Category Archives: Military

Jacksonians and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty

Posted on by

My last two posts have been about the ways that the right seeks to undo the international system built up over the last 65 years. Robert Farley of Lawyers, Guns and Money assesses that they have also succeeded in ruining the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as well (“The NPT is Dead,” 13 October 2007):

The strike [by the Israeli air force on a possible Syrian nuclear reactor], and especially the apparent acquiescence of the United States in its planning and execution, means that the NPT is pretty much a dead letter… and has been replaced by a de facto arrangement in which states that the US approves of are allowed to have nuclear power, while states we dislike get airstrikes. … Combine this with the recent nuclear deal with India, and I’d have to say that the Bush administration’s effort to kill a legal cornerstone of international stability have been remarkably successful.

To which Matthew Yglesias adds (“The End of the Non-Proliferation Treaty,” The Atlantic.com, 14 October 2007),

Iraq was the neocons’ big chance to show that the approach to WMD policy they prefer — basically an ad hoc regime enforced by American military power and undergirded by nothing more principled than American whim — was workable. To make it work, they needed to show that we could successful topple a regime we didn’t like and replace it with one we liked better cheaply and easily enough to make it credible that we’d go and do it again. But it failed. The low-cost airstrike approach isn’t going to succeed against any kind of determined adversary, and the more we act like a rogue superpower the harder it will be to get our way.

This is another masterstroke for the Bush administration. They rip to shreds the one bulwark we do have against nuclear proliferation — one that has been fairly successful over the last 40 years — and have ready in its place absolutely nothing. In this case not even the credible threat of U.S. force.

Jacksonians and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

Posted on by

Yesterday I argued that ideological factors took precedent over more pragmatic considerations of national security in the right-wing fervor for deployment of an ABM system. Another example of this phenomena would be the proposed new generation of small-yield “bunker buster” nuclear weapon and the reliable replacement nuclear warhead. A significant debate revolves around whether the United States would have to resume nuclear testing to certify these weapons, or whether simulation and component-level testing would be sufficient. And why not? If simulation and component-level testing are good enough for ABM aren’t they good enough for a new nuclear weapon? But for proponents of these weapons, resumption of testing is not a means to an end product, but is rather the whole point.

In the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970 the United States and other declared nuclear powers committed themselves to complete nuclear disarmament. But this commitment wasn’t entirely sincere. For supporters of the NNPT on the left it was sincere, but for supporters on the right, it was a throwaway provision. And they weren’t out of their minds for thinking so: a fair amount of language in treaties is nonoperative, there to paper over disagreements. Supporter on the right in favor of a creating a double standard figured that Article VI obligations on declared nuclear powers could be perpetually kicked down the road.

But the United States began to covertly disarm. The Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the unilateral test moratorium announced by George Bush, Sr. in 1992 and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty were disarmament through the back door: with a bar against testing having cut off the path to new nuclear weapons, all that was required for disarmament to obtain was to wait for the last weapon in the existing stockpile to be decertified. But the right caught on to this scheme and the Senate rejection of the CNTBT in 1999 called it to a halt.

But it isn’t enough to stop the left from imposing a test ban. A new generation of weapons and new testing are required to depose the regime of piecemeal nuclear disarmament. Ginning up some new nuclear weapons systems was intended to begin the process of rolling back this development. The RRW was a particularly brilliant maneuver in that one could pick off a number of people who in defense of the de facto non-testing regime might otherwise have opposed a new generation weapon by arguing that the purpose of the new weapon was to preserve the commitment to no nuclear testing. But no one should miss the fact that there is not an across the board disavowal of the need to test these new weapons, but instead a debate about whether they will have to be tested. There should be little surprise that should the Jacksonians find themselves in power again, they will determine that in fact they do need to be tested. The motive is not the simple certification of a weapons system — again, witness ABM: noncertification is acceptable when it serves the ideological objective — but wrecking fundamental damage to one international system, that it might be replaced with another more to their ideological liking.

