The Genie is Out of the Bottle: On Clinton, Nixon, Vietnam, and Iraq and the Future of American National Security

Whenever people ask me what's the best way to reduce nuclear proliferation, I always tell them that we should go back in time and prevent their initial conception. After all, if we can stick the nuclear genie back in the bottle, no one would have nuclear weapons-- not even the great powers-- and no one would be worried about having to control their emergence and prevent their dissemination to unsavory characters who might actualy use them. Rather than seeking nuclear weapons, other states would have to find other means of balancing American power, and many would simply find it easier to bandwagon with US hegemony than to contest it. It's a remarkably sound argument, undermined only by the small, insignificant fact that reverse time travel is not yet (and may never be) possible. Other than that, though, it's a great policy.

I mention all this because that's actually what many serious policy-makers seem to endorse on a different stage with a different problem.

It all starts with former President Bill Clinton's recent contention that he did more than his successor in trying to kill Osama Bin Laden. Appearing on Fox News Sunday, President Clinton stated:

"I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since. And if I were still president, we'd have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him."

. . .

"Now, if you want to criticize me for one thing, you can criticize me for this: After the Cole, I had battle plans drawn to go into Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban, and launch a full-scale attack search for bin Laden. But we needed basing rights in Uzbekistan, which we got after 9/11."

. . .

"The entire military was against sending Special Forces in to Afghanistan and refueling by helicopter. And no one thought we could do it otherwise, because we could not get the CIA and the FBI to certify that Al Qaeda was responsible while I was president."

. . .

"The people on my political right who say I didn't do enough spent the whole time I was president saying, "Why is he so obsessed with bin Laden? That was "wag the dog" when he tried to kill him."

Now I'm not going to sharpshoot the former President so much here, although I need to point out that "the entire military" was most certainly not against sending special forces into Afghanistan (lest General Wayne Downing's proposal to use special forces for precisely that mission never would have reached the Oval Office), and even if they had been (as was more accurately the case with, say, the Bosnian intervention-- remember Colin Powell irresponsibly published an essay in "Foreign Affairs" specifically to tie the Clinton Administration's hands), it is the responsibility of a good President to overcome that resistance and implement their strategic initiatives-- against the opposition of the bureaucracy, if need be. The Administration, after all, directs the military, and the military does what it's told to execute, whether they like it or not, so hiding behind "none of my subordinate wanted to do it" is a rather poor indication of leadership. Nor will I talk in-depth here about what I think is a horrible misconception, that using vastly more Coalition troops in Afghanistan would somehow be a strategically-sound decision-- that's been long addressed, and partisans on both sides will stick fiercely to their positions. God forbid, if they should actually have to think outside of their box. But I do think President Clinton makes a good point that even if he had been inclined to seek a more activist solution to the emerging terrorist threat (and he wasn't), there's no way the Republicans in Congress wouldn't have used the weak national security background of his Administration to attack him politically. For Clinton, an Operation Enduring Freedom would have been political suicide, and largely because of the very people who now support the current OEF. They would have questioned his intervention in a sovereign country, admonished that the operation was not linked to the national interest, and ridiculed his leading the nation into a "war of choice"; many pundits would have questioned his motives, no doubt suggesting that the intervention was not made for strategic reasons, but to turn attention away from his latest domestic or personal transgressions (of which there were many). Sure, 9/11 changed the dynamics, but even if it hadn't, simple partisan positioning would account for a majority of this exchange, and on that, I think he is correct. (Although I don't excuse him any more than I excuse the current President for failing to engage the nation and explain the nature and objectives of the conflict to them).

In any case, virtually every ex-President-- dating back more than two centuries to John Adams-- have zealously maintained the tradition of aggressively using their post-Presidential years to defend and promote their Administration's record in a historical context. This has become especially so with the emergence of mass-market media, talk shows, and million-dollar advances for Presidential memoirs-- former Presidents expend an enormous amount of energy demonstrating how their Administrations really were a lot more successful than people think (the exception appears to be those whose policies seem beyond redemption-- for example, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter-- in which case they seem to make great efforts to stay involved in public service, through one manner or another). Perhaps none were more successful than Richard Nixon who, with the notable assistance of his foreign minister Henry Kissinger, successfully managed to re-cast the Nixon Administration's foreign policy record of detente with the Soviet Union, normalization with China, management of the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and conclusion of the Vietnam War as being almost-unassailably good for America-- this despite being chased out of office days before a Congressional hearing might have made him only the second President to be impeached (and likely the first to be removed from office). It's just the way the system works.

