By Joseph Cerami – Special to the American-Statesman
The U.S. War in Iraq launched in 2003 gives us much to think about. Richard Haass, an experienced State Department, Defense Department and National Security Council policymaker called it a war of “choice,” as opposed to a war of “necessity.” According to Haass, Afghanistan was a necessary war, needed to defeat the regime that supported the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. Iraq on the other hand was a war of choice, chosen for less than vital national interests to eliminate an evil dictator and his weapons of mass destruction programs, and redirect the Middle East towards democratic governance and capitalism.
The George W. Bush administration also highlighted the ethical arguments, with the war justified as a moral obligation – for a great power to bring regime change to a hostile and bloody Iraq suffering under a dictator who had murdered, tortured and even gassed his own people.
The difficult decisions over war and peace are among the most well-researched by historians, political scientists and international relations scholars. The national security team advising Bush included Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice – all highly experienced in foreign and defense policymaking and war. Rumsfeld and Cheney had served in Congress and as White House chiefs of staff in the Ford administration.
Rumsfeld was the youngest secretary of defense in U.S. history under Ford, and Cheney was defense secretary during the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War. Powell had been the national security advisor to President Reagan and was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Persian Gulf War. The resume of the one professor in the president’s inner circle – Condoleezza Rice, now at Stanford University – included real-world experience on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Security Council. The efforts of the George H.W. Bush national security team on U.S.-Russia relations during German reunification were truly transformational in world affairs. So the question remains: How did so many smart – and experienced – people get it so wrong? What accounts for these failures?
Is the U.S. government not effective at long-term policy, strategy and planning?
Experienced practitioners have argued for years that there is no effective strategy office – one that aligns and integrates the U.S. diplomatic, military and economic instruments of statecraft – within and across the U.S. government. The once highly regarded State Department Policy Planning Staff has been relegated from the heights of the critical thinking done by containment architects George Kennan and Paul Nitze immediately after World War II to a speech writing and internal think tank. Containment is viewed with nostalgia by Cold War historians and security specialists. Historian John Lewis Gaddis of Yale points to Kennan’s late-1940s approach to “containing” the Soviet threat as a “great” grand strategy, one that the U.S. has not been able to replicate in the post-Cold War or post-9/11 periods. Gaddis (a University of Texas Ph.D.) points out the success in terms of the four decades of no wars with the Soviet Union, and no appeasement of Soviets expansionist aims.
For more current policy reviews, just ask Haass, the current president of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, who ran the State Department policy shop for Powell during the planning for the 2003 war. Haass’s account in “War of Necessity, War of Choice” includes a declassified, secret, “failed” policy paper on the problems expected in the reconstruction of Iraq. Haass laments that he, as well as Secretary Powell, was out of the loop and ineffectual in contributing to the core administration decision-making process. So if not in the State Department where should major policies be debated and analyzed? In the National Security Council – subject to presidential decision making styles and experiences, time constraints and electoral pressures?
Does current Washington partisanship paralyze government decision-making?
Sure, partisanship between Democrats and Republicans may be at an all-time high in the capital – and the political bickering clearly doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. But have we forgotten the Vietnam War when people reflect on the “bipartisanship” of the Cold War era? Or the Church Committee review of the CIA in the 1970s. Among other things, the agency was accused of experiments in mind-control drugs, foreign assassinations and domestic spying. Consider Iran-Contra during the Reagan administration? Recall the episodes involving national security staffer, Oliver North, running covert operations out of the White House, to trade arms with Iran for freeing American hostages in Lebanon, as well as violating congressional intent and U.S. laws to fund Nicaraguan Contra forces. Note that of the 14 people charged criminally in Iran-Contra, four received felony convictions after jury trials, and seven pleaded guilty to felonies or misdemeanors.
There are plenty of other examples of failed policy and decision-making throughout the post-Cold War and other periods of American history. What about the post-Persian Gulf War period that resulted in the Iraqi Shiite and Kurds being left to the mercy of Saddam Hussein in 1991? How about the Clinton era? In the failed state of Somalia, the well-intentioned George H.W. Bush administration efforts at famine relief were followed by the “Blackhawk Down” chase for a rogue warlord during Clinton’s first term. Rwanda, also during the Clinton administration, included the tragic U.N. and U.S. failures to prevent the slaughter of 500,000 to 1 million people. In sum, the U.S. record in foreign affairs remains mixed in Democratic and Republican administrations. Political partnership or bipartisanship in Washington cannot account for policy successes or failures.
For another more recent update, check out former State Department Iran expert Vali Nasr’s book, “Dispensable Nation,” about the policymaking muddle among the White House, the military, the CIA and the State Department. Democratic political appointee Nasr bluntly criticizes the Obama administration for ignoring the pragmatic approach of the late Richard Holbrooke, a seasoned diplomat who was chief architect of the Dayton accords that ended the war in the former Yugoslavia and became Obama’s special envoy for Afghanistan-Pakistan. Nasr pointedly criticizes the White House for seeking to pivot towards Asia and away from the very real threats and challenges of the Muslim world, and for placing electoral politics ahead of national security concerns.
