Footnote to Wednesday's Post

What passes for diplomacy in this Administration is repeated, categorical statements of what we think should happen, coupled with wildly overoptimisic estimates of how much support we have around the world. No one excels U. N. Ambassador John Bolton at these techniques, but he really outdid himself yesterday. According to this morning's New York Times, Bolton has been pushing (as the U.S. did in Lebanon) for a "chapter VII" resolution--the chapter of the UN Charter that involves authorizing the use of force. Russia and China oppose this. The Times continues:

"Sounding a note of exasperation, Mr. Bolton protested as 'simply incorrect' the interpretation that Chapter VII sets a precedent for military force, as many countries at the United Nations believe it did in Iraq.
'It would require a separate resolution, if one were needed, ot authorize force,' he said."

The U.S. government did, of course, propose a second resolution on Iraq in 2003--but it didn't wait for it to pass.

Later in the story, Mr. Bolton insists that he will not allow a vote on a new resolution to be delayed by endless discussions.

"We are going to continue to work on it," he said, "but we're not going to work on it at the cost of losing sending a swift and strong response."

That the response might lose its effect if the United States had to make it without majority support has, apparently, never occurred to him. The United States has the job of deciding what has to be done; the rest of the world has the job of agreeing, and if they don't, so much the worse for them. We shall pay dearly for this.

A Plea for Sanity

While most thinking people understand that the Bush Administration’s foreign policies have been disastrous, they probably underestimate how hard it will be to undo their effects and how influential their underlying assumptions have become over the last six years. For thirty years the US managed, with considerable difficulty, to maintain critical political footholds in the Middle East by cultivating moderate Arab regimes and encouraging peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Now the peace process seems dead (in large part because President Bush in 2002 announced that Israel would be able to annex as much territory as it could settle), we have alienated all the Arab peoples and many of their regimes, and Arab Iraq within ten years will probably be ruled by one or two fundamentalist dictatorships. More troubling still, however, is the way neoconservative thought has become mainstream—most notably in everyone’s reaction to the North Korean purported test of a nuclear weapon and to the Iranian nuclear program.

For at least the firsts thirty years of the nuclear age, our diplomatic positions reflected sound and impartial principles. In 1945, after thirty years of intermittent world conflict, the United States remained committed to a world of sovereign states. The Atlantic Charter of 1941, the foundation of our war aims, simply called for a world in which nations would be free to choose their own form of government, and the UN Charter guaranteed the territorial integrity of all UN members and banned war except in self-defense. The United States attacked the problem of nuclear weapons (which we had created) within this framework. Initially it called for international control of atomic energy and general nuclear disarmament, but the Soviets rejected that plan. During the 1950s the Eisenhower Administration appeared to accept (and even promote) the spread of nuclear weapons, but during the 1960s Democratic and Republican administrations took two huge steps to stop their spread: the Test Ban Treaty of 1963 and the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1969. Under the latter treaty, the existing nuclear powers (with the exceptions of France and China, who signed much later, and Israel, which has never acknowledged its status) promised not to spread nuclear weapons, and those non-nuclear states who signed promised not to acquire them. But the treaty also included (and still includes) an obligation for the existing nuclear powers to work for general nuclear disarmament. Strategic arms treaties were the only step the Soviets (and later Russians) and Americans took in that direction.

Since the 1990s India and Pakistan have become full-fledged members of the nuclear club, and North Korea now claims to have joined them. (We would be wise, I think, to await indisputable scientific confirmation that their test was nuclear before treating this as a certainty. Communist regimes have bluffed before.) The Bush Administration has not only called the accession of North Korea and Iran to the club unacceptable on numerous occasions but has also publicly threatened to overthrow any hostile regime that seeks nuclear weapons. Everyone seems to have forgotten that we have no legal basis for making claims like this.

