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Winslow Wheeler:
There were a lot of fascinating presentations in the last panel, and perhaps some of the presenters who didn’t get a chance to respond to questions that weren’t asked, may want to ask this panel some questions that we can have some back-and-forth on, because our subjects sort of intersect. I didn’t want to skip over some of those presentations we heard from the last panel that were really quite interesting.
We’ve got three, I think, fascinating presenters. We’re going to hear first from Michael Lind. Obviously you heard him last night. If you weren’t here for the dinner last night, you missed a fantastic presentation. I checked Michael out on the Internet, and I’m really impressed. He’s a horse for work. He’s written all kinds of books and major articles, not least of which was an article—was it in Atlantic Monthly recently?—about the Democrats and how they’re responding to problems. He’s produced several books. You heard Jamie Galbraith describe them last night. I’d like to remind you that his newest book is The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life. Given what I heard last night, I’m going to get myself a copy and see what else is in there that’s pretty interesting.
Second speaker will be Carl Conetta. He was instrumental in setting some of this panel up. He’s the co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives. If you go to their website, you’ll find all kinds of fascinating materials. I urge you to do that. His work and Charles Knight spans a lot of subject matters that are key to some of the things we’ve been talking about today, yesterday, and tomorrow. That website is www.comw.org/pda. To keep it simple, if you just google Project on Defense Alternatives, you’ll get the right immediate number-one response.
Our third talker is Bill Hartung, who you just heard from in the last panel. Bill’s the director of the Arms Trade Resource Center, at the World Policy Institute at The New School University—it’s a mouthful. You know The New School. That’s where perennial presidential hopeful Bob Kerry resides. Bill has a new book about to come out, is that right?
BH:
Well, I am part of an edited volume called Terrornomics, which David Gold is one of the editors of.
WW:
And also The Changing Dynamics of U.S. Defense Policy.
BH:
That’s old news.
WW:
Well, on his bio it says it’s new news. And we’re going to have, you might regard it as a Stalinist rule on time for speakers to get the trains back on time and to give us time to talk about things after presentations. I’ll take about five minutes again to try to provoke the panel. The Stalinist rule is that everybody gets 10 minutes, and if you take more than 10 minutes, we’re not going to eat it out of your time by running longer on talking; it’s going to come out of the next speaker’s time. So in other words, Michael is going to start talking at about ten after, by my watch. Carl’s going to start talking at twenty after; or at least he should start talking at twenty after. And if Michael goes longer, he’s going to eat into Carl’s time, and Carl won’t like that.
ML:
Can I sell him some time?
WW:
That will be between the two of you. Same thing for Bill and Carl [sic]. I’ll give them the standard warnings, but when the speaker has started eating up his colleague’s times I’ll start flashing the blank red at you, so you know what’s going on, and somebody’s being rude to somebody else. And we’re going to try to keep the trains on time that way.
BH:
If I don’t get to say anything, we can talk afterwards.
Michael Lind:
Well, I’ll try to come in at eight minutes, if that’s possible.
Last night I talked about policy, in particular the hegemony strategy which prevailed over its rivals, the Pat Buchanan-type neo-isolationism, what Jean Kirkpatrick called America as an ordinary country. There was a debate in the early 1990s, and it was a very robust debate, much of it in a magazine of which I was executive editor, The National Interest; and these were all set forth. And what happened was that one of the possibilities, one of the possible Cold War strategies that was being discussed, what Charles Krauthammer called the uni-polar world, prevailed. And so the question we have to ask ourselves—the title is, “Rethinking Post-Cold-War U.S. Security Policy: What Went Wrong?” Well, the question is why did that option prevail, instead of one of the other three or four, ranging from isolationism, to a cooperative, multi-polar concert of powers, and perhaps some others.
Well, here is where is I’m going to depart in a radical way from the assumption of most public discourse, and also much social science discourse as well, which is assuming that the United States is a nation like a jury of people whose minds have not been made up from moment to moment, in that they will listen to intellectuals and politicians expounding various strategies, and then after thinking about it, they will then render their verdict.
And I will suggest instead that—Jamie Galbraith earlier suggested that maybe rational decision making isn’t the best way to explain what the U.S. has been doing—that that is indeed the norm, that is the situation; that is what if American foreign policy, and perhaps American domestic policy too, is determined to a large degree by irrational factors? In that case, what are those irrational factors, and how does this constrain our options in thinking about American grand strategy?
About a decade ago, in Foreign Affairs, I published an article entitled, “Civil War By Other Means.” What I did in that article was I went back through American history and looked at the regional distribution of support for American wars. And you find a remarkably consistent pattern all the way from the quasi-war with France in 1798, all the way up to, at that time, the Kosovo war, which is Southerners were generally for the war, New Englanders were generally against it. And the fascinating thing to me was, it didn’t matter who we were fighting. It made no difference. If you say, We’re at war, immediately the Bostonians rush out to protest and the Southerners started shooting off guns in the streets. It was that irrational. It was so irrational that during the Napoleonic wars-- At different times the U.S. fought undeclared wars against France, and then later the War of 1812 against Britain. Britain and France were actually enemies, as you recall, in the Napoleonic Wars. When we were fighting France, the Southerners were enthusiastic about fighting France. And then a few years later, we fought France’s enemy, Great Britain, and the Southerners were enthusiastic about fighting Britain. In both cases, the New Englanders were hostile to the conflict, to the extent that there was a meeting of the Hartford Convention in New England to suggest the New England states seceding from this warlike Southern-dominated union under Jefferson, Madison, the Virginia presidents, to form its own peaceful confederacy.
If you look at the votes on Kosovo, that was the latest one I studied in detail. It was a partisan division, because it was sort of a minor war, minor stakes, compared to other American wars; but nevertheless you find the ghost of this division. It went along party lines, with the Democrats supporting President Clinton, with a slight majority in some of these votes. Northern Democrats were the most likely among Democrats to vote against Clinton and against the Kosovo War; Southern Republicans were the most likely to break ranks to support President Clinton in the Kosovo War. You see the same thing with the vote on the war on Iraq.
