Worldmaking (81 page)

Paul Wolfowitz asked me to join him on what was my second trip to Afghanistan in January 2003. It was a one-day affair; we arrived late on January 14 and departed at the end of the following day. The purpose of Paul's visit was to inspect the road still under construction between Kabul and Kandahar and to reassure Afghans that the United States had not forgotten about them—when of course we really had.
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America's neglect of Afghanistan became a line of criticism that John Kerry deployed against George W. Bush and that Barack Obama used against Bush and John McCain. The charge was not without foundation.

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At the moment Osama bin Laden was making his high-altitude escape into Pakistan—providing a mythic tale of greatness for his followers—Donald Rumsfeld began preparing Americans for the next project, the phase that he and Wolfowitz believed was far more significant than the first. On December 26, 2001, as U.S. Special Forces picked frustratingly through the rubble of Tora Bora, Rumsfeld told troops in Kabul to prepare for redeployment: “Your job certainly is not over. There are a number of countries that are known as being on the terrorist list.”
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This list included other desperately poor nations with weak governments and little by way of rule of law—places like Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. But while each failing state had elements of al-Qaeda in situ, none was deemed worthy of a full-scale military campaign. None was as significant and inviting an enemy as Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The previous month, Bush had hinted at this during a news conference in the White House's Rose Garden. “Afghanistan is still just the beginning…,” he declared. “And as for Saddam Hussein, he needs to let inspectors back in his country to show us that he is not developing weapons of mass destruction.” A journalist asked about the consequences for Saddam of noncompliance. Bush replied tersely: “He'll find out.”
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Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction—whether he had them, what he might do with them, where he was concealing them—was the foreign-policy issue of 2002. Here was a reason for toppling Saddam Hussein that did not rest on an illusory connection with al-Qaeda—although that angle was also developed regardless. And, crucially, it was eminently plausible; Saddam's possessing WMDs and potentially using them against the United States or its allies was not some wild imagining. In 1988, Iraq had used chemical weapons—a pitiless cocktail of mustard gas and the nerve agents sarin, tabun, and VX—to kill three to five thousand Kurds in Halabja.
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Age ninety-eight, Kennan observed despairingly, as the Bush administration identified Saddam Hussein's WMDs as a compelling reason to invade Iraq, “The political arguments on TV, hoping against hope that the President will soon begin to be called to account for his grievous and abundant follies. God help us if he is not.”
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Throughout the 1980s, as a bitter war with Iran raged, Iraq had plowed its scarce resources into developing a biological weapons program. Then following the 1991 Gulf War, the United Nations assumed the task of destroying these stockpiles and ensuring that no new programs were launched. This was achieved through the oversight of an inspections operation, the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), created by UN Security Council Resolution 687. When UNSCOM was disbanded in 1998, following unsubstantiated Iraqi allegations of American spying—and the subsequent launch of air strikes against Iraq, Operation Desert Fox—it was succeeded by the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) led by Hans Blix. But Saddam consistently denied UNMOVIC entry into Iraq, claiming that the organization was subterfuge for American espionage. From 1998 to 2002, the United Nations had no one in Iraq able to assert convincingly and conclusively that Saddam was not developing WMDs. In the post-9/11 world, this uncertainty was intolerable to the Bush administration.

