Fred Kaplan: Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power (2008, Wiley)

(pp. 1-2):

Nearly all of America's blunders in war and peace these past few years stem from a single grand misconception: that the world changed after September 11, when in fact it didn't.

Certainly things about the world changed, not least Americans' sudden awareness that they were vulnerable. But the way the world works -- the nature of power, warfare, and politics among nations -- remained essentially the same.

A real change, a seismic shift in global politics, had taken place a decade earlier, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Yet America's political leaders at the start of the twenty-first century misunderstood this shift -- and in a way that their misreading of 9/11 would exacerbate.

George W. Bush and his top aides in the White House and the Pentagon came to office believing that the United States had emerged from its Cold War victory as the world's "sole superpower" and that they could therefore do pretty much as they pleased: issue orders and expect obeisance, topple rogue regimes at will, honor alliances and treaties when they were useful, and disregard them when they weren't.

But in fact, the end of the Cold War made America weaker, less capable of exerting its will on others. And its leaders' failure to recognize this, their inclination to devise policies based on the premise of omnipotence, made America weaker still.

The Mirage of Instant Victory (pp. 7-8):

Near the start of his [2000] presidential campaign, Bush had given a speech at The Citadel -- the historic military college in Charleston, South Carolina -- spelling out his top priorities for a new defense policy. He would deploy antiballastic missiles "at the earliest possible date," even if doing so meant withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, the long-standing centerpiece of Russian-American arms control accords. And he would transform the United States military. A "revolution in the technology of war" was in the works, he declared. Battles of the future would be won not by an army's "mass or size," but by its "mobility and swiftness," and vital new roles would be played by information networks and by highly accurate missiles and bombs.

If taken seriously, this was a truly dramatic pronouncement. It would mean a new concept of nuclear deterrence, an overhaul of the Army, a new look for war and peace.

As president, Bush said, he would order his secretary of defense to conduct "an immediate, comprehensive review of our military -- the structure of its forces, the state of its strategy, the priorities of its procurement." The secretary would have "a broad mandate -- to challenge the status quo and envision a new architecture of American defense for decades to come." Now that he was president, he told Rumsfeld to carry out that comprehensive review.

(p. 40):

[Rumsfeld's] disdain toward the Army was reinforced by his frequent dealings with Tommy Franks, the general he had come to know best. Franks, by no means a strategist, was widely regarded as a dim bulb, even by fellow officers. Rumsfeld, by nature impatient with people who weren't smart, despised Franks and wanted to get rid of him after the Afghanistan war. But over the Christmas holidays, Bush invited Franks out to his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Franks was a tall, salty, plain-speaking, profane Texan -- he had gone to the same high school as Bush's wife, Laura -- and he and the president got along like gangbusters. Bush called Rumsfeld and said, "Tommy Franks is a hell of a guy!" Rumsfeld realized that Franks would have to stay.

(p. 49):

The invasion of Iraq began on March 19, 2003. In the battlefield phase, it went, to a remarkable degree, as planned. The second part of the war -- after Saddam fled and his regime crumbled -- went disastrously, in part because it had not been planned at all.

Rumsfeld was so enamored of transformation -- as a theory of war, as a tool for control, and as an explanation for what still seemed the triumph in Afghanistan -- that he forgot, if he ever fully understood, that winning wars means more than hitting targets or winning battles. Rumsfeld didn't plan for Phase IV -- securing and stabilizing the country after the capital had fallen -- because he didn't think it would be necessary. [ . . . ]

Rumsfeld was not alone in his failure to think about the post-battle phase. As Wass de Czege noted in his memo on the war games, senior military leaders weren't thinking about it, either. There were no U.S. Army field manuals still in print on the subject of how to end a war.