So what is the deep underlying structure here? Well, I think, to begin with, it shows that whatever may be the case with elites, who have considered ideologies, considered strategies, the mass public does not support or oppose wars on the basis of a theory of strategy. There are more militaristic and less militaristic sub-cultures in the country. These tend to be regional. As a number of historians, including the great American historian David Hackett Fisher, pointed out, these can be traced back centuries to the cultures of the actual colonies. The Southern colonies were founded by aristocrats, for whom the military was one of the few honorable occupations. That’s why, in 2007, most military high schools are in the South, and they’re almost extinct—well, I don’t think there are any in the North; maybe there are a few. You have liberal arts colleges in New England, and you have military reform schools in South Carolina.
I think one of the reasons that this more militaristic, bellicose approach to U.S. strategy prevailed in the 1990s was that Southerners took over the country in the 1990s. They controlled the Republican Party, which then controlled both houses of Congress, and then gained the presidency. For the first time really since the 19th century you had conservative Southerners running all over the political branches, or at least people dependent on conservative Southern support, like Dennis Hastert. There was a backlash against this in the 2006 election, and we have this famous blue state, red state division. The last thing I’ll say about that before quitting is, forget this whole coastal-interior stuff. The Gulf Coastline of the South is longer than the Atlantic coastline. It’s not a division between the red states and the blue states; it’s a division between the North and the South, because the mountain and Plains states are fairly negligible in terms of population. Essentially the red states are the states of the old confederacy.
So there we stand. We essentially have—In China you talk about one country, two systems. Well, in the United States, we have one system, two countries. And it makes a difference whether the party of New England, and the Northeast, and the Midwest is running of the government, or the party of the old Confederacy.
And I will lend my remaining couple of minutes, as promised, to the next speaker.
Carl Conetta:
I’m going to start by defining my problem set. It’s pretty straightforward, but I think kind of simple. Our security policy today evinces a disturbing paradox, that paradox being that it’s delivering and has been delivering for some time less and less security at increasing cost. The thing has been feeding, rather than mitigating, a process of global repolarization and remilitarization.
A good example today: We are largely preoccupied with what, up until recently, was officially called the Long War, which has us engaged across the Muslim world. We’re also quite preoccupied, and have been for a while, with shaping or containing the grower power of China, which is now officially designated as the nation most likely to succeed the Soviet threat. So this suggests there may be a big war to follow the Long War, and that would be the tunnel at the end of the tunnel. There’s no light in that picture. I think none of this is really necessary or conducive to our security.
We’ve certainly come a long way since the early 1990s, when you think back. We briefly thought about, contemplated a common home approach—that was Gorbachev’s phrase—a common home approach to security, which would have involved us reaching across strategic divisions and emphasizing cooperation and emphasizing traditional diplomacy—not just among our friends, that’s relatively easy to do; but across strategic divisions.
Rather than accept the cost and the risk of that approach, I think we succumbed to the temptations of being the world’s only military super-power. I think we did it, largely, for domestic-political reasons. What that meant is emphasizing and having the capacity, or thinking we have the capacity, to emphasize coercion in trying to move the world more rapidly towards a rule set that we thought was acceptable. So today few people talk about a common home, and instead, our policy discourse resides in what I would call the house of war, which is the paradigm, the culture, and the language of warfare.
Some of us have been, and all of us in this room, I’m sure, seeking an exit from that paradigm. We’re looking left and right, we’re searching for a door that says, Peace and Security. But truth be told, as long as we’re operating within the mainstream political consensus, that consensus, I think, today is that presently our security depends uniquely on war. Our security depends uniquely on war and related mechanisms. Yes, peace is the ultimate destination, but war is the road. And that defines the mainstream of both political parties.
So I’m left wondering, who or what will lead us out? How do we get out? What might an exit door even look like? And I’m not going to, what, in five minutes, try to propose a full answer, but I can suggest what is not an exit.
A lot of discussion recently about the Iraq War, specifically how we got into it, how we might have avoided on it, has focused on the relative merits of a realist approach to foreign relations and a liberal internationalist approach. I think that’s an important debate, but I don’t think it’s going to lead us to an exit. And that’s because currents within either school could have led us into our current mess, and that in fact proponents of the Iraq War used both types of argumentation. Originally the initial argument was really a realist argument. It was based on a security rationale, and it was of a type of realism that I would call offensive realism. So you can’t blame it on liberal internationalism, but liberal internationalism could get us into this same place; it could lock us into the house of war.
So instead of joining that debate, what I want to do, is flag several ideas that have had bipartisan appeal. They’ve been central to our security policy over at least the past 18 years, and they’ve served us very badly. There’s a litany of error or an axis of error. I’m hoping that maybe this might serve as a kind of litmus test to help us sort the good from the bad, especially as we enter a presidential election season.
But first in the axis of error is the idea that we can usefully sustain our present condition of military primacy, and that we must in order to be reasonably secure. I don’t think we can, and I don’t think we must. At any rate, we’ve dangerously overestimated both its extent and its usefulness. In light of the Iraq War, our power seems not so super. I think a good part of this is that we don’t really comprehend the appeal and the power or the dynamics of identity politics.
Second in the axis of error is something that Mike Lind has mentioned and talked about in depth last night, something I call the hegemonic presumption. This includes the notion that we the United States are the indispensable power, that we are somehow enabled by superior insight or even we are called by history to carry out some set of missions. The way it’s often stated is that we bear the burden of a special responsibility to act forcefully and unilaterally in the world, in the pursuit of some high purpose, of course.
Well, that’s not really submission to responsibility, is it. What we’re really talking about is the arrogation of power. What we’re really talking about is a power prerogative, a prerogative that recognizes only optionally any external constraints. So one of my favorites is President Bush saying that he’s being called on, we’ve be called by history to do this or that, and we’re responding. That’s one, I imagine, of the perks of being the President of the United States; you get history’s phone number. It will take your calls.
Another thing indicative of the hegemonic presumption is our fixation on American global leadership as a first and necessary goal. We’re obsessed with extolling, asserting, extending, and defending it. Our intention to lead often overshadows the substance of what we propose to do. A different approach might be we carry out our policies. Let others lavish praise on us. Let others call us leader.