ABM

Posted on by

In the wake of the U.S.-Russia dustup over placement of an ABM interceptor site there has been a raft of articles on the U.S. missile shield. The October 2007 issue of Arms Control Today devotes the cover and six articles to it. Matthew Yglesias (“Preemption, 12 October 2007) calls his readers’ attention to a long story in Rolling Stone on the subject (Hitt, Jack, “The Shield,” Issue 1036, 4 October 2007).

I think that Mr. Yglesias is correct to say that the real purpose of ABM is “to facilitate American first strikes.” That the U.S. seeks such a capacity is the conclusion of a RAND report (Buchan, Glen C., et. al., Future Roles of U.S. Nuclear Forces: Implications for U.S. Strategy, Santa Monica, California: RAND, 2003, see p. 61) and Keir Lieber and Daryl Press suggest (“The End of MAD: The Nuclear Dimension of U.S. Primacy,” International Security, vol. 30, No. 4, Spring 2006, pp. 7-44, see p. 28) that in such a scheme, mop-up of a small number of surviving missiles launched after a disarming counterforce strike might be a job for which an ABM system of limited capability might be adequately suited.

But this isn’t the whole of the story: there are three reasons that the right has in the past and continues today to be so in favor of an anti-ballistic missile system.

  1. More fundamental than anything else is the American cultural reason for the fervor for ABM on the right. The culturally Scotch-Irish descended, Jacksonian segment of the United States subscribes to a very specific notion of warfare and the law of nations. War is to be fought all out with no restraint. Victory resulting in complete submission of the opponent is the objective. It is retributive in its notion of justice and particularistic rather than universalizing and legalistic in its reasoning. It is a mentality that never made the leap to the counterintuitive reasoning of the nuclear age. Its members have never understood limited war or restraint in warfare. Hence the angst over Vietnam, the use of torture in Iraq and opposition to all forms of arms control.

    The basis of arms control in the 60s and 70s was the gradual acceptance by nuclear strategists of MAD and its institutionalization in the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972. That nuclear powers would intentionally remain vulnerable to attack was the linchpin in stabilizing the nuclear arms race, but this flew in the face of the Jacksonian notion of war. Conspiring with one’s enemies to limit one’s capabilities and limit the uncontainable violence of war didn’t fit their paradigm and ever since they have been raging to tear down the entire structure. The intense interest in deploying an anti-ballistic missile system has had less to do with pragmatic considerations of national security than with the ideological struggle between two strategic paradigms. No policy debate would be so intense and fought out over generations of strategists and politicians were it just a weapons system at stake. The aim of moving to deploy an ABM system so urgently — even before it has been adequately demonstrated to work — is specifically to destroy the existing arms control regime and international system more generally in favor of one more in line with Jacksonian notions.

    This is why opponents of ABM have done so much to pillor Ronald Reagan, the id of 1970s and 80s America, and why the label “star wars,” with its invocation of psycho-cultural tropes, was so effective. The whole debate about ABM has taken place where strategic reasoning leaves off and social-psychology picks up.

  2. Hedging one’s opposition to ABM on technical infeasibility is probably a bad option. First, Americans, with their infinite faith in technology and can-do attitude won’t buy it. Second, at some point a system of at least some rudimentary capability will probably be up and running. A review of the history of nearly every weapon today touted as a miracle system shows that at some point in its development it was widely considered a boondoggle that would never work.

    The Patriot Missile is a good example here. During development in the late 1970s there was endless harping that the technical hurdles were insurmountable and that it would never work. The first battery was deployed in 1984 as an anti-aircraft weapon, but it was designed to be a modular system and underwent a number of major and minor upgrades, including the 1988 upgrade that gave it the anti-ballistic missile capability for which it is so well known today. In the 1991 Gulf War CNN footage of Patriot missiles rising to destroy incoming Scuds over Israel and Saudi Arabia are some of the most memorable images of the war. Subsequent studies have indicated that the success rate of the Patriot was significantly lower than initially reported, but additional upgrades throughout the 1990s have further refined the performance of the weapon. In the invasion of Iraq the weapon misidentified and shot down two allied aircraft, but it is hardly the only system to have malfunctioned resulting in friendly-fire deaths. It is presently undergoing an upgrade that is nearly a complete system redesign and will significantly enhance performance in nearly every aspect. The important point is that it managed to overcome its technical hurdles, with significant progress being made post-deployment and has undergone a number of modifications that have pushed a thirty year old system well beyond its initial specifications. A similar story could be told for the Tomahawk cruise missile or the B-2 stealth bomber.