Chapter "The Fog of Moral Clarity" -- deals with North Korea (pp. 54-55):

The first President bush launched a policy of "comprehensive engagement" with North Korea -- an all-fronts diplomatic campaign to keep Kim Il Sung from completing the facility or, short of that, from reprocessing the fuel rods. The campaign had little effect until September 27, 1991, when Bush announced that he was unilaterally dismantling all U.S. tactical nuclear weapons worldwide. He made this announcement in the context of rapidly warming relations between the United States and the Soviet Union amid the winding-down of the Cold War. But the move would also eliminate the hundreds of tactical nukes -- most of them on short-range missiles -- that America had deployed in South Korea decades ago to deter a North Korean invasion.

This tangible gesture unleashed a torrent of diplomatic activity. At the end of the year, after American officials confirmed that they had removed all nuclear weapons from the region, the leaders of North and South Korea -- who had never signed a peace treaty to end the war of 1950-1953 -- negotiated a mutual nonaggression pact. And North Korea, which had signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty back in 1985, signed the NPT's "safeguards" agreement, allowing the International Atomic Energy Agency to station inspectors and cameras inside its reactors and to place the nuclear fuel rods under lock and key.

By the time Clinton was elected president, relations were breaking down. North Korea refused to let the IAEA's inspectors inside a building that stored nuclear waste. The South Korean government arrested a ring of North Korean spies. The annual U.S.-South Korean military exercises, known as "Team Spirit," which Bush had suspended at the start of 1992, were scheduled to resume.

In March 1993, just over a month after Clinton took office, a Pyongyang spokesman denounced Team Spirit as a "nuclear war game preliminary to the invasion of North Korea." Kim Il Sung put the country on alert, ordering a dusk-to-dawn blackout and holding a massive rally -- over one hundred thousand attended -- in the capital.

This goes on for several more pages with details of ups and downs in suspicions, threats and negotiations; Kim Jong Il replaces Kim Il Sung; George W. Bush replaces Clinton; Kim Dae Jong is elected head of South Korea, favoring a more conciliatory policy toward the North (p. 61):

When Kim Dae Jong arrived in Washington, Bush publicly criticized him and his sunshine policy. Bush and his advisers, especially Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, decided not only to isolate North Korea, in the hopes -- in their minds, the near-certainty -- that the regime would crumble, but also to ignore South Korea, in hopes that its next election would restore a conservative to office.

Bush turned out to be the naïf. Kim Jong Il survived U.S. pressure. And Kim Dae Jung was soon replaced by Roh Moo Hyun, a populist who ran on a campaign that was not only pro-sunshine but anti-American.

(p. 70):

As the talks got under way, Jack Pritchard -- one of the few administration officials who had ever talked with North Korean diplomats -- resigned in protest. His job title was envoy for North Korean negotiations, yet he was prohibited from conducting negotiations. He asked himself, "What am I doing in government?" Pritchard had heard, from reliable quarters, that White House and Pentagon higher-ups referred to him as "the Clinton guy" and didn't want him involved in the six-party talks, lest he take them too seriously. Powell asked him not to quit, or at least not to do so publicly. Pritchard respectfully declined on both counts. He helped set up the six-party talks, left when they started, and went to work at the Brookings Institution. He explained his reasons for quitting to anyone who asked.

(p. 74):

The Bush administration's whole approach to North Korea hinged on a premise that turned out to be untrue -- that the United States had the power to set the terms of a new world order and, therefore, didn't need to compromise with competing concepts or interests.

The failure of American policy toward North Korea stemmed from a failure to grasp the implications of this new balance of power in Asia. It also stemmed from a failure to understand -- a willful refusal even to try to understand -- Kim Jong Il's motives in this standoff, the patterns of behavior he displayed, and the strategic options for dealing with them. Kim's eccentricities had little to do with it. Had he been the sanest leader on the planet, he would have had a rational motive to develop a nuclear arsenal. His diplomats had studied the two Gulf Wars carefully, and concluded that Saddam Hussein's big mistake lay in not having nuclear weapons to deter U.S. intervention. They made precisely this point in an official statement released back in April 2003, just after American tanks rolled into Baghdad: "The Iraq war teaches us a lesson that, in order to prevent a war, and defend a country's security and a nation's sovereignty, it is necessary to have a powerful physical deterrent."

