Not so with the Global War on Terror. The attack of September 11 elicited from the American people a universal sense of shock, anger, and outrage. But when it came to tapping the energies inherent in that instantaneous emotional response, the administration of George W. Bush did essentially nothing.
Instead of a Lincolnesque summons to “think anew and act anew,” President Bush instructed his fellow citizens to “enjoy America’s great destination spots.” Within weeks of the terrorist attack, he was urging folks to “get down to Disney World in Florida.” Rather than announcing that the imperative of victory had now transcended all other priorities—in his day, FDR had pointedly retired “Dr. New Deal,” making way for “Dr. Win-the-War”—Bush thought it more important for Americans to “enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”
Americans took heed. Within remarkably short order, the country went back to business as usual. Almost as if 9/11 hadn’t happened, ordinary citizens resumed their single-minded pursuit of happiness. Rather than entailing collective sacrifice, “war” this time around meant at most occasional annoyances, the most onerous involving the removal of one’s shoes while transiting airport security. Although patriotic Americans acknowledged an obligation to “Support the Troops,” fulfilling that obligation generally meant displaying decals on the rear of an SUV. Should preventing another 9/11, or the even more devastating attack that officials ominously hint lurks just around the corner, oblige American consumers to tighten their belts and make do with less? Don’t be silly.
Bush the warrior-president has signaled his approval of this response. Instead of a call to service delivered via the local draft board, the commander in chief made a point of easing the burdens of citizenship. Through simultaneous spending hikes and tax cuts, he offloaded onto future generations responsibility to foot the bill for the present generation’s security.
Further, even as he declared that the events of 9/11 had thrust the United States into a global conflict likely to last for years, if not decades, and even as he vowed to liberate the Islamic world and to eliminate evil itself, the president carefully refrained from suggesting that such an enterprise might require expanding the US military services. Despite the extraordinary challenges said to lie ahead, the president assumed from the outset that the all-volunteer force as it existed on September 11 provided the United States all that it needed to wage a protracted global war. From the outset, Bush and his lieutenants took it for granted that the regulars—0.5 percent of the entire population—backed up by a modest number of reservists would suffice to get the job done.
On the one hand, according to Bush, the United States after 9/11 embarked upon a mighty endeavor, a life-or-death struggle against an implacable enemy. On the other hand, the president’s actual policies suggested that prevailing in that endeavor would not require anything remotely comparable to a mobilization of the nation’s resources. Notwithstanding the throwaway line from his second inaugural summoning the nation’s youth to “make the choice to serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself,” President Bush clearly expects the nation to triumph even while serenely persisting in its comfortable peacetime routines.
How are we to reconcile this apparent contradiction? How can we explain the disparity between a monumentally ambitious agenda that is making even some dyed-in-the-wool Reaganites squirm and policies seemingly designed to encourage popular complacency and self-indulgence?
One answer might be that in the inner circles of power the Global War on Terror qualifies as a war only in a metaphorical sense, comparable, say, to the War on Poverty or the War on Drugs. But Bush has gone out of his way to correct any such misapprehension, first by invading Afghanistan, then by promulgating a doctrine of preventive war, and finally by implementing that doctrine through his invasion of Iraq. When this president speaks of a global war, he means precisely that—large-scale, open-ended military campaigns conducted in far-flung theaters of operations. Scholars might argue about whether among Muslims jihad refers to war as such or to a form of spiritual struggle. But when it comes to Mr. Bush’s jihad, the facts permit no such confusion.
A second, more plausible explanation for the apparent disparity between the president’s grandiose agenda and his willingness to let the country coast along undisturbed is to be found in the Bush administration’s view of modern war. During the 1990s, Republican Party elites (and more than a few of their Democratic counterparts) convinced themselves that old-fashioned warfare, which relied on large numbers of soldiers and massive arsenals of destructive but not terribly accurate weapons, had gone the way of the steam locomotive and the typewriter. A new model of high-tech warfare, waged by highly skilled professionals equipped with “smart” weapons, had begun to emerge, with the Pentagon far out in front of any potential adversary in grasping the significance of this military revolution.
This image of transformed war derived from, but also reinforced, the technology-hyped mood prevailing during the years just prior to Bush’s election in 2000. By common consent, the defining characteristics of this Information Age were speed, control, and choice. Even as it was empowering the individual, information technology was reducing the prevalence of chance, surprise, and random occurrences. Henceforth, everything relevant could be known and, if known, could be taken into account. The expected result was to lessen, if not eliminate, uncertainty, risk, waste, and error and to produce quantum improvements in efficiency and effectiveness.
The potential for applying information technology to armed conflict—long viewed as an area of human endeavor especially fraught with uncertainty, risk, waste, and error—appeared particularly attractive. Given access to sufficient information, man could regain control of war, arresting its former tendency to become total. Swiftness, stealth, agility, and precision would characterize the operations of modern armies. Economy, predictability, and political relevance would constitute the hallmarks of war in the Information Age.
