Twilight of the American Century

by Andrew J Bacevich

  In just about anyone’s book, the political transformation of the Islamic world qualifies as a breathtakingly large project. How exactly did the Bush administration intend to achieve this goal? Although citing with considerable pride the “precision” and analytical rigor of OSD’s work, Feith provides no evidence that the Pentagon ever addressed this fundamental question. Just days after 9/11, Rumsfeld was charging his subordinates to devise a plan of action that had “three, four, five moves behind it.” In fact, OSD conjured a plan with exactly two moves: first Afghanistan, and then Iraq; once US forces made it to Baghdad, the other dominos were expected to topple.

  This was not strategy; it was reckless opportunism, marinated in neoconservative ideology and further seasoned with OSD’s spectacular insouciance when it came to considering resources. When the Bush administration set out to reorder the Islamic world after 9/11, no one even bothered to ask whether the United States possessed the means required to make good on such a bold ambition. Nor, apparently, did anyone in OSD pay much attention to exactly what “transformation” might entail. Did it require forswearing support for terror? Categorically rejecting WMD? Embracing liberal democracy? Making peace with Israel? All of the above? A memo to President Bush drafted by Feith in late September 2001 simply took “the vastness of [US] military and humanitarian resources” as a given. As the Pentagon’s policy chief, Feith never bothered to question this assumption, which proved groundless in the face of events.

  The key point is this: Feith’s depiction of the Iraq War as a war of self-defense is a small lie concocted to camouflage a far more egregious transgression. The real crime lies not in dissembling about the war’s origins—in politics, such fictions are a dime a dozen. Rather, the real crime lies in Feith’s complicity in conceiving an ersatz strategy that failed to satisfy even the most rudimentary requirements of common sense. The Iraq War was always unnecessary. From the very moment of its conception, Feith and his colleagues in OSD contrived to make it profoundly stupid as well. Invading Iraq was never going to “transform” Islam. Nor was it ever going to “counter ideological support for terrorism.” Indeed, war was almost guaranteed to produce precisely the opposite result—inflaming hostility toward the United States across the Islamic world.

  Worse, this spurious Feith Doctrine of self-defense is at odds with existing American interests. To take but one example: If Saddam’s past offenses and belligerent attitude constituted sufficient reason for the United States to wage a war of self-defense against Iraq, then surely Iran’s nuclear program and its support for those resisting the US presence in Iraq can be justified on similar grounds; Washington’s history of intervening in Iranian affairs and President Bush’s inclusion of Iran in his “axis of evil” provide Tehran ample reason to fear US aggression. For those with a taste for irony, the massive infiltration of immigrants from south of the border into California and the Southwest might even qualify as an unconventional form of self-defense, Mexicans belatedly retrieving what was theirs in the first place.

  Then there is Feith’s charge that Bremer snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by abandoning “liberation” in favor of occupation. Here, too, what purports to be truth-telling is in reality little more than diversionary scapegoating.

  A careful reading of Feith’s account reveals that OSD’s own plan for liberating Iraq amounted to occupation by another name. Under the terms of that plan, which Feith claims as his own handiwork, immediately upon removing Saddam Hussein from power, US officials in Baghdad were to constitute an Iraqi Interim Authority (IIA) consisting of Iraqi leaders who would manage Iraqi affairs while simultaneously devising the permanent political institutions for the post-Saddam era. From the outset, this project would have an Iraqi face and therefore, according to Feith, likely command broad Iraqi support. To put it another way, by its very existence, the IIA would remove any Iraqi inclination to oppose the United States.

  Yet OSD never actually intended that Iraqis—other than those chosen in advance by the United States—would determine their own nation’s fate. For Feith and his colleagues, “liberation” was a codeword that meant indirect control. OSD sought to exercise that control in three ways.

  First, it established under Pentagon jurisdiction an agency designed to direct developments in Baghdad after Saddam’s removal. This was the misleadingly named Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), created by OSD in January 2003 and headed by retired army Lieutenant General Jay Garner, Rumsfeld’s handpicked choice for the job.