Chapter "Chasing Silver Bullets" -- on missile defense (p. 79):

The debate over missile defenses dated not to Reagan's Star Wars or even to the 1972 ABM Treaty but much further back, to the mid-to-late 1950s, when weapons scientists inside the government, carrying high-level security clearances, first discovered the technical obstacles. Roughly every ten years sine, the debate has repeated itself, with the same arguments, often among the same people. And each repetition has followed the same pattern, with the president and his aides at first enthusiastic about some technological advance that makes shooting down missiles seem suddenly feasible -- then realizing that the same old technical obstacles remain.

If Bush and his aides had known this history -- if they had known that the main critique of missile defenses was not political or philosophical but rather technical -- they might have stepped more gingerly before tripling the missile-defense budget yet again, withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, and rushing a brand-new missile-defense system into production and deployment without having any idea whether it could really defend against an attack. But they didn't know the history; they thought that history was irrelevant anyway; and so they plunged ahead.

(p. 85):

It has been a recurring pattern throughout the history of arms procurement: when one rationale for buying a weapon proves untenable, its most impassioned advocates shift to a different rationale. The advocates know that the weapon is vital to the national defense; they figure that opposition stems from some ulterior motive (political hostility or pacifism or a rivalry with the branch of the armed services that's funding the weapon). For many, it would be too drastic a cognitive shift to reassess the wisdom of a project; better to devise a new argument that justifies it. [ . . . ]

This pattern of shifting rationales has been particularly acute in the history of the ABM, because the desire for a nuclear defense is understandably strong -- and because the case for specific ABM systems has fallen apart so repeatedly.

This is followed by various examples from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including this setback (pp. 88-89):

But a bigger shock came in the spring. On April 9, 1970, Kissinger's assistant on strategic issues, Laurence Lynn, met in DuBridge's White House office with two senior executives from Bell Telephone Laboratories, Safeguard's prime contractor. The executives had called the meeting to announce that they wanted out of the ABM business. They recited all the ways that Safeguard could be overwhelmed by the offense, and concluded -- as Lynn put it afterwards in a secret/eyes-only memo to Kissinger -- that Bell no longer wnted "to be associated with a program which cannot technically perform the missions the government claims it will perform."

Nixon and Kissinger were shocked. Nixon wrote in the margins of the memo, "My guess is that the real reasons are their scientists" -- who might have been influenced by all the Nobel laureates opposing the system -- "and P.R. fears." Whatever the motive, they knew this was a disaster. Once Congress found out that the prime contractor was giving up lucrative business on the grounds that Safeguard wouldn't work, the program was doomed.

Nixon finally negotiated the ABM treaty as a way to cover up the contractor's unwillingness to build the unworkable system. Reagan didn't understand that at all when he came up with his own Star Wars program.

(p. 106):

On September 11, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, was scheduled to give a speech on, as she put it, "the threats the problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday." The main topic was to be missile defense; her prepared text which was later leaked to the press, said nothing about terrorism. She never delivered the speech because that morning, terrorists flew two passenger jetliners into the World Trade Center and another one into the Pentagon.

The attack suggested that ballistic missiles might not be the most likely threat facing America; that even if missile defenses could be made to work, a foe could simply strike with other, far cheaper and easier weapons. But it only galvanized Bush and Rumsfeld to push full speed ahead.

(p. 112):

Spending on missile defense continued soaring, to $10 billion a year and beyond, an amount much larger than the budget for any other single weapons program. It remained a great boon for contractors. And Bush still believed in the idea. To cut back would be to admit that the idea was wrong, that the money spent so far -- over $100 billion since Ronald Reagan sparked its revival nearly twenty years earlier -- had been a waste. Maybe it would work one day. Some enemies might think it works now. Menawhile, there was still the hope that America's enemies might be vanquished, that the axis of evil would collapse, and that freedom would supplant tyranny across the planet.

As Bush began his second term, he adopted this hope as an article of faith and as the centerpiece of his foreign policy.