But Nixon's experience points to something I find more interesting: how former Presidents defend their records by criticizing the action or inaction of subsequent sitting Presidents. If you remember (and I don't-- I had to learn it while studying history at West Point), after the North Vietnamese seized control of the South, Nixon undermined his hand-picked successor, Gerald Ford, by stating that Saigon never would have fallen had Nixon still been President. Of course, anyone can say anything after they've left office (like Clinton claiming he would have sent more than 20,000 troops), and my reading of the historical records has always suggested that Nixon was much more "peace with honor" to Kissinger's "decent interval" with respect to Vietnam-- in other words, Kissinger merely sought to prop up Saigon long enough to minimize the damage to American prestige when it fell, while Nixon felt that South Vietnam could survive indefinitely with an appropriate level of American support. But the reality is that Ford was incapable of getting that appropriate level of support from Congress precisely because Nixon's behavior in the Watergate scandal had changed the political dynamics in Washington. Thus, Nixon might have secured continued support for Saigon, and Clinton might have sent more troops to Afghanistan, but reality tells us that Nixon effectively closed off such an option for himself and his successor, and Clinton's response to successive terrorist attacks never rose above the level of firing cruise missiles at suspected terrorist camps. Again, they can claim whatever they want, but history suggests a slightly different outcome.

Vietnam takes us to another interesting parallel with Iraq. It's fashionable to compare the two conflicts (or at least to want to compare the two conflicts)-- usually by people who have never been to and know little beyond the superficial pale about either place-- and it's common to see people on the side decrying such a comparison. Analogies can be helpful to understand some dynamics (and can be similarly detrimental), even if (or especially if) all we're doing is learning lessons in one field that help explain behavior in an other field. While speaking at Fort Leavenworth's Combat Studies Institute Symposium, noted scholar Andrew Krepinevich offered a contrast/comparison that others rarely seem to talk about. Vietnam, during its origins in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, saw American involvement as essential to securing American interests and containing Communist expansion-- that is, the domino theory made the Vietnam War a "war of necessity," as far as American policy-makers were concerned. Yet after Nixon had assumed the Presidency, he was able to transition Vietnam into a "war of choice"-- because of detente with Russia and normalized relations with China, as well as the Nixon Doctrine's emphasis on "surrogate powers" and indigenous troops backed by American power, the stage had been set so that a withdrawal from Vietnam was widely perceived to no longer affect American interests in such a detrimental manner. Historians debate this point vigorously (Cuban involvement in Angola, for example, seems contradictory to this thesis), but a consensus has emerged that suggests that Soviet and Chinese leaders were now more interested in pursuing the benefits of detente with the US than they were in exploiting their victory in Vietnam for further gain.

Iraq, on the other hand, is a bit different. Widely believed to have been started as a "war of choice," the strategic setting has now changed and transformed the dynamics so that a premature withdrawal of US forces in Iraq could-- and probably would-- lead to serious strategic problems for the US. Chief among them would be the failure to prevent the disintegration of the Iraqi state, which would have ripple effects of its own: Iran would almost certainly seek to extend its control over the new Shi'a hegemony, perhaps using its new territory as a base from which to destabilize their Saudi rivals. Saudi Arabia, unwilling to see its regime undermined, would have no choice but to fight back, probably by striking some ad hoc alliance with Jordan and Egypt to balance Iranian power by backing the Sunni groups. Meanwhile, Turkey has already decided that there will be no independent Kurdistan, and they would act to destablize the Kurdish region-- using military force if necessary-- probably placing the Kurds in a very precarious situation, and likely requiring the continued presence of US forces to prevent a violent conflict (which would be an interesting predicament if we were seeking a complete withdrawal). On top of all that, the complete chaos would lead to even more jihadist training camps than we currently see, and far more than existed under the previous Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad. And if you think that the invasion of Iraq has become a recruiting tool for the radical Islamists, imagine what life would be like when the violent jihadists can now accurately claim that they have successfully expelled the infidels and prepare to achieve the next step in their plan... It seems, then, that Iraq has gone from a "war of choice" to become a "war of necessity."

This appears to be the conclusion of the classified National Intelligence Estimate, which I have not seen, but has been reported by the mainstream media, including CNN. According to the report:

A classified intelligence report concludes that the Iraq war has worsened the terrorist threat to the United States, U.S. officials told CNN Sunday.

