(Editor’s note: The following is adapted from the author’s new book, The Envoy: From Kabul to the White House, My Journey through a Turbulent World.)

“You’ve discovered a new rationale for our role in the world,” Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney declared, looking at me. “I read the document last night and I think it is brilliant.”

I was startled, hardly expecting such a favorable reaction.

It was March 1992 and the document at hand was a draft of the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), the Pentagon’s traditional vehicle for providing strategic planning advice. I had been pleased that my office was assigned the task of drafting the DPG, which would inform choices for the 1994–99 planning cycle. For policy planners, periods of big change often provide the best opportunity to contribute. I saw the DPG as an opportunity to outline a grand strategy for the post–Cold War world that would guide our force structure well beyond 1999.

The policy planning shop can only be effective if the secretary is receptive to new ideas and approaches. Luckily, Cheney was serious about developing a new strategy. He was drawn to conceptual thinking and blocked out time in his schedule to engage in long, substantive policy discussions.

In Cheney’s reading of history, the United States had a record of demobilizing precipitously. After World War I, this enabled Germany and Japan to emerge as major threats. After World War II, the Soviet Union took half of Europe, and Mao won power in China. In a speech on the fiftieth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Cheney had said, “The good news is that it’s a safer world and we can probably. . . reduce the size of the force. The bad news is it’s never been done successfully before. . .”

Cheney’s view squared with my own intuition. I was surprised by how muted the response was in the United States when the Soviet Union collapsed. The Cold War was over, and with it, the bipolar world of Soviet-American rivalry. Yet there were no celebrations commensurate with this monumental change. I expected, at a minimum, that a monument would be erected to celebrate freedom’s triumph and communism’s defeat, or that a museum would be built to document the struggle and remember the enormous sacrifices made by the Americans, victims of the Gulag, and others who had resisted the Soviet Union.

As a Pentagon planner, I was concerned that the American people, and their leaders, did not appreciate the magnitude of this event. I feared that the United States would miss the extraordinary opportunities at hand.

Among the strategists who were thinking about the U.S. role in the world going forward, there was little consensus. “We need another X,” the editor of Foreign Affairs had remarked, referencing George Kennan’s anonymously authored article from 1947. Written without attribution because Kennan was still at the State Department, the X article had analyzed the “sources of Soviet conduct” and prescribed in broad brushstrokes the containment strategy that guided U.S. foreign policy for the next four and a half decades.

I believed that the United States should exercise leadership and expand the liberal international order that the United States and its allies had built after World War II. The twentieth century had shown that the global security environment could change dramatically—with little warning.

The “new world order,” as the president called it, presented a particular challenge for the Department of Defense. President Bush was committed to preserving a “base force” after the Cold War of no fewer than 1.6 million troops. But it was less clear what he believed the central goals of U.S. national security policy should be and why he wanted a force of that size. In the absence of a compelling strategy, there was no logical baseline to determine the appropriate level of defense capabilities and spending.

Doves, including many of the Democrats who controlled Congress, wanted to collect a bigger “peace dividend” and spend it on domestic priorities. Their opponents in Congress wanted to protect the defense budget but were struggling to do so in the absence of a clear rationale from the Bush administration. The toughest challenge was to break out of “threat-based thinking” and pursue opportunities to shape the world.

I knew that large bureaucracies seldom produce sharp strategic insight. So I worked with a small team. At the same time, I wanted to cast the net wide for ideas and involve key officials so that they, too, would have a sense of ownership over the final product.

Throughout the winter of 1991 into early 1992, I convened discussions with a number of experts from both inside and outside the building. Our team developed a set of future contingencies that would be used to test the capabilities of proposed force structures.

The scenarios did not amount to predictions about the future, and they were not exhaustive of the possibilities. Rather, they were illustrative and, we thought, plausible.

We were not arguing that the United States should necessarily get involved in these scenarios if they materialized. Instead, our job was to identify the kinds of forces and capabilities that would be relevant should the president decide to deal with such scenarios.

***

Among the threats on our minds was a reprise of Iraq’s aggression against Kuwait. In subsequent years, a myth developed to the effect that the DPG set in motion thinking and planning to invade Iraq at some point in the future. This was not the case. In fact, senior officials in the Bush administration, including Cheney himself, opposed regime change in the first Gulf War.

