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Practice
to Deceive
Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks' nightmare
scenario--it's their plan.
by
Joshua Micah Marshall
The
Washington Monthly, April , 2003
Imagine
it's six months from now. The Iraq war is over. After an initial burst
of joy and gratitude at being liberated from Saddam's rule, the people
of Iraq are watching, and waiting, and beginning to chafe under American
occupation. Across the border, in Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, our
conquering presence has brought street protests and escalating violence.
The United Nations and NATO are in disarray, so America is pretty much
on its own. Hemmed in by budget deficits at home and limited financial
assistance from allies, the Bush administration is talking again about
tapping Iraq's oil reserves to offset some of the costs of the American
presence--talk that is further inflaming the region. Meanwhile, U.S.
intelligence has discovered fresh evidence that, prior to the war, Saddam
moved quantities of biological and chemical weapons to Syria. When Syria
denies having such weapons, the administration starts massing troops
on the Syrian border. But as they begin to move, there is an explosion:
Hezbollah terrorists from southern Lebanon blow themselves up in a Baghdad
restaurant, killing dozens of Western aid workers and journalists. Knowing
that Hezbollah has cells in America, Homeland Security Secretary Tom
Ridge puts the nation back on Orange Alert. FBI agents start sweeping
through mosques, with a new round of arrests of Saudis, Pakistanis,
Palestinians, and Yemenis.
To most Americans, this would sound like a frightening state of affairs,
the kind that would lead them to wonder how and why we had got ourselves
into this mess in the first place. But to the Bush administration hawks
who are guiding American foreign policy, this isn't the nightmare scenario.
It's everything going as anticipated.
In their view, invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, about
getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons of mass
destruction, though their elimination was an important benefit. Rather,
the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider
effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East. Prior
to the war, the president himself never quite said this openly. But
hawkish neo-conservatives within his administration gave strong hints.
In February, Undersecretary of State John Bolton told Israeli officials
that after defeating Iraq, the United States would "deal with"
Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Meanwhile, neo-conservative journalists
have been channeling the administration's thinking. Late last month,
The Weekly Standard's Jeffrey Bell reported that the administration
has in mind a "world war between the United States and a political
wing of Islamic fundamentalism ... a war of such reach and magnitude
[that] the invasion of Iraq, or the capture of top al Qaeda commanders,
should be seen as tactical events in a series of moves and countermoves
stretching well into the future."
In short, the administration is trying to roll the table--to use U.S.
military force, or the threat of it, to reform or topple virtually every
regime in the region, from foes like Syria to friends like Egypt, on
the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these regimes that
ultimately breeds terrorism. So events that may seem negative--Hezbollah
for the first time targeting American civilians; U.S. soldiers preparing
for war with Syria--while unfortunate in themselves, are actually part
of the hawks' broader agenda. Each crisis will draw U.S. forces further
into the region and each countermove in turn will create problems that
can only be fixed by still further American involvement, until democratic
governments--or, failing that, U.S. troops--rule the entire Middle East.
There is a startling amount of deception in all this--of hawks deceiving
the American people, and perhaps in some cases even themselves. While
it's conceivable that bold American action could democratize the Middle
East, so broad and radical an initiative could also bring chaos and
bloodshed on a massive scale. That all too real possibility leads most
establishment foreign policy hands, including many in the State Department,
to view the Bush plan with alarm. Indeed, the hawks' record so far does
not inspire confidence. Prior to the invasion, for instance, they predicted
that if the United States simply announced its intention to act against
Saddam regardless of how the United Nations voted, most of our allies,
eager to be on our good side, would support us. Almost none did. Yet
despite such grave miscalculations, the hawks push on with their sweeping
new agenda.