. . .

Citing officials familiar with the report, The New York Times said the document "attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee."

True to their political ambitions (and their desperate need to gain House and Senate majorities in six weeks), the Democratic members of Congress took to the air waves to support their point:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called The New York Times report "further proof that the war in Iraq is making it harder for America to fight and win the war on terror."

. . .

Rep. Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, blamed the Bush administration for its "stay-the-course approach to the Iraq war."

. . .

Former presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts said the report "provides jarring confirmation that the disastrous policy in Iraq is a giant recruiting poster for terrorists and it is weakening our hand in the war on terror."

For them, this is about framing the debate before the truth can emerge so that-- like Nixon and Kissinger before them-- Americans will be predisposed to accept as fact, something that may very well not be true. To be sure, there have been some strategic-level successes in the Iraq War-- Libya's Qaddafi folded his hand and took his regime out of the nuclear arms race and ranks of terrorist-sponsoring countries; Crown Prince (and now King) Abdullah was forced to take measures against the terrorist recruiters and financiers in his midst; and Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf was forced to allow Americans to secure his nuclear arsenal and stop the A. Q. Khan nuclear trafficking network that was the Islamists' best chance at securing such a weapon of mass destruction (and, for that matter, they may have already gotten one). But if the NIE indicates that the war in Iraq has fueled radical Islamism and enabled the violent jihadists to recruit more members, that's something that can be accepted at face value. The presence of American forces on Iraqi soil-- or more aptly, the perception that we are Christian occupiers of a Muslim nation-- is one of our three biggest obstacles in winning the public perception war in the Middle East and elsewhere (the other two would be perceived support for Israeli intransigence and our seeming contradiction in espousing freedom and democracy while supporting authoritarian dictatorships in the region). And it's readily acceptable that our presence there feeds the jihadist insurgency, "fans Islamic radicalism," and "provides a training ground" for terrorists to export to other countries. That much is probably true.

On the other hand, it does not logically follow that our security interests would be any better served by handing over control of the country to those radical Islamists who would likely come to power in a premature American withdrawal. In fact, in the event of a premature withdrawal (and by premature, I mean any withdrawal before the legitimate Iraqi government has developed the functional capability to provide for its own security, repond to the needs of its citizens, and provide for a stable Iraqi society that does not support international terrorism), it's far more likely that the Islamist radicals would be far better able to exploit this defeat-- by celebrating their victory and establishing bases of operation-- that would make the radicals more lethal, in terms of quantity and quality, in their attacks against the West. That much is also probably true.

Unfortunately, the Democrats just don't understand this. Pelosi, Emmanuel, and Kerry are all on record as supporting a time-table-based withdrawal from Iraq-- regardless of whether the legitimate Iraqi government is capable of overcoming the vacuum. For them, they're not even "decent interval"-- they simply want to bring Americans home, regardless of its strategic consequence for the nation if the job we started isn't finished. It's as if they believe that because Iraq began as a "war of choice" (and one, they're convinced, that the President lied us into-- here we see the same motive questions that Republicans would have lobbed at Clinton) then it most certainly could not have transformed into a "war of necessity." Now one can absolutely blame the sitting President for leading us into this war, and forcing our hand by requiring us to stay until the job is finished-- just the way fiscal conservatives blame FDR for establishing a pay-go Social Security system that forces us to continue it no matter how bad things get when the Baby Boomers retire. But Democrats can no more wish away the fact that Iraq has become the central front in the Global War on Terror any more than Republicans can wish that Social Security had been a defined contributions plan from the beginning. Instead, their policy seems to be to pretend that we can implement a premature withdrawal from Iraq and that such a move will somehow make the country less vulnerable to future attack.

Now if time travel were possible, perhaps one could go back in time and prevent the invasion of Iraq (although I personally would go back further in time to establish the conditions so that we could more easily fight and win-- i.e, instituting doctrinal and organizational reforms within the military, establishing an interagency active response corps capable of conducting nation-building in less permissive security environments, etc. etc.). But minus that small, insignificant little thing known as "impossible," Democratic leaders are asking us to believe that we can somehow just put the genie in the bottle and turn back the clock to a time before we had ever invaded a country known as Iraq. And it doesn't take a National Intelligence Estimate to figure out how that would turn out.