(pp. 126-129):

After September 11, the Bush White House was looking for new ideas to deal with this new threat, ideas that went beyond traditional Realism. The PNAC report seemed to fit the times,a nd the PNAC authors were well placed to argue its case.

On June 1, 2002, President Bush delivered the commencement address at West Point and laid out a new doctrine -- a "Bush doctrine" -- on national security. The doctrines of deterrence and containment, which served the nation well in the Cold War, were, he said, obsolete. "Deterrence -- the promise of massive retaliation against nations -- means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend," the speech declared. "Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver their weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies. . . . If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long. . . . We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge." That is, we must take "preemptive action."

The argument in Rice's Foreign Affairs article -- that rogue regimes were living on "borrowed time" and that they can be dealt with through classic deterrence -- fell by the wayside.

At this point, though, Bush had not yet drawn the link between security and freedom, the link that would animate his second inaugural address. That connection clicked three weeks later, on June 20, when Dick Cheney flew to a resort in Beaver Creek, Colorado, to chair the World Forum, the annual conference of the American Enterprise Institute. The AEI was Washington's leading neocon think tank. It has served as a Republican cabinet-in-exile while Clinton was president, and it was riding high now that many of its denizens from those years were back in power.

At that conference, Cheney heard a galvanizing speech by Natan Sharansky. [ . . . ]

Many of those at the AEI World Forum knew that President Bush was about to decide on an administration policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Perle, who at the time was chairman of Rumsfeld's Defense Advisory Board, had persuaded Sharansky to deliver the forum's keynote address, in hopes that he might have an impact.

Nine months had passed since the September 11 attacks, but they still shaped the way Americans thought about everything related to foreign policy. Sharansky knew this -- he felt the same way -- and he placed the topic of his speech in that context.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he began, was "not a tribal war between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East," but rather a key battle in "the first world war of the twenty-first century, waged between the world of terrorism and the world of democracy." Just as the Cold War divided the world into democracy and Communism, so, after 9/11, have we returned "to the world of two poles" -- this time, "democracy and terrorism." The West's key task, he said, was "to expand the world our enemies try to destroy" -- that is, "to export democracy."

He urged America not to push for a Palestinian state -- not yet. Yasser Arabat, the PLO chairman, was a dictator and a terrorist; the mere granting of statehood would not turn him into a responsible leader, because he would still be a dictator and, therefore, would still lead a terrorist state. [ . . . ]

Sharansky acknowledged that many people thought Arabs and democracy were incompatible, but he recalled that many people had said the same thing about Russians and, before that, at the end of World War II, about the Japanese. Yet democracy had triumphed in Russia and Japan, and it could triumph in the Middle East, too. "Democracy is for everybody!" he exclaimed. (The text of the speech printed the sentence in italics.) "What a powerful weapon, democracy! What a drug for the people!" Not only does it allow people the freedom to say and d o as they pleased, but -- because it makes leaders accountable to the people, and because people want to live in peace -- it is also, Sharansky said, "the best guarantee of security."

A nation's interests and ideals, as one.

Cheney had spoken with Sharansky a few times over the years. They were scheduled to meet for a half hour after the speech. They ended up talking for an hour and a half. Cheney said he would pass Sharansky's comments on to the president.

Four days later, in the White House Rose Garden, Bush gave his much-anticipated speech about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its theme came straight out of Sharansky's AEI address. The formation of an independent state and Israel's withdrawal from its territories, he said, should be preceded by -- and explicitly linked to -- the Palestinians' move toward democracy.

"I call on the Palestinians to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror," Bush said. "I call upon them to build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty." These new leaders, Bush predicted (following Sharansky to a T), will be able to work out security arrangements with Israel. And after that, "the United States will support the creation of a Palestinian state."