These two things, military primacy, and global leadership, they’re linked closely to each other and then to our security needs. That’s clear as far back as 1997, I think. It was central to the most important security documents that we produced, The Quadrenniel Defense Review and The National Security Strategy. If you read those, the strategy asserts pretty [straightforwardly] security at home depends on our possessing global leadership, and that in turn depends on our military primacy. So what happens there in that formulation is that primacy, American primacy and American global leadership, become security ends in their own right, and by extension challenges to that become challenges to our fundamental security.
But let’s be clear about it: If the pursuit and achievement of military primacy and global leadership is essential to the security of nations, then we’re lost. We as a species are lost if nations generally adopt that approach.
The third member of the axis of error is our doctrine on the use and utility of force. Three successive administrations have backed away from the idea that war should be an instrument of last resort, reserved mostly for defense against aggression narrowly defined. So we’ve seen the threshold for our going to war has steadily come down. The ways we propose to use force, short of war—they’ve increasingly multiplied. And our military goals have grown steadily more ambitious; so we want to fight multiple wars in multiple places. They have to be overlapping, we need to do it fast, and at very low cost. And most recently, we have to be able to accomplish regime change in at least one of the theaters. That’s been inched up gradually throughout the years.
Today we increasingly use force for purposes of coercive diplomacy, which has more or less replaced, in the most important conflicts it’s replaced traditional diplomacy. We’re not engaged in diplomacy with Iran presently; we’re engaged in coercive diplomacy. Force is playing an increasing role in nation building. Democratization—we’ve militarized the process of democratization, and then just generally to shape the strategic environment. It’s a phrase that came into being during the Clinton administration.
Associated with these ideas about the use of force is that we might actually prevent the emergence of threats—not just to deter or defend against threats that exist, but to actually prevent them from arising in the first place. That implies treating things that are not manifest threats or known to be threats as though they are already threats, and that practice is not only provocative, but it leads us to scatter our attention and resources in every direction. It actually makes us more vulnerable to surprise attacks than less vulnerable. So in the months before 9/11, what was our principle debate? What was our principle focus? The rising power of China and how we might deal with the fact that they could be building an aircraft carrier. Also, the threat posed by terrorists bringing anthrax into the United States. So we’re discussing anthrax while Bin Laden is flying in the planes, a more traditional type of attack.
One thing that enables this quicker resort to war—and I’m really talking about how do you build public opinion? How do you maintain public opinion?—the importance of these ideas. And one very important idea is that we have discovered a way to fight wars very quickly and with relatively low cost, low risk, relatively painless precision warfare. Now that idea has really taken a hit recently because of the Iraq War. But a new fetish object is being brought forward, is coming forward to take its place, and that’s counter-insurgency warfare. […?] are going to somehow turn around the impasse in Iraq and in the next and subsequent Iraq wars.
Generally speaking, military power has proved to be less discrete, less manageable, less predictable in its effects than our policy has presumed for the past 20 years. Its negative consequences, the negative consequences of war, have proved to be more far-reaching and more complex than we imagined. So I want to suggest a corrective, at least with regard to this particular axis, this particular error. The corrective is this: Henceforth, let’s recognize war for what it is. Let’s recognize that war itself is a weapon of mass destruction when we’re thinking about launching the next one. Let’s think of it as a weapon of mass destruction, and we can adjust our policy accordingly. Thanks a lot.
WW:
The trains are on time. As a matter of fact, they’re a minute-and-a-half ahead of schedule.
William Hartung:
My presentation is modular, so I can quit at any point, which is a good thing.
I had the pleasant experience of reading over various strategy proposals from Democratic-leaning and –connected think tanks; so for that alone I deserve a drink at dinner.
But there’s a whole network, kind of an echo chamber, of Democratic-related think tanks, overlapping personnel, overlapping ideas. I think that in and of itself would not be a bad thing. Certainly the right has done that. I think the issue is what kind of ideas are being echoed, or thrown into that echo chamber.
I’ll just give you an example of what some of these projects are: The Truman National Security Project, the Center for American Progress, the Third Way National Security Project, the Security and Peace Initiative, Center for a New American Strategy, the American Security Project, the Twenty-First Century Defense Initiative of the Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic International Studies Smart Power Commission—all power is smart now, by the way, not hard, not soft, but smart—, National Security Network, and the Democratic Leadership Council are the ones that I looked at. There [are] undoubtedly others. And I chose them either if they were explicitly presenting themselves as pro-Democratic Party initiatives, or if the majority of their advisors and staff were traditional Democrats, and so people Madeleine Albright, and William Perry, and John Podesta--there was Republican, Richard Armitage, who turns up quite a bit, but the right would call him a Republican in name only, a RINO, as they would say—Leslie Galb, [?] Beers, who ran the Kerry campaign security-foreign policy operation. So there’s kind of a group primarily Clintonistas, some from earlier periods, who have been trying to shape a Democratic strategy.
Then there’s been some lovely books: Peter Beinart, The Good Fight: Why Liberals--and Only Liberals--Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, kind of a modest ambition. There’s a book by Michael O’Hanlon and Kirk Campbell, which I like to call Hard Bodies, Hard Power: The New Politics of National Security, but I added the Hard Bodies part because I thought it would help their sales. Amitai Etzioni has a new book called Security First. I don’t remember the exact subtitle, but it has to do with a muscular foreign policy, speaking of hard bodies. This is sort of a nexus, a network, that has a lot of common themes.
One is to have a broad concept of security, that security doesn’t only involve terrorism and military threats; it can involve epidemics of disease, it can involve global warming, it can involve failed states, it can involve a whole range of threats to life. And I don’t necessarily disagree with that; but there’s a lot of questions about how do you prioritize these threats, how do you approach them institutionally, which are not really addressed in large part in these various reports, studies, and proposals.
There’s also a notion of, as I said, smart power and integrated power, which says you should use all the tools at your disposal—military intelligence, diplomatic, economic, and so forth. And I have a little example, one example of that, which is … where? It may not be here. Well, anyway, I’ll leave that out. Here it is: The Third Way National Security Project: “Indeed, terrorism is only one of several national security crises that cross borders. Organized crime, traffic in strategic materials, genocidal outbursts that demand intervention, and environmental threats such as famine, disease, and water scarcity will have serious national security repercussions. Let’s just hope they’re not all assigned to the Pentagon to solve.