Further, this new style of technowar relied not on the huge, industrial-age armies, but on compact formations consisting of select volunteers. Winning wars during the twentieth century had required guts and muscle. Winning wars in the new century just dawning would emphasize the seamless blending of technology and skill, consigning the average citizen to the role of spectator. Fighting promised to remain something that other people were paid to do.
This vision of surgical, frictionless, postmodern war seemingly offered to the United States the prospect of something like permanent global military supremacy. Better still, at least among the activist neoconservatives who came to exercise great influence in the Bush administration, it held the promise of removing the constraints that had hitherto inhibited the United States in the actual use of its military power. With American society as a whole insulated from the effects of conflict, elites could expect to enjoy greater latitude in deciding when and where to use force.
These militaristic fantasies possessed an intoxicating allure akin to, complementing, and making plausible the ideological fantasies suggesting that the United States after 9/11 was called upon to remake the world in its own image. Hubris in the realm of military affairs meshed neatly with hubris in the realm of international politics.
Alas, as with seemingly brilliant military schemes throughout history, this attractive vision did not survive contact with the enemy. As so often happens, it turns out that our adversaries do not share our views of how modern war is to be conducted. At least, that has been the verdict of the Iraq War thus far. Launched with the breezy expectation that a tidy and decisive preventive war held the prospect of jumpstarting efforts to democratize the Middle East, Operation Iraqi Freedom has transitioned willy-nilly from a demonstration of “shock and awe” into something very old and very familiar: an ugly insurgency conducted by a tough, elusive, and adaptable foe. On the battlefields of the Sunni Triangle, technology and skill have a part to play; but guts and muscle will determine the outcome.
Whether the muscle of the existing all-vo
lunteer force will prove adequate to the task has become an open question. Already, signs of eroding American fighting power, notably a sharp drop in reserve recruiting and retention, have begun to crop up. Steadily accumulating reports of misconduct by US troops suggest that discipline is beginning to unravel.
This situation cannot be sustained indefinitely. Although the armed services today are by no means confronting the sort of crisis that toward the end of Vietnam brought them to the verge of collapse, the process of institutional decay has begun. Unless checked, that process may become irreversible.
The Pentagon is attempting to “manage” the problem, but such efforts can only go so far. A much-touted internal reorganization of the army designed to increase the total number of combat brigades may be the equivalent of trying to get five patties rather than four out of the same pound of ground beef. Increasing re-enlistment bonuses, loosening recruiting standards, recalling retirees to active duty, imposing stop-loss policies to postpone the discharge of soldiers whose enlistments have expired, easing restrictions on the assignment of women to forward areas, increasing the reliance on contractors and mercenaries: all of these are mere stopgaps. None get to the core issue: Mr. Bush has too few soldiers doing too many things, while the rest of the country blissfully contents itself shopping and watching TV.
Some informed observers have argued that in the specific case of Iraq, the presence of large numbers of US troops is exacerbating rather than reducing existing security problems. That said, and recognizing that Iraq forms but one facet of the Bush administration’s larger project that aims to purge the globe of tyrants and bring about the final triumph of liberty for all, there can be no denying that a yawning gap exists between US grand strategy and the forces that the Pentagon can call upon to implement that strategy.
In pursuit of the president’s goal of eliminating tyranny, American military forces today are badly overstretched. But the nation is not. In this gap between breathtakingly grand ideological goals and the failure to raise up the instruments of power to achieve those goals lies the full measure of this administration’s recklessness and incompetence.
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Bush’s Grand Strategy
(2002)
All but lost amidst the heated talk of regime change in Baghdad, the White House in late September issued the Bush administration’s US National Security Strategy. In one sense, publication of this document is a routine event, just one more periodic report mandated by Congress. Yet this latest rendering of US grand strategy—the first to appear since 9/11—deserves far greater attention than it has received.
The Bush USNSS offers the most comprehensive statement to date of America’s globe-straddling post–Cold War ambitions. In it, the administration makes plain both its intention to perpetuate American military supremacy and its willingness—almost approaching eagerness—to use force to reshape the international order. This new strategy places the approaching showdown with Saddam Hussein in a far wider context, showing that overthrowing the Iraqi dictator is only the next step in a massive project, pursued under the guise of the Global War on Terror, but aimed ultimately at remaking the world in our image.
Calling back into service a phrase first employed by candidate Bush, the USNSS propounds what it refers to as “a distinctly American internationalism.” When George W. Bush used that phrase on the campaign trail, it was devoid of content. Here it takes on meaning, at once grandiose and combustible.
The Bush strategy does qualify as truly distinctive in one specific sense—in its fusion of breathtaking utopianism with barely disguised machtpolitik. It reads as if it were the product not of sober, ostensibly conservative Republicans but of an unlikely collaboration between Woodrow Wilson and the elder Field Marshal von Moltke.
