The Assassins' Gate by George Packer Page A

worst-case analysis favored by the White House. A shipment of aluminum tubes that experts in the Department of Energy doubted could be used as centrifuges for enriching uranium were, Condoleezza Rice asserted in a television interview, suitable for nothing else. Documents recording the sale of yellowcake uranium from Niger to Iraq kept being cited by top officials, including the president, long after they had been discredited as fraudulent. A group of civilians at the Pentagon under the direction of Douglas Feith and William Luti was culling through raw data on Saddam’s possible ties to al-Qaeda in order to produce the desired result that the established intelligence community, including the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, would not provide. Outside the government, war advocates like Perle, Kristol, and Kagan warned that time was running out. It was as if the administration were working around the clock to head off a nuclear Pearl Harbor and simultaneously prove that it was about to happen. One didn’t need special expertise in the fields of intelligence or proliferation to smell something wrong. The administration had boxed itself in by deciding to go to war before it knew exactly why.
    Even as Bush and his war cabinet made their particular case on Iraq, they laid out a far-reaching grand strategy for the use of American power in the world. The president began to articulate it in a series of speeches to the military academies. Rice codified it in a document prepared under her supervision and titled “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America.” The first draft, written by Richard Haass, was too long and mild for Rice’s taste, and she turned over the revision to Philip Zelikow, a University of Virginia professor who had been her colleague on the NSC under the first President Bush. Zelikow produced a short, eloquent statement of principles with a new passage on preemptive war, which, when the document was released in September, was immediately taken as a justification for war with Iraq. It was as if that earlier and almost forgotten bureaucratic document, the Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, drafted near the end of the administration of the first President Bush, had been put in a deep freeze for safekeeping during the long exile of the Clinton years, to be restored to life a decade later after September 11 in the second Bush presidency by some of the same players who had written, directed, and approved the original. The new document announced a new Bush Doctrine. This doctrine promised “a distinctly American internationalism that reflects the union of our values and our national interests.” It would seek to promote “a balance of power that favors human freedom.” Bush and his national security adviser Rice seemed to be splitting the difference between the realism of Bush’s father and his national security adviser, Rice’s mentor Brent Scowcroft, and the idealism of the neoconservatives who were now ascendant. But in fact, the new document’s high-flown language and, even more, its substance marked a decisive break with the foreign-policy establishment. The “balance of power” was out; in the new era, the old Cold War policies of containment and deterrence no longer applied. Rogue states and global terrorists could not be deterred. America, preeminent and without rivals, would ensure the peace in part by preempting threats to peace. It would do so within the existing international framework if possible but with ad hoc “coalitions of the willing” if necessary, or even alone. American might did not make America right; America was right by virtue of being America. But American might would uphold the right across the globe. And this is where the new post–September 11 strategy differed from the old post–Cold War strategy of the Defense Planning Guidance: After the terror attacks, the world’s superpower could