Despite America's annual budgets of $419.3 billion on defense, and $44 billion on intelligence, a small band of fanatics armed with boxcutters managed to flatten the World Trade Center towers and hit the Pentagon. In a single, well-coordinated attack, symbols of America's financial and military supremacy took a pounding.
President Bush responded by launching two wars to strike back at those deemed responsible. US forces swept aside first the Taliban fighters, then the Iraqi army. But what looked like a pair of swift victories turned into two unwinnable quagmires. Equally distressing, our justifications for the Iraq invasion turned out to be false. America not only failed to re-assert its strength, but had severely damaged its reputation around the world.
Not only had our pride taken a hit, our worldview had suffered a body blow. Big countries with big armies are supposed to be safe at home, and irresistible abroad. How could flea-powered resistance forces defy the unbeatable United States of America?
Similar mysteries have confounded mankind for ages. A Hebrew poet once observed that the qualities we believe will make us successful are often illusions:
"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all." Ecclesiastes 9–11
Whatever the Hebrew poet glimpsed that day under the revealing Judean sun, he learned sobering and useful lessons from it. What Ecclesiastes 9–11 tells us is that injustice is real – genuine talent often goes unnoticed and unrewarded. But it also warns that the world is a more complex place than we imagine it to be, and we should therefore avoid talking ourselves into a false sense of security. And sometimes the weak can overcome the strong.
Blinded by ideology and puffed up with confidence, the administration steered the nation into a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. Bush unleashed his shock and awe campaign to almost unanimous acclaim at home. At first it appeared that this battle had indeed been won by the strong. But while most of the American people saluted their Commander-in-chief's flight-suited swagger, some sharper-eyed critics cautioned things in Iraq might not be what they appeared.
William Lind, an analyst and writer on guerilla warfare, warned the underlying assumptions behind the Iraq occupation were hopelessly out of touch with reality. US forces, trained and outfitted to fight the Soviet Red Army, were unprepared to fight what Lind called "Fourth Generation Warfare." In this kind of action, said Lind, the apparently boundless might of the American armed forces did not assure victory. Indeed, displays of power actually undermined the US mission. As Lind described it, "Actions such as sealing off Auja, bulldozing farmers’ orchards and Operation Iron Hammer are worse than crimes; they are blunders. They may result in some small gains at the tactical and physical levels of war, but at tremendous cost at the strategic and moral levels, where guerilla war is decided."
But, just as strength does not assure victory, being right does not guarantee riches or favor. Lind, as well as others who questioned the rightness and logic of this war, have had to settle for the satisfaction of having been proved right. On the other hand, those who got the war and its aftermath exactly wrong have flourished and prospered. And they still don't seem to have learned a thing.
For example, Time magazine hired William Kristol in December as its “star columnist.” Kristol, already a Weekly Standard editor and Fox News contributor, has since enriched the pages of Time with such articles as, "Why Republicans Are Smiling," predicting boom times ahead for the party of national security and solid support for Bush's Global War on Terror.
Kristol, of course, was one of the most prominent cheerleaders for invading Iraq. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February, 2002, he assured the Senate that invading Iraq would generate boundless good: "The political, strategic and moral rewards would also be even greater. A friendly, free, and oil-producing Iraq would leave Iran isolated and Syria cowed." In a pre-invasion interview on National Public Radio, he dismissed warnings that "the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni" as "pop sociology."
Days before Bush unleashed his shock and awe campaign against Iraq, Bill Kristol gave the American people this tidy summary of why the US was justified in launching an aggressive war against Saddam's regime:
“He’s got weapons of mass destruction. At some point he will use them or give them to a terrorist group to use…Look, if we free the people of Iraq we will be respected in the Arab world….France and Germany don’t have the courage to face up to the situation. That’s too bad. Most of Europe is with us. And I think we will be respected around the world for helping the people of Iraq to be liberated.”
And consider the case of Paul Wolfowitz, who served as Bush's Deputy Secretary of Defense. When he quit that job to become president of the World Bank in 2005, he received a "full-honor farewell ceremony" at the Pentagon. Before the Iraq invasion, he, like Bill Kristol, also predicted easy victory with nothing but good things resulting, and vigorously responded to rare critics. Days before American bombers took to the Iraqi skies, the scholarly and reserved General Eric Shinseki, who was then Army Chief of Staff, questioned Donald Rumsfled's plan to use less than 100,000 troops to conquer and pacify the entire country. Wolfowitz assured the House Budget Committee on February 27, 2003 that Shinseki's comments were "quite outlandish" and added it was "hard to imagine" it would take more troops to do the job than Rumsfeld anticipated. In August of 2003, Rumsfeld named Peter Schoomaker to replace Shinseki as Army Chief of Staff.
But sometimes, neglected men of understanding enjoy modest vindication. On November 15, 2006, in testimony before Congress, General John Abizaid testified that General Shinseki's judgment about required troop strength in Iraq had been proven correct in the streets of Baghdad. And in October of 2003, Wolfowitz and his staff, while visiting Baghdad, had to scramble for their lives in the middle of the night when their hotel was hit by a rocket attack. A Lieutenant Colonel was killed, and seventeen other US soldiers were wounded, while Wolfowitz and his entire staff escaped unharmed. As the poet observed, the race is not always to the swift.
April 19, 2007
Michael C. Tuggle [send him mail] is a project manager and writer in Charlotte, NC. His first book, Confederates in the Boardroom, explores the implications of organizational science on political systems, and is published by Traveller Press.