On the one hand, the document rings with assurances affirming the inevitable triumph of liberty around the world. America’s “great mission,” President Bush writes in the document’s introduction, is to hasten this triumph, by “extend[ing] the benefits of freedom across the globe.” Fulfilling that mission obliges the United States to assume responsibility for eliminating the obstacles to freedom everywhere: war and terror, poverty and disease, and “the clashing wills of powerful states and the evil designs of tyrants.”
But America’s mission has a positive as well as a negative aspect. Fulfilling it requires not only removing obstacles but also creating a new global order conducive to freedom. When it comes to identifying the principles around which to organize that order, George W. Bush harbors no doubts. Like his predecessor Bill Clinton, he is certain that the United States has deciphered the deepest secrets of history and understands its direction and purpose. There is, he declares, only “a single sustainable model for national success,” one to which all people aspire and to which all societies must ultimately conform. That model is ours.
Democracy, the rule of law, freedom of speech and worship, respect for private property and for the rights of women and minorities: these comprise the “nonnegotiable demands of human dignity.” (Regarding rights of the unborn, the USNSS is silent.) But beyond those principles, the quality that will bind the world together and bring utopia within reach is “openness.” In an increasingly interdependent world, one in which “the distinction between domestic and foreign affairs is diminishing,” nations—including this nation—have no choice but to “be open to people, ideas, and goods from across the globe.”
In an open and integrated world—achieved in the first instance by removing impediments to trade and investment—all things become possible. Without openness, material abundance for those who presently enjoy it becomes unsustainable and for those who yearn for it remains beyond reach. Here too Bush echoes the views of Bill Clinton, who based his foreign policy on the conviction that an “open world” knit together by the forces of globalization offered a sure-fire formula for limitless prosperity, universal freedom, and perpetual peace.
The Johnny Appleseed of globalization, Clinton spent eight years travelling the world, extolling the benefits of openness and exuding good cheer, no doubt expecting peace and prosperity to spring up wherever he trod. But events in the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, the Balkans, and elsewhere showed such expectations to be illusory. To these indicators that openness might not be quite the panacea that its advocates claimed, Clinton responded by resorting to force, usually belatedly, almost always indecisively, but with remarkable frequency.
Throughout the Clinton era, US military forces marched hither and yon, intervening in a wider variety of places, and for a wider variety of purposes, than at any time in our history. More often than not, once the troops arrived, they stayed. As a result, by the time that Clinton left office in 2001, the defining fact of international politics—albeit one vigorously denied by the outgoing administration—had become not openness and globalization but the emergence of a Pax Americana.
Bringing into office a greater affinity for exercising power and a pronounced belief in the efficacy of coercion—both reinforced by the chastening experience of 9/11—senior members of the Bush administration do not share Bill Clinton’s ambivalence about American military might. Hence, the second major theme of the new US National Security Strategy—a candid acknowledgment and endorsement of the progressively greater militarization of US foreign policy.
To state the point bluntly, the Bush administration no longer views force as the last resort; rather, it considers military power to be America’s most effective instrument of statecraft—the area in which the United States owns the greatest advantage. Beginning with the premise that “our best defense is a good offense,” the USNSS describes how President Bush intends to exploit that advantage to the fullest.
He will do so in two ways. First, he will expand US global power projection capabilities. Already spending roughly as much on defense as the entire rest of the world combined, the United States will spend still more—much, much more. The purpose of this increase is not to respond to any proximate threat. Rather, the Bush
administration is boosting the Pentagon’s budget with an eye toward achieving a margin of such unprecedented and unsurpassed superiority that no would-be adversary will even consider mounting a future challenge. The United States will thereby secure in perpetuity its status as sole superpower. Old concerns about the “clashing wills of powerful states” will disappear; henceforth, a single power will call the tune.
Second, with the USNSS codifying the concept of “anticipatory self-defense,” President Bush claims for the United States the prerogative of using force preemptively and unilaterally, however its interests may dictate. (That prerogative belongs exclusively to the United States; the Bush strategy pointedly warns other nations not to “use preemption as a pretext for aggression.”) In contrast to his predecessor’s reactive, half-hearted military adventures, Bush will employ America’s armed might proactively and on a scale sufficient to achieve rapid, decisive results. The prospect of ever greater US military activism—against terrorists, against rogue states, against evildoers of whatever stripe—beckons.
Nowhere does the Bush administration’s national security strategy pause to consider whether the nation’s means are adequate to the “great mission” to which destiny has ostensibly summoned the United States. Asserting that American global hegemony is necessarily benign and that Washington can be counted on to use the Bush Doctrine of preemption judiciously, nowhere does it contemplate the possibility that others might take a contrary view. Nowhere does it tally up the costs of shouldering an ever-expanding array of military commitments that flow from efforts to police the world. Nowhere does it convey any awareness that America’s power and the world’s plasticity may each have limits. Nowhere does it even speculate on when the United States might be able to lay down its imperial burdens and become a normal nation. Indeed, in all likelihood, the zealots who crafted this strategy have no interest in such matters.
Twilight of the American Century Page 42