The rapid defeat of Saddam’s armies had opened a debate on how to end the Gulf War. At first, General Norman Schwartzkopf, and then President Bush, announced that the United States would not advance further into Iraq. Senior officials believed that the devastating defeat would lead to a coup against Saddam. Yet, by leaking statements to this effect, they only alleviated pressure on Saddam. Without the prospect of further U.S. action against Iraq, officers in the regime were less willing to move against Saddam. When it became clear that Saddam’s security forces would stay loyal and intact, President Bush called on “the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.”

Insurgents in Basra began to rebel against Saddam. Within weeks, armed revolts broke out across Iraq. Saddam believed that his regime had lost control of seventeen provinces, with only Anbar Province remaining loyal. In negotiating an armistice with Saddam’s generals, however, Schwarzkopf permitted the Iraqi regime to fly helicopters over the south of the country. Saddam deployed the helicopter gunships to mow down his opponents, slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians.

Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had emerged as the leading voice in the administration arguing that the United States should aid the Iraqis who were trying to topple Saddam. I had agreed and suggested that the United States could overthrow the Baathist regime without sending large numbers of American troops to Baghdad. The United States already had F-15 pilots patrolling southern Iraq within one hundred kilometers of where the massacres were happening. They could prevent the gunship attacks and provide protection while we transferred arms to insurgents who were fighting Saddam’s military with only small arms, machine guns, and grenades.

I had been disturbed by the U.S. passivity in the face of Saddam’s massacres. Building, in part, on my ideas, Wolfowitz advocated for three moves: shoot down Saddam’s gunships, arm the Shia and Kurdish rebels, and create U.S.-protected enclaves in northern and southern Iraq.

Cheney had rejected these proposals.

When I kept raising the issue within the government, however, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell called Wolfowitz to complain about “civilians in the Pentagon.” At that point, Wolfowitz stood down.

Saddam retaliated ruthlessly. Iraqi forces moved into Kurdish cities and slaughtered Saddam’s opponents indiscriminately. Remembering Saddam’s chemical weapons attacks against them in 1988, millions of Kurds began fleeing toward the Iranian and Turkish borders. The situation finally prompted an American response. Pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution 688, the United States began enforcing a no-fly zone in the north and provided humanitarian assistance to the Kurds under Operation Provide Comfort.

The United States was less responsive to atrocities in the Shia-dominated south of Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of civilians fled to the borders of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Iran to escape Saddam’s forces.

While we achieved our limited aim in the Gulf War, the outcome left unresolved the question of how to manage the continuing threat of a dangerous and unpredictable regime in Iraq.

***

Against this backdrop, I had, by 1992, developed a clear sense of the strategy I wanted the DPG to advance. With only 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States could not be a global hegemon. This meant that the United States would be vulnerable in the most foundational scenario we envisioned, in which “a single nation or a coalition of nations” would coalesce behind “an adversarial security strategy” and develop “a military capability to threaten U.S. interests.”

Instead, I concluded that we needed a strategy of American leadership. The strategy would be designed to preserve peace among the major world powers and galvanize collective action among allies as challenges—like Iraq—arose.

I thought it was critical to expand what we called the democratic “zone of peace,” which provided the basis for an open international system. This meant that we could not allow a hostile power like Iraq or other major regional powers to take control over key regions like the Middle East. These goals, I assumed, required the United States to preserve its military preeminence and forward presence, as well as its economic strength.

While we believed that there had to be a floor beneath which defense spending could not fall, we understood how important it was to maintain the health of the economy at home. I did not see defense spending as a threat to the economy, but too large a budget would drag down economic growth. And even with a large military, I thought we had to be judicious in the use of force. Alliances were critical to share the burden of global leadership. Otherwise, public support in the United States would not permit American presidents to carry out this strategy.

***

The DPG went through multiple drafts and revisions. It was reviewed extensively within the Pentagon bureaucracy, particularly by the Joint Staff, which reported to Powell. The military services viewed all of these activities as a high-stakes game. For the most part, they were willing to concede the strategy development process to the civilians, but they were intensely interested in any decisions on force structure and resources that would affect their individual services. In the end, the civilian policy team produced the first strategy that guided America’s post–Cold War policy, which fit well with the advice on forces and resources that Powell and his team were offering.

