US goes from imperial offense to
defense By Michael T Klare
There are many reasons President George W
Bush might have wanted to replace Donald Rumsfeld
with Robert M Gates as secretary of defense: to
distance himself from the current military
disaster in Iraq, to make the adoption of a new
Iraqi strategy easier, to prevent further disunity
within the military, or to clear the path for a
revival of Republican fortunes in the 2008
elections.
All of these may, in fact, have
been contributing factors in Gates' appointment;
yet on a deeper level, the move can also be read as
signaling a momentous shift in
America's global posture - from imperial offense
to imperial defense.
For the past six
years, the top officials in charge of US foreign
and military policy have known how to play
rough-and-tumble offensive American football, but
were simply clueless when it came to defense.
However, just as every football team must at some
point surrender possession of the ball and bring
in its defensive specialists to stop the other
team from scoring a touchdown, so the president
has evidently at long last called for a changing
of the guard. Far too late in the game, he has
finally decided to send the defense on to the
field for Team America. This is Bob Gates'
historic mission.
After all the setbacks
and spilled blood in Iraq, it's nearly impossible
even to recall those heady days in late 2001 when
Bush and his acolytes announced that the US was
entering a new epoch of enduring American
greatness - a golden era in which the United
States would use its overwhelming military might
to spread its divinely inspired values to the rest
of the world.
This vision of American
beliefs carried to the far ends of the Earth at
the point of a sword (or, at least, the modern
cruise- and Hellfire-missile-armed equivalents
thereof) was first concocted in right-wing
think-tanks and talk shops such as the Project for
the New American Century during the second term of
president Bill Clinton's administration. It was
then quietly incorporated into the Bush campaign
of 1999-2000.
In perhaps the most
evocative, if not yet fully militarized,
expression of this messianic prospect,
then-governor Bush told an appreciative audience
at The Citadel military college on September 23,
1999, that in rebuilding the US military after the
supposed neglect of the Clinton years, his goal
would be "to take advantage of a tremendous
opportunity - given few nations in history - to
extend the current peace into the far realm of the
future. A chance to project America's peaceful
influence, not just across the world, but across
the years."
To achieve such a grandiose
vision, as its planners imagined it, required a
substantial expansion of the military's capacity
to "project power" to remote areas of the
developing world, far from the existing Pentagon
infrastructure in Europe and the Pacific. "We must
be able to project our power over long distances,
in days or weeks," Bush explained at The Citadel.
"Our forces in the next century," he added, "must
be agile, lethal, readily deployable and require a
minimum of logistical support."
Here, the
analogy of the US game of football was already
unmistakably present. Surely, the president was
describing a swift, no-huddle, run-and-pass
offense. To captain this offense-oriented outfit,
Bush chose Rumsfeld, a true fellow believer, who
would oversee the "transformation" of the US
military from a stodgy, ponderous Cold War relic
into a fleet, agile, "readily deployable" tool
capable of sustaining his global crusade.
Then came September 11, 2001. In its wake,
the president and his secretary of defense added a
new element to their global agenda: the preemptive
emasculation of hostile states deemed capable of
posing a future threat to US dominance. This new
policy - quickly dubbed the "Bush Doctrine" - was
first spelled out in a June 2002 commencement
speech Bush gave at the United States Military
Academy in West Point, New York. "The 'war on
terror' will not be won on the defensive," he
exclaimed. "We must take the battle to the enemy,
disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats
before they emerge."
This, of course,
required yet another expansion of US military
capabilities, focusing again on America's capacity
for power projection to distant lands. In the view
of Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and his close
pal Rumsfeld, as well as the neo-conservative
punditry, it also required a willingness to employ
force in a muscular and conspicuous manner, so as
to intimidate potential rivals into submission.
"In the world we have entered," Bush declared at
West Point, "the only path to safety is the path
of action. And this nation will act."
It
was this aggressive impulse more than anything
else that tipped the balance toward war with Iraq.
"At the extreme," commented John Ikenberry of
Georgetown University, these newly introduced
notions formed "a neo-imperial vision in which the
United States arrogates to itself the global role
of setting standards, determining threats, using
force and meting out justice".
And so
began the rush to war with Iraq - with visions of
victory not just in Baghdad but subsequently in
Tehran, Damascus and who knows where else dancing
in the minds of the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Bush
backfield, their various offensive linemen, and a
bevy of overly enthusiastic cheerleaders on the
sidelines.
