Worldmaking (82 page)

As widely respected and farsighted as they were, Scowcroft and Kennan were pitted against an administration that had locked on war with Iraq and had more or less destroyed the fail-safe mechanisms that might permit deviation from this path. They did not stand a chance in those circumstances, although they did have like-minded allies within the administration. Colin Powell, for example, had serious doubts about the efficacy of invading Iraq. He continued to view this course as a distraction from the main job of defeating al-Qaeda. But by the summer of 2002, Powell was coming to understand that the debate had left him behind—the decision to invade Iraq had more or less been made. “Our counterparts at the Pentagon and the vice president's office are too cocky,” one State Department official complained. “It's like they know something we don't.”
188

The idea of not merely deposing Saddam but also democratizing and liberalizing Iraq and holding the nation aloft as an exemplar was becoming increasingly appealing to George W. Bush. Indeed, he came to think that a push for democratization could reap benefits elsewhere in the region—and he acted on that Wilsonian instinct with Wolfowitz's encouragement. During an important speech in the Rose Garden on June 24, 2002, Bush ended America's long-standing dialogue with Yasser Arafat. He instead urged “the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror,” and “build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty.”
189
In January 2006, the Islamist group Hamas, designated by most nations in the West as a terrorist organization, won a majority of the seats in Palestinian parliamentary elections. It has governed the Gaza Strip ever since, provoking a series of bloody short wars with Israel by firing rudimentary rockets toward Tel Aviv—and in so doing inviting a predictably asymmetrical response from the Israeli military. In this instance, “democratizing” Palestine was clearly no panacea when it came to resolving the world's most damaging and long-standing territorial dispute.

But the ascension of Hamas in Gaza was some way into the future. The potential for democratizing the Middle East appeared limitless in 2002—before theory made acquaintance with reality. This came through clearly in the Bush administration's most important policy document: the National Security Strategy of the United States, 2002—or NSS 2002, as it became commonly known. The first sentence declared with absolute conviction that there was “a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.” Thereafter the words “freedom” and “democracy” recur with a frequency that might have made President Wilson blush. Wolfowitz did not draft the document, but he can lay good claim to being its spiritual author. “We will defend the peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants … We will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent.” NSS 2002 fleshed out the Wilsonian elements that Wolfowitz believed were lacking in the 1992 DPG. It also provided a rationale for invading Iraq in the absence of a direct, verifiable threat to the American homeland: “While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country.”
190

The concept of preemptive or preventive defense—what came to be known as the Bush Doctrine—thus entered the foreign-policy lexicon. American presidents had always reserved the right to unilaterally neutralize a threat before its realization. John F. Kennedy's policy of “quarantining” Cuba loosely falls into this category, and John Lewis Gaddis claimed historical precedent for the Bush administration in the unilateral and preemptive foreign-policy doctrines of John Quincy Adams.
191
But reserving the privilege to strike before being struck—or not, as the case may be—had never been proclaimed so baldly. NSC-68, for example, had characterized preventive defense as a step too far.

On February 26, 2003, just a few weeks prior to the invasion of Iraq, President Bush delivered a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank that had provided Wolfowitz and his ideological allies a sheltered contemplative setting in which to think and strategize about foreign policy during the Clinton years. In this remarkable address, Bush rationalized the planned invasion of Iraq as a war to make the Middle East safe for democracy. It was informed by Wolfowitz's deeply felt belief in humanity's innate perfectibility (to a Western blueprint): “There was a time when many said that the cultures of Japan and Germany were incapable of sustaining democratic values. Well, they were wrong. Some say the same of Iraq today. They are mistaken. The nation of Iraq—with its proud heritage, abundant resources and skilled and educated people—is fully capable of moving toward democracy and living with freedom.”

Bush, delighting his rapt, like-minded audience, riffed on this Wilsonian theme throughout the address. “The world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder … A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region.”
192

An important question remained: How many American troops were necessary to effect such momentous change? On February 25, the chief of staff of the United States Army, General Eric Shinseki, gave an answer his political masters did not want to hear. During testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, a Democrat from Michigan, asked Shinseki how many troops would be required to keep order after the fall of Saddam. Shinseki replied that he was not in the chain of command and not privy to such discussions. But if forced to hazard a guess, the number would be several hundred thousand. “We're talking about posthostilities control over a piece of geography that's fairly significant,” Shinseki continued, “with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems. And so it takes a significant ground-force presence.”
193
The defense secretary was furious and asked Wolfowitz to make a statement rebutting Shinseki's shoddy guesswork. Rumsfeld was keen to replicate the small-footprint model that he believed had worked so well in toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan. And so on February 27, Wolfowitz dismissed Shinseki's estimate as “wildly off the mark” and downplayed the prospect of sectarian conflict in the war's aftermath. “I am reasonably certain,” said Wolfowitz, “that they will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep [troop] requirements down.”
194
These words, epitomizing the hubris present in the Pentagon at that time, would return to haunt Wolfowitz.