Like any group of permanent Washington revolutionaries fueled by visions
of a righteous cause, the neo-cons long ago decided that criticism from
the establishment isn't a reason for self-doubt but the surest sign
that they're on the right track. But their confidence also comes from
the curious fact that much of what could go awry with their plan will
also serve to advance it. A full-scale confrontation between the United
States and political Islam, they believe, is inevitable, so why not
have it now, on our terms, rather than later, on theirs? Actually, there
are plenty of good reasons not to purposely provoke a series of crises
in the Middle East. But that's what the hawks are setting in motion,
partly on the theory that the worse things get, the more their approach
becomes the only plausible solution.
Moral Cloudiness
Ever since the neo-cons burst upon the public policy scene 30 years
ago, their movement has been a marriage of moral idealism, military
assertiveness, and deception. Back in the early 1970s, this group of
then-young and still mostly Democratic political intellectuals grew
alarmed by the post-Vietnam Democrats' seeming indifference to the Soviet
threat. They were equally appalled, however, by the amoral worldview
espoused by establishment Republicans like Henry Kissinger, who sought
co-existence with the Soviet Union. As is often the case with ex-socialists,
the neocons were too familiar with communist tactics to ignore or romanticize
communism's evils. The fact that many neocons were Jewish, and outraged
by Moscow's increasingly visible persecution of Jews, also caused them
to reject both the McGovernite and Kissingerian tendencies to ignore
such abuses.
In Ronald Reagan, the neo-cons found a politician they could embrace.
Like them, Reagan spoke openly about the evils of communism and, at
least on the peripheries of the Cold War, preferred rollback to coexistence.
Neo-cons filled the Reagan administration, and men like Paul Wolfowitz,
Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, and others provided the intellectual ballast
and moral fervor for the sharp turn toward confrontation that the United
States adopted in 1981.
But achieving moral clarity often requires hiding certain realities.
From the beginning, the neo-cons took a much more alarmist view of Soviet
capacities and intentions than most experts. As late as 1980, the ur-neo-con
Norman Podhoretz warned of the imminent "Finlandization of America,
the political and economic subordination of the United States to superior
Soviet power," even raising the possibility that America's only
options might be "surrender or war." We now know, of course,
that U.S. intelligence estimates, which many neocons thought underestimated
the magnitude and durability of Soviet power, in fact wildly overestimated
them.
This willingness to deceive--both themselves and others--expanded as
neo-cons grew more comfortable with power. Many spent the Reagan years
orchestrating bloody wars against Soviet proxies in the Third World,
portraying thugs like the Nicaraguan Contras and plain murderers like
Jonas Savimbi of Angola as "freedom fighters." The nadir of
this deceit was the Iran-Contra scandal, for which Podhoretz's son-in-law,
Elliot Abrams, pled guilty to perjury. Abrams was later pardoned by
Bush's father, and today, he runs Middle East policy in the Bush White
House.
But in the end, the Soviet Union did fall. And the hawks' policy of
confrontation did contribute to its collapse. So too, of course, did
the economic and military rot most of the hawks didn't believe in, and
the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, whom neo-cons such as Richard Perle
counseled Reagan not to trust. But the neo-cons did not dwell on what
they got wrong. Rather, the experience of having played a hand in the
downfall of so great an evil led them to the opposite belief: that it's
okay to be spectacularly wrong, even brazenly deceptive about the details,
so long as you have moral vision and a willingness to use force.
What happened in the 1990s further reinforced that mindset. Hawks like
Perle and William Kristol pulled their hair out when Kissingerians like
Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell left Saddam's regime in place after
the first Gulf War. They watched with mounting fury as terrorist attacks
by Muslim fundamentalists claimed more and more American and Israeli
lives. They considered the Oslo accords an obvious mistake (how can
you negotiate with a man like Yasir Arafat?), and as the decade progressed
they became increasingly convinced that there was a nexus linking burgeoning
terrorism and mounting anti-Semitism with repressive but nominally "pro-American"
regimes like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In 1996, several of the hawks--including
Perle--even tried to sell Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
on the idea that Israel should attack Saddam on its own--advice Netanyahu
wisely declined. When the Oslo process crumbled and Saudi Arabian terrorists
killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11, the hawks felt, not without some justification,
that they had seen this danger coming all along, while others had ignored
it. The timing was propitious, because in September 2001 many already
held jobs with a new conservative president willing to hear their pitch.
