Worldmaking (78 page)

Yet Wolfowitz did identify serious flaws in the Clinton administration's policies toward other regions. First among them was Saddam Hussein's sullen and resentful Iraq, where Clinton's containment strategy relied on the enforcement of no-fly zones through intermittent air strikes and the maintenance of stringent UN sanctions. Wolfowitz viewed this combination as not up to the task of applying sufficient pressure on Saddam Hussein. In a widely discussed article in
The Wall Street Journal
in 1996, with the attention-grabbing title “Clinton's Bay of Pigs,” Wolfowitz accused Clinton of neglecting the growing threat posed by Saddam. This was manifested in Iraq's invasion of a Kurdish “safe zone” in northern Iraq in August 1996 and a dishearteningly weak U.S. military response in the form of ineffectual cruise missile strikes. Wolfowitz lambasted the “pinprick” Tomahawk attacks favored by Clinton and accused the administration of “betraying” the Kurds in permitting Iraqi forces to strike northward against that restive region with impunity.

This was clearly bad news for America's reputation as a guarantor, and for its hard-won reputation as a military power without equal, but it also emboldened Saddam, whose military might pose a threat to the United States itself. Wolfowitz believed the stakes in Iraq could scarcely be higher: “Saddam is a convicted killer still in possession of a loaded gun—and it's pointed at us.” Here was one of the first public references to Saddam's chemical and bacteriological weapons programs, and the potential that he might either use them against the United States or sell or gift them to a terrorist organization to do the same. As Derek Chollet and James Goldgeiger write, Wolfowitz urged Clinton to “go beyond the containment strategy and confront the Iraqi dictator once and for all.”
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In the general election of 1996, Wolfowitz served as an adviser to the aged Republican candidate, Bob Dole. Iraq turned out to be one area where clear daylight could be detected between the candidates. While campaigning for Dole, Wolfowitz remarked to a reporter, “The U.S. has virtually abandoned its commitment to protect a besieged people from a bloodthirsty dictator.”
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But Dole and Wolfowitz struggled to land any meaningful blows on Clinton. Dole's campaign staked out positions that were considerably more hawkish than those of George H. W. Bush—the need for developing a missile defense system and his implacable hostility to the United Nations. But in the realm of foreign policy, Clinton's first term had been largely devoid of Carter-like disasters.

There had been some wretched moments, certainly. During a calamitous UN-sanctioned intervention in Somalia in October 1993, two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters were shot down and a brutal gunfight ensued on the streets of Mogadishu in which eighteen Americans and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Somalis died.
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This was a human tragedy and a public relations disaster—footage of American corpses being dragged down Mogadishu streets were relayed on cable news. This episode had a major impact on Clinton's willingness to deploy the nation's military in areas that George Kennan viewed as peripheral. Indeed, Kennan had warned against intervention in Somalia in December 1992:

I regard this move as a dreadful error of American policy … The dispatch of American armed forces to a seat of operations in a place far from our own shores, and this for what is actually a major police action in another country and in a situation where no defensive American interest is involved—this, obviously, is something that the founding fathers of this country never envisaged or would ever have approved. If this is in the American tradition, then it is a very recent tradition.
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The debacle in Somalia was sufficient to relieve the Clinton administration of any latent impulse toward humanitarian intervention.

This became clear when the administration averted its gaze—for open eyes might have meant acting—from a well-documented genocide in Rwanda, when between five hundred thousand and one million Rwandans, mainly from the minority Tutsi ethnic group, were slaughtered by the Hutu majority.
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Four years later, Clinton traveled to Kigali, Rwanda's capital city, and apologized for failing to act.
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But there was no need to issue an apology to the American public. These dark episodes scarcely registered with the electorate in 1996. Somalia and Rwanda were two of the poorest nations in the world—what happened there clearly had little bearing on the United States' economic interests or indeed its prestige and credibility. The end of the Cold War had sharply reduced the attention that strategists afforded the poor nations (Angola, for example, interested Henry Kissinger only as a proxy, mineral-rich battleground.) With the technology bubble still in the inflating phase, the U.S. economy was motoring. Clinton was well liked by centrist voters, and Dole proved to be an uninspiring candidate. Clinton comfortably secured his reelection. It turned out that he didn't need a grand strategy that fit onto a bumper sticker.

*   *   *

Wolfowitz was profoundly disappointed that Dole had lost the election, his defeat hastened by the peripheral part that foreign affairs played in the overall outcome. He and Dole had certainly found it difficult to land significant blows on Clinton for being weak on national security in the absence of serious geopolitical threats. U.S. elections are not won or lost on the fate of the Kurds, Rwandans, Bosnians, or Kosovars. During the Cold War, the draft-dodging Clinton would likely have been easy prey for a decorated World War II veteran like Dole, who had only narrowly avoided death in 1945 after being seriously wounded by German machine gun fire. But times had changed, as the GOP foreign-policy establishment well understood.

The problem may have been complexity. The bipolar Cold War era often rewarded leaders with a Manichaean sensibility. The post–Cold War world did not. Gorbachev's warning that he had done a terrible thing to the United States by depriving it of an enemy lacked specificity. It turned out that the GOP was the damaged party. A relatively placid international environment certainly helped Clinton defeat George H. W. Bush—also a decorated World War II veteran, and with a formidable foreign-policy record—and Dole in successive elections. Voters traditionally favored the GOP over the Democrats to better protect national security. The end of the Cold War had neutralized this advantage.

