neoconservatism

The 9/11 Commission Report dominates the agenda these days on Capitol Hill and the airwaves in the public debate over the restructuring of the intelligence community (IC). Commission members are now busily arguing for a new National Intelligence Director (NID) coupled with new intelligence fusion centers--for counter-terrorism and proliferation-- which they argue go a long way to fix what ails American intelligence.

Aside from the media splash, it is hard to discern how the commission's recommendations would cut to the heart of our intelligence problems, and not just those associated with the 9/11 tragedy. The portfolio of responsibilities for the proposed NID are little more than a rehash of the responsibilities currently exercised by the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). And new intelligence centers are not needed because they already exist in the bowels of the CIA. The IC needs wider and deeper horizontal sharing and webbing of intelligence, with a special emphasis on getting the FBI to contribute to the information pool, as befitting the information-technology age--not the creation of a ponderous new layer of bureaucracy reminiscent of the Cold War.

The 9/11 Commission recommends structural, or "hardware", additions when better management and business practices, or "software", in core intelligence functions inside the existing IC--especially at the CIA--are most needed. Although it has been eclipsed by media attention on the commission report, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) report on intelligence failings in the run up to the Iraq War is in many respects a more perceptive, penetrating and diagnostic study of the CIA's faults.

Of the three interwoven threats to America--terrorists, rogue states and the proliferation of WMD--the third has provoked the least public debate since 9/11. This is curious, since the invasion of Iraq was intended as an exercise in counter-proliferation and the administration has announced a major program to deal with other cases of the spread of WMD. But public debate has focused on the prudence of pre-emptive war and unilateralism, and on whether Iraq had stockpiled WMD in the first place, not on the ways the momentum can be and is being used to overcome further WMD threats in Libya and Pakistan and to strengthen the anti-proliferation regime more generally. The Bush Administration's ongoing program has received little serious attention outside of expert circles, despite eye-catching measures such as the Proliferation Security Initiative, which empowers the United States to board ships suspected of carrying WMD contraband.

Meanwhile Iran and North Korea demonstrate that the old non-proliferation regime is still in crisis. Yet at the same time, wider diplomatic conditions are better than at any point since the 1940s for a realistic policy of not only non- but even counter-proliferation--that is, the use of force to stop proliferation. Measures can be taken in the near future to reverse the impending crisis, and a short capsule history will explain why.

The history of non-proliferation diplomacy falls into three periods. The first was the period of U.S. nuclear monopoly that lasted from 1945 to 1949, during which robust plans for an anti-proliferation regime were proposed. In the late 1940s, the Baruch Plan proposed global management of uranium and UN enforcement actions that would have been exempt from a veto in the Security Council.

One of Washington's most exclusive clubs during the 1990s was the annual board dinner of The National Interest. Presided over by founding editor Owen Harries and often kicked off with a presentation by Henry Kissinger, the group included Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Irving, Bea and Bill Kristol, Samuel Huntington, Paul Wolfowitz, Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Pipes, Charles Krauthammer, Marty Feldstein, Eliot Cohen, Peter Rodman and a host of other conservative thinkers, writers and doers, including just about everyone now characterized as a "neoconservative."

What I always found fascinating about these dinners was their unpredictability. People's views were very much set in concrete during the Cold War; while this group was divided into pro- and anti-détente camps, virtually everyone (myself included) had staked out territory years before. The Berlin Wall's fall brought a great change, and there was no clear mapping between one's pre-1989 views and the ones held thereafter. Roughly, the major fault line was between people who were more realist and those who were more idealist or Wilsonian. But everyone was trying to wrestle with the same basic question: In the wake of the disappearance of the overarching strategic threat posed by the former USSR, how did one define the foreign policy of a country that had suddenly become the global hegemon? How narrowly or broadly did one define this magazine's eponymous "national interest"?

Islam Karimov was such a happy and contented Communist Party leader that, when his domain inconveniently became the independent republic of Uzbekistan in 1991, he simply took all the trappings of Soviet Communism--one-party rule, state control of the press, secret surveillance of the populace, five-year plans, government monopolization of the means of production--and converted them, lock, stock and political prison, into a well-oiled banana republic--or, to speak more properly, a cotton republic, since Uzbekistan was completely denuded and environmentally destroyed during its decades as the designated cotton supplier to the rest of the USSR.