  3. As Senator Lyndon Johnson argued to liberal skeptics who thought the 1957 civil rights bill didn’t go far enough, it was more important that a bill get passed than any particular content of the bill. Or as Senator Johnson put it, “Once you break the virginity, it’ll be easier next time.” Senator Edward Kennedy has offered a similar defense of his votes for micro-initiative healthcare programs or No Child Left Behind. If a comprehensive universal healthcare bill is unpassable, than pass it in a million little pieces. Or, it is more important to get Congress to agree in principle on federal education spending. The program can later be reengineered with amendments.

    One of the notable features of the post Newt Gingrich / George W. Bush right is the degree to which they have learned to use the very things they most hate about government to their advantage. One is that a budget line-item never dies. All that was necessary was to fund ABM once, then there would be interest groups, a bureaucracy, a scientific community, a lobby and the fundamental human laziness of just carrying a line-item forward. The program would then live in perpetuity.

    Combine this with number two, that the technological problems can be ironed out in the field with enough money, and the important point is to get systems in place. The pressures of real-world operability plus the bureaucratic juggernaut will force a system into existence. The arguments that Mr. Hitt in the Rolling Stone piece thinks his strongest are, at this high-level, no argument at all. You really have to dig down into the nitty-gritty — which he does not do — before such arguments start to have any impact. In this scenario, a few negative GAO reports are no threat. In fact, they could shame politicians to throw good money after bad, lest failure show their previous votes in a new light. In fact, I’ll wager that if the Democrats capture Congress and the White House in 2008, the ABM juggernaut just keeps rolling on unabated.

The real problem with an anti-ballistic missile system is that it is a Maginot Line. This is the case for three reasons.

  1. ICBM counter-measures and ABM system requirements don’t scale at the same rate so would-be attackers can defeat ABM — or at least confound it to the point where a defender could not factor it into their strategic considerations with any reliability — much more easily and affordably than defenders can adapt. And being on the right side of a scalability calculation is how one wins a strategic competition.

    If the technical countermeasures aren’t enough, it’s worth noting that the calculation of an ABM system is that its OODA loop is inside that of an ICMB flight time. As terrifyingly short as ICBM flight times are, they are long enough compared to modern C3I. To defeat ABM, all one has to do is compress ballistic missile flight time to less than the OODA of ABM. The 25 minutes from Asia to the U.S. is a relatively long time, but park a missile submarine loaded with intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) a few hundred miles off the coast and now you are talking about flight times of more like five minutes. Many IRBMs are suborbital so even if detected and reacted to, there just might not be enough air under a warhead for a ground-based interceptor to work its magic.

    Reaction time of ABM could be shortened too, with the first C of C3I — Command — being the lowest hanging fruit. But automate the decision-making component and SkyNet goes live.

    All of these calculations explain why the Chinese are spending so heavily on SSBNs (Lewis, Jeffrey, “Two More Chinese Boomers?,” Arms Control Wonk, 4 October 2007) as well as why the United States continues to turn out attack submarines ($2.7 billion for one Virginia class submarine in the FY 2008 budget) nearly 20 years after the end of the Cold War and without a single navy peer competitor prowing the seas.

  2. Once it becomes clear that ballistic missiles are under threat, states will quickly realize that the future is in cruise missiles.

