Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (22 page)

Bill Clinton’s contribution to the process was to normalize the use of force. During the several decades of the Cold War, the United States had resorted to overt armed intervention only occasionally. Although difficult today to recall, back then whole years might pass without U.S. troops being sent into harm’s way. During Clinton’s two terms in office, however, intervention became commonplace.

The average Israeli had long since become inured to reports of IDF incursions into southern Lebanon or Gaza. Now the average American became accustomed to reports of U.S. troops battling Somali warlords, supervising regime change in Haiti, or occupying the Balkans. Yet the real military signature of the Clinton years came in the form of air strikes. Employing bombs and missiles to blast targets in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Serbia, and Sudan, but above all Iraq, became the functional equivalent of Israel’s reliance on airpower to punish “terrorists” while avoiding the risks and complications of putting troops on the ground.

In the wake of 9/11, George W. Bush, along with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, a true believer in full spectrum dominance, set out to liberate or—take your pick—pacify the Islamic world. The United States followed Israel in assigning itself the prerogative of waging preventive war. Although depicting Saddam Hussein as an existential threat, the Bush administration also viewed Iraq as an opportunity. By destroying his regime and occupying his country, the United States would signal to other recalcitrants the fate awaiting them should they mess with or defy Uncle Sam.

More subtly, in going after Saddam, Bush was tacitly embracing a long-standing Israeli conception of deterrence. For the United States during the Cold War, deterrence had meant conveying a credible threat (the prospect of nuclear retaliation) to dissuade your opponent (the Soviet Union) from hostile action. Israel had never subscribed to that view. Influencing the behavior of potential adversaries required more than signaling what Israel
might
do if sufficiently aggravated or aggrieved; influence was exerted through punitive action, ideally delivered on a disproportionate scale. Hit the other guy first, if possible. Failing that, whack him several times harder than he hit you; not the biblical injunction of an eye for an eye, but both eyes, an ear, and several teeth, with a kick in the groin thrown in for good measure.
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The aim of these “retribution operations” was to send a message: screw with us and this will happen to you. This message Bush intended to convey when he ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Unfortunately, Operation Iraqi Freedom, launched with all the confidence that had informed Operation Peace for Galilee, Israel’s equally ill-advised 1982 incursion into Lebanon, landed the United States in an equivalent fix. Or perhaps a different comparison applies: the U.S. occupation of Iraq triggered violent resistance similar to that which the IDF faced as a consequence of its occupation of the West Bank. Two successive intifadas gave the Israeli army fits. The insurgency in Iraq (along with its Afghan sibling) gave the American army fits, too.

Neither the Israeli nor the American reputation for martial invincibility survived these encounters. What did survive was Washington’s belief, imported from Israel, in the efficacy of anticipatory action. The United States now subscribed to the view that the key to successful self-defense was to attack the other guy first. The dictum that force should be a last resort might still apply to others, but after 9/11 it no longer applied to the United States. Nothing that actually occurred in Iraq, the first large-scale application of the Bush Doctrine of preventive war, altered that conviction.

While he was in office, George W. Bush adamantly rejected the arguments of those who characterized the intervention in Iraq as a mistake or a failure. Senator Barack Obama had forthrightly labeled the war a mistake of the first order, a position that became the foundation for his run for the presidency in 2008. Yet when the war became his, President Obama proved less inclined to criticize its conduct. By the time it finally ended in 2011, Obama was spinning the mission in Iraq as anything but a flop or a fiasco. Speaking at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, he described the war as “one of the most extraordinary chapters in the history of the American military,” culminating in “an extraordinary achievement, nearly nine years in the making,” to wit, the emergence of “a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq.”
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At best half-truths tailored to suit Obama’s soldier audience, his claims nonetheless meshed with the inclinations of Americans unwilling to face a painful truth: that the culmination of the Iraq War had yielded a verdict almost identical to that of Vietnam. As in Vietnam, U.S. forces had not succumbed to outright defeat. Yet whatever solace Americans might take from that fact paled in comparison with the massive policy failure the United States had again suffered.