Are national security affairs in an age of globalization just too complicated?
There is an argument that the issues of war and peace, in an age of globalization with the threats of shadowy terrorists, with the deep-seated sectarian and ethnic divisions, make it just too complicated to do much better. After all, the foreign policy elites and government officials mentioned above are all smart people. Many have spent their adult lives in foreign and defense agencies as well as in military service. Surely if there were answers they would know.
But time after time we find out that they really don’t know. See the CIA’s reports on the “intelligence” drawn from “Curveball” the Iraqi taxi driver in Germany, who is now described as a habitual liar intent on personally bringing down the Iraqi regime. We now know that Curveball, identified as former Iraqi chemical engineer Rafid Amed Alan al-Janabi, invented the claims about Iraq weapons of mass destruction that became part of Powell’s narrative in his 2003 U.N. Security Council briefing, as well as the intelligence community’s pre-2003 war National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq.
See also the decisions by Paul Bremer, head of the Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority, in ignoring his staff and disbanding the Iraq Army, firing Baathist Iraqi government officials and having to reverse course in short order after planning for a longer reign as America’s proconsul. See Powell’s mea culpa over his misleading U.N. testimony.
Or read the 9/11 Commission Report on systemic government failures before, during and after 9/11. Recent scorecards by a variety of experts, including the “Tenth Anniversary Report Card” by the 2001 Hamilton-Kean 9/11 Commission, continue to site the government’s failing grades in meeting the recommended changes to policy, strategy, and organizational reforms.
Perhaps no one really knows how to fix these problems?
Iraq in 2003, unfortunately, is not the exception that proves the rule. It is a prime example of why some argue that major reforms are long overdue or, as most agree, that at the very least these problems are worthy of serious presidential attention. The Project on National Security Reform, in two volumes of case studies of the post-World War II era, concludes that the national security system is antiquated and dangerous and undermines the tireless efforts of the talented men and women charged with protecting U.S. national security. After two years of serious study, recommendations in the project’s final 2011 report include the critical needs for improving: “comprehensive strategy; foresight and anticipatory governance; strategic management; interagency high-performance teaming; integrated and flexible national security resourcing; the role of Congress; public-private partnering and global networking; and our greatest strength – human capital.” That document, and others including a comprehensive study for building an integrated national security professional system, is online atpnsr.org. On July 31, 2012 they posted a press release pointing out that their efforts to transform the national security system had failed.
One dimension of the problem is that in the planning, programming and budgeting processes designed for ordinary times we have more internal, government red tape than would ever be tolerated in the private sector. Just read the reports of the Special Inspector General of Iraq Reconstruction on the waste, fraud and abuse in the spending of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq or in the corresponding program evaluations in Afghanistan (online at sigar.mil). In the rush to begin the necessary military operations in Afghanistan and the war of choice in Iraq, there was no time to get the accountants, contractors, auditors and lawyers on board.
Congressional oversight and its constitutional responsibilities to provide critical and timely assessments of administration policy, strategy, and operations, all are cited in the need for national security policy reforms. In general, the cost of opposition to a popular war, in a time of national emergency, clearly requires a strong political will as well as expertise in foreign and defense affairs. It has been argued that overwhelming congressional votes in support of 2003 executive branch initiatives (such as the use of force Iraq, the Patriot Act, etc.) in the immediate post-9/11 period reflects lessons learned from administration opponents in 1990 – those who opposed the Persian Gulf War and suffered the political consequences of nay votes.
The George W. Bush themes have now been turned into caricatures, screening out much of the real substance over the policy debates and lessons to be learned. So, of course, the litany of wrong statements bears repeating. Cheney warned of threatening Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Rice raised concerns about uncertainty over Iraq WMD programs leading to a future mushroom cloud. The Director of Central Intelligence called the case for Iraq weapons of mass destruction a slam dunk. At the United Nations, Powell warned of secretive mobile biological weapons laboratories. Deputy of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (a former ambassador, Senate staffer, political science professor and international affairs school dean) forecast U.S. troops being met as liberators and greeted with flowers. He also projected using Iraq oil revenues to finance their own reconstruction. I could go on.
In the end, however, it is still fair to ask why senior government officials didn’t know better than to think, or even say, that it would be relatively easy to overthrow a long-term dictator, reestablish a government, reconstruct a devastated country, create a civil society and depart in short order. It is also relevant and important to also ask why the national security systems, interagency processes and ultimately the U.S. government – institutions, organizations and people – all failed. Lessons should be learned, or the potential for real learning to develop a deeper understanding of the recurring problems, as well as the opportunities for pragmatic reforms to improve future effectiveness, will surely be lost.
Joseph Cerami is a senior lecturer in national security and director of the Public Service Leadership Program at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. He joined the Bush School in 2001 after a 30-year Army career. He has a doctorate from the Penn State School of Public Affairs and a master’s in government from the University of Texas. Cerami is the author of the book ‘Leadership and Policy Innovation – From Clinton to Bush Countering the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction.’