The problem, of course, was that the Palestinians never got the hang of democracy -- they kept electing unapproved ("compromised by terror") leaders, the proof of their inadequacy being Israel's inability to work out the requisite security arrangements. The neocons are often charged with being agents not just of Israel but of the Likud bloc; in fact, Bush picked an even stranger bed fellow, one far to the right of Likud (pp. 129-130):

Sharansky was on a plane heading back to Israel when Bush delivered the speech. Perle later called him on the phone to tell him about it. "He was speaking your words," Perle told him. Sharansky was thrilled. The news, he wrote later, was "almost too good to be true."

In Israel, Sharansky was widely viewed as an obstructionist to peace talks. Long before the AEI Forum, he had presented his plan to Ariel Sharon's government, which brusquely rejected it. There was no chance Arafat would stp down or allow pluralism. Maybe Sharansky was right; maybe that meant there could be no peace as long as Arafat was in charge. But to make Palestinian democracy a precondition for talks was equivalent to saying there would be no talks, and not even Sharon was willing to go that far.

(pp. 144-145):

The crucial thing was that his views fits. They provided an intellectual foundation, an air of legitimacy, for Bush's view of the world. In a pre-inaugural interview with the Washington Times, Bush said, "If you want a glimpse of how I think about foreign policy, read Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy." On CNN, he elaborated on the plug, "Sharansky's book," he said, "confirmed . . . what I believe . . . that deep in everybody's soul -- everybody's soul -- is this deep desire to be free. That's what I believe. No matter where you were raised, no matter your religion, people want to be free. And that a foreign policy, particularly from a nation that is free, ought to be based upon that thought."

(p. 153):

Rumsfeld wanted to get into Iraq, crush Saddam's army, overthrow his regime, then get out. The whole point of military transformation, as he saw it, was to demonstrate that America could project power and topple rogue regimes with a small, light force and that, therefore, it could do so repeatedly, anytime, anywhere, at low cost and little effort. To get involved in a serious postwar occupation -- stabilization, security, nation-building, and all the rest -- would nullify the concept; it would bog down lots of troops for a long time.

In short, Rumsfeld did not miscalculate how many troops would be needed to stabilize Iraq after the war, as some critics later charged; he understood the calculations all too well. Rather than ratchet up the troop levels to meet that mission, he simply side-stepped the mission. He wasn't interested in it, didn't think postwar stabilization was what a modern military -- especially a transformational military -- ought to be doing.

(pp. 155-156):

Here, though, Rumsfeld's plan hit two roadblocks. The first, unexpectedly, was President bush. At an NSC meeting in February, a few weeks before the invasion, Feith mentioned in passing Chalabi's impending government. Bush interrupted him. We're not choosing anybody as Iraq's leader, he said. That's for the Iraqi people to decide. A few days later, Wolfowitz, who had not been at the earlier meeting and apparently had not been briefed on it by Feith, brought up Chalabi again. Bush lashed out. This is about democracy, Bush said. He had nothing for or against Chalabi, but the United States was not going to put its "thumb on the scale."

Now Rumsfeld and his assistants were in a spot. The invasion was about to go forward with the small force that Rumsfeld had demanded. He was convined it would be enough to beat the Iraqi Army and topple Saddam; in that, he turned out to be right and the generals turned out to be wrong. But his solution for postwar order -- his excuse for not thinking about, much less authorizing a plan for, Phase IV -- had just been overridden by the president.

Some defense secretaries might have hurriedly prepared a new plan. Rumsfeld prepared an end run. Right after Saddam's regime fell and American troops took the capital, Wolfowitz supplied Chalabi and more than six hundred of his Free Iraqi Fighters with a transport plane to Nasiriya.

Then came the second roadblock -- the Iraqi people. After a brief flurry of excitement, Chalabi never sparked popular support. He allied himself with one political party after the next, ran some ministries in transition governments, and headed a de-Baathification board for a while. But he alienated the various party chiefs. By the time parliamentary elections took place, he ran on his own ticket -- and didn't attract enough votes to win a seat.

The only option left for Rumsfeld, at this point, was denial. The Department of Defense had executive authority over postwar Iraq. But by June 2003, just a couple months into the occupation, it was clear to several officials who watched him at NSC meetings on the subject that the secretary of defense had lost interest.