Characterizing the Iraq War as a success, however tenuous or qualified, undoubtedly made that disaster easier to swallow, while also shielding the Bush Doctrine of preventive war from critical scrutiny. On that score, Obama expressed no regret and apparently harbored no second thoughts. Bush’s successor was not about to forfeit the option of striking first. In that regard, the Gates Doctrine—no more land invasions in the Middle East or Asia—may have amended but did not revoke the Bush Doctrine. Gates had no wish to limit U.S. freedom of action in employing force. He merely pointed to the need to devise different techniques for doing so. Like Israel, when it comes to “anticipatory defense,” the United States shows no signs of relinquishing its self-proclaimed entitlement.

The Israelification of U.S. policy also extended to the means employed in waging war. As its own preferred approach to preventive action, Israel had for decades relied on a powerful combination of tanks and fighter-bombers. In more recent times, however, it has sheathed its swift sword in favor of the knife between the ribs. Why deploy lumbering armored columns when a missile launched from a single Apache attack helicopter or a bomb fixed to an Iranian nuclear scientist’s car can do the job more cheaply and with less risk? Thus has targeted assassination eclipsed conventional military methods as the hallmark of the Israeli way of war.

Here too, lagging behind by a couple of decades, the United States has conformed to Israeli practice. By the time Barack Obama succeeded Bush in 2009, most Americans (like most Israelis) had lost their appetite for invading and occupying countries. Yet as a political rallying cry, “Never Again Iraq” no more foreshadowed a dovish turn in U.S. policy than had “No More Vietnams.”

Nobel Peace laureate or not, Obama had no intention of forfeiting the expanded latitude to use force bequeathed to him by his predecessor. Yet to maintain his freedom of action—affirming that war was the commander in chief’s business, with others invited to butt out—Obama needed to avoid the mistakes that had tripped up Bush. By reducing the likelihood of costly quagmires, the Israeli approach again offered an attractive model.

With this in mind, Obama demonstrated a keen preference for small-scale operations rather than big wars, quick strikes rather than protracted campaigns, actions conducted in secret rather than under the glare of publicity. The
Washington Post
columnist Michael Gerson got it right. “Obama wants to be known for winding down long wars,” he observed. “But he has shown no hesitance when it comes to shorter, Israel-style operations. He is a special ops hawk, a drone militarist.”
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With his affinity for missile-firing drones, the president established targeted assassination as the very centerpiece of U.S. national security policy. With his predilection for commandos, he expanded the size and mandate of U.S. Special Operations Command, which under Obama maintained an active presence in some 120 countries.
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That Obama should further the Israelification of U.S. policy was not without irony. After all, personal relations between the president and his Israeli counterpart, Prime Minister Netanyahu, were famously chilly. Yet in Yemen, Somalia, the frontier regions of Pakistan, and other far-flung places, Obama showed that when it came to using force, he and Netanyahu occupied the same page. Both were committed to the proposition that if you keep whacking bad guys long enough, a positive outcome should eventually ensue.

In the meantime, for the president, the downside of targeted assassination appeared minimal. True, from time to time an errant U.S. missile might kill the wrong people (to include children) or American commandos might “take out” some bystanders along with Mr. Big. Yet back home, reported incidents of this type elicited a muted response. As far as the American media were concerned, the death of a few nameless Somalis or Pakistanis carried about as much newsworthiness as a minor traffic accident. As a determinant of presidential standing, a U.S. fighter-bomber inadvertently wiping out an Afghan wedding party lagged far behind a slight uptick in the unemployment rate.

The government of Israel (along with ardently pro-Israeli Americans like Michael Gerson) may view the convergence of U.S. and Israeli national security practices with some satisfaction. Washington’s now-prevailing definition of
self-defense
—a self-assigned mandate to target anyone anywhere thought to endanger U.S. security—is exceedingly elastic. As such, it provides a certain cover for equivalent Israeli inclinations. And to the extent that the American roster of enemies overlaps with Israel’s—Iran providing an obvious example—the hope always remains that military action ordered by Washington just might shorten Jerusalem’s “to do” list.