Then one of the other common themes is an unfortunately very broad range of scenarios for when force should be used: for humanitarian intervention, to deal with failed states, to deal with countries that are developing nuclear weapons. Probably the most ambitious example of this is Michael O’Hanlon, who’s written a piece that talks about we might have to intervene in North Korea if there’s an implosion-explosion of the state; military force against Iran in the case of nuclear weapons development; going into Pakistan either to resolve a civil war in favor of a secular government, or a problem that they admit is not necessarily easily solved by force, but sealing off Pakistan’s borders in case a fundamentalist regime comes to power to keep the nuclear weapons from leaking out. Their estimate is that it could take a million troops or more to do this. There’s talk about dealing with failed states in Nigeria, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia.
Peter Beinart has his own contribution to make, where he says, “We’d be naïve to think that freedom, even broadly defined, is enough to defeat Jihad-ism, When governments lose control of their territory, unleashing threats that spill beyond their borders, no amount of investment or aid will help unless someone reestablishes order. Most of the time that someone will be the government bolstered by outside help. Some governments cannot reassert control; others are themselves the root of the problem. From the Middle East to South Asia, from the Horn of Africa to the [Sahale?], the United States may need to enter stateless zones, capture or kill Jihad-ists taking refuge there, and staying long enough to begin rebuilding the state.” I’m halfway through.
So needless to say, almost every region of the world. The notion of not just intervening against terrorist organizations, but rebuilding the state, which, you know, I think our recent experience in trying to rebuild states has been less than stellar, not to mention the resources that would be involved if this is sort of your national policy.
There’s also a predilection for more troops, anywhere from 100,000 to 136,000. Interesting, the highest number is from the Center for American Progress, which is perceived as being the most progressive of this kind of network of think tanks. And the notion seems to be either you accept some of these scenarios I mentioned before, or you’re assuming that Iraq and Afghanistan are going to go on for some time. Because you’re not going to get new troops well trained, able to really function, for probably two or three years. So it runs contrary to the proposals about pulling out of Iraq; while depending what you think the word redeployment means, I guess, because that could leave significant numbers of troops.
So the one other thing I wanted to highlight is this notion that somehow you need nuclear weapons to deal with unfriendly states that get their own nuclear weapons, or a missile defense, for example. And Greg Feelman, who was an intelligence person at State, who kind of was one of the ones who predicted that Iraq was not going to have as robust or complete weapons of mass destruction programs as advertised, says: “For emerging missile powers to anticipate effectively, intimidating the United States with threats of a direct missile attack on the American homeland is a dubious proposition. There’s no empirical evidence that even the most erratic foreign leader would believe himself immune from a U.S. counter-attack. There are no plausible scenarios for disguising the source of an intercontinental ballistic missile attack on the United States. Devastating retaliation and the end of the attacker’s regime would have to be assumed.”
So I think a lot of the scenarios that are projected in these alternative Democratic proposals are not really the things we should be concerned about. I don’t think they’re highly plausible. I think there’s other ways to deal with them. How am I doing?
I think I’ll stop. My other piece of it is some things we might do. But that seems like a logical thing to come up in the question-and-answer. So that’s that.
Winslow Wheeler:
Thank you. I’d like to try to provoke a discussion here by suggesting the following: Michael said that the decisions that we’ve been making are irrational; Carl said that many of the decisions we’ve been making on national security issues are misinformed; and one of Bill’s points was that this whole process has been highly unsuccessful. I’d like to suggest to you that each of those assertions is wrong. It’s that the people—I’m not going to argue about the policies—it’s that the people making these decisions have their eye on a very different ball, not the one we’ve been talking about.
I’d like to suggest what I’m trying to express by citing two examples: the Israeli raid on the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1983. Amongst all the talk about striking Iran today in a similar thing, and all the fallout that might occur from that, it’s an article of faith that the Israeli strike against that reactor was successful.
When I was at GAO I did a report on the air campaign in Desert Storm. And we looked at the strikes on the Iraqi nuclear facilities. There are six of them, and by the end of the air war, about three of them had been bombed enough so that the Defense Intelligence Agency told CENTCOM, You can stop bombing there. Three of them needed some more, but the war is over, so we can stop. The U.N. went in and looked at all of the Iraqi nuclear facilities, and they didn’t quibble with the bomb damage assessment in those six facilities; they simply pointed out that we missed twelve, and that their assessment, not ours, was that Iraq was about a year away from a working device. And the inference was, from the other things we looked at about those targets, was that the Israeli strike forced the Iraqi program for a working device underground, it united the government around the decision to have a device, and encouraged them to put more resources into it. In other words, the Israeli strike accelerated the Iraqi bomb program. But that’s not part of the lexicon these days.
The second example I’d like to cite is from an experience I had with Senator Kasselbaum. I worked for four different senators, Senator Kasselbaum, Nancy Kasselbaum, a moderate Republican from Kansas is one of them. I joined her staff in 1981, and I started sending her memos about the B1 bomber. Reagan revived it. There’s a billion dollars worth of avionics work in Wichita, Kansas, at the Boeing plant, and despite her vested pork interests, is the word we used today, I was encouraging her to oppose the program. And I pointed out to her its performance deficiencies, its costs, all kinds of reasons why we didn’t need a replacement for the B-52, etc. And I was sending her memos, and being a dutiful staffer, and I basically get a response from her that said, What do you want me to do about this? I can’t do anything about this.
And so I changed my tactics. I started talking to a correspondent for The New York Times, whose name is Charlie Moore, and we started a dialogue about the B-1 bomber, and I was giving him information about it. He checked with GAO and some other places, and got himself informed about the program. He wrote a front-page New York Times article about the B-1 and how it was performing poorly, it was too expensive, and the B-52 was just fine, thank you very much; we really didn’t need the thing. And of course Senator Kasselbaum saw the article. I of course was not mentioned in the article, but she called me into her office and waved this article that she had clipped out of the newspaper in my face and said, Winslow, what are we going to do about this?