Wolfowitz responded to this challenge by focusing most of his energies on a single enemy, Iraq, and by broadening the range of his ambition. In 1997, he wrote a chapter for an edited book,
The Future of Iraq
, in which he detailed three possible ways to deal with Saddam Hussein: containment, engagement, or replacement. Wolfowitz argued strongly for the final option, though he did not spell out what this might entail.
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He followed this up with an article coauthored with his long-standing collaborator Zalmay Khalilzad titled “Overthrow Him.” Wolfowitz and Khalilzad identified the primary strategic lesson of the Gulf War, “Military force is not enough,” instead stating that a broad and effective U.S. policy toward Iraq “must be part of an overall political strategy that sets as its goal not merely the containment of Saddam but the liberation of Iraq from his tyranny.”
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In the absence of the Soviet Union, overthrowing Saddam Hussein and liberating Iraq became Wolfowitz's idée fixe.

That same year, Wolfowitz joined other hawkish Republicans declaring intellectual allegiance to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a think tank in Washington, D.C., founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. It released its Statement of Principles on June 3, 1997. The statement revealed a political party in deep dialogue with itself—rattled by Clinton's success in winning two consecutive elections—about its future foreign-policy direction:

American foreign and defense policy is adrift. Conservatives have criticized the incoherent policies of the Clinton Administration. They have also resisted isolationist impulses from within their own ranks. But conservatives have not confidently advanced a strategic vision of America's role in the world. They have not set forth guiding principles for American foreign policy … We seem to have forgotten the essential elements of the Reagan Administration's success: a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States' global responsibilities.
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The Statement of Principles was a rousing declaration of allegiance to the style and substance of Ronald Reagan's first term in office, although it was short on policy specifics. Among the statement's signatories were Elliot Abrams, Dick Cheney, Eliot A. Cohen, Francis Fukuyama, Fred Iklé, Zalmay Khalilzad, Scooter Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz—the shadow foreign-policy establishment.

Some of the specifics were fleshed out on January 26, 1998, when PNAC published an open letter to Bill Clinton, urging a change in U.S. policy toward Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The signatories rendered their concerns in simple prose, writing that the “current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate.” President Clinton needed to open his eyes to the fact that Iraq was working assiduously to develop weapons of mass destruction, which could destabilize the region and indeed the world. “It hardly needs to be added,” stated the authors darkly, “that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world's supply of oil will all be put at hazard.”
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After the letter was published, a small selection of its signatories, including Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Donald Rumsfeld, traveled to the White House to discuss Iraq with Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger. After the meeting, Perle declared that he was “appalled at the feebleness of the Clinton administration.”
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The clock was ticking on Bill Clinton's presidency, however. During 1998, the GOP foreign-policy brain trust began surveying the field in earnest to identify (and tutor) the Republican most likely to defeat Al Gore—Clinton's vice president, who was all but certain to win his party's nomination—in 2000. In the spring of 1998, the governor of Texas, George W. Bush, visited Stanford University's Hoover Institution to discuss foreign policy with an illustrious group that included George Shultz and Condoleezza Rice, Stanford's provost, who had worked for Bush's father and had coauthored a well-received book on the reunification of Germany with the University of Virginia's Philip D. Zelikow.
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The meeting went well, with Bush and Rice striking up a rapport based on a common love of sports. A follow-up meeting was scheduled in Austin a few months later. Joining Bush, Rice, and Shultz in the heat of July were Dick Cheney—then head of the Halliburton Corporation, a vast oil field services company with a staff in excess of fifty thousand—and Wolfowitz. Bush informed the gathering that he was planning to run for the presidency and he wanted their help.

Bush was not uniformly popular across the GOP. Many preferred Senator John McCain, who had accumulated significant foreign-policy experience and whose willingness to deploy the U.S. military for humanitarian purposes had been broadly consistent. William Kristol warned his colleagues that “getting in bed with Bush” would be a mistake.
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Kristol feared that Bush Jr. might turn out to be just as cautious and centrist as his father. And besides, he evinced no particular interest in foreign affairs and had accumulated no great accomplishments either in his business career—which was largely bankrolled by an indulgent father—or his political career, which was necessarily devoted to the sizable if parochial matter of governing Texas. Arizona's John McCain, with his thirteen years in the Senate as of 2000, was a titan compared to Bush. On nearly every level—intellect, experience, valor—McCain appeared the superior candidate. McCain had spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, two of them in solitary confinement. Bush accepted a commission to the Texas Air National Guard and saw no active service. McCain had won over many neo-Wilsonian Republicans when he supported President Clinton's air strikes on Serbia to protect Kosovo. He was a man of principle and experience. William Kristol's choice was clear: “I preferred McCain, and Kosovo was what did it for me, where he bucked a large chunk of the Republican party.”
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Others detected a lot more potential in Bush, largely because he was unafraid of declaring his own foreign-policy ignorance and asking simple exploratory questions. They discerned no overbearing ego and little of the bluster often commonplace among the politically ambitious. Richard Perle viewed Bush as an endearing tabula rasa, observing that he “didn't know very much … [but] had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know very much … He was eager to learn … You got the sense that if he believed something, he'd pursue [it] tenaciously.”
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Wolfowitz was even more enthusiastic. According to Jacob Heilbrunn, “In August 1999 an excited Wolfowitz told me over lunch at I Ricchi restaurant in Washington, D.C., that Bush had the ability to penetrate the dense fog of foreign-policy expertise to ask a simple question, ‘Tell me what I need to know?' Bush, Wolfowitz said, was ‘another Scoop Jackson.'”
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So Perle and Wolfowitz both hailed Bush for his willingness to declare his own ignorance—a rare trait in Washington, admittedly—and seek advice from the likes of them. Put in those terms, Bush's appeal is not hard to comprehend.