Standoff, page 16
“It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq,” Bush replied in January 2007. That was when he announced “a new way forward.” But his plan shocked the country. He announced, “I have committed more than twenty thousand additional American troops to Iraq.” The plan for a surge was defiant of public opinion. And the public didn’t like it. By better than two to one in a CNN poll (66 percent to 32 percent), Americans opposed sending additional US troops to Iraq.10
The surge brought an outpouring of rage from Democrats. The 2006 midterm had been a decisive repudiation of the war. Bush’s surge two months later looked like a gesture of contempt for the voters. Democrats were virtually united in their opposition; 88 percent opposed the troop buildup. There was even criticism from Republicans. Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a decorated Vietnam veteran and a Republican, called Bush’s troop buildup “the most dangerous foreign-policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.” Hagel, later to become President Obama’s secretary of defense, spoke for the 30 percent of Republicans who opposed the surge.
Americans have always had confidence in the capabilities of the US military. They never had confidence in the capabilities of the Iraqi government—a government that wasn’t even capable of managing Saddam Hussein’s execution. Americans were wary of the notion that our success depended on the Iraqi government’s ability to achieve political reconciliation.
In the year following the surge, the public’s view of the Iraq War went through yet another twist. With the arrival of more US troops, the violence in Iraq began to subside. The number of Americans who felt “the US military is making progress in improving conditions in Iraq and bringing an end to violence in that country” rose from 47 percent in August 2007, to 52 percent in February 2008, to 54 percent in June 2008, according to CNN polls.11 But the impression of military progress did not increase public support for the war. The number of Americans who favored the war barely changed: 31 percent in January 2007, when the troop buildup began; 30 percent in June 2008. Two-thirds continued to oppose the Iraq War.12 Most Americans just wanted it over.
Nevertheless, the surge worked. The military situation in Iraq stabilized temporarily, long enough to give the United States cover to start withdrawing troops. So what happened in the United States? Politically, the Iraq issue began to disappear from the agenda. The war never became popular. Americans continued to regard it as a mistake. But by the time of the 2008 presidential election, Iraq was no longer a major issue. On Election Day 2008, only 10 percent of the voters cited the war in Iraq as the biggest issue facing the country. Nearly two-thirds cited the economy.
The Failure of Nation Building
Afghanistan was front and center on the nation’s radar screen for a few months after the 9/11 attacks. US-led military strikes began in October 2001. By December, the Taliban regime was out of power. For the next five years, Iraq dominated the foreign-policy agenda. Afghanistan was the forgotten war.
When Barack Obama took office in 2009, the United States had been fighting in Afghanistan for eight years. But to many Americans, Afghanistan looked like a new war. In 2009, even with 130,000 US troops still in Iraq, Iraq was becoming the forgotten war. Suddenly Afghanistan grabbed public attention, starting with Obama’s decision to send 21,000 additional troops. He described Afghanistan as a “war of necessity” rather than a “war of choice” like Iraq. The problem was that the necessity had occurred eight years earlier, immediately after 9/11.
Obama’s liberal base abandoned him on Afghanistan. In the CNN poll, opposition to the war grew fastest among Democrats, from 55 percent opposed in April 2009 to 73 percent opposed in September.13 What changed wasn’t the nature of the enemy. The Taliban and Al Qaeda remained perfect enemies for Americans: barbaric, intolerant, and threatening. What changed was the character of the war. What started as a limited counterterrorism campaign turned into a difficult and costly exercise in nation building.
General Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan in 2009, wrote a classified counterinsurgency strategy that said, “Protecting the people is the mission. The conflict will be won by persuading the population, not by destroying the enemy.”14 That’s a political war, the kind Americans hate. Once again, the United States was fighting to build confidence in another country’s government. Just as we tried and failed to do in Vietnam and Iraq.
The August 2009 election in Afghanistan was supposed to solidify popular support for the Hamid Karzai government. Instead, it raised issues of fraud and mismanagement and threw a shadow over that government’s legitimacy. Americans were fighting and dying for a government that stole elections.
Afghanistan doomed the Bush Doctrine. The Bush Doctrine was promulgated by the president in his second inaugural address on January 20, 2005: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” That is an arguable proposition. Would the United States really be more secure if countries such as Saudi Arabia became democracies? When Egypt and Gaza and Turkey held elections, Islamist parties won. Nor is it clear that US policy makers understand enough about other countries’ politics and cultures to turn them into functioning democracies.
The United States did succeed in building functioning democracies in Germany and Japan following World War II. Two exceptional conditions made those ventures a success. First, Germany and Japan had powerful preexisting national identities, even if those identities were exaggerated and distorted under fascism. Second, both countries faced total defeat and unconditional surrender after World War II. America had both the authority and the legitimacy to rebuild their national institutions. Those conditions did not hold in Iraq and Afghanistan, where national identities were weaker and the US objective was more limited (“regime change”). In Iraq and Afghanistan, unlike Germany and Japan, the United States was seen as the invader.