What I’m trying to suggest is that in talking to our national security leaders in this country—it’s not just a problem in Congress—that we can talk ourselves blue making arguments, collecting data, being rational, and asking them to understand. My experience all too many times on Capitol Hill with each of the four senators I worked for was, So what do you want me to do about it? I can’t do anything about that. They’re much more interested in ideas that will help them with what they’re primarily interested in. What they’re primarily interested in is survival. Some of them are interested in promotion, but all of them are interested in survival. If your arguments help them achieve survival, they’ll be interested. If they don’t perceive your arguments that way, you’re going to be treated politely, but they’re not going to pay attention.
In other words, if, for example, The New York Times announces the new conventional wisdom, people will be very receptive to arguments about that new conventional wisdom. If the conventional wisdom is that we need to expand the Army and the Marine Corps by 92,000 soldiers and marines, they system will produce all kinds of reasons why that is very logical, and makes all kinds of sense, and yes, we should do that. And they’ll commit to an idea, and all of a sudden, the costs will show, and when the time comes for those troops to do something, we’ll find out we’re just as incompetent at doing these kinds of things in Pakistan or wherever that we are today in Iraq, and it was a terrible mistake.
So what I’m trying to say is that we need to think about not just how to present data and logic and arguments to our decision-making community in this country; we need to think about how to make them want to look at that data, and pay attention to it, and to understand why that is in their interests to do that. And I think we’re doing a very poor job at that.
I’ll stop there. I’d like to invite some of the presenters from the previous panel, like Jamie, who didn’t have a chance to respond to questions. Perhaps some of you who want to ask questions of this panel will get us to answer some of the questions that your presentations provoked. But let’s have some discussion.
Q:
Related to your alternative reasons for wars, I’ve read in places that the rationale for this war has been the neo-con policies and owning the oil. I mean, I’ve read from Greg Pallis, for example, the BBC reporter who said that in fact this war was part of compliance with the Al Quaida demands to 1) get out of Saudi Arabia; and 2) to increase the price of oil so the Bin Laden Construction Company could get paid quicker for its construction on Mecca; and also so that Saudi Arabia maintained control of the oil prices because the Iraqi, Saddam Hussein, was increasing and decreasing supply and making the prices irrational. Can you speak to that?
WW (?):
I think this is an important question, and a good example. I don’t buy the argument that we did Iraq because Haliburton wanted to control the oil. I don’t buy that. I think the oil explanation for this war is a different one. If Iraqi oil got back to some of its pre-Gulf War production levels, that would tend to suppress the price of oil. Before Iraqi freedom, they were at 2.5 million barrels per day. They’re still about there. There’s been some investments in the oil infrastructure, but not a lot, and certainly a target of the insurgents, and their oil production per day is down below pre-war levels, and the price of oil is where it is, keeping the oil business extremely productive for the manufacturers. That’s my oil explanation. But I’d like to hear what some of the others have to say.
ML (?):
I think it goes back to the Gulf War. There were two factions within the first Bush administration. There were Cheney and Wolfowitz, who wanted to go to Baghdad; and there were Powell and Baker and the president himself, the older Bush, who said no. So I think that you can’t explain this war in terms of, they thought of all of this after 9/11, or even after George W. Bush’s inauguration. I mean, they had been agitating for this 1991-’92 onwards. They succeeded in getting the Iraq Liberation Act from Congress in 1998, and so on. So you have to see this as a continuation of the Gulf War. There was just this group that wanted to go to Baghdad under Clinton, and he didn’t do it, and then the next president did; and 9/11 gave this emotional shock, and they managed to try to link Saddam. But they were determined to do this from 1991-92 onwards.
And then the question is why. And I think the answer is bases. Again, this was before Osama Bin Laden. You had Paul Wolfowitz, as early as the 1980s, writing about how we need permanent military bases in the Middle East. I don’t want to put much weight on it, but this Defense Planning Guidance came out around the time of the Gulf War. It said that the U.S., in order to be the hegemonic power, needs to provide for the interests of the industrial states. Well, what is the one interest that most of the industrial states have? It’s access to Persian Gulf oil, primarily the Asians, secondarily the Europeans, and North America is the least dependent on Persian Gulf oil.
So oil came into it, but it was our role as protector of the oil of the other industrial countries, and this was our role in the world. So after the Cold War was gone, we’re no longer protecting other countries against a totalitarian empire, but we’re protecting their interests outside of their immediate zones. And as Bill Crystal and Roger Kagan and Paul Wolfowitz and others repeatedly said in public, we’re doing that because that is cheaper than having chaos in the Middle East so that the Chinese build up their power projection forces, and the Europeans intervene, and you get all the great powers intervening to protect their own wealth. So I do think oil in that sense played a role; but it wasn’t that we were grabbing oil for Americans. It’s the lynchpin to America’s status as a global cop, was protecting the global filling station on behalf of the industrial powers so that they wouldn’t feel a need to protect themselves.
CC (?):
There’s two ways to think about the question, why did we go to war? You could interpret it as, well, why did those people who led us to war, lead us to war? What did they have in mind? And that’s what you were addressing. I would only add to that that Iraq was vulnerable, that in their calculation the fact that Hussein had challenged us—We had trusted him not to do the wrong thing, in a certain sense, and he went and did the wrong thing. He attacked Kuwait. This man cannot stay in power. We can’t let that lesson stand. He’s got to come down. And that policy toward Iraq, including Clinton Administration policy from that moment forward, was regime change.
How to do it? There, there were differences. The bombing, of course, did not begin in 2003. We know that. the bombing began in 1998. So those were some of the reasons that figure, and I totally agree that the purpose is not oil as something that we buy and sell; it’s a strategic asset. You not only get your hands around—[end Side A] –but I think that those are some of the reasons.
The other way to think about why did we go to war is why in fact, the fact of war, how is it that this nation went to that war? Not just why did the people who are leading the nation go to war, but why did the rest of us stand for it? How did they get the Pentagon on board? You’ve got to build a coalition for war, and then you’ve got to build a war consciousness which minimally takes your opponents and puts them in a cul-de-sac, neutralizes the opposition. And that has more to do with the conceptual reasons for war, because as I said, if you believe in the rogue state doctrine, if you think it’s right to designate certain countries as rogues, if you believe in regime change by any means, if you believe in preventing the emergence of threats by use of force, if you believe in using force to democratize, or if you believe that it’s okay to have offensive counter-proliferation—if you believe any of those things, you really increase the likelihood that somebody is going to take the country to war for regime change.