  Second, against bitter opposition from the CIA and State Department, Feith and his colleagues tried to ensure that OSD would have the final say in deciding exactly which Iraqis would occupy positions of influence in the IIA. Contemporary press reports identified neoconservative favorite Ahmad Chalabi as the Pentagon’s preferred candidate to run the IIA. Feith denies that OSD was promoting Chalabi, but his relentless attacks on Chalabi’s critics, professing bafflement at how others could malign someone of such manifest decency, belie those denials. (Subsequent charges that Chalabi was playing a double game, leaking sensitive intelligence to Iran, number among the matters that Feith ignores altogether.)

  Third, even as it was touting the Iraqi Interim Authority as an embryonic government run by Iraqis, OSD established narrow limits on that government’s prerogatives. For example, as Feith notes in passing, under the IIA, the United States would retain “the authority to appoint top officials for the ministries of Defense, Finance, Interior, and Oil.” That authority provided the ultimate guarantee that the United States would continue to call the shots. The IIA would be a puppet regime, Feith and his colleagues apparently expecting Iraqis either not to notice or not to care who was actually pulling the strings.

  The point here is not to defend L. Paul Bremer, whose tenure as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority produced an unmitigated disaster. Rather, the point is to recognize that as an alternative to Bremer’s ham-handed policy of occupation, Feith’s concept of liberation was really no alternative at all. It was the same policy with a different label attached.

  There is a further problem with making Bremer the fall guy: he was, after all, Rumsfeld’s man, doing Rumsfeld’s bidding. With ORHA barely having set up shop in Baghdad, Rumsfeld decided that Garner had to go. Feith denies that Garner was fired, but to characterize his abrupt replacement in any other way is laughable. Rumsfeld then urged President Bush to install Bremer as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, reporting directly to the secretary of defense.

  Furthermore, by the summer of 2003 Rumsfeld himself did not want to speed up the process of creating a fully sovereign Iraqi government. Feith lets on that Rumsfeld was “unhappy that the Iraqis were pushing so hard for power.” The secretary of defense needed more time to assess the political acceptability of the various Iraqis vying for positions of leadership. With that in mind, he “wanted to tap the brakes on the political process,” slowing down efforts to transfer power. When Bremer scrapped the IIA, his decision was consistent with Rumsfeld’s wishes. Indeed, Rumsfeld concurred in Bremer’s decision.

  Feith portrays the Iraqi Interim Authority as the war’s great missed opportunity: If only Bremer had adhered to OSD’s conception of liberation, all would have turned out well. The argument fails on two counts. First, the actual purpose of the IIA was not to empower Iraqis but to facilitate even while disguising the exercise of American control. Second, it was Rumsfeld himself who decided that indirect control did not suffice. The United States opted for a policy of outright occupation in large part because the Pentagon itself came to the conclusion that occupation was essential to achieving US objectives. If the occupation was a self-inflicted wound, Feith’s boss pulled the trigger.

  A memo drafted by Feith for Rumsfeld, reaching the desk of President Bush on September 30, 2001, declared, “If the war does not significantly change the world’s political map, the U.S. will not achieve its aim.” Considered in that light, the wars that Feith labored so mightily to pr
omote, not only the war in Iraq but also the larger global war on terror, must be judged abject failures.

  Feith wants his readers to believe that failure stemmed from errors in execution, most of them attributable to decisions made beyond the confines of OSD. The truth is that the principal explanation for failure is a conceptual one: pseudo-strategists within OSD misconstrued the threat, misread the Islamic world, and vastly overestimated American power. From day one, with Feith their willing accomplice, they got it wrong. This mendacious and self-serving book serves only to affirm Feith’s complicity in the ensuing debacle.

  Ricardo Sanchez is the highest-ranking Latino military officer in this nation’s history, rising from grinding poverty to achieve the lofty rank of three-star general. Wiser in Battle is above all an expression of his anger and bitterness at not achieving four-star rank. He uses his memoir to lash out at those he holds responsible for denying him further promotion. The result can only be described as unseemly. It is never pretty to see a grown man whine.