No binding, permanent international law forbids nations from developing any weapon they choose. They can, indeed, renounce weapons by treaty, but the Non-proliferation treaty can, as the North Koreans should have reminded us, be denounced. (The Iranians remain a party.) The argument our government has been making, and which no political figure of either party seems willing to challenge head on, is that nuclear weapons should be limited to nations whom we think should have them. It is, in short, a claim by the United States to rule the world, at least so far as this area of military weaponry goes. And it is not surprising, of course, that when the Bush Administration—at the height of its confidence in American military power—put North Korea and Iran within the “axis of evil” and proclaimed the demise of their governments as a goal of American foreign policy, at least one of those two governments decided that it had better acquire nuclear weapons as soon as possible.

Three huge problems, it seems to me, come out of this position. First of all, we have abandoned the dream of establishing rules for every nation to live by (as we have also done with respect to torture), and substituted the old Athenian rule (which did not save Athens from catastrophe), “the strong do what they will and the weak do what they must.” But the second problem is more practical: no other nation is likely to accept this in the long run. While our European allies on the one hand, and our Asian allies on the other, have agreed that Iran and North Korea should not develop nuclear weapons and have tried diplomatically (that is, in a manner that acknowledges those nations’ freedom of action) to dissuade them from doing so, they have not agreed that we have a right to make war to stop them. And the third problem is similar to the one that has emerged in Iraq: we cannot carry out grandiose schemes for remaking the world without real coalitions such as the one George H. W. Bush put together in 1990-1 to liberate Kuwait. In short, our new policy fails as an impartial moral guide to behavior, lacks significant international support, and cannot, for those very reasons, be successfully executed.

Our whole foreign policy establishment seems to be drunk on the idea of the United States as the world’s strongest power, capable, in theory, of achieving everything it wants. I am not aware of any elected official who has bluntly stated that the transformation of Iraq was beyond our capabilities and should never have been attempted—but that is, I think, a fact. In the same way, I have not heard anyone acknowledge, as our own government did in 1965, that if we want other nations to forsake nuclear weapons we must in principle at least agree eventually to abandon them ourselves. Since the United States, Israel, and the nations of Western Europe seem at this moment to be at by far the greatest risk of a nuclear attack and will never have any real defense against a terrorist strike, I do not think that this would be an unwise goal to adopt. And it was in fact endorsed, repeatedly, by one postwar American President. His name was Ronald Reagan.

The new scandal

Seven or eight years ago, at the height of the Lewinsky scandal, I argued repeatedly to my Republican friends that private sexual matters should be kept out of politics. I even wrote an op-ed speculating about how the public revelation of the affairs of Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt or Martin Luther King, Jr., might have changed the course of history, but I couldn’t find a home for it. Now, faced with the Foley scandal, I have to ask myself some hard questions about applying the same standard to this regrettable situation.

Certainly Representative Foley emerges from his instant messages as a very disturbed middle-aged man. They are tasteless, childish, extraordinarily adolescent, and unbelievably indiscreet. He seems to have seen himself like a teenager trying on homosexuality. For the record, however, I do not believe that what he did, based upon what we know so far, should be treated as a crime. The concept of an age of consent is an old one, and in Washington, D. C. in is 16. I would not favor raising it; I have already read about too many prosecutions of 16-year old boys who had sex with 14-year old girls (including one young Kansan who not only impregnated the girl, but married her.) Foley obviously was taking advantage of the charisma of his position as a Congressman, but such things have happened (more commonly in a heterosexual context) for centuries, and there is no way to stop them. (The contemporary feminist argument that such affairs always represent the exploitation of the powerless by the powerful is much too simplistic. Actually it is the lesser person in the hierarchy who often feels more power in such cases.) Foley did not, according to what we know so far, use his position actually to extort sex or threaten pages who did not respond to his advances.

What gives the scandal its interest, it seems to me, is the monstrous Republican hypocrisy that it has revealed (and that may have had something to do with it in the first place.) Foley, who had made legislation against child sexual predators one of his main planks, had gotten away with his behavior for years in full view of his Republican colleagues. Two or three Republican staffers or Congressmen state that Dennis Hastert or his staff had been informed, and they did nothing. But that is not all. The Republican-appointed clerk of the house, who has just resigned (and whose resignation was not commemorated in the usual fashion on the House floor), was gay. So was Foley’s former administrative assistant, who had tried to bring the problem to Hastert’s attention. Indeed, according to the New York Times, there is a considerable network of gay Republican house staffers who are now keeping a very low profile. Meanwhile, no one has ever uncovered anything further about “Jeff Gannon”, the male prostitute who visited the White House dozens of times for purposes that have never been revealed, meanwhile posing as a reporter who fed Scot McClellan softball questions.