Back in 2000, in a campaign debate with Al Gore, George W. Bush warned, “If we don’t stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we’re going to have a serious problem coming down the road.” As we did.
A New Cold War?
For a year after the 9/11 attacks, the American public was united. President Bush’s job approval rating hit 90 percent in the September 2001 Gallup poll—the highest rating ever recorded for any president (just above his father’s 89 percent at the end of the 1991 Gulf War). His job rating remained above 50 percent for more than two years; among Democrats, for one year.15 During that period, the country experienced what looked like an era of good feeling; an era of national solidarity in the face of a dire threat.
The closest analogy to the war on terror was supposed to be the Cold War: an open-ended conflict with no definitive outcome in the foreseeable future. The enemy was an “ism”: first Communism, later terrorism. It was a global confrontation. The United States divided the world into our side and their side. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” Bush said on September 20, 2001.
During the Cold War, Americans were obsessed with the nuclear threat. After 9/11, we were obsessed with the threat of terrorism. US citizens pursued airport security with the same zeal we once built fallout shelters and practiced “duck and cover” exercises. Perhaps the closest parallel to the fear Americans felt after 9/11 was the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
The Cold War taught the country some important lessons that were applied to “America’s New War.” In the early years of the Cold War, Americans were preoccupied by “the enemy within.” After 9/11, President Bush insisted that the Islamic religion, and Muslim Americans in particular, were not the enemy. “This is civilization’s fight,” he said, being careful to include Muslims: “We respect your faith . . . The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself.”
The early years of the Cold War were marked by the unsubtle and inflexible diplomacy of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles: “brinkmanship” and “massive retaliation.” President George W. Bush seemed to understand that the war on terror would be fought in a world of complex competition, shifting allegiances, and sometimes devious diplomacy. For example, the United States quickly lifted its antinuclear sanctions on Pakistan. The administration contemplated an opening to Iran if it would help us.
The Cold War lasted forty-five years. It was costly, difficult, and often controversial. When the conflict began, there was considerable doubt that the American people would have the stomach for a massive, open-ended, global commitment. But through it all, Americans sacrificed and endured. In the end, Communism collapsed, owing in no small measure to the relentlessness of US opposition.
The analogy with the war on terror does not hold. The war on terror lasted barely twelve years. President Barack Obama declared an end to it on May 23, 2013: “We have now been at war for over a decade.” From now on, “we must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror’ but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.”16 Obama was describing more a police action than a war.
The war in Iraq undermined public confidence in the war on terror. In 2005 the White House used the “war on terror” to try to boost sagging support for the war in Iraq. As Bush’s White House spokesman said in June 2005, “We are fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them here at home.”
Public satisfaction with the way things were going in the war on terror was the lowest since 9/11, according to Gallup. It was not because Americans felt more threatened. They didn’t. The number who said further acts of terrorism against the United States were likely in the near future had gone down, from more than 50 percent a year earlier to just over a third in 2005.17 Discontent with the war in Iraq eclipsed terrorism. In a June 2005 New York Times–CBS News poll, more than three times as many Americans mentioned Iraq as mentioned terrorism as the most important problem facing the country.18 When President Obama declared an end to the global war on terror, he acknowledged that the threat of terrorism had not disappeared. It had “shifted and evolved” to a smaller scale, as was the case before 9/11.
America had experienced terrorist attacks before 9/11: on a US Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, on the Khobar Towers military residence in Saudi Arabia in 1996, on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on the same day in 1998, and on the destroyer USS Cole off the coast of Yemen in 2000. The World Trade Center in New York was first bombed in 1993 and, as noted earlier, it was treated not as an act of war but as a crime. The perpetrators were apprehended and brought to justice.
During the 2004 campaign, Republicans skewered John Kerry’s “law enforcement” approach to counterterrorism. In a New York Times Magazine interview, Kerry compared terrorism to prostitution and illegal gambling. He pledged to reduce it to the point where “it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.” The Bush campaign quickly released a television ad asking, “How can Kerry protect us when he doesn’t understand the threat?”19
Did President Obama propose returning to the law enforcement approach used after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing? Not exactly. What he proposed could be called “law enforcement plus.” “Despite our strong preference for the detention and prosecution of terrorists,” Obama said, “sometimes this approach is foreclosed.” Terrorists hide out in remote and inaccessible locations. They are protected by local populations. Other governments cannot or will not cooperate with the United States. What do we do then? The president’s answer was drones.
He defended the use of drones (“targeted lethal action”) as an alternative to military intervention.20 He called drones “the course of action least likely to result in the loss of innocent human life.” Drones, Obama argued, must be measured “against the history of putting American troops in distant lands among hostile populations.”