  General Sanchez depicts himself as a man of honor surrounded by careerists and connivers. During his thirty-three years as a serving officer, while “a greed for power” motivated others, he sought only to do the right thing. Long before he assumed command in Baghdad, Sanchez had reached certain conclusions about civilians back in Washington, not only politicians but also journalists: they tended to be largely clueless and were certainly not to be trusted.

  Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld confirmed this negative impression of anyone not wearing a uniform. Sanchez describes Rumsfeld as a meddler and a micromanager, intent on exercising not only civilian control but even “civilian command of the military.” For a political appointee to claim such sweeping authority was, in Sanchez’s eyes, “a recipe for disaster.”

  Without offering any substantiating evidence, Sanchez charges that Rumsfeld, shortly after 9/11, gave the green light for torture—according to Sanchez, a “colossal mistake.” With his famously abrasive manner, Rumsfeld had also induced within the Pentagon “an environment of fear and retribution that made top military leaders hesitant to stand up to the administration’s authoritarianism.” In essence, after 9/11 an intimidated officer corps lost its moral compass. Embarking on its global war on terror, the Bush administration had “unleashed the hounds of hell.” Even at the uppermost levels of the armed services, “no one seemed to have the moral courage to get the animals back in their cages.”

  Such qualms of conscience did not prevent Sanchez from interviewing with Rumsfeld for promotion to lieutenant general or from accepting an appointment to command all US and coalition forces in Iraq just weeks after President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech.

  When Sanchez assumed command, evidence of a brewing insurgency was already mounting. While back in Washington Feith was lovingly perfecting his vision of an Iraqi Interim Authority, Baghdad was already coming apart at the seams. By the time Sanchez departed Baghdad a year later, chaos had engulfed Iraq, and US forces were caught in the middle of a civil war that Sanchez himself reports “our actions had undeniably ignited.” Punctuating this deteriorating situation was the Abu Ghraib scandal, which seemed to affirm that something had gone fundamentally wrong.

  In short, when the animals in Iraq escaped their cages, Ricardo Sanchez was the chief zookeeper. His mission was to secure Iraq. He failed egregiously. The results of his efforts were almost entirely negative. As measured by the number of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed and wounded, they were also costly. Yet none of this, Sanchez insists, was his fault.

  According to a core value of the military professional ethic, commanders are responsible for everything that occurs on their watch. The whole point of Wiser in Battle is to suggest that in the case of Ricardo Sanchez the principle of command responsibility should not apply.

  As a consequence, Sanchez’s narrative of his year in Baghdad becomes essentially one long list of recriminations. Rumsfeld, who dangled the prospect of a fourth star only to reverse himself after Abu Ghraib, comes across as his principal nemesis. The secretary of defense, however, is but one target among many. Sanchez takes his own shots at the widely discredited Bremer, with whom he tangled repeatedly, and blasts the entire National Security Council mechanism as “incompetent.” He professes shock at discovering that, for the White House, “ensuring the success of President Bush’s reelection campaign” took precedence over all other considerations. Nor does Sanchez spare his fellow generals, especially those serving on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When General Peter Pace, JCS vice-chairman, broke the news that the much-coveted promotion was not going to happen, Sanchez replied, “Well, sir, you all have betrayed me.”

  Sanchez refrains from criticizing the president directly, depicting him as well-intentioned yet utterly out of his depth. During a videoconference in the midst of the notorious first Fallujah offensive of April 2004, Bush offered the following guidance to his field commander: “Kick ass! If someone tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! . . . Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out!” Two days later, orders from above directed Sanchez to suspend the offensive. “Politics”—Sanchez employs the term as shorthand for any intrusion by ignorant civilians with ulterior motives—had produced “a strategic defeat for the United States and a moral victory for the insurgents.”