(p. 163):

But it indicated no such thing. Had Bush looked at his own country's history, he would have seen that the election sporting one of the highest turnouts ever, with 81 percent of the eligible population voting, was the election of 1860 -- the election right before the American Civil War. He would have seen, in other words, that high turnouts don't necessarily reflect great harmony, that they can also presage implacable conflict and impassioned violence.

In the 2005 Iraqi election, Sunnis voted almost entirely for Sunni parties, Shiites voted almost entirely for religious Shiite parties (the explicitly secular Shiite candidates won only a handful of seats), and the Kurds ratified a nonbinding referendum to secede from Iraq altogether. The Iraqis didn't vote for a free society; rather, each ethnic or religious group voted for a society in which it would dominate the rival groups. And the act of voting that way -- the politicization of social tensions -- hardened their mutual hostilities.

When Israel attacked Lebanon in 2006 (pp. 171-172):

When asked at her press conference why she hadn't embarked on shuttle diplomacy already, Rice replied, "I could have gotten on a plane and rushed over and started shuttling," but "it wouldn't have been clear what I was shuttling to do." She added, "I have no interest in diplomacy for the sake of returning Lebanon and Israel to the status quo ante. I think that would be a mistake."

Then came the remark that dropped jaws and made headlines. "What we're seeing here," she said, "is, in a sense, the growing -- the birth pangs of a new Middle East. And whatever we do, we have to be certain that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old Middle East."

(p. 178):

However, out in that world, the view was very different. Against the backdrop of Bush's rhetoric about freedom, his maneuverings for material interest appeared more venal than usual; and against those maneuverings, his lofty rhetoric rang especially hollow.

For two brief periods -- just after Saddam Hussein was toppled, when American power seemed supreme, and during the Orange and Cedar Revolutions, when it seemed that freedom might really be "on the march" -- some leaders in the Middle East wondered if their days of unfettered power were numbered, if they might have to adopt political reforms to survive.

But before long, they concluded that Bush's calls for reform were bogus, a cynical veneer for big-power domination. They saw the war in Iraq as purely a play for Middle Eastern oil or as a crusade against Islam or simply as a sign of incompetence. And as American troops became bogged down in Iraq, it became clear that Bush had little leverage to press the issue in any case. Because they tought Bush didn't believe his rhetoric about democracy, they didn't have to take it seriously either. They could clamp down on their oppressed people even more, without consequence.

In their attempt to pass off America's ideals and interests as one and the same, President Bush and his advisers damaged both.

(pp. 183-183):

When Karen Hughes was appointed to the job [Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy] in March 2005, Condoleezza Rice introduced her at a press conference, saying, "We must do more to confront the hateful propaganda, dispel dangerous myths, and get out the truth."

A few months earlier, Charles Wolf, a longtime analyst at the RAND Corporation, wrote a paper on the subject entitled "Public Diplomacy: How to Think About It and Improve It." Almost twenty years earlier, Wolf had served with Andy Marshall on the panel that foresaw the economic downfall of the Soviet Union. Now, Wolf wrote, referring to the declining image of the United States, "Misunderstanding of American values is not the principal source of anti-Americanism." Many foreigners understand America quite well; they simply don't like what they see. It isn't myths, Wolf noted, but rather "some U.S. policies" that "have been, are, and will continue to be major sources of anti-Americanism."

Contrasts Bush's strategies with the founding precepts of the cold war era, under Truman, Acheson, Marshall, Kennan (p. 191):

By contrast, Bush's strategies neither succeeded nor endured -- not even through the two terms of his presidency -- because they did not fit the realities of his era. They were based not on a grasp of technology, history, or foreign cultures but rather on fantasy, faith, and a willful indifference toward those affected by their consequences.

Those in charge of his policies cared little about the details of warfare, knew little about the realities of the Middle East, and had not thought through what made freedom work in their own country, much less what might make it work elsewhere.