Descent Into Chaos (5 page)

Nevertheless, Clinton was affable, a brilliant speaker, and a firm believer in sharing decision making with his European allies. In contrast, Bush was seen around the world as brash, cocky, profoundly unreflective, and unresponsive when it came to sharing decision making on global issues. There was a total absence of debate with European partners. Within the first few months of taking office in 2001, Bush was conducting a unilateralist foreign policy that aimed to force allies to accept a U.S. agenda. A senior Bush official called it “the doctrine of integration,” which was aimed at integrating “other countries and organizations into arrangements that will sustain a world consistent with U.S. interests and values, and thereby promote peace, prosperity and justice, as widely as possible.”
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Bush’s message to the rest of the world was “it’s either my way or the highway.”

Bush immediately broke with the international community on several issues. In December 2000 Clinton had signed the treaty that created the International Criminal Court, the world’s first war crimes tribunal. Bush’s first act was to refuse to send the treaty to the Senate for ratification. After 9/11 Washington threatened those countries that signed up to the Court with the loss of U.S. military aid. The Bush administration said it was opposed to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which 150 countries had signed and which was the bedrock of nuclear nonproliferation. In March 2001 the United States refused to support ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, which would reduce global warming, and in June the United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Europe was shell-shocked. Allies were unable to understand how to structure their relationship with the Bush White House and with the neoconservatives, or “neocons,” who dominated policymaking.

The neocons carried complex political baggage. Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and others were archconservatives who considered themselves as radicals with a messianic vision of using American military power to reshape the world according to their own interests. Many of them had military backgrounds—G. W. Bush’s first administration had appointed sixty-three retired military officers into senior government positions. To some outsiders the neocons were classic imperialists who were influenced by neofascist writings from the 1930s about the use of state power. For others their intellectual roots lay in Trotskyism or America’s past, making them “a complex amalgam of the military imperialism of Theodore Roosevelt and the idealistic imperialism of Woodrow Wilson.”
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They claimed that in the post-cold war era, the United States was now running an empire and needed to project the kind of power that went with being the sole global imperial force.

The anger, grief, and rage felt by many Americans after 9/11, and the determination to hit back under any circumstances, was the perfect playing field for the neocons, who were to exploit retaliation for 9/11 into a much broader foreign and domestic agenda. They saw the war on terrorism as a means to fulfill a long-desired venture to remodel the Middle East, starting with destroying Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, securing more of the region’s oil fields for American companies, and propping up the state of Israel. At home they saw the war as a means of carving out greater presidential power by ignoring legal constraints and the checks and balances of the U.S. political system.
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The neocons were to use 9/11 as justification for making themselves exempt from American or international law.

The neocons deliberately manipulated the worldwide sympathy for the United States after 9/11 as an endorsement of their ideas. Overnight the U.S.-led war on terrorism could become, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, “the central organizing principle of the West’s global security policy.”
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It was a chronic mistake, as all other global issues were subsumed in a monolithic view of fighting terrorism. The vast majority of Europeans and Muslims could not connect with the militarized, self-obsessed policies of the neocons, who cared nothing for the rest of the world or its problems. When others wanted to discuss development or global warming, Bush wanted to discuss terrorism.

Naming the adversary as “terrorism” enabled the neocons to broaden the specific struggle against a bunch of murderous criminals (al Qaeda) into a global conflict with Islam. The neocons identified “state sponsors” of terrorism such as Iraq and Iran, who suddenly became part of the al Qaeda network, even as they overturned international law in the process. All this tapped into the fear and anger of a largely ignorant and accepting American public still in shock over how easily a small group of terrorists had destroyed so many lives on American soil.

Even the phrase “war on terrorism” was a misnomer, a rhetorical device, an emotive manipulation of the public’s horror after 9/11. It had no more legal or practical meaning than would a war on cancer, drugs, or poverty.
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Terrorism
cannot be party to a conflict, so there can be no war against it. Moreover, there was no internationally accepted definition of what constituted terrorism, given the cliché that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. And the
war,
which is fought by soldiers, ignored all other policies needed to fight Islamic extremism—political, economic, and social reforms. Al Qaeda had a political strategy wrapped in the flag of Islam, so defeating al Qaeda required an equally broad political strategy, one that would win hearts and minds in the Muslim world.

Instead, the phraseology of the neocons became more and more disturbing as it aimed to terrify the American public. Paul Wolfowitz, then U.S. deputy secretary of defense, warned about ending states. “It’s not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism,” he said as the war in Afghanistan got under way.
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Not surprisingly such comments were hated and ridiculed by Muslims everywhere, and helped convince many Muslims that the United States was out to target all Muslim civilization.
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In the heady days after 9/11 the neocons sold Bush a predetermined foreign policy based not on reality, good intelligence, and analysis but on an ideology. “We’re an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality,” a Bush adviser told Ron Suskind—a quote that historians will doubtlessly use as a defining one for the Bush era.
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“And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” The neocons truly believed that 9/11 was a God-given opportunity to make up history as they went along, and so changing the target from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein, from Afghanistan to Iraq, was their prerogative to rearrange their own reality.

For all their intellectualism, the neocons seemed to have no knowledge of what history had taught us about empires. The great empire builders quickly learned that when it came to ruling newly conquered lands, they had to put back in almost as much as they took out. If the conquerer was to extract the raw materials, taxes, and manpower he needed from the colony, he had to establish a system of security and law and order over the conquered and help his subjects maintain their economic livelihoods. Most significantly, empire builders from Alexander the Great to Queen Victoria had to learn about their subjects if they were to rule over them with any authority. At the very least they had to be curious about them. In the nineteenth century the British epitomized a colonialism that exploited with responsibility, used force judiciously, and yet learned about its subject peoples.