Yet where does this all lead? “We don’t have enough drones,” writes the columnist David Ignatius, “to kill all the enemies we will make if we turn the world into a free-fire zone.”
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And if Delta Force, the Green Berets, Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, and the like constitute, in the words of one SEAL, “the dark matter … the force that orders the universe but can’t be seen,” we probably don’t have enough of them either.
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Unfortunately, the Obama administration has seemed willing to test both propositions.

EYELESS IN GAZA

Accept at face value the narrative described by any of these several threads, and U.S. military policy over the past several decades acquires a certain logic. Those needing further assurance that the various and sundry dots do indeed connect can consult piles of official statements issued by the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon, the content of which can be summarized in a single sentence: trust us; we know what we are doing. Think tankers and pundits respond to such claims with clarifications, modifications, or mild dissents, but the overall impact of their critique is to affirm, rather than overturn, official views. On Friday afternoons and Sunday mornings, at high-toned journalistic venues, panels and roundtables comb through the events of the past seven days and do likewise. The weekly bits of wisdom offered by Shields and Brooks or Brooks and Dionne—“So
should
the United States attack Iran? You first, E. J.”—serve ultimately to endorse Washington’s prevailing worldview.

Embrace that worldview and you’ll find no reason to doubt that America, acting at God’s behest, is still out there doing God’s work, no matter what some disgruntled foreigners might say. You’ll take it for granted that proliferating international crises should rightly entail the further proliferation of overseas military activities. You won’t need to ask how preventive war, long condemned as immoral, became almost overnight morally permissible. And you won’t find it odd that assassination, once considered beyond the pale, has now emerged as a core function of the chief executive, the president himself choosing individual targets and periodically updating the nation’s “kill list.”
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Yet superficial logic cannot conceal an absence of overall direction and purposefulness. Reject Washington’s self-aggrandizing worldview, and the fundamental irrationality of its policies becomes unmistakable. The fact is that the three threads don’t connect, and worse yet they don’t lead anywhere except to ever more arduous efforts undertaken at ever escalating costs. Since the end of the Cold War, even with people in Washington busily moving the tiller back and forth, the American ship of state has been adrift and foundering, with the sacrifices of U.S. troops serving mostly to increase the rate at which the ship is taking on water.

The contrast with Vietnam is instructive. There, successive presidents erred by grotesquely misapplying a fundamentally sound strategy. Shortly after World War II, containing Soviet power had emerged as the lodestar of U.S. policy. Measured in those terms, Vietnam qualified as a stupefying blunder—the wrong war, in the wrong place, against the wrong enemy. Yet despite the inappropriate application of containment to a civil war in postcolonial Indochina, the overall strategy devised by Harry Truman (who inaugurated the U.S. commitment to Vietnam) retained its utility up to and beyond the era of Gerald Ford (who presided over the liquidation of that commitment). For decades, containment endowed U.S. policy with at least a modicum of coherence.

With the passing of the Cold War, the last vestiges of coherence vanished. Granted, considered in isolation, efforts by U.S. troops to rescue the downtrodden, overthrow dictators, or fight terrorists possessed a cursory plausibility. After all, back in 1992, Somalis really
were
starving. Slobodan Milošević and Saddam Hussein really
were
bona fide bad guys. Prior to 9/11, the Taliban
had
provided sanctuary to Al Qaeda. Yet taken together, these episodes, along with all the other military misadventures of recent decades, do not even remotely amount to a strategy worthy of the name. When it comes to basic policy, there may be threads, but there is no fabric.

Reflecting on the mind-set in 1960s Washington that gave rise to Vietnam, the literary critic Alfred Kazin once wrote, “Power beyond reason created a lasting irrationality.”
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Kazin’s observation applies in spades to the period following the Cold War. With the collapse of communism, Washington convinced itself that the United States possessed power such as the world had never seen. Democrats and Republicans alike professed their eagerness to exploit that power to the fullest. A sustained bout of strategic irrationality ensued, magnified and reinforced by the events of 9/11. Sadly, the principal achievement of President Obama, who came to office promising something better, has been to perpetuate that irrationality.