The problem was evidence. Just because Saddam was denying UNMOVIC inspectors entry into Iraq did not necessarily mean he was developing chemical and bacteriological weapons. This was broadly the view of the CIA, which did not possess any verifiable intelligence to suggest that Saddam had stockpiled or was developing WMDs. For this reason the agency could not identify Iraq as an immediate threat to the United States—or at least it couldn't in good faith.
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Wolfowitz feared that the CIA's sanguine view of Saddam's Iraq in 2002 paralleled its too kind assessment of the Soviet Union in the 1970s, which he had challenged as part of Team B. He believed that Saddam and al-Qaeda were connected, and that Iraq's WMD program made that relationship potentially incendiary. With the support of Cheney and Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz set up an alternative intelligence-gathering operation in the Pentagon—the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (PCTEG)—and invited Feith to take charge. The value of PCTEG, as Wolfowitz described it, was that it was cognizant of “a phenomenon in intelligence work, that people who are pursuing a certain hypothesis will see certain facts that others won't, and not see other facts that others will. The lens through which you're looking for facts affects what you look for.”
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PCTEG certainly looked at Iraq through a different lens from the CIA. But it never turned up any “facts” to substantiate its innuendo. In 2003, Feith admitted to members of Congress that PCTEG was essentially an advocacy operation—its purpose was “to help me develop proposals for Defense Department strategies for the war on terror, which is a policy exercise, not an intelligence activity.”
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Wolfowitz had no particular enthusiasm for using WMDs as the primary justification for invading Iraq: “The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on[,] which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason.”
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So what did Wolfowitz truly believe? Certainly he thought that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were linked in ways that the CIA had not fathomed and substantiated. CIA director George Tenet observed: “Wolfowitz genuinely believed that there was a connection between Iraq and 9/11.”
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But there was a measure of doubt on this issue—as even he recognized. Rather, Wolfowitz believed that an American invasion of Iraq could rid the world of a brutal despot, provide the United States with a strategic foothold in this pivotal, oil-rich region, and lead ultimately to the creation of a democratic and prosperous Iraq, which would serve as a model for the rest of the Middle East and make Israel's place in the region more secure. As Andrew Bacevich observes, Wolfowitz also wanted to “establish new norms governing the use of force … The objective was to lift any and all restrictions on the use of armed force by the United States.”
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There were potential “wins” right across the board. As Lewis Solomon appropriately notes, Wolfowitz's plan for regime change in Iraq “represented one of the most ambitious programs to transform a region in U.S. history.”
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Colin Powell's chief of staff, Lawrence B. Wilkerson, identified in Wolfowitz's plans a more dismal future: “I call them utopians … I don't care whether utopians are Vladimir Lenin on a sealed train going to Moscow or Paul Wolfowitz. Utopians, I don't like. You're never going to bring utopia, and you're going to hurt a lot of people in the process of trying to do it.”
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Was Wolfowitz as utopian as Wilkerson suggests? When it came to Iraq, the available evidence suggests he was. Colin Powell's State Department was a continual source of irritation to Wolfowitz and his fellow war enthusiasts. Powell would stab at Wolfowitz's Wilsonian proselytizing on democratizing Iraq and the Middle East, observing that conditions in the region were not conducive to the implantation of “Jeffersonian Democracy.” Wolfowitz took direct aim at Powell during an interview with
The New York Times
:

You hear people mock [the goal of transforming Iraq into a democracy] by saying that Iraq isn't ready for Jeffersonian democracy. Well, Japan isn't Jeffersonian democracy, either. I think the more we are committed to influencing the outcome, the more chance there could be that it would be something quite significant for Iraq. And I think if it's significant for Iraq, it's going to cast a very large shadow, starting with Syria and Iran, but across the whole Arab world, I think.
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Wolfowitz's boss did not share his zeal. Testifying before a congressional committee in September 2002, Rumsfeld was asked what would happen after the fall of Saddam. He replied, “Going the next step and beginning to talk about democracy or things like that is a step I can't go.”
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Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were united on the necessity of invading Iraq and deposing Saddam. But they had different scales of ambition as to what would come after. There was only one point on which the two men fundamentally agreed, and it happened to repudiate Woodrow Wilson's most cherished goal. The United Nations should not under any circumstances be permitted to constrain America's freedom of action. Washington reserved the absolute right to go it alone.