    Having watched a number of U.S. air power attacks on CNN, Americans think that cruise missiles are an exclusive U.S. technology. While, say, the U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile is an extremely sophisticated weapon, cruise missiles are not beyond the reach of less capable powers. The German V-1 “flying bomb”, first flown in 1944, was essentially a cruise missile. The United States deployed its first cruise missile, the problem-prone Snark, in 1961 and initially development of the cruise missile was considerably ahead of that of the ICBM. The Europeans have the Storm Shadow. During the invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait with a Chinese-made Silkworm cruise missile, first deployed in the early 1980s. Proliferation of cruise missiles is proceeding apace and the technology is not so sophisticated as to be intercepted by export control regimes. Hell, the flight control system of a Tomahawk runs on an 8086 processor. And it’s not even manufactured by Intel anymore. The design has been licensed to a bunch of low-end Asian chip fabricators.

    Cruise missiles fly low and under radar detection systems, are capable of maneuver and because they don’t follow set, easily calculable trajectories like ICBMs, are not subject to easy intercept. Cruise missiles usually have shorter ranges, so we are potentially back talking about anti-submarine warfare again.

  3. Then, of course, there is the most radical delivery system. If I were a terrorist or rogue state plotting to get a weapon of mass destruction to a U.S. city, I would just FedEx it.

    As has been fairly well observed, modern terrorism and to an increasing extent, modern war in general, is parasitic on the very highways and byways of globalization. There is no killer app here that can solve the problem. This is more labor-intensive problem demanding a myriad of heterogeneous and creative operations.

It would seem to me that given the scalability issue covered in number one, ABM is a grand-strategic looser. Much more security per dollar could be had through the tried and true means of anti-proliferation, traditional deterrence, counterforce, anti-submarine warfare and the newer, but relatively affordable area of homeland security.

Iraq and Vietnam; Civil Wars and Asymmetric Conflict

Posted on by

Someone at some point should drive home to the right that Iraq and Vietnam are not some apparition or anomaly requiring exceptional explanation — namely the Dolchstoßlegende — but in fact the historical trend.

Our historical-materialist problems in Iraq are multifaceted. Iraq is a combination of two pernicious trends: one relating to civil wars and one relating to asymmetric conflict.

First, on the issue of civil wars, they are by nature long, intractable and fought to the bitter, bloody end. The Los Angeles Times had the good sense to have Barbara F. Walter, author of the study, Committing to Peace: The Successful Settlement of Civil Wars (2002), write a brief summary of her survey of civil wars and the likely meaning for Iraq (Walter, Barbara F., “You Can’t Win With Civil Wars,” Los Angeles Times, 2 October 2007):

The approximately 125 civil wars — conflicts involving a government and rebels that produce at least 1,000 battle deaths — since 1945 tell us several things: The civil war in Iraq will drag on for many more years; it will end in a decisive victory for either the Shiites or the Sunnis, not in a compromise settlement; and the weaker side will never sign a settlement or lay down its arms because it has no way to enforce the terms.

Civil wars don’t end quickly. The average length of all civil wars since 1945 is 10 years. Conflicts in Burma, Angola, India, the Philippines, Chad and Colombia have lasted more than 30 years. Wars in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Lebanon, Sudan and Peru have lasted more than 15 years. Even Iraq’s previous civil war, fought against the Kurds, lasted 14 years.

This suggests that, historically speaking, Iraq’s current civil war could be in its early stages, with nothing to suggest that it will be a short, easy war.

Another lesson from history is that the greater the number of factions involved in a civil war, the longer it is likely to persist. Iraq simply has too many factions, with too much outside support, to come to a compromise settlement now. Not only is there no Shiite or Sunni who can speak for all of his side’s factions, but the parliament seems incapable of stopping the violence between these groups.

…

Civil wars rarely end in negotiated settlements. In research for a book on the topic, I found that 76% of civil wars between 1945 and 2005 ended only after one side had defeated all others. Only 24% ended in some form of negotiated solution. This suggests that the war in Iraq will not end at the bargaining table but on the battlefield.

Second, on the issue of asymmetric conflict, the trend over the last two centuries is toward small powers defeating larger ones, to the point where in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, small powers actually defeat large powers more often than not. Below is figure 2 from Ivan Arreguín-Toft, “How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conlict,” (International Security, vol. 26, no. 1, Summer 2001, pp. 93–128).