The House Republicans, in short, while railing against gay marriage, outlawing gays in the military, and relying largely on the homophobic religious right, have, inevitably, tolerated a substantial gay presence in their midst. That might even explain why Dennis Hastert and his office was so reluctant to do anything about Foley—they knew that revelations would not stop with him. The Republican Party’s anti-gay stance, like claims of imminent victory in Iraq, simply denies reality. Gays are here, even in Republican politics (indeed, they always have been), and are not going away. The sooner we learn to treat them like other Americans, the better off we will all be. But the Republican Party is clinging to the razor-thin majority that has enabled it to exercise almost absolute power for the last four years, and increasingly relying upon constituencies who apparently regard homosexuality as a temptation to which only the weak succumb. (As a lifelong, hopeless heterosexual, this is a view I have never been able to understand.) So desperate are the Republicans to deal with this inevitable gulf between their rhetoric and their behavior that they have begun to argue that the pages somehow entrapped Foley, or that Democrats are somehow to blame for the whole affair. Speaker Hastert’s odd behavior and shell-shocked demeanor suggest that he in fact knows a good deal more than he has let on.

Electoral-vote.com, my favorite source, now shows the Democrats with a tie in the Senate and a 4-5 seat majority in the House, based upon the most recent polls. All week the Democrats have gained a house seat about once every two days. In my opinion the real reason is that the Republicans’ proudest achievement—their ability to “stay on message”—is catching up to them. Their statements on major issues are simply not credible, and they are not what they claim to be. Perhaps more and more Americans seem to feel that they need to be taught a lesson.

Inside the War on Terror

Some weeks ago I referred briefly to Ron Suskind’s new book, The One Percent Doctrine, one of a series (including those by James Risen and now, Bob Woodward) attempting to uncover the inner workings of the most secretive Presidency since Richard Nixon. I have now had a chance to read it all, and while it is frustrating and in some ways disappointing, it contains a great deal of information both about the war on terror and about the way the White House works.

Suskind, who has left the Wall Street Journal, has essentially built a new career out of befriending those who could not stick with the Bush Administration. His first book focused on domestic policy through the eyes of Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, while this one draws heavily on George Tenet and a number of lesser figures within the CIA. Although Suskind spends too much time of atmospherics for my taste, his sources told him a lot about how the war on terror has really been going and how it has been waged. Brutal interrogations, evidently, have contributed relatively little—raids on Al Queda safe houses that turned up hard drives and documents have provided far more real information—something that will come as no surprise to any trained historian or intelligence professional. One of the first victims of our new interrogation tactics, Abu Zubaydah, was clearly a mentally disturbed individual who could not possibly be relied upon in any case. But according to Suskind’s sources, the President, has been deeply interested and involved in interrogations of suspects from the beginning. Being himself the kind of man who prefers to size people up in person rather than read up on them, he apparently believed that this was the way to find out about the next attack on the US. Not surprisingly, suspects in the midst of harsh interrogations have given up long lists of targets, but most, or even all, of them have not panned out.

This leads to one of Suskind’s main points: that the President insists on relying upon his instincts, and, inevitably, those around him have been reduced to the role of trying to validate them. The title of his book comes from Vice President Cheney’s belief that the Administration had to act to prevent anything that might happen, no matter how low the probability. This prejudices the leadership towards any indication that the worst is really likely, and makes it harder for them to face complex truths. The President himself was amazed to learn that Zawahiri, Al Queda’s second in command (whose death was falsely assumed in 2002 when some one else’s head was sold to the CIA as his), had canceled an attack on New York subways a year or two after 9/11. Even Suskind does not dare play with a fairly obvious conclusion. The 9/11 attacks brought American troops and Jihad into Afghanistan, and then into the heart of the Arab world in Iraq—a godsend to Osama Bin Laden, as many have noted. Another attack on the United States might actually destroy his sanctuary in Pakistan. Extremism is already winning the growing struggle in the Muslim world, and there is no need to risk the impact of the deaths of hundreds or thousands of additional Americans now.

