Trigger Man
In the months preceding the U.S.-led invasion, with the ranks of those opposing the administration swelling, Wolfowitz figured prominently among the officials called upon to rebut any objections to war. Never has a deputy cabinet secretary played such a visible role in making the case for a policy so fraught with controversy. Cool, imperturbable, and relentlessly “on message,†Wolfowitz performed impressively. Only once did his mask of self-assurance slip: when the United States Army, in the person of its chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, ventured to say nay.
The clash between Shinseki and Wolfowitz received considerable media coverage. For some, it lives on as emblematic of the arrogance and over-confidence attributed to the Bush administration on the eve of war. But the full significance of this civil-military confrontation remains unappreciated. For Shinseki, an honorable soldier with few intellectual pretensions, was also in his own way the embodiment of specific forces, very much at odds with those that Wolfowitz had championed. Although couching his critique in green-eyeshade, bean-counting terms, the general set out to subvert the very project that represented the deputy defense secretary’s life’s work.
The administration, Shinseki told members of Congress, was badly underestimating the number of troops that pacifying Iraq was likely to require. Given that the requisite additional troops simply did not exist, Shinseki was implicitly arguing that the U.S. armed services were inadequate for the enterprise. Further, he was implying that invasion was likely to produce something other than a crisp, tidy decision; from a soldier’s viewpoint, a display of precision warfare was not likely to settle the matter. “Liberation†would leave loose ends. Unexpected and costly complications would abound.
In effect, Shinseki was offering a last-ditch defense of the military tradition that Wolfowitz was intent on destroying, a tradition that saw armies as fragile, that sought to husband military power, and that classified force as an option of last resort. The risks of action, Shinseki was suggesting, were far, far greater than the advocates for war had let on.
Shinseki’s critique elicited an immediate retaliatory response. One could safely ignore the complaints of liberal Democrats or the New York Times, not to mention those coming from a largely inchoate antiwar movement. But if the brass openly opposed the war, they could halt the march on Baghdad even before it began. Besides, how could Shinseki dare even to raise the question of an occupation? Wolfowitz was already on the record as declaring that the United States was “committed to liberating the people of Iraq, not to becoming an occupation force.†Shinseki had to be discredited then and there, lest the opportunity to validate the new American way of war be lost forever.
So the normally unflappable Wolfowitz responded with uncharacteristic brusqueness, caustically dismissing the general’s estimate as “wildly off the mark.†For his dissent, Shinseki paid dearly. Publicly rebuked and immediately marginalized, he soon retired, his fate an object lesson for other senior military professionals. (The episode affirmed the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz theory of civil-military relations: heap lavish public praise on soldiers in the ranks while keeping the generals and admirals on an exceedingly short leash.)
In the end, Wolfowitz got his war. Operation Iraqi Freedom provided the first salvo in an open-ended campaign to transform the Islamic world. Should the conduct of that campaign require the anticipatory use of force, it also provided ample precedent to do just that.
[...]
In its trial run, the doctrine of preventive war—Wolfowitz’s handiwork as much as the president’s—has produced liberation and occupation, a crisp demonstration of “shock and awe†and a protracted, debilitating insurgency, the dramatic toppling of a dictator and horrifying evidence implicating American soldiers in torture and other abuses. The Iraq War has now entered its third year with no end in sight, taxing U.S. forces to the limit. The ongoing conflict has divided the nation like no event since Vietnam. Like Vietnam, it is sapping our economic strength and has already done immeasurable damage to our standing in the world. Despite expectations of Saddam’s overthrow paving the way for what some expected to be a foreign policy of moral incandescence, the United States finds itself obliged once again to compromise its ideals, cozying up to little Saddams like Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf and Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov.
The forces that Paul Wolfowitz helped unleash—a dangerous combination of hubris and naivete—are exacting an ever mounting cost. His considerable exertions notwithstanding, truth in matters of statecraft remains implacably gray. Even assuming honorable intentions on the part of those who conceived this war, wielding power in Iraq has left the United States up to its ankles, if not up to its knees, in guilt.
In his solitude, General Shinseki can await the final judgment of history with considerable confidence. At the pinnacle of professional success, Paul Wolfowitz must look forward to a different verdict that will be anything but kind.