Prime Minister bin Laden
The pitch was this: The Middle East today is like the Soviet Union 30
years ago. Politically warped fundamentalism is the contemporary equivalent
of communism or fascism. Terrorists with potential access to weapons
of mass destruction are like an arsenal pointed at the United States.
The primary cause of all this danger is the Arab world's endemic despotism,
corruption, poverty, and economic stagnation. Repressive regimes channel
dissent into the mosques, where the hopeless and disenfranchised are
taught a brand of Islam that combines anti-modernism, anti-Americanism,
and a worship of violence that borders on nihilism. Unable to overthrow
their own authoritarian rulers, the citizenry turns its fury against
the foreign power that funds and supports these corrupt regimes to maintain
stability and access to oil: the United States. As Johns Hopkins University
professor Fouad Ajami recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, "The
great indulgence granted to the ways and phobias of Arabs has reaped
a terrible harvest"--terrorism. Trying to "manage" this
dysfunctional Islamic world, as Clinton attempted and Colin Powell counsels
us to do, is as foolish, unproductive, and dangerous as détente was
with the Soviets, the hawks believe. Nor is it necessary, given the
unparalleled power of the American military. Using that power to confront
Soviet communism led to the demise of that totalitarianism and the establishment
of democratic (or at least non-threatening) regimes from the Black Sea
to the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait. Why not use that same power
to upend the entire corrupt Middle East edifice and bring liberty, democracy,
and the rule of law to the Arab world?
The hawks' grand plan differs depending on whom you speak to, but the
basic outline runs like this: The United States establishes a reasonably
democratic, pro-Western government in Iraq--assume it falls somewhere
between Turkey and Jordan on the spectrum of democracy and the rule
of law. Not perfect, representative democracy, certainly, but a system
infinitely preferable to Saddam's. The example of a democratic Iraq
will radically change the political dynamics of the Middle East. When
Palestinians see average Iraqis beginning to enjoy real freedom and
economic opportunity, they'll want the same themselves. With that happy
prospect on one hand and implacable United States will on the other,
they'll demand that the Palestinian Authority reform politically and
negotiate with Israel. That in turn will lead to a real peace deal between
the Israelis and Palestinians. A democratic Iraq will also hasten the
fall of the fundamentalist Shi'a mullahs in Iran, whose citizens are
gradually adopting anti-fanatic, pro-Western sympathies. A democratized
Iran would create a string of democratic, pro-Western governments (Turkey,
Iraq, and Iran) stretching across the historical heartland of Islam.
Without a hostile Iraq towering over it, Jordan's pro-Western Hashemite
monarchy would likely come into full bloom. Syria would be no more than
a pale reminder of the bad old days. (If they made trouble, a U.S. invasion
would take care of them, too.) And to the tiny Gulf emirates making
hesitant steps toward democratization, the corrupt regimes of Saudi
Arabia and Egypt would no longer look like examples of stability and
strength in a benighted region, but holdouts against the democratic
tide. Once the dust settles, we could decide whether to ignore them
as harmless throwbacks to the bad old days or deal with them, too. We'd
be in a much stronger position to do so since we'd no longer require
their friendship to help us manage ugly regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria.
The audacious nature of the neocons' plan makes it easy to criticize
but strangely difficult to dismiss outright. Like a character in a bad
made-for-TV thriller from the 1970s, you can hear yourself saying, "That
plan's just crazy enough to work."
But like a TV plot, the hawks' vision rests on a willing suspension
of disbelief, in particular, on the premise that every close call will
break in our favor: The guard will fall asleep next to the cell so our
heroes can pluck the keys from his belt. The hail of enemy bullets will
plink-plink-plink over our heroes' heads. And the getaway car in the
driveway will have the keys waiting in the ignition. Sure, the hawks'
vision could come to pass. But there are at least half a dozen equally
plausible alternative scenarios that would be disastrous for us.