What successes we have had—and there have been quite a few—have come from cooperation with foreign intelligence services in places like Pakistan, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. Cooperation hasn’t been perfect; the governments of those nations are obviously walking a tightrope (and as American policies in the Middle East make their lives more difficult, they will probably tack further towards the side of the insurgents.) Tenet, by his own account, became the key American diplomatic envoy to the region, relaying critical messages directly to his intelligence counterparts. Two CIA directors later, one wonders how well that cooperation has held up since his departure.

Suskind’s measured, often elliptical prose, struck me as inadequate to the task he had set himself. It is an almost conscious counterpoint to the blunt, often faith-based assertions of the Administration. He knows he belongs to the “reality-based community” which the Administration disdains, but he writes almost as an impartial observer, rather than as a partisan of rationality. I personally doubt that this kind of stance is a luxury members of the reality-based community can afford. In the same way, sooner or later, the religious right will have to be challenged by a renaissance of militant atheism if religion is going to return to its rightful place within an Enlightenment democracy—that is, a source of personal comfort rather than a reference point for public policy.

The One Percent Solution confirmed my belief that the Administration will not change its course, and my conviction that we must separate the actual war on terror—the identification and neutralization of terrorist networks—from our misguided plans to use American force to transform the Middle East. It highlights what is probably the worst threat we face—an alliance between Pakistani nuclear no-how and terrorists—but suggests that intergovernmental cooperation took care of that at a relatively early stage. (Much post-9/11 hysteria arose after a report of a meeting between Pakistani scientists and Bin Laden.) It suggests that traditional tools, enhanced by digital methods, can be successful enough against the terrorist threat to the United States, while taking no position on the future of the Middle East. But the Bush Administration, whatever the outcome of the midterm elections, will continue its apparently hopeless fight in Iraq, and may well send air strikes against Iran to try to eliminate its supposed (though certainly not yet actual) nuclear capability.

One passage from the book particularly caught my eye:

"The Cheney Doctrine released George W. Bush from his area of greatest weakness--the analytical abilities so prized in America's professional class--and freed his decision making to rely on inmpulse and improvisation to a dgree that was without precedent for a modern president."

On October 21, 2004, I posted "George W. Bush: Man of the Sixties." The President frequently refers to the supposedly discredited mantra of that era, "If it feels good, do it--if you've got a problem, blame some one else." But is there really any difference between relying on "impulse and improvisation" and simply doing what feels good? Isn't the Administration increasingly blaming the Democratic Party and the media for its woes? We are all, alas, marked by our generational impulses to some degree or another--whatever our politics.

Kissinger then and now

For exactly 35 years I have been plying my trade as a professional historian, teaching, doing archival research, and writing. My work has usually (although not always) concentrated on great questions of war and peace, the questions that dominated professional history at its inception in the mid-nineteenth century in Germany and elsewhere, and which have produced in my judgment most of the greatest works in the western historical tradition. In recent years I have been able to improve my efficiency considerably with the help of contemporary technology. Most of the research for my current project (on the United States, Cuba, and covert action in the early 1960s, including assassination plots against both Castro and Kennedy) is stored on Excel spreadsheets, which not only enable me to find half-forgotten data within seconds, but also creates the text of footnotes to order. Meanwhile, in an even more important trend, huge collections of data such as Foreign Relations of the United States are becoming available online. Inevitably this trend will go on until entire archives can be accessed instantaneously from anywhere in the world, opening up undreamed-of opportunities for scholarship.