A few months before the onset
of hostilities, the administration adopted a new
national-security strategy document enshrining the
Bush Doctrine as formal US policy and indicating a
readiness to conduct any number of "preventive"
assaults on potential adversaries. "The
publication of the strategy was the signal that
Iraq would be the first test [of the new
doctrine], not the last," a high official involved
in its drafting told David E Sanger and Steven E
Weisman of the New York Times after the attack on
Iraq had commenced.
As we now know, the
"agile, lethal, readily deployable" force
assembled by Rumsfeld in March 2003 to topple
Saddam Hussein did a remarkable job of penetrating
Iraqi defenses and scoring the touchdown that the
elder president George H W Bush had passed up in
Baghdad 12 years earlier, but has proved wholly
incapable of defending the capital and vital US
interests in Iraq ever since.
If Bush goes
down in history as a failed president, it will be
for this. After it became inescapably evident that
US forces needed to shift quickly to a defensive
strategy and put in place leadership better suited
to manage such a shift - a point reached well
before the end of 2004 in Iraq - Bush chose to
cling to the old strategy as well as the old
leadership, and simply go on hallucinating about a
last-second miracle touchdown that would avert
certain defeat. It took a while, but the US public
finally grasped the insane folly of this stance
and voted for change in the November 7 mid-term
elections.
Of course, the president - his
approval rating in the latest Newsweek poll at
31%, a personal low - was not up for re-election
on November 7, or he, too, would be out of a job.
Still, having dimly perceived the true nature of
America's existential predicament, he did the
next-best thing, and finally began to replace his
top imperial team with defensive specialists.
This is not to suggest that Gates and his
patron, former secretary of state James A Baker
III, are any less dedicated imperial managers than
Cheney and Rumsfeld. Far from it: they are just as
committed to some form of perpetual US global
supremacy - but they seem to have some grasp of
the actual limits of US power, as Cheney, Rumsfeld
and the neo-con appointees under them never did.
Cheney and Rumsfeld thought there was
endless stretch to imperial overstretch and, as a
result, managed to push US power (military and
economic) so hard in the service of their dreams
of global dominion that the actual imperial might
of the US began to crack and give way under the
strain.
Gates is all too aware of the
vulnerabilities this opens up - like a football
coach whose team has suddenly found itself deep in
its own territory. That's the moment, of course,
when you need to pay closer attention to your
adversaries; you need to psych out their
strategies and tactics; you have to be able to
play defense and give up some yards when endless
blitzes of the other team's quarterback prove
futile; you have to establish fall-back positions
you can hold on to. Rumsfeld could never master
those skills; Gates, with his long experience in
the intelligence community, already has. It is for
this reason, more than any other, that he was
chosen at this pivotal moment in US history.
It is too early to foresee what particular
course Gates and his soon-to-be-selected
associates will adopt in their effort to refashion
US strategy in light of current international
realities. But any notion of emerging triumphant
from Iraq will now be abandoned, and the search
will be on for a strategy that would allow the US
to extricate itself from the Iraqi morass while
retaining its dominant position in the greater
Persian Gulf region. This has become the
overarching objective.
Such a withdrawal
will require the tacit acquiescence of Iraq's
neighbors, including Iran and Syria, both of which
have a stake in the outcome of the Iraqi imbroglio
and possess an ability to frustrate any US plans
that run counter to their fundamental interests.
Hence these nations must be consulted as part of
the process, a move expected to be advocated by
the Iraq Study Group (of which Baker is co-chair
and Gates was, until recently, a member). This, in
turn, will require that talk of air strikes
against Iran or of "regime change" in Damascus be
muzzled in Washington, at least for the time
being.
From a long-term strategic
perspective, the most serious task facing the new
imperial cadre is to rebuild US ground forces
after three years of relentless combat in Iraq.
The lean, agile machine envisaged by Bush and
Rumsfeld before 2001 was never designed for the
sort of brutal urban warfare it has been exposed
to in Baghdad. ("Why carry heavy armor? It only
slows you down" was the prevailing Pentagon
attitude back then.) It will take several hard
years and a great deal of money to restore the
army and marines to any sort of combat
proficiency.
Messrs Gates, Baker and
associates understand full well that a vision of
enduring US supremacy will continue to govern US
political thinking - and that there will be many
tests of US hegemony to come. But more than others
in and around the White House, they recognize that
this is a time for adopting a defensive stance if
the United States is ever to go on the offensive
again.
Michael T Klare is a
professor of peace and world security studies at
Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and
author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and
Consequences of America's Growing Dependence on
Imported Petroleum (Owl Books).