So I think that a lot of the ideas that were popularized during the Bush period were founded on ideas that were developed years earlier. But it also confused a lot of us, because I think you go into the debates around what to do—Right in the lead-up to the war, all that discussion in the U.N. about does he or doesn’t he, and what did Colin Powell show us, and the pictures—It’s all nonsense. The real question was, if he does have it, so what? Do you go to war on that basis? Is it okay? Is that a justification for going to war, he’s developing these weapons potentially? That’s the discussion we should have been having, but it wasn’t the discussion. It became, do we or don’t we. And I think that’s just one example of this sort of argumentation around the war established the stage and left us rather confused.
You know, our whole system failed. I would love to just blame the neo-conservatives. We all failed. We failed in going to the war.
Jamie Galbraith:
I think the panel has done an excellent job of discussing the reasons why we went into Iraq. And there are multiple reasons that are not necessarily inconsistent. There may be a coalition of allied interests inside the government and outside the government. One factor that has not been mentioned is the larger strategy with respect to the security of Israel, which will also play into this.
I wonder if I could push the conversation a little further toward the question you raised, which is, how do you get those with responsibility to wave the paper and say, What should we be doing about this?
One—I’ll lay out one line of argument, and ask you to react to it, and then I have one other point to go on past that. The line of argument would be, look, what have we learned? We’ve learned that our power in these areas is largely illusory. You’ve made this point. The point has been made going back to 1945. Bombing doesn’t work. We don’t know where the targets are. If we do know where they are, our capacity to effectively stop a well-organized government from doing what it wants to do with bombs isn’t there. So the alternative to bombing is occupation.
Occupation clearly doesn’t work. We can roll in, as Michael said last night. We can defeat a weak state militarily. We can occupy its territory, but we can’t provide security there; we can’t sustain the occupation.
So number one doesn’t work, and number two, to come back to what Linda Bilmes was saying at lunchtime, the costs are extraordinary and we invariably behave in a way such as to try and conceal them from the political debate; but they’re not concealed from the public. The public becomes aware of them very fast and becomes repelled, not only by the human consequences, but also by the travesty, the hypocrisy, the bad faith involved in creating such large numbers of devastated kids and then not caring for them because to care for them is politically not viable. So if you wanted to get your equivalent of the B-1 story, I think it’s a bigger story, but that’s […?].
And the next question I would have is, okay, supposing you persuaded your latter-day [?] that something had to be done. What do you on the panel see—and this gets back to something Michael was talking about last night—as the conceptualization of the alternative security strategy? Where do we go? Obviously we can talk in general terms about multilateralism and cooperation and collective security as being a lower cost and potentially more effective alternatives; but there’s got to be a concrete first step, there’s got to be something more specific than that. I don’t think we’ve been very effective yet in articulating that here today. So I’m wondering if you can give us your best shot.
WW:
One of the key parts that we haven’t talked a lot about is the press, and I’ve sort of used the press to manipulate Kasselbaum into a position on something that I was lobbying her on. I called it the two-by-four approach. The problem with that approach is anybody can do it, and you don’t need the facts to do it either, as we’ve learned in the run up to the Iraq war. You can feed the press garbage or worse, and they’ll be happy to go with it if it fulfills whatever their need is to be at the head of conventional wisdom, or to break a new story, or have good sources or access, or whatever. And so to try to influence decision makers into competent, informed decisions, my approach was highly unethical, especially if, as we have today, the press will go for anything.
So what I think is an important element of this is to try to get the press reoperative in this country in reading things other than press releases or for making phone calls of things other than highly placed administration sources, whatever the administration. I tried to suggest my hopefully subtle, seemingly innocuous solution in a paper that’s on the table back there. The title, something like, “What Now, Spot? The Democrats […?]. Now What Do They Do?” And I’ve a series of suggestions in that paper to try to address a variety of problems.
My suggestion on this problem is a mechanism to try to get both Capitol Hill and the press more competent information. As a product of that system, my suggestion is this: that the committee staffs on Capitol Hill should no longer be the partisan political operatives that they are today. We should go back to a system that was operative after World War II for a short period, in the National Security Police, Foreign Relations, and armed services, where the chairman and the ranking member of the committee jointly hired all the staff, and the staff had, in essence, tenure; so when the chairmanship changed, the staff didn’t. In other words, there was a permanence there of professionalism. Some of those staffers were pretty terrible back then; some of them were pretty good. But you had a permanence there that the rest of the system had to deal with, and these guys could feed memos into members that those members didn’t want to read; but they had information put before them that was very different from what they’re getting today from highly politicized operatives on Capitol Hill on the committee staffs.
The question is how do make them read it? Okay, let’s make those memos available not just to the chairman and ranking member, but to every single member of Congress, whether you’re on that committee or not. Some of those memos will be classified, […?] the clearances [if?] they can get it. In other words you provoke an informed debate, hopefully. And also, by the way, the unclassified memos you also make available to the press, and get them going on some more sound information.
It’s a minor, seemingly innocuous change, but I think something like that would have tremendous effect. And I’ve talked too long, sorry.
ML (?):
Just to respond to Jamie’s question. First of all, I’m not convinced that publishing in The New York Times, which I do not infrequently, influences people whose constituencies despise The New York Times. In fact, I’m not convinced there is a public in the United States. I think there are radically different publics who live in different little universes. What makes me optimistic is at the elite level I do think that you have a sort of consensus that can be shaped by debate; so there’s more room for discussion among the elites of both parties than there is for the mass voting public. And then you just have to sell the program differently in Mississippi than Massachusetts.
