{PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT="}THE NEXT WORLD ORDER
by NICHOLAS LEMANN
The Bush Administration may have a brand-new doctrine of
power.
Issue of 2002-04-01
Posted 2002-03-25
When there is a change of command”and not just in
government”the new people often persuade themselves that the
old people were much worse than anyone suspected. This feeling
seems especially intense in the Bush Administration, perhaps
because Bill Clinton has been bracketed by a father-son team. It's
easy for people in the Administration to believe that, after an
unfortunate eight-year interlude, the Bush family has resumed its
governance”and about time, too.
The Bush Administration's sense that the Clinton years were a
waste, or worse, is strongest in the realms of foreign policy and
military affairs. Republicans tend to regard Democrats as
untrustworthy in defense and foreign policy, anyway, in ways that
coincide with what people think of as Clinton's weak points: an
eagerness to please, a lack of discipline. Condoleezza Rice, Bush's
national-security adviser, wrote an article in Foreign Affairs two
years ago in which she contemptuously accused Clinton of "an
extraordinary neglect of the fiduciary responsibilities of the
commander in chief." Most of the top figures in foreign affairs in
this Administration also served under the President's father. They
took office last year, after what they regard as eight years of
small-time flyswatting by Clinton, thinking that they were picking
up where they'd left off.
Not long ago, I had lunch with”sorry!”a senior Administration
foreign-policy official, at a restaurant in Washington called the
Oval Room. Early in the lunch, he handed me a twenty-seven-
page report, whose cover bore the seal of the Department of
Defense, an outline map of the world, and these words:
Defense Strategy for the 1990s:
The Regional Defense Strategy
Secretary of Defense
Dick Cheney
January 1993
One of the difficulties of working at the highest level of
government is communicating its drama. Actors, professional
athletes, and even elected politicians train for years, go through a
great winnowing, and then perform publicly. People who have
titles like Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense are just as
ambitious and competitive, have worked just as long and hard,
and are often playing for even higher stakes”but what they do all
day is go to meetings and write memos and prepare briefings.
How, possibly, to explain that some of the documents, including
the report that the senior official handed me, which was physically
indistinguishable from a high-school term paper, represent the
government version of playing Carnegie Hall?
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dick Cheney, then the Secretary
of Defense, set up a "shop," as they say, to think about American
foreign policy after the Cold War, at the grand strategic level. The
project, whose existence was kept quiet, included people who are
now back in the game, at a higher level: among them, Paul
Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense; Lewis Libby,
Cheney's chief of staff; and Eric Edelman, a senior foreign-policy
adviser to Cheney”generally speaking, a cohesive group of
conservatives who regard themselves as bigger-thinking, tougher-
minded, and intellectually bolder than most other people in
Washington. (Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, shares
these characteristics, and has been closely associated with Cheney
for more than thirty years.) Colin Powell, then the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, mounted a competing, and presumably more
ideologically moderate, effort to reimagine American foreign
policy and defense. A date was set”May 21, 1990”on which
each team would brief Cheney for an hour; Cheney would then
brief President Bush, after which Bush would make a foreign-
policy address unveiling the new grand strategy.
Everybody worked for months on the "five-twenty-one brief," with
a sense that the shape of the post-Cold War world was at stake.
When Wolfowitz and Powell arrived at Cheney's office on May
21st, Wolfowitz went first, but his briefing lasted far beyond the
allotted hour, and Cheney (a hawk who, perhaps, liked what he
was hearing) did not call time on him. Powell didn't get to present
his alternate version of the future of the United States in the world
until a couple of weeks later. Cheney briefed President Bush,
using material mostly from Wolfowitz, and Bush prepared his
major foreign-policy address. But he delivered it on August 2,
1990, the day that Iraq invaded Kuwait, so nobody noticed.
The team kept working. In 1992, the Times got its hands on a
version of the material, and published a front-page story saying
that the Pentagon envisioned a future in which the United States
could, and should, prevent any other nation or alliance from
becoming a great power. A few weeks of controversy ensued
about the Bush Administration's hawks being
"unilateral"”controversy that Cheney's people put an end to with
denials and the counter-leak of an edited, softer version of the
same material.