Arreguín-Toft, Ivan, "How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conlict," International Security, vol. 26, no. 1, Summer 2001, pp. 93–128, Figure 2: Percentage of Asymmetric Conflict Victories by Type of Actor in Four Fifty-Year Periods

Given these two trends, the deck was stacked against the U.S., even with the greatest effort, but since it was undertaken by the Solomon Grundy administration (Wikipedia | Sean Baby) we never stood a chance. They know how to smash and that’s about it.

Neither of these two observations are new: both trends were generally known at the time of the invasion of Iraq — Ms. Walter’s book is from 2002 and Mr. Arreguín-Toft’s article is from 2001 and neither were breaking new ground. Five year on, it is now completely apparent outside of administration propagandists that the key strategic judgment with respect to Iraq was not how many soldiers in the initial invasion, or how many in the subsequent occupation, or whether to intervene in the looting, or to disband the Iraqi army, or seasoned experts versus right-wing sycophants to staff the CPA, or any of the many, many other mistakes, but whether to go into Iraq or not in the first place. Barring sufficient historical awareness here, at least the administration should have known and acted like the odds were not in favor of success. Instead we got the fast-talker’s sales pitch.

And as the Dolchstoßlegende crowd now attempts to rewrite the history of the Iraq debacle a la the Vietnam War version thereof, it should be born in mind that that war was part and parcel of these trends.

Syria Gets the Osirak Treatment?

Posted on by

Also in nuclear news, despite some pretty severe smack-downs from some prominent names in the arms control community, Glenn Kessler and the Washington Post are apparently sticking by their story that Israel bombed a Syrian nuclear installation on 6 September 2007 (“Israel, U.S. Shared Data On Suspected Nuclear Site,” 21 September 2007, p. A1).

Joseph Cirincione, coauthor of the widely consulted reference, Deadly Arsenals: Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Threats, calls this story “nonsense” (“North Korea-Syria Nuclear Ties: Déjà Vu All Over Again?,” Foreign Policy, Passport, 14 September 2007) and Jeffrey Lewis of Arms Control Wonk goes so far as to call it “bullshit” (“Did Israel Strike a Syrian Nuclear Facility?, 16 September 2007). Mr. Cirincione writes and Mr. Lewis excerpts approvingly:

The Washington Post story should have been headlined “White House Officials Try to Push North Korea-Syria Connection.” This is a political story, not a threat story. The mainstream media seems to have learned nothing from the run-up to war in Iraq. It is a sad commentary on how selective leaks from administration officials who have repeatedly misled the press are still treated as if they were absolute truth. Once again, this appears to be the work of a small group of officials leaking cherry-picked, unvetted “intelligence” to key reporters in order to promote a preexisting political agenda.

This is definitely the administration that has cried wolf too many times, but the Washington Post article seems pretty heavily sourced. And I don’t believe that Syria is an Israeli bombing range where the IDF just flies out for practice missions. If they went in, they must have had some pretty serious concerns. I’m going to need a lot more than unnamed Bush officials and bluster before passing judgment on this story.

A Bent Spear

Posted on by

The Washington Post put a major story about the six nuclear armed cruise missiles unwittingly flown across the country on the cover of the weekend edition (Pincus, Walter and Joby Warrick, “The Saga of a Bent Spear,” 23 September 2007, p. A1). Details on the exact point of failure remain under wraps, but it sounds like an instance of a single failure leading to a chain of subsequent failures.

The article goes on to point out that this is just the final, high-profile outcome of a longstanding, but not yet newsworthy problem:

A secret 1998 history of the Air Combat Command warned of “diminished attention for even ‘the minimum standards’ of nuclear weapons’ maintenance, support and security” once such arms became less vital, according to a declassified copy obtained by Hans Kristensen, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ nuclear information project.

The Air Force’s inspector general in 2003 found that half of the “nuclear surety” inspections conducted that year resulted in failing grades — the worst performance since inspections of weapons-handling began. Minot’s 5th Bomb Wing was among the units that failed, and the Louisiana-based 2nd Bomb Wing at Barksdale garnered an unsatisfactory rating in 2005.

