Twilight of the American Century

Introduction

Straying from the Well-Trod Path

Everyone makes mistakes. Among mine was choosing at age seventeen to attend the United States Military Academy, an ill-advised decision made with little appreciation for any longer-term implications that might ensue. My excuse? I was young and foolish.

Yet however ill-advised, the decision was all but foreordained. At least so it appears to me in retrospect. Family background, upbringing, early schooling: all of these, along with the time and place of my birth, predisposed me to choose West Point in preference to the civilian schools to which I had applied. Joining the Corps of Cadets in the summer of 1965 was a logical culmination of my life’s trajectory to that point.

West Point exists for one reason only: to produce soldiers. Not all graduates become career military officers, of course. Many opt out after a few years of service and retool themselves as lawyers, bankers, business executives, stockbrokers, doctors, dentists, diplomats, and the like. But the nation doesn’t need federally funded service academies to fill the ranks of these occupations. For such purposes, America’s multitude of colleges and universities, public and private, more than suffice.

My alma mater is—or at least was—a different sort of place. At the West Point I attended, education per se took a backseat to socialization. As cadets we studied the arts and sciences, thereby absorbing knowledge much like our peers at Ohio State or Yale. Yet mere learning was not the object of the exercise. West Point’s true purpose was to inculcate a set of values and a worldview, nominally expressed in the academy’s motto Duty, Honor, Country.

Virtually all institutional mottos—Google’s now-defunct Don’t be evil offers a good example—contain layers of meaning. Apparent simplicity conceals underlying ambiguity, which only the fully initiated possess the capacity to decipher.

Embedded in West Point’s motto are two mutually reinforcing propositions that we aspiring professional soldiers were expected to absorb. According to the first, the well-being of the United States as a whole is inextricably bound up with the well-being of the United States Army. Much as Jesuits believe that the Society of Jesus not only defends but also embodies the Faith, so too does West Point inculcate into its graduates the conviction that the army not only defends but also embodies the nation. To promote the army’s interests is therefore to promote the national interest and, by extension, all that America itself signifies.

According to the second proposition, individual standing within the military profession is a function not of what you are doing but of who you give evidence of becoming. Upward trajectory testifies to your potential for advancing the army’s interests. In this regard, promotability—prospects for ascending the hierarchy of rank and position—becomes the ultimate measure of professional status. Thus does the code of professional values incorporate and indeed foster personal ambition and careerism.

I was, to put it mildly, slow to grasp the tension between the values that West Point professed and those that it actually imparted. Appreciating the contradictions would have required critical faculties that in my passage from adolescence to adulthood I did not possess. After all, I was not given to questioning institutional authority. Indeed, my instinct was to defer to institutions and to take at face value the word handed down from podium, pulpit, or teacher’s desk, whatever that word might be. Spending four years at West Point powerfully reinforced that tendency.

Born during the summer of 1947 in Normal, Illinois, of all places, I was, as it were, marked from the outset with the sign of orthodoxy. From an early age, as if by instinct, I deferred to convention, as I was brought up to do.

My roots are in Chicagoland, the great swathe of the Midwest defined by the circulation area of Colonel Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, which in those days proclaimed itself the World’s Greatest Newspaper. My father, the son of Lithuanian immigrants, had grown up in East Chicago, Indiana, a small, charmless city known chiefly as the home of the now-defunct Inland Steel. My mother came from an undistinguished farm town situated alongside the Illinois River, a hundred miles from the Windy City. Both of my parents were born in the early 1920s, both were cradle Catholics, and both were veterans of World War II. Within a year of returning from overseas once the war ended, they had met, fallen in love, and married. Theirs was a perfect match. Eleven months later, with my father now enrolled in college courtesy of the G.I. Bill, I arrived on the scene.

Ours was an upwardly mobile family at a moment when opportunities for upward mobility were plentiful, especially for white Americans willing to work hard. And ours was a traditional family—my Dad as breadwinner, my Mom as housewife—at a time when such arrangements seemed proper, natural, and destined to continue in perpetuity.

After my father graduated from college and then from medical school—years during which my parents struggled financially—we returned to East Chicago and began our ascent into a comfortable middle-class existence: a small home, then a bigger one; first one car, then two; black-and-white TV, then color; lakeside summer vacations in Wisconsin; a single sibling, and eventually a houseful. Big families were the order of the day, especially among Catholics. That within the confined spacing defining our existence, things occurred as they were meant to occur was a proposition that I accepted without question. This was, after all, the 1950s.

I attended the local parochial school, staffed by the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ, and committed to memory the Baltimore Catechism, as required. Upon finishing eighth grade, I was off to an all-boys Benedictine high school situated among the cornfields of Illinois, the very school that my father had attended back in the 1930s. I was a boarding student and here commenced a long journey away from home, even though in some indefinable sense I was to remain a son of the Middle Border.