As it became apparent that Bush was going to lose to Clinton, the
Cheney team's efforts took on the quality of a parting shot. The
report that the senior official handed me at lunch had been issued
only a few days before Clinton took office. It is a somewhat
bland, opaque document”a "scrubbed," meaning unclassified,
version of something more candid”but it contained the essential
ideas of "shaping," rather than reacting to, the rest of the world,
and of preventing the rise of other superpowers. Its tone is one of
skepticism about diplomatic partnerships. A more forthright
version of the same ideas can be found in a short book titled
"From Containment to Global Leadership?," which Zalmay
Khalilzad, who joined Cheney's team in 1991 and is now special
envoy to Afghanistan, published a couple of years into the Clinton
Administration, when he was out of government. It recommends
that the United States "preclude the rise of another global rival for
the indefinite future." Khalilzad writes, "It is a vital U.S. interest
to preclude such a development”i.e., to be willing to use force if
necessary for the purpose."
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When George W. Bush was campaigning for President, he and the
people around him didn't seem to be proposing a great doctrinal
shift, along the lines of the policy of containment of the Soviet
Union's sphere of influence which the United States maintained
during the Cold War. In his first major foreign-policy speech,
delivered in November of 1999, Bush declared that "a President
must be a clear-eyed realist," a formulation that seems to connote
an absence of world-remaking ambition. "Realism" is exactly the
foreign-policy doctrine that Cheney's Pentagon team rejected,
partly because it posits the impossibility of any one country's ever
dominating world affairs for any length of time.
One gets many reminders in Washington these days of how much
the terrorist attacks of September 11th have changed official
foreign-policy thinking. Any chief executive, of either party,
would probably have done what Bush has done so far”made war
on the Taliban and Al Qaeda and enhanced domestic security. It is
only now, six months after the attacks, that we are truly entering
the realm of Presidential choice, and all indications are that Bush
is going to use September 11th as the occasion to launch a new,
aggressive American foreign policy that would represent a broad
change in direction rather than a specific war on terrorism. All his
rhetoric, especially in the two addresses he has given to joint
sessions of Congress since September 11th, and all the
information about his state of mind which his aides have leaked,
indicate that he sees this as the nation's moment of destiny”a
perception that the people around him seem to be encouraging,
because it enhances Bush's stature and opens the way to more
assertive policymaking.
Inside government, the reason September 11th appears to have
been "a transformative moment," as the senior official I had lunch
with put it, is not so much that it revealed the existence of a threat
of which officials had previously been unaware as that it
drastically reduced the American public's usual resistance to
American military involvement overseas, at least for a while. The
Clinton Administration, beginning with the "Black Hawk Down"
operation in Mogadishu, during its first year, operated on the
conviction that Americans were highly averse to casualties; the
all-bombing Kosovo operation, in Clinton's next-to-last year, was
the ideal foreign military adventure. Now that the United States
has been attacked, the options are much broader. The senior
official approvingly mentioned a 1999 study of casualty aversion
by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies, which argued that
the "mass public" is much less casualty-averse than the military or
the civilian élite believes; for example, the study showed that the
public would tolerate thirty thousand deaths in a military
operation to prevent Iraq from acquiring weapons of mass
destruction. (The American death total in the Vietnam War was
about fifty-eight thousand.) September 11th presumably reduced
casualty aversion even further.
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Recently, I went to the White House to interview Condoleezza
Rice. Rice's Foreign Affairs article from 2000 begins with this
declaration: "The United States has found it exceedingly difficult
to define its 'national interest' in the absence of Soviet power." I
asked her whether that is still the case. "I think the difficulty has
passed in defining a role," she said immediately. "I think
September 11th was one of those great earthquakes that clarify
and sharpen. Events are in much sharper relief." Like Bush, she
said that opposing terrorism and preventing the accumulation of
weapons of mass destruction "in the hands of irresponsible states"
now define the national interest. (The latter goal, by the way, is
new”in Bush's speech to Congress on September 20th, America's
sole grand purpose was ending terrorism.) We talked in her West
Wing office; its tall windows face the part of the White House
grounds where television reporters do their standups. In her
bearing, Rice seemed less crisply military than she does in public.