Of course, there were little niggling problems for Karimov. He had to get a new flag. He had to invent a new name for the KGB. (He settled on National Security Service.) He had to learn Uzbek, since that's what some of the natives actually speak. He had to take the oath of office with one hand on the Quran and one hand on the new democratic constitution, which must have thoroughly revolted him since, in the intervening 13 years, he's never actually paid attention to either one.

You would think at some point he would have changed his first name, since he believes that most Islamists are threats to civilization and, more to the point, to his own life. But since the country is 86 percent Muslim, he's got that General Custer feeling in the pit of his stomach all the time. He deals with it by forcing all mosques to be approved by the state. Anyone caught worshipping at home (the official charge is being "too pious"), or praying in public (he forbids the mosques to broadcast the call to prayer), or wearing a beard (the symbol of what he inevitably calls "Wahhabism"), is subject to summary arrest and interrogation.

In his Brief Description of New York (London, 1670), Daniel Denton says, in the quaint English of a son of a Presbyterian manse on 17th-century Long Island,

"To say something of the Indians, there is now but few upon the Island, and those few no ways hurtful but rather serviceable to the English, and it is to be admired, how strangely they have decreased by the Hand of God, since the English first settling of those parts; for since my time [Denton was born in 1644], where there were six towns, they are reduced to two small villages, and it hath generally been observed, that where the English come to settle, a Divine Hand makes way for them, by removing or cutting off the Indians either by wars one with the other, or by some raging mortal Disease."

Elsewhere in his panegyric of New York, which is really a plug for immigration, Denton praises its "sweet and pleasant Air, and a continuation of such Influences as tend to the Health both of Man and Beast." He notices no contradiction between the blooming health of the English and their livestock, and the fact that the Indians are dropping dead from raging mortal diseases. The remarkable decline in the Indian population that he reports has nothing to do with interracial conflict, for he describes the treaties and the trade that bind the communities as being mutually "serviceable." He would know all about that, because in 1662 and 1663 his job was to negotiate the purchase of lands from the natives. So the Divine Hand was encompassing the convenient reduction of the Indian population by means of (here Denton got them in the wrong order) internecine conflict between tribes, and diseases to which the English were immune and the Indians were not.

Since November of last year the United States has been committed to transferring sovereignty to the Iraqis after June 30, 2004. Even though Iraqis themselves will be making their own decisions regarding the civil order, the critical issue of security for Iraq will remain in American hands--and under the control of a selected four-star general. under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1511, Iraqi armed forces will be "a principal partner in the multinational force operating in Iraq under unified command", in accordance with the Transitional Administrative Law. Thus, even after the transfer of sovereignty, in the crucial area of security (which remains the largest challenge in Iraq) there will be little change from the current situation. Contrary to widespread public impressions, the transfer of authority on June 30 does not mean that the American role in Iraq is ending or that the United States is somehow washing its hands of Iraq.

In other words, June 30 is not a magic date after which unrest in Iraq will cease. Nor does it mean that significant numbers of U.S. troops can be swiftly withdrawn. Iraqis and Americans both must be prepared for the United States to continue to play a major role in Iraq.

Withdrawal before we have successfully stabilized Iraq is not an option. But the statement, "We will stay the course", while perhaps being a necessary exhortation, is not a strategy. "We will stay the course until we have an Iraqi force capable of providing reasonable security for the people of Iraq"--this is a strategy. But it means that there must be a viable plan to create such a force.

And this is why it is important to review the record of the past year, to understand where mistakes may have been made and to determine what needs to be done to ensure that we are successful in our mission in Iraq.

John Lewis Gaddis, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2004), 150 pp., $18.95

Owen Harries, Benign or Imperial? (Adelaide, Australia: ABC Books), 138 pp.

Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies (New York: Free Press, 2004), 304 pp., $27.

Walter Russell Mead, Power, Terror, Peace, and War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 226 pp., $19.95.

David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2003), 284 pp., $26.95.

These days, American foreign policy analysis revolves around two vast and far-reaching surprises. On the morning of December 25, 1991, the United States was one superpower in a two-superpower world; by day's end, as the Soviet Union dissolved, it became the sole survivor. At dawn, September 11, 2001, America was arguably the most secure of nations. By noon, it appeared among the most vulnerable. The first was an unalloyed American victory. The second was an unalloyed American defeat.