To begin with, this whole endeavor is supposed to be about reducing
the long-term threat of terrorism, particularly terrorism that employs
weapons of mass destruction. But, to date, every time a Western or non-Muslim
country has put troops into Arab lands to stamp out violence and terror,
it has awakened entire new terrorist organizations and a generation
of recruits. Placing U.S. troops in Riyadh after the Gulf War (to protect
Saudi Arabia and its oilfields from Saddam) gave Osama bin Laden a cause
around which he built al Qaeda. Israel took the West Bank in a war of
self-defense, but once there its occupation helped give rise to Hamas.
Israel's incursion into southern Lebanon (justified at the time, but
transformed into a permanent occupation) led to the rise of Hezbollah.
Why do we imagine that our invasion and occupation of Iraq, or whatever
countries come next, will turn out any differently?
The Bush administration also insists that our right to act preemptively
and unilaterally, with or without the international community's formal
approval, rests on the need to protect American lives. But with the
exception of al Qaeda, most terrorist organizations in the world, and
certainly in the Middle East, do not target Americans. Hamas certainly
doesn't. Hezbollah, the most fearsome of terrorist organizations beside
al Qaeda, has killed American troops in the Middle East, but not for
some years, and it has never targeted American civilians on American
soil. Yet like Hamas, Hezbollah has an extensive fundraising cell operation
in the States (as do many terrorist organizations, including the Irish
Republican Army). If we target them in the Middle East, can't we reasonably
assume they will respond by activating these cells and taking the war
worldwide?
Next, consider the hawks' plans for those Middle East states that are
authoritarian yet "friendly" to the United States--specifically
Egypt and Saudi Arabia. No question these are problem countries. Their
governments buy our weapons and accept our foreign aid yet allow vicious
anti-Semitism to spew from the state run airwaves and tolerate clerics
who preach jihad against the West. But is it really in our interests
to work for their overthrow? Many hawks clearly think so. I asked Richard
Perle last year about the dangers that might flow from the fall of Egyptian
President Hosni Mubarak. "Mubarak is no great shakes," he
quipped. "Surely we can do better than Mubarak." When I asked
Perle's friend and fellow Reagan-era neocon Ken Adelman to calculate
the costs of having the toppling of Saddam lead to the overthrow of
the House of Saud, he shot back: "All the better if you ask me."
This cavalier call for regime change, however, runs into a rather obvious
problem. When the communist regimes of Eastern and Central Europe fell
after 1989, the people of those nations felt grateful to the United
States because we helped liberate them from their Russian colonial masters.
They went on to create pro-Western democracies. The same is unlikely
to happen, however, if we help "liberate" Saudi Arabia and
Egypt. The tyrannies in these countries are home grown, and the U.S.
government has supported them, rightly or wrongly, for decades, even
as we've ignored (in the eyes of Arabs) the plight of the Palestinians.
Consequently, the citizens of these countries generally hate the United
States, and show strong sympathy for Islamic radicals. If free elections
were held in Saudi Arabia today, Osama bin Laden would probably win
more votes than Crown Prince Abdullah. Topple the pro-Western autocracies
in these countries, in other words, and you won't get pro-Western democracies
but anti-Western tyrannies.
To this dilemma, the hawks offer two responses. One is that eventually
the citizens of Egypt and Saudi Arabia will grow disenchanted with their
anti-Western Islamic governments, just as the people of Iran have, and
become our friends. To which the correct response is, well, sure, that's
a nice theory, but do we really want to make the situation for ourselves
hugely worse now on the strength of a theoretical future benefit?