She looked a little tired, but she was projecting a kind of
missionary calm, rather than belligerence.
In the Foreign Affairs article, Rice came across as a classic realist,
putting forth "the notions of power politics, great powers, and
power balances" as the proper central concerns of the United
States. Now she sounded as if she had moved closer to the one-
power idea that Cheney's Pentagon team proposed ten years
ago”or, at least, to the idea that the other great powers are now
in harmony with the United States, because of the terrorist attacks,
and can be induced to remain so. "Theoretically, the realists
would predict that when you have a great power like the United
States it would not be long before you had other great powers
rising to challenge it or trying to balance against it," Rice said.
"And I think what you're seeing is that there's at least a
predilection this time to move to productive and coöperative
relations with the United States, rather than to try to balance the
United States. I actually think that statecraft matters in how it all
comes out. It's not all foreordained."
Rice said that she had called together the senior staff people of the
National Security Council and asked them to think seriously about
"how do you capitalize on these opportunities" to fundamentally
change American doctrine, and the shape of the world, in the
wake of September 11th. "I really think this period is analogous to
1945 to 1947," she said”that is, the period when the containment
doctrine took shape”"in that the events so clearly demonstrated
that there is a big global threat, and that it's a big global threat to a
lot of countries that you would not have normally thought of as
being in the coalition. That has started shifting the tectonic plates
in international politics. And it's important to try to seize on that
and position American interests and institutions and all of that
before they harden again."
The National Security Council is legally required to produce an
annual document called the National Security Strategy, stating the
over-all goals of American policy”another government report
whose importance is great but not obvious. The Bush
Administration did not produce one last year, as the Clinton
Administration did not in its first year. Rice said that she is
working on the report now.
"There are two ways to handle this document," she told me. "One
is to do it in a kind of minimalist way and just get it out. But it's
our view that, since this is going to be the first one for the Bush
Administration, it's important. An awful lot has happened since
we started this process, prior to 9/11. I can't give you a certain
date when it's going to be out, but I would think sometime this
spring. And it's important that it be a real statement of what the
Bush Administration sees as the strategic direction that it's going."
It seems clear already that Rice will set forth the hope of a more
dominant American role in the world than she might have a
couple of years ago. Some questions that don't appear to be settled
yet, but are obviously being asked, are how much the United
States is willing to operate alone in foreign affairs, and how much
change it is willing to try to engender inside other countries”and
to what end, and with what means. The leak a couple of weeks
ago of a new American nuclear posture, adding offensive
capability against "rogue states," departed from decades of official
adherence to a purely defensive position, and was just one
indication of the scope of the reconsideration that is going on. Is
the United States now in a position to be redrawing regional
maps, especially in the Middle East, and replacing governments
by force? Nobody thought that the Bush Administration would be
thinking in such ambitious terms, but plainly it is, and with the
internal debate to the right of where it was only a few months ago.
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Just before the 2000 election, a Republican foreign-policy figure
suggested to me that a good indication of a Bush Administration's
direction in foreign affairs would be who got a higher-ranking job,
Paul Wolfowitz or Richard Haass. Haass is another veteran of the
first Bush Administration, and an intellectual like Wolfowitz, but
much more moderate. In 1997, he published a book titled "The
Reluctant Sheriff," in which he poked a little fun at Wolfowitz's
famous strategy briefing of the early nineties (he called it the
"Pentagon Paper") and disagreed with its idea that the United
States should try to be the world's only great power over the long
term. "For better or worse, such a goal is beyond our reach," Haass
wrote. "It simply is not doable." Elsewhere in the book, he
disagreed with another of the Wolfowitz team's main ideas, that of
the United States expanding the "democratic zone of peace":
"Primacy is not to be confused with hegemony. The United States
cannot compel others to become more democratic." Haass argued
that the United States is becoming less dominant in the world, not
more, and suggested "a revival of what might be called traditional
great-power politics."