But since we were supposed to talk about the alternatives, it seems to me there are three alternatives to hegemony. Hegemony is where you have one super-power policing the world on behalf of a number of [?] states. The three alternatives are consensual spheres of influence. That’s what isolationism was in America; you draw a line around North America, and the Chinese have a sphere, Europeans have a sphere, Russians have a sphere. Historically that doesn’t work except in the Americas because we happen to be the only great power in our neighborhood, but everywhere else—A German sphere influence would cut across France and Russia; the Russian sphere would cut across the Chinese; the Chinese, across the Japanese. So I think a sphere of influence policy can’t possible be stable in Eurasia.
But that leaves the two other alternatives: a balance of power or a concert of power in a multi-polar system.
Now a balance of power is a hostile or conflictual multi-polar system, where you have shifting alliances against each other in a state of perpetual tension, potential war, sometimes a world war, at the very least arms races. And that, as presidents from Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt recognized, would be disastrous. It would be better than domination of the world by a hostile power, but it would mean perpetual wartime footing for the U.S. and the other great powers.
And so their preferred alternative was what they called a concert of powers. That is, you get all of the great powers in the world that are not aggressive, that don’t have revisionist, revolutionary goals of overcoming world order, and they cooperate to preserve the peace. This differs from spheres of influence because the premise is that two or more great powers would share the task of policing particular regions.
And just to sum up quickly: How would you get from there to here? Well, there are […?] that could do it very quickly: Convert the American alliance system into a global concert of powers system. The first is you admit Russia to NATO, and that transforms NATO into a pan-Eurasian security alliance; it’s no longer a residual anti-Russian alliance. The other thing is you make the Six Power talks, which are the only organization within East Asia that unites Japan, China, Russia, and the United States, into the nucleus of a regional Asian concert. Those are two steps you could take fairly quickly.
BH:
Yeah, I haven’t said anything. Well, this is a good tough question to start on.
I think, in terms of this country, aside from electing a new American public, I think we should try and capitalize on the sentiment against the Iraq War, push the Democrats harder to come up with more effective means of opposing it, and most importantly, hold the next president more accountable. I think if we don’t do that, it’s very hard to deal with the broader issue of the U.S. role in the world, very hard to deal with things like getting rid of unnecessary Cold War weapons systems which I think a lot of people think, well, when you’re at war, you need as much as you can get, even if they don’t know what it is or how it might be used. So I think those two leverage points are probably the most important right now.
And then I think the concept of reinvesting some of the savings from military budget cuts into other tools of security—in technological assistance, into dealing with climate change, and so forth. And I think there the issue, the litmus test, is can you show that these programs that you would support in that regard can be effective. And that is a big if. I think just as the military programs have to be scrutinized, so you would have to scrutinize these other security-related programs. But I see those as things that we can work on. I think it’s not easy to do because, as has been suggested, this isn’t entirely a rational process. But I think, nonetheless, we have to make every best effort to make it more rational than it is now.
CC:
Three things just quickly about how we might move forward: You could think about it institutionally; you could think of it in other ways too. One problem that we have to deal with is China. Or specifically the problem that we have to deal with is that we’re not ready to make room for China, and what we need to do is reorient to accommodate to the notion that American power is time-limited, and no matter what we do, they’re on the way up. We’re not necessarily on the way down, but there’s certainly going to be a rebalancing of power.
And the question is, how do we move ourselves to the point of permitting it to happen? Because right now the policy has been, for two administrations, that we want to integrate them into a world order led by the United States. They don’t want to come, you see. They don’t want to come. That’s one of the problems with that particular hegemonic vision. If we could get them there, everything would be fine. The problem is getting them there. They don’t want to come. So we need to somehow accommodate that and move out of the idea that we need to preserve the top dog position in order to be reasonably secure.
And that has to do—and I want to use that of suggestive of a different way of looking at security problems. We could look at Iran in somewhat the same way. The way forward with the Iran situation is simply—or let’s say is a key is to say, as a confidence-in-security-building measure you stop enrichment; and as a confidence-in-security-building measure, we give you concrete guarantees of no movements toward war on our part, and we will lift very substantially a broad range of sanctions. Now that’s not the end of the negotiation; that’s just the first step. That’s to create the right atmosphere. Then you proceed to talk forever, you talk forever. You never conclude, you never reach a conclusion. You just leave it there. Sanctions lifted; no enrichment.
And this is the type of maneuver that was utilized early on in the IMF talks and in the Conventional Forces in Europe talks. You set certain things aside, you presume certain thing, and you’re going to get back sooner or later, but you don’t.
But you see, the point of what we are trying to negotiate with Iran is their surrender, and they’re refusing to play along. So it has to do with a conceptual change. The second thing I think we need to do is, as I said before, to go to war, you need to build a coalition of opinions and interests in the United States. We need to attack that coalition. That’s got to be our perspective. People want to preserve the peace, and that means a battle inside of public opinion, and we’ve got to focus on that and try to peel away various portions of the other side’s coalition, which is, I think something we failed to do previously.
I like the idea of having a concert of powers. I don’t think that it would be the end-all; but I think an important part of what we need to do is create clusters that reach across strategic divides. Russia is certainly important, but China is important too; and doing that, we might have movement inside of existing institutions, including, of course, not just those that we lead, but things like the United Nations, and perhaps the creation of new institutions as well.
WW:
We have three more minutes, is that right?
Q:
I think the concert of power is very important, and I see it as a kind of flexible, organic potential to have different regional concerts, even overlapping, and cooperation.
But I’d like to also get back to the point that Mike Intriligator raised, and Herbert Wulff spoke about also from the last panel, to do with Tinbergen’s ideas, because I think Herb Wulff—and this was one of Tinbergen’s concerns—that having the lack of democracy in the U.N. system is one aspect of the problem; that when the Security Council decided not to back the American adventure in Iraq, that was good, but the Security Council is kind of not empowered to do anything very much, because it’s a coalition of five countries that happen to be the victors at the end of the Second World War, and their proposals now for having a more regional representation in the Security Council whereby everyone would be included, including the less developed countries, including the Arab League, the Conference of Islamic Nations, etc. So I think having a more democratic U.N. would perhaps involve some sort of way to voting, and there are lots of specific proposals on that—
WW:
Let’s try to also get Mr. Abt’s question on the table; then we can try to deal with both.