In the American church, the years following World War II had produced a windfall in vocations and this particular monastic community had reaped its share of that harvest. In my four years as a high school student, I had a single lay teacher—all the rest were priests. Fifty years later my old school survives, but the abbey community has dwindled to a shadow of its former self. With virtually the entire school faculty now consisting of laypeople, the character of the place has radically changed. Truth to tell, I no longer think of it as my school.

The monks who taught and mentored us were an extraordinary lot, varying widely in age, ability, and temperament. Whenever possible, we students gave them grief, as adolescent boys inevitably do in the face of authority. Yet they were, in our eyes, objects of fascination, from whom we learned much. For me at least, real religious formation began here as a direct consequence of daily exposure to imperfect men striving to live a godly life.

Although not nearly as bright as I imagined myself to be, I was a good student. I tested well, this at a time when performance on standardized exams counted for much. I also read a lot, mostly escapist fiction, albeit with attention to writers—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, and J. D. Salinger—who in some scarcely fathomable way touched on what it meant to be a man. I dabbled in poetry, briefly fancying myself heir to Carl Sandburg. All in all, I was a brooding self-centered twit, beset by hormone-fueled insecurities.

Yet for whatever reason, that one lay teacher took a particular interest in me. Mr. Burke was not Mr. Chips. He was a Chicagoan through and through: whip smart, sophisticated (at least in my eyes), funny, impatient, and sarcastic to the point of outright cruelty. He taught history, a subject I thought I liked without actually understanding. Mr. Burke cared about books and ideas and thought I should too. Through him I glimpsed, ever so briefly, the life of the mind, which implied a future altogether different from the one toward which I imagined myself heading. I dimly recall Mr. Burke advising against me choosing a service academy. I ought to have listened to him. As it was, for me at least, the life of the mind was about to go on long-term hiatus.

Apart perhaps from those who had attended West Point back when the Civil War erupted, few cadets, if any, passed through the United States Military Academy at a more disconcerting time than my own class experienced. We joined the Corps of Cadets in July 1965, just as the first increments of US combat troops were deploying to South Vietnam. We received our diplomas and accepted our commissions in June 1969, with fighting still very much underway. Increasingly viewed as misguided and unwinnable, the war had waited for us.

In the interim, the country and certainly the generation to which we belonged had all but split in two. To prepare for entry into the military profession during that interval was to be simultaneously exposed to and insulated from the profound upheaval that was affecting all aspects of American society. Protest, unrest, riots, and the backlash they induced: to all of this, from our fortress-like campus just upriver from New York City, we were perplexed witnesses rather than participants.

Graduation meant release, but also donning harness. After pausing to marry my very young Chicago-born bride, I departed for a yearlong tour of duty in Vietnam. The war was now winding down and the army was falling apart, beset by widespread drug use, acute racial tension, and indiscipline. The implicit mission was to contain these pathologies while preventing the soldiers in your charge from getting killed to no purpose. For a young officer, it did not pay to reflect too deeply about the predicament into which the army and the nation as a whole had gotten itself. The demands of duty were enough; thinking could wait.

I returned home in one piece, even if somewhat unsettled by my experiences. After a stint of stateside soldiering, with my service obligation about to expire, we contemplated getting out and trying our hand at civilian life. But with the economy doing poorly, a family to care for, and the army offering graduate school followed by a tour teaching at West Point, we opted to stay in. Short-term expediency had prevailed.

So it was off to Princeton to study history under the tutelage of an illustrious and learned faculty. I arrived completely unprepared and spent two years trying to conceal my ignorance. I read hundreds of pages a day, testing my wife’s patience while giving too little attention to our young daughters. Fearing failure, I somehow concluded that my task was to absorb as much information as possible; my fellow graduate students knew better. Mastering the arguments mattered as much as or more than mastering the facts. Historiography rather than history per se was the name of the game.

I was not particularly interested in or attuned to the ideas then in fashion on university campuses. But this was the mid-1970s, still the heyday of the New Left, and ideas were interested in me. Those that I encountered in seminar challenged and subverted my worldview, particularly regarding the course of American statecraft. I both resisted these ideas and absorbed them. They became lodged in my subconscious.

Much as I had survived Vietnam, I survived Princeton. I worked hard, showed up on time for class, met deadlines, and followed the rules. Perhaps suspecting that a dour, but compliant, army captain was unlikely to cause permanent harm to the historical profession, my mentors allowed me to graduate.

Returning to West Point where our family continued to grow, I tried my hand at teaching. It did not go well. For some bizarre reason, I set out to provide the young cadets assigned to my section room with an experience comparable to a Princeton graduate seminar when all they wanted was sufficient knowledge to pass the course—precisely what I had wanted a dozen years earlier.