The hawks' other response is that if the effort to push these countries
toward democracy goes south, we can always use our military might to
secure our interests. "We need to be more assertive," argues
Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, "and
stop letting all these two-bit dictators and rogue regimes push us around
and stop being a patsy for our so-called allies, especially in Saudi
Arabia." Hopefully, in Boot's view, laying down the law will be
enough. But he envisions a worst-case scenario that would involve the
United States "occupying the Saudi's oil fields and administering
them as a trust for the people of the region."
What Boot is calling for, in other words, is the creation of a de facto
American empire in the Middle East. In fact, there's a subset of neo-cons
who believe that given our unparalleled power, empire is our destiny
and we might as well embrace it. The problem with this line of thinking
is, of course, that it ignores the lengthy and troubling history of
imperial ambitions, particularly in the Middle East. The French and
the English didn't leave voluntarily; they were driven out. And they
left behind a legacy of ignorance, exploitation, and corruption that's
largely responsible for the region's current dysfunctional politics.
Another potential snafu for the hawks is Iran, arguably the most dangerous
state in the Middle East. The good news is that the fundamentalist Shi'a
mullahs who have been running the government, exporting terrorism, and
trying to enrich their uranium, are increasingly unpopular. Most experts
believe that the mullahs' days are numbered, and that true democracy
will come to Iran. That day will arrive sooner, the hawks argue, with
a democratic Iraq on Iran's border. But the opposite could happen. If
the mullahs are smart, they'll cooperate just enough with the Americans
not to provoke an attack, but put themselves forth to their own people
as defenders of Iranian independence and Iran's brother Shi'a in southern
Iraq who are living under the American jackboot. Such a strategy might
keep the fundamentalists in power for years longer than they otherwise
might have been.
Then there is the mother of all problems, Iraq. The hawks' whole plan
rests on the assumption that we can turn it into a self-governing democracy--that
the very presence of that example will transform politics in the Middle
East. But what if we can't really create a democratic, self-governing
Iraq, at least not very quickly? What if the experience we had after
World War II in Germany and Japan, two ethnically homogeneous nations,
doesn't quite work in an ethnically divided Iraq where one group, the
Sunni Arabs, has spent decades repressing and slaughtering the others?
As one former Army officer with long experience with the Iraq file explains
it, the "physical analogy to Saddam Hussein's regime is a steel
beam in compression." Give it one good hit, and you'll get a violent
explosion. One hundred thousand U.S. troops may be able to keep a lid
on all the pent-up hatred. But we may soon find that it's unwise to
hand off power to the fractious Iraqis. To invoke the ugly but apt metaphor
which Jefferson used to describe the American dilemma of slavery, we
will have the wolf by the ears. You want to let go. But you dare not.
And what if we do muster the courage to allow elections, but the Iraqis
choose a government we can't live with--as the Japanese did in their
first post-war election, when the United States purged the man slated
to become prime minister? But if we do that in Iraq, how will it look
on Al Jazeera? Ultimately, the longer we stay as occupiers, the more
Iraq becomes not an example for other Arabs to emulate, but one that
helps Islamic fundamentalists make their case that America is just an
old-fashioned imperium bent on conquering Arab lands. And that will
make worse all the problems set forth above.
None of these problems are inevitable, of course. Luck, fortitude, deft
management, and help from allies could bring about very different results.
But we can probably only rely on the first three because we are starting
this enterprise over the expressed objections of almost every other
country in the world. And that's yet another reason why overthrowing
the Middle East won't be the same as overthrowing communism. We did
the latter, after all, within a tight formal alliance, NATO. Reagan's
most effective military move against Moscow, for instance, placing Pershing
II missiles in Western Europe, could never have happened, given widespread
public protests, except that NATO itself voted to let the weapons in.
In the Middle East, however, we're largely alone. If things go badly,
what allies we might have left are liable to say to us: You broke it,
you fix it.