The Pentagon had assumed complete control of both the invasion of Iraq and the occupation thereafter. This was a peculiar situation, given that the State Department was better served through experience and capability to direct the latter. State had previously expressed significant doubts about the logic of toppling Saddam. In late 2002, Colin Powell had instructed Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs William Burns and his assistant, Ryan Crocker, to analyze the risks involved in the invasion of Iraq. They produced a tightly argued eight-page memorandum titled “The Perfect Storm,” which warned that Iraq's patchwork of ethnicities would be ripped apart and radicalized following the departure of the oppressive presence that tied them all together. They also warned that Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia would all intervene in postwar Iraq—with varying degrees of openness—further inflaming the Sunni-Shia divide. In 2004, Crocker pointed out that, “nearly everything we said would happen, did happen, particularly the insurgency.”
195
But Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz dismissed the report as flat-out wrong and entirely predictable from such a risk-averse, liberal institution. Their ideology trumped caution. Colin Powell's State Department, America's principal repository of foreign-policy knowledge, was pushed further to the margins.

In her memoir, Condoleezza Rice expressed regret that the Pentagon led both the invasion and the occupation of Iraq. In late March 2003, the State Department provided a list of eight officials to assist with the pacification and administration of post-Saddam Iraq. Most were area specialists with particular expertise in the region. Some even knew Arabic. But the White House instructed this delegation to “stand down” until further notice on the advice of the Pentagon. As Rice recalled, “The State Department was prepared to deploy employees, many of whom were Arabists. Some were sent without incident, but Feith vetoed several State recommendations on what could only be called ideological grounds. When I learned of this, I went to the President and told him that it was an affront to Colin to act that way and we needed the expertise. But it was the Defense Department's show, and the president was reluctant to intervene.”
196
As Stephen Glain writes in
State vs. Defense
, Kenneth Keith, a former U.S. ambassador to Egypt and Qatar, compared the Pentagon's actions to a coup d'état: “Whether it was in the form of a memo or a phone call from the president, that coup did take place. It was part of the struggle led by Wolfowitz and the Secretary of Defense, who convinced the president that postwar Iraq should be in the hands of the Defense Department.”
197

Some numbers allow us to comprehend just how unrealistic the Bush administration's planning was prior to the invasion of Iraq. To liberate Kuwait, President George H. W. Bush had assembled a coalition of just under one million troops, of which 500,000 were American. To invade Iraq, depose Saddam Hussein, and preside over the democratization of that nation, President George W. Bush assembled a coalition of 265,000, of which 148,000 were American. It is tempting to conclude that the debacle that followed the invasion was foreseeable to anyone with basic numeracy and an open mind. The fiscal cost of the war was also badly underestimated. When invited during congressional hearings to assess the likely cost of invading Iraq, Wolfowitz declined to give a number but claimed that it would be “considerably” lower than the suggested $95 billion. A recent study led by Brown University suggests than the cost of the Iraq War has exceeded $2.2 trillion, and that the combined cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will rise to more that $4.4 trillion, excluding future interest costs on borrowing.
198

Insights from the Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman also cast the Bush administration's lack of foresight—its blinkered unwillingness to contemplate negative repercussions—in a harsh light. Wolfowitz had a simple theory: the invasion of Iraq would proceed smoothly, the Iraqi people would greet Americans as liberators, and the unshackled nation would march toward free elections and prosperity. But there were other hypothetical scenarios, and most were not so sunny. In
Thinking, Fast and Slow
, Kahneman discusses the concept of “planning fallacy,” whereby individuals “make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than the rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities.” To correct this fallacy, Kahneman proposes the rigorous completion of what his fellow psychologist Gary Klein describes as a “premortem.” This process consists in inviting the author or authors of a particular plan to “imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.”
199
There is no guarantee that this exercise would have changed a thing. But who knows? The exercise might have persuaded some to confront the notion of contingency. Or maybe not. A premortem might instead have been dismissed as defeatist and somehow unpatriotic. Cognitive suppleness was not a common trait among the planners of the second Iraq War.

*   *   *

On March 19, 2003, President Bush announced the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom. As in 1991, the cruise missile and aerial bombardment was devastating, the progress after the ground invasion was swift, and most of Saddam Hussein's hopelessly outgunned Iraqi army prioritized self-preservation and melted away. Iraq did not use its alleged weapons of mass destruction—whether Saddam would have used them if he had them is a moot point—and did not fire missiles at Israel to lure it into the fray. On April 6, in the midst of the war, Wolfowitz talked ambitiously about the future: “I think Iraq can be an inspiration to the Muslim world and the Arab world that Arabs and Muslims can create a democratic country … Many people have done it in the latter part of the 20th century. It's time for the Arabs to do it now.”
200
On May 1, President Bush donned a flight suit and landed on the aircraft carrier USS
Abraham Lincoln
aboard a Lockheed S-3 Viking to declare the “end of major combat operations” in Iraq. The backdrop to Bush's speech was a large banner that read
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
.

A few days later, Dick Cheney held a party at his home to celebrate the liberation of Iraq. Included on the guest list were true believers such as Paul Wolfowitz and his deputy Scooter Libby. Excluded were Condoleezza Rice, whom Cheney viewed warily as an irritating competing influence on Bush, and Colin Powell, who had no discernible influence on Bush but was reviled for his geopolitical caution. It was a moment of great euphoria and self-congratulation, although Cheney and Wolfowitz differed on which cause the war was promoting. Cheney was primarily interested in invading Iraq for the chilling “demonstration effect”—as Cheney's adviser, the Princeton professor of international relations Aaron Friedberg, described it—on America's enemies.
201
The vice president's rationale was similar to Henry Kissinger's: display strength, crush an enemy, inspire fear and respect, and bolster the nation's credibility. For Wolfowitz, of course, it was a free and prosperous Iraq that would exhibit the “demonstration effect,” inspiring its neighbors to democratize their political systems and liberalize their economies. But these differences did not cloud the bonhomie chez Cheney.