Wolfowitz got a higher-ranking job than Haass: he is Deputy
Secretary of Defense, and Haass is Director of Policy Planning for
the State Department” in effect, Colin Powell's big-think guy.
Recently, I went to see him in his office at the State Department.
On the wall of his waiting room was an array of photographs of
every past director of the policy-planning staff, beginning with
George Kennan, the father of the containment doctrine and the
first holder of the office that Haass now occupies.
It's another indication of the way things are moving in Washington
that Haass seems to have become more hawkish. I mentioned the
title of his book. "Using the word 'reluctant' was itself reflective of
a period when foreign policy seemed secondary, and sacrificing
for foreign policy was a hard case to make," he said. "It was
written when Bill Clinton was saying, 'It's the economy,
stupid'”not 'It's the world, stupid.' Two things are very different
now. One, the President has a much easier time making the case
that foreign policy matters. Second, at the top of the national-
security charts is this notion of weapons of mass destruction and
terrorism."
I asked Haass whether there is a doctrine emerging that is as broad
as Kennan's containment. "I think there is," he said. "What you're
seeing from this Administration is the emergence of a new
principle or body of ideas”I'm not sure it constitutes a
doctrine”about what you might call the limits of sovereignty.
Sovereignty entails obligations. One is not to massacre your own
people. Another is not to support terrorism in any way. If a
government fails to meet these obligations, then it forfeits some of
the normal advantages of sovereignty, including the right to be left
alone inside your own territory. Other governments, including the
United States, gain the right to intervene. In the case of terrorism,
this can even lead to a right of preventive, or peremptory, self-
defense. You essentially can act in anticipation if you have
grounds to think it's a question of when, and not if, you're going to
be attacked."
Clearly, Haass was thinking of Iraq. "I don't think the American
public needs a lot of persuading about the evil that is Saddam
Hussein," he said. "Also, I'd fully expect the President and his
chief lieutenants to make the case. Public opinion can be changed.
We'd be able to make the case that this isn't a discretionary action
but one done in self-defense."
On the larger issue of the American role in the world, Haass was
still maintaining some distance from the hawks. He had made a
speech not long before called "Imperial America," but he told me
that there is a big difference between imperial and imperialist. "I
just think that we have to be a little bit careful," he said. "Great as
our advantages are, there are still limits. We have to have allies.
We can't impose our ideas on everyone. We don't want to be
fighting wars alone, so we need others to join us. American
leadership, yes; but not American unilateralism. It has to be
multilateral. We can't win the war against terror alone. We can't
send forces everywhere. It really does have to be a collaborative
endeavor."
He stopped for a moment. "Is there a successor idea to
containment? I think there is," he said. "It is the idea of
integration. The goal of U.S. foreign policy should be to persuade
the other major powers to sign on to certain key ideas as to how
the world should operate: opposition to terrorism and weapons of
mass destruction, support for free trade, democracy, markets.
Integration is about locking them into these policies and then
building institutions that lock them in even more."
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The first, but by no means the last, obvious manifestation of a new
American foreign policy will be the effort to remove Saddam
Hussein. What the United States does in an Iraq operation will
very likely dwarf what's been done so far in Afghanistan, both in
terms of the scale of the operation itself and in terms of its
aftermath.
Several weeks ago, Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National
Congress, the Iraqi opposition party, came through Washington
with an entourage of his aides. Chalabi went to the State
Department and the White House to ask, evidently successfully,
for more American funding. His main public event was a panel
discussion at the American Enterprise Institute. Chalabi's leading
supporter in town, Richard Perle, the prominent hawk and former
Defense Department official, acted as moderator. Smiling and
supremely confident, Perle opened the discussion by saying,
"Evidence is mounting that the Administration is looking very
carefully at strategies for dealing with Saddam Hussein." The war
on terrorism, he said, will not be complete "until Saddam is
successfully dealt with. And that means replacing his regime. . . .