Q:
Okay, two more quick points. One more quick point: The idea that U.N. capacity to provide security: There’s a proposal now which is getting a lot of traction for a U.N. emergency peace force which would go in early, not after a Darfur builds up, but at an early stage to sort of prevent it.
Q:
I’m a little surprised that nobody has mentioned nuclear disarmament. All these organizational reforms that have been mentioned—and I like Michael Lind’s approach—sort of assume that when those things work, then we will be able to prevent more wars, and possibly nuclear wars. But I think we have that backwards. Nuclear wars are the only kind of wars that really threaten the United States. If the world gave up all its nuclear forces, including the United States, we would be more secure, and so would most countries.
Now we haven’t really paid much attention to the failure of the NPT and our failure to abide by it by significant reductions in our nuclear arms, and the Russians haven’t done their bit; and so I think it’s practically inevitable that nuclear proliferation will continue, whether in Iran, or North Korea, or in Nigeria, or in Turkey. But the capability there is worldwide and will continue unless the major nuclear powers take the lead and push for nuclear disarmament. The only two stable points on the whole nuclear arms race is practically everybody has it, or nobody has it. We can’t continue the selective nuclear power monopolies, or duopolies.
So I’m interested in your ideas in having America, which has the strongest nuclear capability worldwide, taking the lead in nuclear security as a probably more worldwide productive step towards reducing the risks of large-scale violent conflict than organizational measures that sort of assume that the nuclear problem is put aside.
WW:
We’ve got non-proliferation and the U.N. Let’s each take one minute, if that’s okay.
I’ve got good news and bad news on non-proliferation. The good news is that Bruce Blair at our umbrella organization, WSI, and some of the producers of Al Gore’s movie, are putting together a movie documentary on abolition of nuclear weapons.
My bad news is if we are entirely successful in doing that and can convince ourselves that we have indeed abolished nuclear weapons, we just made major conventional warfare fun to do again, and we can expect that to break out at some point the future.
I regard the existence of nuclear weapons as the primary reason why we did not have a conflict with the Soviet Union over 40, 50 years. If we do abolish nuclear weapons, we have a problem to solve.
ML:
Very quickly, the United Nations, like the League of Nations before it, is an inter-governmental organization, and in my opinion, since I think democracy functions best at the level of the nations-state, should remain nothing but an inter-governmental organization representing democratic countries, universally, let’s hope.
Nuclear disarmament? I think that nuclear weapons will eventually cease to be desirable and be dismantled, and cease to be invented, probably only when they are superceded technologically, probably by conventional precision-guided munitions which are much more discriminate and much more effective. So I think what you’ll see—and this builds on your point—increasingly atomic weapons, because they’re indiscriminate, will be the weapons of rapport, deterrents against all […?] technological super-powers. And I would not be at all surprised if the U.S. leads the world in abolishing nuclear weapons for purely tactical or strategic reasons, because it’s got something better.
CC:
As a democrat—small ‘d’—I believe democratizing the United Nations, and it seems to me that the Security Council constitutes having a little bit of dictatorship. And that especially having veto within that is the character of a little bit of dictatorship.
Now, let me be realistic, both small r and big R: For the United Nations to have the capacity to act, you need to draw in the big players. And if you expect them to pay a lot of money and forward a lot of power, you’re going to have to make some concessions. I wish that weren’t the case, but I think that it is.
That said, I think that a number of reforms are possible; that is sensible to give the United Nations more standing capacity to respond to emergencies. And I do think that we can begin, and we should begin, to expand who sits on the Security Council, and we should alter the veto rule in some fashion to loosen it. I think steps can be made, and they are in fact reflecting the changes of power balances in the world since 1945. So it’s not quite that leap into democracy. It’s actually saying that we should maintain the idea that the United Nations, to really function, has got to draw the big players, the countries, it has to draw them in. Yes, there has to be some concessions; but gee, the concessions that are being made today don’t make any sense, given the balance of power in the world.
On the nuke issue: I think that the United States could afford to easily lead the world with I think a beneficial impact on all of the talk of non-proliferation if we made some very serious and fast steps to further reduce our arsenal, and it could be done in a very short period of time without the destabilizing—I mean I think that what you’ve raised, [?], is a real issue. It’s not an issue to […?]; but we can get down to a minimum deterrent capacity, and that will have a positive effect on non-proliferation, the progress there; but I think also what Michael says is important, is that there’s new stuff coming. There’s new stuff coming that at some point will make us look back at nukes wistfully. So this is not going to get us to that next stage, but it can certainly have a powerful impact on the non-proliferation issue, I think.
BH:
Well, I don’t see proliferation as inevitable. If you look at when Kennedy was raising the issue in the ‘60s, he thought by now there’d be two dozen or more nuclear weapon states. There’s about a third of that. Since the end of the Cold War, more countries have given up nuclear programs than have developed them. I think the current real threats are Iran and North Korea, which I think there’s a possibility of dealing with through negotiations. So I think the non-proliferation treaty, it’s under siege, it’s leaking, but it can still be repaired. I think more expenditures on locking down loose nuclear weapons and nuclear materials, and then I think if you do all those things, you also want the United States to take the lead—[de-productions?], using that as leverage for other countries, maybe using some of these ideas of regional concerts of power or regional security bodies to help create the sense of security needed for countries to relinquish their nuclear weapons. I think all those things are feasible. You’ve got an elite, the beginning of an elite opinion. You have these waves of this every five or ten years, where you’ve got people like Henry Kissinger saying we should get rid of these things—not one of my poster children for wise foreign policy, but nonetheless. Bill Perry. So I think it’s feasible. There’s been even some small victories: Congress cut the money for this next generation of nuclear weapon that the Department of Energy wants to build. They’re not willing to fund a new plutonium factory. That’s only a very small beginning, but I think it is indication that there’s something to build on. So I’m not, I think, as pessimistic as a lot of other people.
But I would also say I can’t imagine a new weapon that could be more destructive than nuclear weapons. I think if it was precision strike, I think that would have real implications for the kind of calculations of whether or not to go to war; but given the larger risk of nuclear weapons destroying whole countries or leading to global interchange, I think it’s worth taking that risk.
WW:
The train got out of the station. It’s a little bit late, but thank you very much for your indulgence.
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