  Sanchez’s assessment of Bush applies to himself as well: no doubt meaning well, he was out of his depth. Unlike the execrable Feith, earnestly crafting memos back in the Pentagon, Sanchez knew better than to imagine that depicting Americans as “liberators” was going change the facts on the ground. “According to any definition,” he writes, “we were, in fact, occupiers” (emphasis in original). Yet Wiser in Battle contains little to suggest that Sanchez understood the actual nature of the problem in Iraq any better than Feith did. The aggrieved general’s distaste for politics, which is intrinsic to war and from the outset played a central role in this particular conflict, indicates that understanding lay beyond his ability. The book’s title notwithstanding, wisdom—or even thoughtful reflection—is notable by its absence.

  Sanchez was the wrong man for the job. That Feith’s boss should have appointed Sanchez in the first place provides further confirmation—if any were needed—of OSD’s monumental capacity for screwing up.

  Apart from the finger-pointing and score-settling, these two accounts do agree at least implicitly on a single issue: taken as a whole, the national security apparatus is irredeemably broken. The so-called “interagency process” created to harmonize the efforts of national security institutions so that the president receives sound and timely advice and to ensure that presidential decisions are promptly implemented, whether in Baghdad or within the Beltway, actually produces the opposite effect. From quite different vantage points, Feith and Sanchez affirm that the principal product generated by the interagency process is disharmony, dishonesty, and dysfunction. Whether a different process employing the same people or recruiting different people while retaining the existing process would yield different results is difficult to say. To imagine, however, that simply electing a new chief executive in November will fix the problem is surely to succumb to an illusion.

  ____________

  1. Douglas J. Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism (New York: Harper, 2008); Ricardo S. Sanchez, Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story (New York: Harper, 2008).

  12

  Tommy Franks

  A Modern Major General

  (2004)

  It is the flip side of the celebrity culture: prominent figures in various walks of life—entertainment, sports, big business, politics—bask in the adulation of the unwashed and inhabit a rarefied world of privilege and deference. But their entrée into that world is highly contingent, requiring that they continue to meet the capricious, even whimsical expectations of their adoring fans. Fail to deliver and the
accounting can be as abrupt as it is brutal. Ask the movie star who bombs on successive pictures, the high-priced quarterback who somehow cannot win the big ones, the corporate executive who, for one too many quarters, falls short of “market expectations.” Ask Al Gore.

  But one highly visible segment of the American elite has been largely exempt from this rule. Ever since the Persian Gulf War of 1990–91, when by common consent the United States established itself as The Greatest Military Power The World Has Ever Seen, those entrusted with commanding US forces have enjoyed a protected status. As newspapers once treated the local archbishop with kid gloves lest they invite the charge of being insufficiently respectful of the Church, so in recent years otherwise free-swinging critics have generally given generals and admirals a pass lest they appear to violate that ultimate diktat of present-day political correctness: never do anything that might suggest less than wholehearted support for our men and women in uniform. As a consequence, those who occupy the uppermost ranks of the armed forces have become the least accountable members of the American elite. Or perhaps more accurately, members of this exclusive club are unique in being accountable only to their peers.

  Consider: when Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez assumed command of coalition forces in Iraq in 2003, the first stirrings of an insurgency had begun to appear; his job was to snuff out that insurgency and establish a secure environment. When Sanchez gave up command a year later, Iraq was all but coming apart at the seams. Security had deteriorated appreciably. The general failed to accomplish his mission, egregiously so. Yet amidst all the endless commentary and chatter about Iraq, that failure of command has gone all but unnoted, as if for outsiders to evaluate senior officer performance qualifies as bad form. Had Sanchez been a head coach or a CEO, he would likely have been cashiered. But he is a general, so the Pentagon pins a medal on his chest and gives him a pat on the back. It is the dirty little secret to which the World’s Only Superpower has yet to own up: as the United States has come to rely ever more heavily on armed force to prop up its position of global pre-eminence, the quality of senior American military leadership has seldom risen above the mediocre. The troops are ever willing, the technology remarkable, but first-rate generalship has been hard to come by.