That action will be taken, I have no doubt."
Chalabi, who lives in London, is a charming, suave middle-aged
man with a twinkle in his eye. He was dressed in a double-
breasted pin-striped suit and a striped shirt with a white spread
collar. Although he and his supporters argue that the Iraqi
National Congress, with sufficient American support, can defeat
Saddam just as the Northern Alliance defeated the Taliban in
Afghanistan, this view hasn't won over most people in
Washington. It isn't just that Chalabi doesn't look the part of a
rebel military leader ("He could fight you for the last petit four on
the tray over tea at the Savoy, but that's about it," one skeptical
former Pentagon official told me), or that he isn't in Iraq. It's also
that Saddam's military is perhaps ten times the size that the
Taliban's was, and has been quite successful at putting down
revolts over the last decade. The United States left Iraq in 1991
believing that Saddam might soon fall to an internal rebellion;
Chalabi's supporters believe that Saddam is much weaker now,
and that even signs that a serious operation was in the offing could
finish him off. But non-true believers seem to be coming around
to the idea that a military operation against Saddam would mean
the deployment of anywhere from a hundred thousand to three
hundred thousand American ground troops.
Kenneth Pollack, a former C.I.A. analyst who was the National
Security Council's staff expert on Iraq during the last years of the
Clinton Administration, recently caused a stir in the foreign-policy
world by publishing an article in Foreign Affairs calling for war
against Saddam. This was noteworthy because three years ago
Pollack and two co-authors published an article, also in Foreign
Affairs, arguing that the Iraqi National Congress was incapable of
defeating Saddam. Pollack still doesn't think Chalabi can do the
job. He believes that it would require a substantial American
ground, air, and sea force, closer in size to the one we used in
Kuwait in 1990-91 than to the one we are using now in
Afghanistan.
Pollack, who is trim, quick, and crisp, is obviously a man who has
given a briefing or two in his day. When I went to see him at his
office in Washington, with a little encouragement he got out from
behind his desk and walked over to his office wall, where three
maps of the Middle East were hanging. "The only way to do it is a
full-scale invasion," he said, using a pen as a pointer. "We're
talking about two grand corps, two to three hundred thousand
people altogether. The population is here, in the Tigris-Euphrates
valley." He pointed to the area between Baghdad and Basra.
"Ideally, you'd have the Saudis on board." He pointed to the Prince
Sultan airbase, near Riyadh. "You could make Kuwait the base,
but it's much easier in Saudi. You need to take western Iraq and
southern Iraq"”pointing again”"because otherwise they'll fire
Scuds at Israel and at the Saudi oil fields. You probably want to
prevent Iraq from blowing up its own oil fields, so troops have to
occupy them. And you need troops to defend the Kurds in
northern Iraq." Point, point. "You go in as hard as you can, as fast
as you can." He slapped his hand on the top of his desk. "You get
the enemy to divide his forces, by threatening him in two places at
once." His hand hit the desk again, hard. "Then you crush him."
Smack.
That would be a reverberating blow. The United States has
already removed the government of one country, Afghanistan, the
new government is obviously shaky, and American military
operations there are not completed. Pakistan, which before
September 11th clearly met the new test of national
unacceptability (it both harbors terrorists and has weapons of
mass destruction), will also require long-term attention, since the
country is not wholly under the control of the government, as the
murder of Daniel Pearl demonstrated, and even parts of the
government, like the intelligence service, may not be entirely
under the control of the President. In Iraq, if America invades and
brings down Saddam, a new government must be established”an
enormous long-term task in a country where there is no obvious,
plausible new leader. The prospective Iraq operation has drawn
strong objections from the neighboring nations, one of which,
Russia, is a nuclear superpower. An invasion would have a huge
effect on the internal affairs of all the biggest Middle Eastern
nations: Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and even Egypt. Events have
forced the Administration to become directly involved in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as it hadn't wanted to do. So it's really
the entire region that is in play, in much the way that Europe was
immediately after the Second World War.