Both units passed subsequent nuclear inspections, and Minot was given high marks in a 2006 inspection. The 2003 report on the 5th Bomb Wing attributed its poor performance to the demands of supporting combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wartime stresses had “resulted in a lack of time to focus and practice nuclear operations,” the report stated.

It’s worth noting that it’s not just the Army that is being degraded by the excess demands of the administration’s war in Iraq.

Attack on Peoria

Posted on by

One might be prone to get worried about the fact that after fifteen years of dormancy, Russia has resumed regular, long-range bomber patrols (Troianovski, Anton, “Russia Resumes Its Long-Range Air Patrols,” The Washington Post, 18 August 2007, p. A7). Soviet era prop-driven TU-95 “Bear” bombers have been intercepted by Norwegian and British fighters (“British Jets Intercept Eight Russian Bombers,” Reuters, 6 September 2007) and have buzzed Guam and other U.S. targets.

One might be so inclined — were the United States not buzzing itself with nuclear bombers. On 30 August 2007 a B-52 took off from Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, and flew to Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, unknowingly carrying five (or maybe six, but what’s a nuclear warhead between friends) armed W80-1 nuclear warheads (5-150 kiloton yield) in under-wing mounted air-launch cruise missiles (Hoffman, Michael, “Commander Disciplined for Nuclear Mistake,” Military Times, 5 September 2007). The missiles were being transported to Barksdale along with 400 others to be decommissioned and should have been without any munition but were somehow — no one knows how yet — inadvertently loaded with the nuclear armed variant. The most disturbing part is that to accomplish this fuck-up a number of heretofore though foolproof safeguards had to be foiled. Presumably no malfeasance was at play — which would only go to show that stupidity is a significantly greater danger than ill will — but a huge investigation, rising all the way to Defense Secretary Gates, the President and Congress has ensued. And rightly so. Though the probability of a nuclear detonation even in the event of a crash was vanishingly small, this is the first time since 1968 that armed nuclear weapons have flown and there is some concern that international treaties may have been violated.

Here (Philips, Alan F., “20 Mishaps That Might Have Started Accidental Nuclear War,” NuclearFiles.org) is a list of nuclear accidents, including the 1968 Thule, Greenland crash that brought U.S. armed airborne alert flights to an end. It’s a fairly disquieting list that just grew to twenty-one.

David Brooks Through the Looking Glass

Posted on by

When David Brooks first began writing for The New York Times editorial page, I thought that a better selection could not have been made. Brooks is funny, cleaver and unorthodox1 — exactly the sort of conservative that should be writing for this country’s “newspaper of record.” As his output has begun to pile up, though, I have begun to think that he will need a star chart to locate the current state of debate.

His latest editorial, “Looking Through Keyholes” would be more aptly titled, “Through the Looking-glass.” He argues that D.C. commentators, rather than focus on the critical events in Najaf and Falluja, are a’chatter about the books and testimonies of Richard Clarke, Condoleezza Rice and Bob Woodward — all dealing with events prior to 2004. “This is like pausing during the second day of Gettysburg to debate the wisdom of the Missouri Compromise.” Time spent preparing for hearings and defending the administration against the myriad accusations is time not spent on solving the problems of Iraq. He dismisses criticisms of Bush as mere Washington conceit. “The first duty of proper Washingtonians is to demonstrate that they are smarter than whomever they happen to be talking about. It’s quite easy to fulfill this mission when you are talking about the past.”2

The fact is that for nearly two years now, Washington insiders have been trying — to no avail, but in the worst case, to their peril — to contribute to the debate over how to handle the situation in Iraq.