Paradoxically, however, while these opportunities have grown, my own profession has lost interest not only in questions of war and peace, but in how governments make decisions. My contemporaries in academia decided around the time I was starting my career that the state in general, and war in particular, were evil—largely because they were dominated by white males—and that one might make such evils atrophy by ignoring them. Diplomatic and military history are extinct in many major departments (although they still have beachheads at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania), and many very bright students pass through college history programs without learning basic historic political facts. (About fifteen years ago a colleague told me she had met a graduate student who could not identify the Weimar Republic.) Never have we had so many opportunities to learn, and so little enthusiasm for learning.

Because young reporters learn, or fail to learn, basic research tools in college, this trend is having an effect on the media as well. Today’s media stars have no time for sustained analysis—they want sound bites that they can read on 60 Minutes. This brings me to Bob Woodward’s new book, in which he evidently turns on the Bush Administration with the zeal of an apostate. Much could be written about the data that has already emerged from it, but I am going to focus on one small point—a memo from Henry Kissinger to Richard Nixon, written in September 1969, raising questions about American troop withdrawals. According to Woodward, Kissinger has been citing our Vietnam experience (and perhaps this memo) to argue that we must not even begin troop withdrawals from Iraq, so as not to set off an irresistible momentum. Intrigued, I went right to the State Department website, opened the correct chronological portion of the on-line volume of Foreign Relations, searched for “salted peanuts”—a featured phrase—and found the memo. It is a great deal more interesting than Woodward let on.

Vietnamization was, of course, an exact parallel to our supposed current strategy in Iraq—that of training Iraqi forces to take over for us. President Nixon had already adopted it as a pillar of his strategy, although when Kissinger wrote his memo Nixon had announced only one entirely trivial troop withdrawal. (The main pressure for troop withdrawals came from the Pentagon, where military leaders knew the war was wrecking the American military. Donald Rumsfeld may in fact still be Secretary of Defense for a related reason—that the President and Vice President know that only he would hold out against the advice of our military leaders to wind the conflict down.) What is truly striking about the Kissinger memo is his recognition that the strategy was not going to work, that our allies were fatally weak, and that, implicitly, Hanoi was almost certain to win the war.

With extraordinary accuracy, Kissinger outlined the probable course of Vietnamization in September 1969:

“’Vietnamization’ must be considered both with regard to its prospects for allowing us to turn the war over to the Vietnamese, and with regard to its effect on Hanoi and U.S. public opinion. I am not optimistic about the ability of the South Vietnamese armed forces to assume a larger part of the burden than current MACV plans allow. These plans, however, call for a thirty-month period in which to turn the burden

of the war over to the GVN. I do not believe we have this much time. “

In fact, the Administration did have that much time, but the 30-month period Kissinger foresaw took it exactly to March 1972, the eve of Hanoi’s next huge offensive, which during the next two months nearly brought down the Saigon government. Only the remaining American advisors and a huge infusion of American air power halted that offensive, although the North Vietnamese emerged in a much stronger position than before. Kissinger, however, could not have been very surprised by all this. As he wrote in the same memo:

“The more troops are withdrawn, the more Hanoi will be encouraged—

they are the last people we will be able to fool about the ability of the South Vietnamese to take over from us. They have the option of attacking GVN forces to embarrass us throughout the process or of waiting until we have largely withdrawn before doing so (probably after a period of higher infiltration).”

Kissinger went on to predict that North Vietnam would successfully wait the United States out. In an effort to find a way to win, his staff, just weeks later, proposed a new military option, Duck Hook, whose major feature was a bombing campaign against North Vietnamese agricultural dikes. (The National Security Archive, with the help of historian Jeffrey Kimball, has recently released important documents on this plan. Nixon eventually rejected it, perhaps recognizing that its results would not justify the domestic and international outcry it provoked.) But perhaps Kissinger’s worries about time related to the 1972 election—what he really wanted to do was to preserve South Vietnam until then. In that, he barely succeeded.

The memo is also surprisingly acute about the political weakness of the South Vietnamese government.

”’Vietnamization’ depends on broadening the GVN, and Thieu’s

new government is not significantly broader than the old (see below).

The best way to broaden the GVN would be to create the impression

that the Saigon government is winning or at least permanent. The more

uncertainty there is about the outcome of the war, the less the prospect

for “Vietnamization.”