In this sense, Wolfowitz was as hostile as Kissinger toward Wilson's views on the potential for a collaborative world system. Does this not make it impossible to characterize him as Wilsonian? Well, yes and no. Wolfowitz and other so-called neoconservatives reject Wilson's multilateralism as wishful thinking, but they embrace his views on America's global role in spreading democracy. In 2004, the historian Max Boot, who later served as an adviser to John McCain's presidential campaign, drew a useful distinction between “hard Wilsonians,” such as Wolfowitz, “who place their faith not in pieces of paper, but in power, specifically the power of the United States,” and “soft Wilsonians,” such as Jimmy Carter (this example does not entirely persuade), who “share a faith that multilateral organizations such as the League of Nations or the United Nations should be the main venues through which the United States promotes its ideals, and that international law should be the United States' main policy tool.” Hard Wilsonians, Boot writes, “believe the United States should use force when necessary to champion its ideals as well as its interests, not only out of sheer humanitarianism but also because the spread of liberal democracy improves U.S. security, while crimes against humanity inevitably make the world a more dangerous place.” It is a characterization that suits Wolfowitz well.
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In the fall of 2002, Albert Eisele, editor of the congressional daily,
The Hill
, landed quite a scoop. George Kennan, then aged ninety-eight, had agreed to an interview on the Bush administration's foreign policies. At a Georgetown senior citizens' home, Eisele questioned the esteemed diplomat on the headlong move to war with Iraq. Kennan was thoroughly distressed at the prospect, warning that “the history of American diplomacy” showed that “war has a momentum of its own, and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the President would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.” Kennan believed that a simple-minded Republican president deserved censure on this issue, but he also lambasted high-profile Democrats—particularly those eyeing a run for the presidency—for refusing to criticize President Bush's intentions on Iraq. He scorned their assent as a “shabby and shameful reaction. I deplore this timidity out of concern for the elections on the part of the Democrats.” He closed the interview by cautioning that the United States cannot “confront all the painful and dangerous situations that exist in the world … That's beyond our capabilities.”
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The interview was classic Kennan: plainspoken, sharply judgmental, historically literate, and hostile to overreach and ideology. That he delivered this prescient jeremiad just two years short of his hundredth birthday was testament to his intellectual lucidity and vigor. Yet as was so often the case, Kennan was somewhat isolated in his opinion, at least among the foreign-policy mainstream. He wrote in his diary, “I have been urged, by at least one friend, to write another X-article, urging patience and avoidance of violence even with regard to Saddam Hussein and his Iraq … But I am simply not in any position, at this stage in my life, to involve myself in public controversy. So the matter stops at that point.”
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Kennan's absence from the debate was a pity. Meanwhile, centrist supporters of Bush's unfolding policies toward Iraq included Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Henry Kissinger—with the occasional qualification regarding the unlikelihood of the United States successfully “democratizing” Iraq—and Joe Biden. When President Bush's speechwriter Michael Gerson asked Henry Kissinger why he supported a war against Iraq, he replied, “because Afghanistan wasn't enough.” America's radical enemies in the Muslim world wanted to humiliate the United States, Kissinger continued, “and we need to humiliate them.” Gerson had drafted some of Bush's grandest phrases—about “ending tyranny” and “ridding the world of evil”—and he confessed to disappointment that Kissinger “viewed Iraq purely in the context of power politics. It was not idealism. He didn't seem to connect with Bush's goal of promoting democracy.”
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Liberal intellectuals such as Michael Ignatieff, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Peter Beinart, and Christopher Hitchens also lent their support.
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Wilsonianism was clearly a force that united aspects of the left and the right in admiration. But some devotees of realism departed from Kissinger in issuing strenuous objections. Kennan was joined in his dissent by three GOP heavyweights: Lawrence Eagleburger, James Baker, and Brent Scowcroft. In an op-ed titled “Don't Attack Saddam” in
The Wall Street Journal
on August 15, 2002
,
Brent Scowcroft observed that “Saddam's goals have little in common with the terrorists who threaten us.” Deposing Saddam Hussein would be relatively straightforward but “it undoubtedly would be very expensive—with serious consequences for the U.S. and global economy—and could as well be bloody.” Condoleezza Rice was upset that her mentor had turned on the administration she served: “Why didn't you tell me?” she asked.
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