The American people reacted to these disturbances in most revealing ways. They declined the invitation to empire offered by sole superpower status after they elected Bill Clinton in 1992, a man not only inexperienced in foreign policy but also fairly promising to ignore it ("It's the economy, stupid!"). They remained oblivious to dangers from abroad, electing at the end of the decade the equally inexperienced George W. Bush, after a ferocious campaign dominated by domestic issues.

Neither Bush's initial plans for his presidency nor American complacency survived 9/11. The United States has now pledged, through the War on Terror, to rehabilitate Afghanistan and Iraq as democracies and to transform the Middle East, among other things. The Bush Administration has compared this campaign to change the world with America's historic efforts in post-1945 Europe and Japan.

While Iraq-related debates continue to dominate the headlines, Morton Abramowitz, in the Spring 2004 issue of The National Interest, was the first senior member of the foreign policy establishment to attempt to furnish a veneer of intellectual respectability for the proposition that a precipitous American withdrawal from Iraq would not necessarily be calamitous. (He has been followed more recently by William Odom, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who is a contributor to this symposium as well.) Accordingly, these views merit attention, even if they are, in my opinion, ultimately unpersuasive.

Abramowitz analyzes both the probability and the consequences of our success in Iraq--success being defined as the establishment of "a stable, reasonably democratic system"--as well as the implications of an early departure, both on the country itself and the Greater Middle East. Although there is some analytical overlap between these two issues, they are not identical. Indeed, while the prospects and strategic implications of building a U.S.-prompted Iraqi democracy are probably better than Abramowitz seems to suggest, it is fair to acknowledge that they are inherently speculative and uncertain.

The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, were both good and bad news for the Bush Administration's early commitment to the near-term deployment of defenses against ballistic missiles. The good news was that the vulnerability of the American homeland to devastating attack was demonstrated to be real, not merely a figment of the overactive imagination of Reagan-era strategists. The bad news, on the other hand, was that the method of attack utilized by the terrorists involved neither ballistic missiles nor nuclear weapons. Al-Qaeda's largely unanticipated concept--the use of fuel-laden commercial airliners in suicide missions to produce enhanced conventional explosive effects--inflicted less damage than might be anticipated from most so-called weapons of mass destruction, but it was well suited to a technically constrained and low-budget terrorist organization.

Critics of ballistic missile defense (BMD) were quick to seize on 9/11 as proof that the real threats of the future were likely to come not from intercontinental-range missiles with a recognizable "return address", but rather from a variety of possible weapons or devices clandestinely inserted into the United States, or even from aircraft or cruise missiles originating within the country or not far from its borders. They argued that states capable of attacking the United States with long-range ballistic missiles will continue to be deterred from such a step by America's overwhelming retaliatory capabilities. And missile defense is technically problematic and enormously expensive compared to other pressing defense needs.

Three months before the start of the American operation in Iraq I visited the United States, where I met with Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. Our conversations were difficult. When I commented that the action in Iraq would lead to serious losses--and not simply during the military operations--the vice president smiled dismissively and said that I was exaggerating the danger. I posed the question as to whether the United States had thought through the Iraq operation "one step ahead" to Condoleezza, with whom I have met several times before, and she answered: "Yevgeny, don't worry. The political decision about the start of the operation hasn't been made yet...."

At any rate, I received a firm impression that in Washington nobody gave much thought to the problems that might arise after Saddam's regime was defeated. And events have confirmed this conclusion.

The Resistance

First and foremost, it is evident that the United States did not foresee that resistance to the occupation would take on such wide parameters. And the paradox here is that the armed struggle against the occupational government is not identical with the resistance by supporters of Saddam. This makes the American position that much more complicated. It deprives or significantly weakens international support for the U.S. approach. If the situation were different, then U.S. policy in Iraq would be better understood, even by the Arab countries.

One of the centers of resistance in Iraq is the so-called "Sunni triangle." Of course, the Sunnis formed the base of the population upon which Saddam's regime depended. However, current Sunni resistance is not predicated on loyalty to Saddam. Rather, it springs from their fear that, as a result of the occupation, Sunnis will be diminished and become a second-class minority in Iraq.