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In September, Bush rejected Paul Wolfowitz's recommendation of
immediate moves against Iraq. That the President seems to have
changed his mind is an indication, in part, of the bureaucratic skill
of the Administration's conservatives. "These guys are relentless,"
one former official, who is close to the high command at the State
Department, told me. "Resistance is futile." The conservatives'
other weapon, besides relentlessness, is intellectualism. Colin
Powell tends to think case by case, and since September 11th the
conservatives have outflanked him by producing at least the
beginning of a coherent, hawkish world view whose acceptance
practically requires invading Iraq. If the United States applies the
doctrines of Cheney's old Pentagon team, "shaping" and
expanding "the zone of democracy," the implications would
extend far beyond that one operation.
The outside experts on the Middle East who have the most
credibility with the Administration seem to be Bernard Lewis, of
Princeton, and Fouad Ajami, of the Johns Hopkins School of
Advanced International Studies, both of whom see the Arab
Middle East as a region in need of radical remediation. Lewis was
invited to the White House in December to brief the senior
foreign-policy staff. "One point he made is, Look, in that part of
the world, nothing matters more than resolute will and force," the
senior official I had lunch with told me”in other words, the
United States needn't proceed gingerly for fear of inflaming the
"Arab street," as long as it is prepared to be strong. The senior
official also recommended as interesting thinkers on the Middle
East Charles Hill, of Yale, who in a recent essay declared, "Every
regime of the Arab-Islamic world has proved a failure," and Reuel
Marc Gerecht, of the American Enterprise Institute, who
published an article in The Weekly Standard about the need for a
change of regime in Iran and Syria. (Those goals, Gerecht told me
when we spoke, could be accomplished through pressure short of
an invasion.)
Several people I spoke with predicted that most, or even all, of the
nations that loudly oppose an invasion of Iraq would privately
cheer it on, if they felt certain that this time the Americans were
really going to finish the job. One purpose of Vice-President
Cheney's recent diplomatic tour of the region was to offer
assurances on that matter, while gamely absorbing all the public
criticism of an Iraq operation. In any event, the Administration
appears to be committed to acting forcefully in advance of the
world's approval. When I spoke to Condoleezza Rice, she said that
the United States should assemble "coalitions of the willing" to
support its actions, rather than feel it has to work within the
existing infrastructure of international treaties and organizations.
An invasion of Iraq would test that policy in more ways than one:
the Administration would be betting that it can continue to
eliminate Al Qaeda cells in countries that publicly opposed the
Iraq operation.
When the Administration submitted its budget earlier this year, it
asked for a forty-eight-billion-dollar increase in defense spending
for fiscal 2003, which begins in October, 2002. Much of that sum
would go to improve military pay and benefits, but ten billion
dollars of it is designated as an unspecified contingency fund for
further operations in the war on terrorism. That's probably at least
the initial funding for an invasion of Iraq.
This spring, the Administration will be talking to other countries
about the invasion, trying to secure basing and overflight
privileges, while Bush builds up a rhetorical case for it by giving
speeches about the unacceptability of developing weapons of
mass destruction. A drama involving weapons inspections in Iraq
will play itself out over the spring and summer, and will end with
the United States declaring that the terms that Saddam offers for
the inspections, involving delays and restrictions, are
unacceptable. Then, probably in the late summer or early fall, the
enormous troop positioning, which will take months, will begin.
The Administration obviously feels confident that the United
States can effectively parry whatever aggressive actions Saddam
takes during the troop buildup, and hopes that its moves will
destabilize Iraq enough to cause the Republican Guard, the
military key to the country, to turn against Saddam and topple him
on its own. But the chain of events leading inexorably to a full-
scale American invasion, if it hasn't already begun, evidently will
begin soon.