“(3) We face a dilemma with the GVN: The present GVN cannot

go much farther towards a political settlement without seriously endangering

its own existence; but at the same time, it has not gone far

enough to make such a settlement likely.

“Thieu’s failure to “broaden” his government is disturbing, but not

because he failed to include a greater variety of Saigon’s Tea House

politicians. It is disturbing because these politicians clearly do not believe

that Thieu and his government represent much hope for future

power, and because the new government does not offer much of a

bridge to neutralist figures who could play a role in a future settlement.

This is not to mention his general failure to build up political

strength in non-Catholic villages. In addition, as U.S. troops are withdrawn,

Thieu becomes more dependent on the political support of the

South Vietnamese military.”

Kissinger, in other words, knew everything he needed to know in September 1969. We had not won the war (although he pointed out that repeated North Vietnamese offensives over the last eighteen months had left the enemy at a temporary disadvantage and in need of regrouping.) The South Vietnamese could not cope with the enemy, and the Thieu government was weak politically. A similar appreciation of Iraq today, it seems to me, would note that the insurgency was continually getting stronger; that its real political rival was Shi’ite fundamentalism, closely allied with the U.S.-supported government; and that our vision of a united, pluralistic Iraq clearly had no future.

But neither then nor now, apparently, was Kissinger willing to draw a reality-based conclusion. Since South Vietnam was almost certain to fall eventually anyway, we might have given the North Vietnamese the coalition government in the South that they demanded and at least spared the Indochinese people six more years of heavy fighting and millions of tons of American bombs. (Peace in 1969 might also have preserved Prince Sihanouk in power in Cambodia, and we would never have heard of the Khmer Rouge.) That, however, was politically unacceptable, both domestically and, in Nixon and Kissinger’s eyes, internationally. In the same way, facing reality—that Iraq will never turn out as we had hoped and that continued insurgency and civil war are further strengthening extremism—is not an option, apparently, in the Bush Administration.

As I mentioned yesterday, Kissinger’s real betrayal came in 1975, when he decided to blame the American people for the loss of South Vietnam. (While US aid to the South had been reduced—not cut off—in 1973-4, it has been shown by scholarship and even by a contemporary Pentagon report that the South Vietnamese had not even received all the equipment they had been promised. They collapsed from political weakness, not from lack of supplies.) And as I pointed out yesterday, the only purpose I can see to holding the course in Iraq for two more years is to blame President Bush’s successor for whatever happens afterwards, rather than accept that we have made one of the worst strategic miscalculations in American history. Meanwhile the violence in Iraq will get worse.

Let us not, however, mince words. The net effect of the invasion of Iraq will indeed be negative, because two-thirds of that country will almost certainly wind up under the control of militant Islamists of one kind or another. Like the Egyptian nationalist government that still survives, the Ba’athist regime in Iraq (and in Syria) was a relatively modern form of government for the Arab world, but the tides have been running against such regimes for at least thirty years. Our invasion may only have accelerated something that was likely to happen anyway—but the map of the Middle East will be worse, from the American point of view, when we do, inevitably, leave. Kurdistan may easily remain friendly, but it is already causing problems in neighboring Turkey. The negative result, however, is no reason to continue staying the course, because staying the course will not in the end stave it off. It is more likely to make it worse.

What should we do? In my opinion, we should convene a regional summit and invite all the Iraqi parties, including the insurgents, to discuss the boundaries of a new federalized Iraq—or perhaps, even, three states. Reconciliation among Sunnis and Shi’ites was never likely, as Peter Galbraith has argued, and now seems utterly impossible. We should try to write some human rights guarantees into any new constitutions, and we should try to make any movements of populations as peaceful as possible. We should also stand ready to rebuild Iraq, but only after Iraqis have once again stabilized their country sufficiently to allow reconstruction to take place. We are three and a half years into this war, a moment corresponding to the fall of 1968 in Vietnam. By then, as now, the American people had realized that this latest military adventure was a mistake, but successive American governments still sacrificed tens of thousands of American lives, and hundreds of thousands of others, to a hopeless vision. We still do not have to do that again.