1992, Wolfowitz sent the final draft to Dick Cheney and added a PS: “We have never had a defense guidance this ambitious before.”107 While the document fell into partial abeyance for eight years, the next President Bush resuscitated it. And his administration would reintroduce the idealistic Wilsonian dimension that Wolfowitz felt was lacking in the original DPG drafts: a strong emphasis on America’s role in fostering democratization.108
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The election of 1992 pitted the incumbent Bush against Bill Clinton, a charismatic and politically gifted former governor of Arkansas. For James Carville, a key Clinton adviser, the election was about one thing, “It’s the economy, stupid,” and his reductionism was apposite—Clinton won the election largely on those terms, aided by the candidacy of the center-right third-party candidate Ross Perot, who siphoned votes from the unfortunate Bush. But foreign policy did figure significantly in the campaign—how could it not, just one year after the collapse of the Soviet Union?—and many Wilsonians on both sides of the political aisle found that there was much to like about Clinton. For starters, Clinton criticized Bush’s narrow realism on multiple fronts. He accused Bush of issuing a weak, un-American response to the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, when Chinese troops attacked prodemocracy demonstrators in Beijing, and across the nation, killing hundreds and injuring thousands. He attacked Bush for failing to engage seriously with the looming crisis in the former Yugoslavia, where Slobodan Miloević’s Serbia posed a serious threat to regional stability, and whose army had Bosnia’s Muslim population in its sights. Clinton believed that James Baker’s callous assessment of the crisis in the Balkans—“We don’t have a dog in that fight”—revealed a distressing truth about the Bush administration’s human rights deficiencies.
Wolfowitz was sympathetic to the sweep of Clinton’s critique of Bush, as his appraisal of the Bush administration attests:
That impressive victory [in Iraq], coming on top of the victory in the Cold War, contributed to a widespread feeling that the United States no longer faced serious dangers in the world or else that the problems we faced could be handled by a newly invigorated United Nations. Rhetoric from the administration about “A New World Order”—or comments that we had “no dog” in fights such as those in the former Yugoslavia—did nothing to counter that complacency.109
But while he found Bush’s foreign policies largely wanting, Wolfowitz had learned a painful lesson in the Carter era: it was difficult to work for a Democrat without burning bridges with the GOP. And besides, Clinton could criticize Bush’s timidity all he wanted on the campaign trail. The real test was how he would act in office. Wolfowitz doubted, with good reason, that Clinton was nearly as hawkish and values-led as he appeared. So he left the Pentagon and took up the position of dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. The policy school that Paul Nitze had cofounded was an appropriate place for Wolfowitz to begin his assault on an irresolute Democratic president. He began assailing Clinton’s foreign policies on largely the same grounds as Clinton had attacked those of Bush.
Clinton was the first Democratic president in twelve years, and he was acutely conscious of how Jimmy Carter’s presidency had unraveled in the face of geopolitical calamities with which his divided advisory team had failed to cope. Clinton’s foreign-policy team all had clear memories of that period. Secretary of State Warren Christopher had served as Cyrus Vance’s deputy at the State Department. Clinton’s national security adviser, Tony Lake, had been Carter’s chair of policy planning. Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations and later Christopher’s successor as secretary of state, had worked in Carter’s NSC as a congressional liaison under the direction of her Columbia Ph.D. supervisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Christopher, Lake, and Albright all understood that Clinton’s diplomacy needed to display far greater unity of purpose than Carter’s. So with this consideration in mind, Clinton’s foreign-policy team began to search for a new name to define America’s post–Cold War approach to world affairs—a process that they jokingly described as the “Kennan sweepstakes.”110 Secretary of State Christopher solicited advice from the source in 1994, when he asked Kennan what he thought of their quest. Kennan replied that “containment” had misled as much as it illuminated, and that a nation’s foreign policy could not be reduced to fit onto a “bumper sticker.” Clinton laughed when he learned of Kennan’s response, observing, “That’s why Kennan’s a great diplomat and scholar but not a politician.”111
But was Kennan so wrong? His cautionary words regarding single-word reductions and monotheories could also be construed as sound political advice. Clinton’s foreign policies proved to be multifaceted and irreducible to a single word or concept. How could they be otherwise in the absence of an enemy like the Soviet Union? One theme emphasized repeatedly was the necessity for “democratic enlargement”—that the United States (and NATO) should extend security and political commitments to the emerging democracies in Eastern and Central Europe. A renewed dedication to free and open trade was also stressed as vital. On January 1, 1994, Clinton presided over the creation of a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) among Canada, the United States, and Mexico. So far, so Wilsonian. The collapse of the Soviet Union was akin to the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. Clinton, like Wilson, welcomed a significant increase in the number of independent nation-states and encouraged their long-suppressed democratic aspirations.
But purposeful American leadership of this democratically enlarged and economically liberalized world was taken as given. There would be no ceding of U.S. sovereignty in the manner Wilson envisioned in 1918. Bill Clinton did not view the United Nations as a practicable conduit through which to realize specific U.S. goals or, indeed, to keep the peace more generally—here Clinton hewed more closely to Mahan and Wolfowitz than to Wilson. Clinton promised to lead “an America with the world’s strongest defense, ready and willing to use force when necessary.”112 During Clinton’s second term, Secretary of State Albright declared herself comfortable “wit
h the projection of American power.” She pointedly observed that the historical analogy that motivated her worldview took place in the 1930s, not the 1960s: “My mind-set is Munich; most of my generation’s is Vietnam. I saw what happened when a dictator was allowed to take over a piece of a country and the country went down the tubes. And I saw the opposite during the war when America joined the fight. For me, America is really, truly, the indispensable nation.” Wolfowitz thrilled to Albright’s words, observing that she “represents the best instincts of this administration on foreign policy.”113 Indeed, the Clinton administration appeared to be following the recommendations presented in the controversial 1992 DPG. Defense spending scarcely dipped in real terms from Reagan-era levels, the maintenance of primacy remained the principal goal, and the United States reserved the right to undertake unilateral action when necessary to protect its interests or right wrongs.
These sentiments were borne out in practice. In 1999, for example, the United States spearheaded NATO air strikes against Slobodan Miloević’s Serbia to defend Kosovo against a brutal assault motivated by ethnic cleansing. The UN was not willing to authorize such an action, due to Russian objections, so Clinton operated through NATO instead. Serbia eventually desisted and Milo8ević’s odious regime collapsed—a win on multiple levels. But the United States had indeed acted as “the indispensable nation” in sidestepping the UN when it deemed action necessary. And most allies, such as Prime Minister Tony Blair, recognized and encouraged this reality. Much of Clinton’s foreign policy vindicated a document that roused such ire upon its publication in 1992. The playing was different—Clinton favored pianissimo; Wolfowitz, forte—but the notation was largely the same.