Whacking the Hornet's Nest
If the Bush administration has thought through these various negative
scenarios--and we must presume, or at least pray, that it has--it certainly
has not shared them with the American people. More to the point, the
president has not even leveled with the public that such a clean-sweep
approach to the Middle East is, in fact, their plan. This breaks new
ground in the history of pre-war presidential deception. Franklin Roosevelt
said he was trying to keep the United States out of World War II even
as he--in some key ways--courted a confrontation with the Axis powers
that he saw as both inevitable and necessary. History has judged him
well for this. Far more brazenly, Lyndon Johnson's administration greatly
exaggerated the Gulf of Tonkin incident to gin up support for full-throttle
engagement in Vietnam. The war proved to be Johnson's undoing. When
President Clinton used American troops to quell the fighting in Bosnia
he said publicly that our troops would be there no longer than a year,
even though it was widely understood that they would be there far longer.
But in the case of these deceptions, the public was at least told what
the goals of the wars were and whom and where we would be fighting.
Today, however, the great majority of the American people have no concept
of what kind of conflict the president is leading them into. The White
House has presented this as a war to depose Saddam Hussein in order
to keep him from acquiring weapons of mass destruction--a goal that
the majority of Americans support. But the White House really has in
mind an enterprise of a scale, cost, and scope that would be almost
impossible to sell to the American public. The White House knows that.
So it hasn't even tried. Instead, it's focused on getting us into Iraq
with the hope of setting off a sequence of events that will draw us
inexorably towards the agenda they have in mind.
The brazenness of this approach would be hard to believe if it weren't
entirely in line with how the administration has pursued so many of
its other policy goals. Its preferred method has been to use deceit
to create faits accomplis, facts on the ground that then make the administration's
broader agenda almost impossible not to pursue. During and after the
2000 campaign, the president called for major education and prescription
drug programs plus a huge tax cut, saying America could easily afford
them all because of large budget surpluses. Critics said it wasn't true,
and the growing budget deficits have proven them right. But the administration
now uses the existence of big budget deficits as a way to put the squeeze
on social programs--part of its plan all along. Strip away the presidential
seal and the fancy titles, and it's just a straight-up con.
The same strategy seemed to guide the administration's passive-aggressive
attitude towards our allies. It spent the months after September 11
signaling its distaste for international agreements and entangling alliances.
The president then demanded last September that the same countries he
had snubbed support his agenda in Iraq. And last month, when most of
those countries refused, hawks spun that refusal as evidence that they
were right all along. Recently, a key neo-conservative commentator with
close ties to the administration told me that the question since the
end of the Cold War has been which global force would create the conditions
for global peace and security: the United States, NATO, or the United
Nations. With NATO now wrecked, he told me, the choice is between the
Unites States and the United Nations. Whether NATO is actually wrecked
remains to be seen. But the strategy is clear: push the alliance to
the breaking point, and when it snaps, cite it as proof that the alliance
was good for nothing anyway. It's the definition of chutzpah, like the
kid who kills his parents and begs the judge for sympathy because he's
an orphan.
Another president may be able to rebuild NATO or get the budget back
in balance. But once America begins the process of remaking the Middle
East in the way the hawks have in mind, it will be extremely difficult
for any president to pull back. Vietnam analogies have long been overused,
and used inappropriately, but this may be one case where the comparison
is apt.
Ending Saddam Hussein's regime and replacing it with something stable
and democratic was always going to be a difficult task, even with the
most able leadership and the broadest coalition. But doing it as the
Bush administration now intends is something like going outside and
giving a few good whacks to a hornets' nest because you want to get
them out in the open and have it out with them once and for all. Ridding
the world of Islamic terrorism by rooting out its ultimate sources--Muslim
fundamentalism and the Arab world's endemic despotism, corruption, and
poverty--might work. But the costs will be immense. Whether the danger
is sufficient and the costs worth incurring would make for an interesting
public debate. The problem is that once it's just us and the hornets,
we really won't have any choice.
Joshua Micah Marshall, a Washington Monthly contributing writer,
is author of the Talking
Points Memo.
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