Obama’s New America coalition was forged out of antiwar activism. He first rose to prominence as an opponent of the war in Iraq. His approach to counterterrorism was commensurate with his antiwar roots. “Unless we discipline our thinking, our definitions, our actions,” he said, “we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight.”
Americans supported the use of drones (65 to 75 percent in various polls), so long as they were not used inside the United States.21 The president admitted that drone strikes raise troubling legal questions. But he insisted that the strikes continue, albeit with stronger safeguards and more transparency. They were his alternative to Bush’s policy of preemptive war.
The Islamic State Challenge
In 2014 President Obama dismissed the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (or ISIS) as “jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.” Then they grabbed huge swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq, terrorized the local populations, and committed grisly murders of Americans. The public sees ISIS as bloodthirsty fanatics who must be eliminated by force. Despite the public’s revulsion against ISIS brutality, Americans ruled out the use of US ground troops. And the president promised not to dispatch any. Americans are okay with air strikes, intelligence support, and military aid to local militias.22 We want to fight this war by technology and by proxy. With no US casualties.
Who are our allies in this fight? And can we trust them to fight ISIS and not one another? That is exactly the political thicket Americans will not tolerate. They want to win a clear-cut military victory, destroy ISIS, and go home. During the 2016 Republican presidential campaign, Texas senator Ted Cruz vowed to “carpet bomb ISIS into oblivion.” Donald Trump said he would “knock the shit out of ’em” and then “take the oil.” As we learned in Vietnam and Iraq, the public doesn’t trust unreliable foreign allies or wish to get involved in other countries’ civil wars.
Benjamin Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, captured the sentiment of the nation’s establishment perfectly in 2013 when he made this point to the New York Times during the debate over Syria: “One thing for Congress to consider is the message that this debate sends about US leadership around the world: that the US for decades has played the role of undergirding the global security architecture and enforcing international norms. And we do not want to send a message that the United States is getting out of that business in any way.”23
The problem is that many Americans want to send that very message. A Pew poll taken for the Council on Foreign Relations in December 2013 found that a majority of Americans (52 percent) endorse a radically alternative view to that of the establishment: namely, that the United States “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along as best they can on their own.” That was the highest level of isolationism measured in nearly fifty years.24
A Populist Foreign Policy
Thanks to Donald Trump, we now know what a populist foreign policy looks like: in Trump’s words, “I’m not isolationist, but I am America First.” When an interviewer first mentioned the slogan “America First,” Trump said, “I like the expression,” giving the impression that he had never heard the term before. The America First Committee, founded in 1940, opposed any US involvement in World War II and included isolationists and Nazi sympathizers.
“ ‘America First’ will be the major and overriding theme of my administration,” the presidential candidate said when he delivered a speech defining his foreign policy in April 2016. “I will view as president the world through the clear lens of American interests.” If our NATO allies won’t pay their fair share of the cost of defending them, “the US must be prepared to let those countries defend themselves.” He said America must be “willing to leave the table” if we can’t get the deal we want. And “our military dominance must be unquestioned—and I mean unquestioned—by anybody and everybody.”
Trump horrified the editors of the Washington Post when he said he wanted to renegotiate NATO. (“We certainly can’t afford to do this anymore.”) When asked whether the United States gains anything by having military bases in South Korea and Japan, he replied, “Personally, I don’t think so.” He said South Korea is “a wealthy country” that he had “great relationships with.” (“I have buildings in South Korea.”) His complaint? “We are not reimbursed fairly for what we do.” Hillary Clinton accused Trump of “turning our alliances into a protection racket.” You pay us, and we’ll protect you.
Trump’s approach to ISIS exhibited markers of isolationism. “I would knock the hell out of ISIS in some form,” he told the Post’s editors. “I would rather not do it with our troops, you understand that. Very important.” His plan was to use unrestrained air power and get Muslim countries to provide the ground troops. He said he would find it “very, very hard” to send thousands of US ground troops to the Middle East, even if the generals at the Pentagon recommended it. How would Trump persuade other countries to commit troops? He threatened to halt oil purchases and end the US alliance with Saudi Arabia unless it committed ground troops. “Without us, Saudi Arabia wouldn’t exist for very long,” he told the New York Times. That’s called bribery.
Trump called it negotiation. He said the key to negotiation is unpredictability: “We have to be unpredictable. We’re totally predictable. And predictable is bad.” That’s how he justified shifting positions on issues like the war in Iraq.
But military alliances are based on predictability. If a NATO ally is attacked, the attacker has to know that the United States will retaliate. “We need steady hands,” Hillary Clinton told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in 2016, “not a president who says he’s neutral on Monday, pro-Israel on Tuesday, and who-knows-what on Wednesday because everything is negotiable.”