Though the draft DPG remains classified, important parts of the document have been published in the press and released by the Pentagon. The strategy reiterated U.S. intentions to uphold our alliances and multilateral collective security institutions. However, it also contained new, far-reaching strategic ideas.

The most important idea in the document, while pertinent to Iraq, was most obviously concerned with Russia. It argued that the United States must prevent the rise of a peer competitor: “Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union.” The DPG wanted to preclude the emergence of bipolarity, another global rivalry like the Cold War, or multipolarity, a world of many great powers, as existed before the two world wars. To do so, the key was to prevent a hostile power from dominating a “critical region,” defined as having the resources, industrial capabilities, and population that, if controlled by a hostile power, would pose a global challenge.

Values were an important part of the strategy. The DPG saw “increasing respect for international law” and “the spread of democratic forms of government” as critical factors in “deterring conflicts or threats in regions of security important to the United States.”

Among the more challenging issues was how to establish criteria for sizing military forces. Some thought that sizing forces for one large contingency—a second Gulf War, for example—would be enough. But we argued that this was insufficient. What if a crisis were to erupt elsewhere or an adversary tried to take advantage of our preoccupation in one region? To be a credible global partner, I thought U.S. forces needed to be prepared for aggression in more than one region.

The military was ultimately directed to maintain sufficient forces for two major regional contingencies—or 2MRCs. This still represented a major peace dividend, but did not amount to the even larger downsizing that many were advocating.

***

Initial reviews of the DPG inside the Pentagon were positive, so I had been unprepared for the controversy that erupted when the New York Times ran a front-page story on the document: “U.S. Strategy Plans Call for Insuring No Rivals Develop: A One-Superpower World.” The Times reported that the Pentagon had a secretary strategy document that advanced the “concept of benevolent domination by one power.”

When the Times story was published, I was in Germany for a NATO security conference with my Pentagon colleague Stephen Hadley, who had contributed to the DPG. Having seen the Times article, the French were wondering why the Pentagon was developing a strategy to “keep Europe down.”

The leak had generated such an outcry that it became an issue in the 1992 presidential campaign. Governor Bill Clinton’s spokesman George Stephanopoulos—a former student of mine at Columbia—attacked the paper as “one more attempt” by the Defense Department “to find an excuse for big budgets instead of downsizing.”

The leaked scenarios drew particular ire on Capitol Hill. Senator Joe Biden dismissed the strategy as “literally a Pax Americana.” While he conceded that “American hegemony would be nice,” he asserted with characteristic confidence that, “It won’t work.” Senator Carl Levin quipped, “You have to have insurance against unlikely events. Having a fire in our house is an unlikely event but it’s a plausible event. Some of these threats are implausible.” Senator Ted Kennedy complained that the contingency planning was aimed “at finding new ways to justify Cold War levels of military spending.”

Even inside the Bush administration, the draft DPG had come under fire. National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft considered the paper to be “nutty” and “kooky.” At a staff meeting the morning after the leak, he had made clear his unhappiness. Unnamed officials from State and the National Security Council lambasted the “dumb report,” telling reporters that they wanted it to go “down in flames.”

As word got around the administration that I had drafted the leaked document, I began receiving phone calls from State Department and White House officials. My counterpart at the State Department protested that formulating a national security strategy was not “DoD’s business.”

“Of course it is not DoD business!” I replied. “It should be happening at the presidential level.” Ideally, I believed, State would take the lead, and then the interagency process would review it. The State Department, however, had been missing in action in terms of formulating post–Cold War strategy.

A senior director on the NSC staff also reached out to tell me that the White House did not appreciate the document’s provocative language and unilateralist theme. “Look,” I responded, “I’d be more than happy to withdraw the text, but I need more material for a defense strategy. I need a strategy for force-sizing. Why don’t you schedule an interagency review so we can agree on language?”

I had never before been the focus of a Washington policy tempest. While I told myself that this was exactly the kind of debate the country needed, I was disconcerted. I took solace in some of the positive review of the draft DPG. Charles Krauthammer, for one, praised the DPG in his Washington Post column. His was the minority view, however.