Regarding troop levels, General Tommy Franks initially planned to go into Iraq with a force comparable to that of the first Gulf War, but, under pressure from Rumsfeld, continually whittled it down. General Shinseki told congress that a few hundred thousand soldiers would be required in Iraq for up to five years. Retired military personnel voiced concern about troop levels.3 John McCain and even General Abizaid have both called for additional soldiers and for a more international force.4

Pentagon personnel were prohibited from, or reprimanded for, participating in CIA war games that simulated the disorder of the aftermath of invasion.5 In the Pentagon sponsored war games, those acting the role of the enemy were specifically prohibited from employing tactics similar to those used by Iraqi irregulars during combat. Hence Lt. Gen. William Wallace’s controversial remark, “The enemy we’re fighting is a bit different than the one we war-gamed gainst.”6

A parade of Iraqi exiles met with administration officials, including Bush, to warn about the dangers of a lapse in order.7 Reports by the Army War College, The Council on Foreign Relations and the James A. Baker III Institute for Foreign Policy also warned about the dangers of a breakdown in civil administration and the disbanding of the Iraqi army.8 French officials warned Rice about an insurgency and ethnic tensions.9 Former Central Command chief Anthony Zinni telephoned a general inside his old command to remind him of planning and simulations for an occupation of Iraq that Zinni had conducted in 1999.10 The State Department’s Future of Iraq project spent nearly a year producing a thirteen volume report11 and Powell circulated among the National Security Council a fifteen page memo on the history of U.S. occupations that argued that troop strength and postwar security would be critical factors.12

The administration was still maintaining that oil revenue would pay for Iraq’s reconstruction, when Lawrence Lindsey gave an interview to The Wall Street Journal in which he estimated that the cost of the war would be $100 to 200 billion.13 Throughout the FY2004 budget negotiations, Bush stuck to his original budget for Iraq despite close Congressional questioning. Even after the $87 billion had been authorized, the Chiefs of the Army, Marine Core and Air Force warned that it only covered about eight months of operations.14

The rewards for this diligency have been few. Shinseki was severely dressed down about his estimates with Wolfowitz calling his estimate “wildly off the mark” and Rumsfeld reiterating the same.15 Zinni has gone from special envoy to Israel and Palestine to personae non grata. Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya, whose book, Republic of Fear was closely read in administration circles, has gone the same way since voicing his concerns.16 Rumsfeld specifically told Jay Garner to disregard the Future of Iraq report and that the project’s chief, Thomas Warrick, was to be removed from his staff. Garner resisted the disbanding of the Iraqi army, but it went ahead after he was replaced. Lawrence Lindsey was fired for his forthrightness on the costs of the adventure in Iraq.17 Retired army personnel who spoke out on force levels were slandered as “Clinton generals,” “armchair generals” and the like.

Of course, I am skipping over the reams of excellent commentary in the media because, as Bush has said, “I rarely read the [news] stories.”18 One could have a bang-on solution for our problems in Iraq and may as well leave it tri-folded in one’s jacket pocket for all the impact it will have. Even interventionist extraordinaire Max Boot is saying that the administration is in “a political cocoon where they cut themselves off from outside criticism, just dismiss it as being naysayers.”19

But there is something more fundamental here. We live in a democracy and are approaching an election. The president is up for his quadrennial review. President Bush is continually saying, “I look forward to talking to the American people about why I made the decisions I made.”20 Conservative pundits defend Bush’s use of September 11th as a campaign issue saying “Sept. 11, its aftermath and the response…are central to deciding the fitness of George W. Bush to continue in office.”21 What people like Brooks who complain about the criticisms of Bush miss is that this is exactly what a discussion of Bush’s record looks like. All the hullabaloo that Brooks derides is about “deciding the fitness of George W. Bush to continue in office.” Brooks and other defenders of the administration are frustrated that the “discussion” is two sided, not merely the Bush campaign — sole owner of all information and opinion regarding its record — talking at a pliant audience.

I think Bush would agree with me that the presidential campaign ranks at least as high as our problems in Iraq, because after neutralizing (not solving) the Falluja problem, the man overburdened with Iraq jumped on a campaign bus for a tour of battleground states.

As for Brooks, despite the deployment of French culture as window dressing, he is merely repeating the Republican boilerplate of “You cannot criticize the president. He is a war president.” That sort of intellectual thugery has about as little place in the “newspaper of record” as Jayson Blair.