In comparison, the first thought of the Bush administration after the Afghan war ended was how to declare victory, get out, and move on to Iraq. The administration wanted no responsibility for reconstructing the now-occupied nation of Afghanistan and was unwilling to learn about the people or the country. In their haste to move on, security in Afghanistan was handed over to warlords and drug barons, who were supported lavishly by the CIA and the Pentagon with a one-billion-dollar budget, because Washington wanted to focus on the upcoming war in Iraq.

In 2003 the misinformation the Bush administration fed to the American people through a pliant and mostly willing media confirmed Saddam Hussein’s possession of nuclear weapons and his links to al Qaeda. “You can’t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror,” said a confident Bush in 2002.
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A completely false justification for going to war in Iraq and abandoning Afghanistan had just been created. It was only after the U.S. invasion that al Qaeda truly arrived in Iraq, luring in extremists from all over the world to act as suicide bombers.

It was an Orwellian experience to visit Washington during Bush’s first term. Outsiders like me found it remarkable that a U.S. president could live in such an unreal world, where the entire military and intelligence establishments were so gullible, the media so complacent, Congress so unquestioning—all of them involved in feeding half-truths to the American public. “Official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions,“ wrote Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA official.
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I feared the worst kind of criticism when I made these points to young American students during a lecture tour of U.S. university campuses just before the Iraq war began. However, my ideas were well received and applauded. It became apparent to me that most Americans had the right instincts, but they were so poorly educated about world history, geography, and politics that they could not make political decisions for themselves about the world outside and left such choices to their leaders. The neocons counted on just this ignorance and compliance to conduct their foreign policy.

Compared to the pre-9/11 isolationism, the neocon ideology now focused on keeping the American public in a constant state of fear, with looming exaggerated threats and potential war. The administration was helped by the fact that it had arrived on the political stage when the United States had unquestioned military prowess around the globe. In the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Department of Defense or the Pentagon had been steadily displacing and obscuring the State Department in the formulation and conduct of U.S. foreign policy in the third world. “The military simply filled a vacuum left by an indecisive White House, an atrophied State Department, and a distracted Congress,” wrote journalist Dana Priest.
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Well before 9/11, military treaties with foreign armies eclipsed political agreements between the State Department and foreign ministries.

Under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the Pentagon’s influence in the U.S. decision-making process was to become overwhelming, as the State Department, led weakly by Secretary of State Colin Powell, was steadily bypassed. The wars after 9/11 gave the Pentagon even more power and money. In 2001 the U.S. defense budget was $293 billion—still more than the aggregate budget of the next fifteen ranked countries in the world, including all the European powers and China. In 2003 the defense budget reached $360 billion, and in 2006 it topped $427 billion, growing by a phenomenal 40 percent in the five years since 9/11. In 2008 it reached $647 billion, by which time the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were expected to have cost more than $1 trillion.
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By now the U.S. defense budget was equivalent to what the entire rest of the world spent on defense.

Meanwhile, the State Department’s budget was a mere fraction of the defense budget. In 2003 State received $26 billion, or just 6 percent of the defense budget. “We are conducting diplomacy on a shoestring in an era when . . . we depend on diplomats to build alliances,” berated Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
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By 2008 State’s total budget, including its loan and aid programs, amounted to $42 billion, or 6.5 percent of the defense budget. Even the foreign aid traditionally distributed by the State Department was being undercut by the Pentagon. Between 2001 and 2007, a virtually unknown Pentagon department called the Defense Security Cooperation Agency had secured 20 percent of Washington’s $15 billion in foreign aid, while also managing some $12 billion in foreign arms sales.
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The might of the U.S. military should not be underestimated. The 1.37-million -strong U.S. armed forces divided up the world into regional commands that have more assets and facilities than similar divisions in the State Department or the CIA. The combined U.S. military has joint command operations stretched right around the world, including CENTCOM, or Central Command, in the Middle East, which fought the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; PACOM, in the Pacific; EUCOM, in Europe; and SOUTH-COM, in Latin America. Each of these joint command headquarters has a staff of more than a thousand officers, far larger than the staffs of most U.S. embassies. The U.S. Navy has thirteen aircraft carrier battle groups, whereas no navy in the world has even one such carrier group. Before 9/11 the U.S. military deployed more than a quarter of a million men at 725 bases in 38 foreign countries, and during the war in Afghanistan it acquired 14 more bases, in Pakistan and Central Asia. CENTCOM had the widest theater of operations, covering 25 countries stretching from Kenya through the Middle East to China’s western borders.

After the war in Afghanistan, the forty-seven-thousand-strong Special Operations Forces (SOF), involving soldiers from all three armed services, led the worldwide attack on Islamic extremists. The SOF budget of $3.0 billion in 2001 more than doubled, to $6.5 billion in 2004, and then doubled again four years later. Even before 9/11, SOF were operating in 140 countries, acting as virtual ambassadors to allied armies, offering specialized training and other support.
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In sharp contrast, the one group of American soldiers considered essential for nation building—army civil affairs units, which rebuild bombed villages, bridges, power lines, and water supplies— were downgraded by Rumsfeld. When the terrorists struck the Twin Towers, most civil affairs units had been relegated to the U.S. Army Reserves and few were mobilized when the United States invaded Afghanistan. It was not until 2007, after the massive failure in Iraq, that the Pentagon decided to increase civil affairs officers by 33 percent, to 3,500 men.