***

It was for this reason that I had felt demoralized when Cheney asked several of us who had worked on the DPG draft to come to his office. As the meeting was about to start, Scooter Libby, my immediate boss, leaned over and joked, “We’re all in trouble with Cheney because of you.”

When Cheney endorsed the draft, much to our surprise, Wolfowitz and Libby jumped in and recommended that we change some of the more controversial wording before finalizing the draft. Cheney concurred but underscored that he wanted to keep the basic contours of the strategy.

When Cheney received a revised draft, he asked for a “sharper” rewrite. Much of the original, assertive language returned to the draft.

Even with Cheney’s blessing, the DPG was not reviewed at senior levels of the interagency process. When Cheney realized that the rest of the administration did not want to conduct a full strategic review, he asked us to produce an unclassified version of the DPG with his name as the main author.

***

Looking back at the controversy, it seems oddly ironic. Many of the scenarios we mentioned in our document came to pass. President Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox in December 1998 to destroy Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction programs and considered going to war against North Korea to stop its nuclear weapons program. Entreaties by every post–Cold War president have failed to prevent the emergence of an aggressive Russia, which has launched wars against Georgia and Ukraine. Leaders in the Baltic states, including Lithuania, fear that they might be next, and today the United States has a treaty obligation to come to their defense. President Obama’s “pivot to Asia” was based on the recognition that China’s rise requires the United States to increase its presence in the region.

The DPG’s prescience on these issues, however, is not the reason the document remains such a source of historical intrigue over a quarter century later. A simple Google search of the 1992 DPG pulls up countless articles citing the document as evidence that Cheney and his Pentagon colleagues had laid the seeds of the 2003 Iraq War many years earlier.

It is true that many of the DPG’s far-reaching and controversial ideas were gradually adopted as U.S. policy under both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. The national security strategies of those administrations emphasized the need to maintain alliances, partnerships, and forces needed to maintain the balance of power in key regions.

The notion that the 1992 DPG presaged the Iraq War, however, ignores a more fundamental reality: It was the 9/11 attack, not any earlier history, that explains the decision to invade Iraq.

Had Cheney and his colleagues been intent on waging war against Iraq, an early policy review in the Bush administration over Iraq policy would have been quite different. I was quite involved in Iraq policy during this period as a senior National Security Council aide to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. I was tasked with overseeing the Iraq review after the Defense Department vetoed the idea of giving the State Department the lead on Iraq. My views on Iraq were well known. I was dissatisfied with the status quo and how it had left Iraqis with the worst of both worlds—Saddam and sanctions. Throughout the 1990s, I had advocated publicly for regime change through greater support for the Iraqi opposition to Saddam. But neither I, nor any of my colleagues from the DPG period, had ever argued for a full military invasion of Iraq.

I saw in the Iraq policy review how difficult it was for the United States, even under a new administration, to undertake a bold policy departure in the absence of a crisis of major policy failure. Policymakers tend to live within existing constraints rather than challenging them. Policy reviews tend to conclude with minor revisions of the status quo. This was the story of the Iraq review in 2000.

The situation was troubling. Saddam had been throttled in the Gulf War and Operation Desert Fox but remained belligerent and dangerous. The consensus in the intelligence community was that he had retained stockpiles of chemical weapons and preserved the capability to restart his weapons programs if and when international pressure relented. Support for the sanctions was waning, even among U.S. allies, and Iraq had developed ways to skirt their constraints. U.S. forces continued to enforce no-fly zones in the north and south of Iraq. Efforts to orchestrate a military coup had failed, and the United States was providing only minimal support to Iraqi opposition groups. It was increasingly difficult to keep Saddam “in a box.”

The principals and their aides who had contributed to the 1992 DPG—notably Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Powell—brought different concerns to the table this time around. They disagreed on which Iraqi opposition groups to support, whether to maintain no-fly zones, and how to enforce international sanctions against Iraq. But none even broached the possibility of an invasion of Iraq.

Early discussions on Iraq left me with the impression that the principals were unsatisfied with the tit-for-tat engagements that characterized our Iraq policy. But in terms of adopting a new strategy, they were not even united on the goals we should be prioritizing. Did we want to contain Saddam or press for regime change? Did we want to increase pressure or reduce it through narrower sanctions and less activity in the no-fly zones? I knew that, in the absence of clear guidance from the principals, it would be difficult to develop robust policy recommendations at my level.