Notes

  1. Do you doubt me? Though some of his political writings for The Weekly Standard are perhaps more true to form, I judged him on the cultural work such as BOBO’s in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. New York: Simon & Schuster. 2000; “The Organization Kid.” The Atlantic Monthly. April 2001. http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/04/brooks-p1.htm; or “Patio Man and the Sprawl People.” The Weekly Standard. 12-19 August 2002. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/531wlvng.asp
  2. Brooks, David. “Looking Through Keyholes.” The New York Times. 27 April 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/27/opinion/looking-through-keyholes.html.
  3. E.g. Hoar, Joseph P. “Why Aren’t There Enough Troops in Iraq?” The New York Times. 2 April 2003; McCaffrey, Barry. “Gaining Victory in Iraq.” U.S. News & World Reports. 7 April 2003. p. 26; McCaffrey, Barry. “We Need More Troops.” The Wall Street Journal. 29 July 2003.
  4. Schmitt, Eric. “General in Iraq Says More G.I.’s are Not Needed.” The New York Times. 29 August 2003; McCain, John. “Why We Must Win.” The Washington Post. 31 August 2003. p. B7. Schmitt’s article was given a misleading title. Abizaid did say that additional American troops should not be sent, but because he worried about “the public perception both within Iraq and within the Arab world about the percentage of the force being so heavily American.” He did however say that more soldiers from other countries were needed and that the training of native Iraqi forces should be hastened.
  5. Fallows, James. “Blind Into Baghdad.” The Atlantic Monthly. January/February 2004. p. 58. http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/01/fallows.htm.
  6. Kaplan, Fred. “War-Gamed.” Slate. 28 March 2003. http://www.slate.com/id/2080814.
  7. Brinkley, Joel and Eric Schmitt. “Iraqi Leaders Say U.S. Was Warned of Disorder After Hussein, But Little Was Done.” The New York Times. 30 November 2003.
  8. Fallows. p. 68; Elliott, Michael. “So, What Went Wrong?” Time. 6 October 2003. p. 34.
  9. Mann, James. The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet. New York: Viking. 2004, p. 349; Burrougil, Bryan, Evgenia Peretz, David Rose and David Wise. “The Path to War.” Vanity Fair. no. 525. May 2004. pp. 288-289.
  10. Ricks, Thomas E. “For Vietman Vet Anthony Zinni, Another War on Shaky Territory.” The Washington Post. 23 December 2003.
  11. Fallows. pp. 56-58.
  12. Packer, George. “Letter from Baghdad: War After the War.” The New Yorker. 24 November 2003. pp. 61-62. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031124fa_fact1.
  13. Davis, Bob and David Rogers. “Bush Economic Aide Says Cost of Iraq War May Top $100 Billion.” The Wall Street Journal. 16 September 2002.
  14. Schmitt, Eric. “Service Chiefs Challenge White House on the Budget.” The New York Times. 11 February 2004.
  15. Schmitt, Eric. “Pentagon Contradicts General on Iraq Occupation Force’s Size.” The New York Times. 28 February 2003.
  16. E.g. Makiya, Kanan. “The Wasteland.” The New Republic. 5 May 2003. pp. 19-21. http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030505&s=makiya050503; Makiya, Kanan. “Hopes Betrayed.” The Observer. 16 February 2003. http://observer.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,896611,00.html.
  17. An administration insider confirms that this was the specific reason for his firing. Allen, Mike, David Von Drehle and Jonathan Weisman. “Treasury Chief, Key Economic Aide Resign as Jobless Rate Hits 6 Percent.” The Washington Post. 7 December 2002. p. A1.
  18. Bush, George W. Interview with Brit Hume. Fox News Chanel. 22 September 2003. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,98006,00.html.
  19. Boot, Max. Lou Dobbs Tonight. CNN. 30 April 2004. http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0404/30/ldt.00.html.
  20. E.g. Bush told Tim Russert that he was “looking forward” to a discussion seven times. Bush, George W. and Tim Russert. Meet the Press. NBC News. 8 February 2004. http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4179618/.
  21. Krauthammer, Charles. “Why 9/11 Belongs in the Campaign.” Time. 15 March 2004. p. 100.