no longer be neutral toward the politics practiced inside other countries, where âstabilityâ might actually be a dangerously advanced form of decay. America would now actively promote freedom around the world. âFreedomâ was the key word of the 2002 document, whose opening lines are these: âThe great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedomâand a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.â
In its long struggle for the soul of the Republican Party and American foreign policy, neoconservatism had finally triumphed. The first chance to test the creed was coming up fast, in Iraq.
The worm in the apple, the seed of future trouble, is easier to see in retrospect. The leading figures of the Bush war cabinet had all worked at high levels in at least one previous administration; some of them had served in three or four. No Democratic contemporary could claim anything like their experience. Counting his years in Congress, Dick Cheney had been an influential insider under every Republican president since Nixon. Except for the Clinton years, Paul Wolfowitzâs career in government extended through every administration from Nixon to the second Bush. George W. Bushâs foreign-policy advisers were vastly experienced, they were aggressively self-confident, and they were peculiarly unsuited to deal with the consequences of the Bush Doctrine.
They entered government in the aftermath of the trauma in Vietnam, and they were forged as Cold War hawks. They devoted their careers to restoring American military power and its projection around the world. Through the three decades of their public lives, the only thing America had to fear was its own return to weakness. But after the Cold War ended, they sat out the debates of the 1990s about humanitarian war, international standards, nation building, democracy promotion. They had little to say about the new, borderless security threatsâfailed states, ethnic conflict, poverty, âloose nukesâ in post-communist Russia, and global terrorism. Clintonâs foreign policy was feckless; once they got back into power, they told themselves, they would do everything differently. Cheney, the hardest of hard-liners, expressed contemptuous disapproval of every intervention of the decade. Rumsfeld hadnât formed a new idea since opposing arms control as Gerald Fordâs secretary of defense. Powell and Rice were deep skeptics of open-ended military commitments on behalf of âsoftâ ideals. Bush himself came into office with no curiosity about the world, only a suspicion that his predecessor had entangled America in far too many obscure places of no importance to national interests. Wolfowitz alone among them supported the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, but his worldview left even him unprepared to deal with or even to acknowledge a stateless organization with an ideology of global jihad. When September 11 forced the imagination to grapple with something radically new, the presidentâs foreign-policy advisers reached for what they had always known. The threat, as they saw it, lay in well-armed enemy states. The answer, as ever, was military power and the will to use it.
3
E XILES
IN APRIL 2002, with the Pentagon already deep into planning for a war, the State Department realized that it had better start thinking about a postwar. The departmentâs Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs recruited Iraqi exiles with expertise in various fields and organized them into seventeen committees that would draft reports on subjects of importance for administering Iraq after Saddamâtechnical reports on topics like electricity, health, transitional justice, and policing. Among those Iraqis whom State invited to participate in its Future of Iraq Project was Kanan Makiya. But Makiya declined.
He had been publicly
In its long struggle for the soul of the Republican Party and American foreign policy, neoconservatism had finally triumphed. The first chance to test the creed was coming up fast, in Iraq.
The worm in the apple, the seed of future trouble, is easier to see in retrospect. The leading figures of the Bush war cabinet had all worked at high levels in at least one previous administration; some of them had served in three or four. No Democratic contemporary could claim anything like their experience. Counting his years in Congress, Dick Cheney had been an influential insider under every Republican president since Nixon. Except for the Clinton years, Paul Wolfowitzâs career in government extended through every administration from Nixon to the second Bush. George W. Bushâs foreign-policy advisers were vastly experienced, they were aggressively self-confident, and they were peculiarly unsuited to deal with the consequences of the Bush Doctrine.
They entered government in the aftermath of the trauma in Vietnam, and they were forged as Cold War hawks. They devoted their careers to restoring American military power and its projection around the world. Through the three decades of their public lives, the only thing America had to fear was its own return to weakness. But after the Cold War ended, they sat out the debates of the 1990s about humanitarian war, international standards, nation building, democracy promotion. They had little to say about the new, borderless security threatsâfailed states, ethnic conflict, poverty, âloose nukesâ in post-communist Russia, and global terrorism. Clintonâs foreign policy was feckless; once they got back into power, they told themselves, they would do everything differently. Cheney, the hardest of hard-liners, expressed contemptuous disapproval of every intervention of the decade. Rumsfeld hadnât formed a new idea since opposing arms control as Gerald Fordâs secretary of defense. Powell and Rice were deep skeptics of open-ended military commitments on behalf of âsoftâ ideals. Bush himself came into office with no curiosity about the world, only a suspicion that his predecessor had entangled America in far too many obscure places of no importance to national interests. Wolfowitz alone among them supported the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, but his worldview left even him unprepared to deal with or even to acknowledge a stateless organization with an ideology of global jihad. When September 11 forced the imagination to grapple with something radically new, the presidentâs foreign-policy advisers reached for what they had always known. The threat, as they saw it, lay in well-armed enemy states. The answer, as ever, was military power and the will to use it.
3
E XILES
IN APRIL 2002, with the Pentagon already deep into planning for a war, the State Department realized that it had better start thinking about a postwar. The departmentâs Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs recruited Iraqi exiles with expertise in various fields and organized them into seventeen committees that would draft reports on subjects of importance for administering Iraq after Saddamâtechnical reports on topics like electricity, health, transitional justice, and policing. Among those Iraqis whom State invited to participate in its Future of Iraq Project was Kanan Makiya. But Makiya declined.
He had been publicly
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