In the Deputies Committee, the Defense Department and vice president’s office, represented by Wolfowitz and Libby, respectively, argued that Iraq was a looming threat—one that continued to grow as the containment regime against Saddam weakened. They doubted that the international community had the desire or will to keep pressure on Saddam. That the Iraqi regime continued to seek weapons of mass destruction and support terrorism, they warned, only exacerbated the threat.

The Pentagon and office of the vice president argued for an invigorated policy of regime change, though not a full-scale invasion of the sort that the President chose after 9/11. Instead, they urged that the United States increase support for the Iraqi opposition, create U.S.-enforced safe havens in Shia-dominated southern Iraq similar to the ones in the Kurdish north, and recognize a provisional government for areas of Iraq outside of Saddam’s control.

With no policy agreement among the major players—either on goals or strategy—my NSC colleagues and I drafted a tactical paper with an escalating three-step plan for liberating Iraq. As a starting point, it called for taking advantage of the Iraq Liberation Act by allocating all of the assistance to the Iraqi opposition that Congress had already made available. The next step would involve arming the opposition. The final measure would entail direct U.S. military action to protect southern Iraq, weaken Saddam, and foment an uprising.

When we first presented the proposal to Deputy National Security Advisor Hadley, he was understandably reluctant to endorse it without a presidential decision on U.S. goals in Iraq.

The plan’s key elements were eventually incorporated into an NSC paper entitled “A Liberation Strategy,” which the principals received in early August 2001. The document laid out a series of options—short of a full-scale invasion—that the president could consider if he decided to topple Saddam’s regime.

In the absence of a clear decision, however, our Iraq policy continued largely unchanged.

***

The tenor of the Iraq debate changed dramatically after 9/11. I was a member of Hadley’s Deputies Committee meetings on Iraq, comprised of a small group of senior officials. Attendees could not reveal even the existence of the meetings, and we processed papers through special channels to avoid press leaks.

At the deputies level, a consensus now existed on three points. First, Iraq needed to be disarmed. Second, if Saddam refused to disarm, the United States would pursue a serious policy of regime change in Iraq. Containment was no longer a viable alternative. Third, our policy of regime change would seek a broad-based representative in Iraq, even if a coup ousted Saddam during our planning.

On December 2, 2002, President Bush appointed me as his “Special Presidential envoy to the Free Iraqis.” I was to work with the Iraqi opposition to prepare for a post-Saddam Iraq. I concluded around this time that the President had decided to invade Iraq.

***

While I hope that my memoir will endure as a window into a critical period in American foreign policy, I also wrote it with the country’s current bout of cynicism in mind. The United States fell far short of its aspirations in Iraq—a reality that weighs deeply on me. While it will take some time before the true impact of the United States’ efforts in Iraq become clear, in the near term, it is perhaps inevitable that the region’s conflicts and the threat they pose will dominate our relations with the Middle East.

I am deeply concerned by how contentious our foreign policy debates have become and hope, as we formulate an approach for the region, that we can pull back from our growing division at home. Case in point is the recent debate in our presidential campaign about the origins of the Iraq War, and whether the Bush administration “lied” in the run-up to the war.

It is clear from the record that the Iraq War was hardly conceived in the decades prior to the 2003 invasion. Many of the architects of the war did indeed work together in previous administration and reached similar conclusions about the U.S. role in the world and the capabilities it needed to underwrite global security. But their views on Iraq in the years before 9/11 were neither uniform nor substantially at odds with the assumptions that had formed around Iraq policy since the Gulf War.

It was the shock of 9/11 and the risks posed by Saddam’s dangerous regime—not the 1992 DPG, or anything else—that led the President and his advisors to reconsider our approach to Iraq, and, ultimately, to support an invasion of the country.

Zalmay Khalilzad was the Head of Policy Planning in the Defense Department from 1991-1992. He was the Special Presidential Envoy to Free Iraqis from 2002-2003 and later was the US Ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and the UN. He is the author of The Envoy, published by St. Martin’s Press.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/U.S. Air Force