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Lewis (Scooter) Libby, who was the principal drafter of Cheney's
future-of-the-world documents during the first Bush
Administration, now works in an office in the Old Executive
Office Building, overlooking the West Wing, where he has a
second, smaller office. A packet of public-relations material
prompted by the recent paperback publication of his 1996 novel,
"The Apprentice," quotes the Times' calling him "Dick Cheney's
Dick Cheney," which seems like an apt description: he appears
absolutely sure of himself, and, whether by coincidence or as a
result of the influence of his boss, speaks in a tough, confidential,
gravelly rumble. Like Condoleezza Rice and Bush himself, he
gives the impression of having calmly accepted the idea that the
project of war and reconstruction which the Administration has
now taken on may be a little exhausting for those charged with
carrying it out but is unquestionably right, the only truly prudent
course.
When I went to see Libby, not long ago, I asked him whether,
before September 11th, American policy toward terrorism should
have been different. He went to his desk and got out a large black
loose-leaf binder, filled with typewritten sheets interspersed with
foldout maps of the Middle East. He looked through it for a long
minute, formulating his answer.
"Let us stack it up," he said at last. "Somalia, 1993; 1994, the
discovery of the Al Qaeda-related plot in the Philippines; 1993,
the World Trade Center, first bombing; 1993, the attempt to
assassinate President Bush, former President Bush, and the lack of
response to that, the lack of a serious response to that; 1995, the
Riyadh bombing; 1996, the Khobar bombing; 1998, the Kenyan
embassy bombing and the Tanzanian embassy bombing; 1999, the
plot to launch millennium attacks; 2000, the bombing of the Cole.
Throughout this period, infractions on inspections by the Iraqis,
and eventually the withdrawal of the entire inspection regime; and
the failure to respond significantly to Iraqi incursions in the
Kurdish areas. No one would say these challenges posed easy
problems, but if you take that long list and you ask, 'Did we
respond in a way which discouraged people from supporting
terrorist activities, or activities clearly against our interests? Did
we help to shape the environment in a way which discouraged
further aggressions against U.S. interests?,' many observers
conclude no, and ask whether it was then easier for someone like
Osama bin Laden to rise up and say credibly, 'The Americans
don't have the stomach to defend themselves. They won't take
casualties to defend their interests. They are morally weak.' "
Libby insisted that the American response to September 11th has
not been standard or foreordained. "Look at what the President
has done in Afghanistan," he said, "and look at his speech to the
joint session of Congress"”meaning the State of the Union
Message, in January. "He made it clear that it's an important area.
He made it clear that we believe in expanding the zone of
democracy even in this difficult part of the world. He made it
clear that we stand by our friends and defend our interests. And he
had the courage to identify those states which present a problem,
and to begin to build consensus for action that would need to be
taken if there is not a change of behavior on their part. Take the
Afghan case, for example. There are many other courses that the
President could have taken. He could have waited for juridical
proof before we responded. He could have engaged in long
negotiations with the Taliban. He could have failed to seek a new
relationship with Pakistan, based on its past nuclear tests, or been
so afraid of weakening Pakistan that we didn't seek its help. This
list could go on to twice or three times the length I've mentioned
so far. But, instead, the President saw an opportunity to refashion
relations while standing up for our interests. The problem is
complex, and we don't know yet how it will end, but we have
opened new prospects for relations not only with Afghanistan, as
important as it was as a threat, but with the states of Central Asia,
Pakistan, Russia, and, as it may develop, with the states of
Southwest Asia more generally."
We moved on to Iraq, and the question of what makes Saddam
Hussein unacceptable, in the Administration's eyes. "The issue is
not inspections," Libby said. "The issue is the Iraqis' promise not
to have weapons of mass destruction, their promise to recognize
the boundaries of Kuwait, their promise not to threaten other
countries, and other promises that they made in '91, and a number
of U.N. resolutions, including all the other problems I listed.
Whether it was wise or not”and that is the subject of
debate”Iraq was given a second chance to abide by international
norms. It failed to take that chance then, and annually for the next
ten years."
"What's your level of confidence," I asked him, "that the current
regime will, in fact, change its behavior in a way that you will be
satisfied by?"
He ran his hand over his face and then gave me a direct gaze and
spoke slowly and deliberately. "There is no basis in Iraq's past
behavior to have confidence in good-faith efforts on their part to
change their behavior." {PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT="}
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