Once again, we contemplated getting out. I applied for the Foreign Service and satisfied all the necessary requirements for joining the State Department. From career soldier to career diplomat sounded like an attractive move. But when the offer of an appointment actually materialized, it involved taking a cut in pay. We now had three very young children. Again, expediency won out.

After West Point came a decade of troop duty, including two tours in what was then West Germany. Assignments as a commander or operations officer alternated with fellowships and attendance at army schools.

The Cold War was winding down, but in the field we found it convenient not to notice. After Vietnam, the Cold War had provided the army with its principal raison d’être. Preparing to defend against an all-out attack by the Warsaw Pact, which we pretended to think could come at any minute, infused everything we did with urgency and a sense of purpose. We worked as if freedom’s very survival hung in the balance.

That said, I did not much care for the day-to-day routine of soldiering. I disliked being away from home for long stretches, sitting up half the night on gunnery ranges, and being cold, wet, tired, and miserable on field training exercises. Most of all, I hated the exorbitant waste of time: mindless meetings that went on for hours; the pre-briefings that preceded the briefings that were anything but brief; the pre-rehearsals that preceded the rehearsals that preceded the actual event; the drafting and endless revision of dull, jargon-filled documents that nobody ever read.

I had begun to write, at first by contributing occasional articles to service journals. Then over the course of a three-year period, I wrote an interpretive history of the army during the interval between Korea and Vietnam, co-authored a monograph about US military involvement in El Salvador during the 1980s, and converted my Princeton dissertation into a publishable book. In each of these projects, I found considerable satisfaction.

This is not to say that anyone noticed. Yet I was discovering that here was something I liked to do very much. I enjoyed the challenge of formulating an argument. I enjoyed the hard work of composition. Most of all, I enjoyed drawing connections between past and present, employing history as an instrument of illumination.

In 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War ended. My own military career likewise ended soon thereafter, abruptly and ingloriously.

Command, I had learned, is something of a juggling act. It requires closely attending to all that is happening today even while putting the finishing touches on what is to happen tomorrow and next week while simultaneously preparing for what should occur next month or next year. When the synchronization works, the results are gratifying, almost magical. Maintain that synchronization and you’ve got a disciplined, high-performing outfit in which all involved can take pride.

But as with juggling, just one miscalculation can produce catastrophe. In the summer of 1991, I dropped a ball. And in the immortal words of Bruce Springsteen, man, that was all she wrote.

Soon after the Cold War had ended, I assumed command of one of the army’s more storied units. Not long thereafter, Saddam Hussein foolishly invaded Kuwait. In the subsequent campaign to liberate that country, we remained at our home stations, mortified at being left behind in Germany while friends went off to fight. Shortly after Operation Desert Storm ended, however, and with Kuwaitis still eyeing Saddam nervously, we received orders to deploy to the Gulf. Although a second Iraqi assault on Kuwait was even less likely than a Soviet invasion of Western Europe had been, the Emir of Kuwait needed reassurance and my regiment was tagged to provide it.

The mission went well until it didn’t. I did not take seriously any threat posed by Saddam. I took very seriously the possibility of a terrorist attack of the sort that had befallen the US Marines in Beirut, Lebanon, less than a decade earlier. I failed completely to anticipate the real threat: a vehicular fire touching off massive explosions that destroyed millions of dollars of equipment and caused dozens of casualties among my own soldiers.

With my unit committed to what was still nominally a war zone, I had directed that our ammunition be stored so that we could engage the enemy on a moment’s notice. This, of course, is what we were meant to convey to the Kuwaiti government. The very purpose of our mission required that we maintain a ready-to-fight posture. In retrospect, I took that requirement way too literally.

In any event, at a time when it appeared that the United States Army could do no wrong, I had presided over a spectacular failure. Of greater significance to me personally, I had brought dishonor to the regiment entrusted to my care.

Over the course of some two decades on active duty, I had on several occasions observed commanders dodging responsibility for misfortunes that had occurred on their watch, usually by fingering some subordinate to take the fall. I had vowed never to do that.

Only one recourse appeared available: accept responsibility for what had occurred, finish out my command tour, and quietly leave the service, confident that the army would do just fine without me. This is the course I proceeded to follow.

How well I could do without the army was a different question altogether. We now had four children, two of them of college age. There were bills to pay. Although hiring on with a defense contractor might have been a possibility, the mere prospect of doing so was highly disagreeable. Now in my mid-forties, I needed to find a new calling.

In truth, even during my last years in the army, I had begun to feel increasingly restless and out of place. I had mastered the art of striking a soldierly pose, which largely involved attitude, posture, vocabulary, and dubious personal habits. (I drew the line at chewing tobacco.) However belatedly, I sensed that I had drifted into the wrong vocation. To some of us, self-knowledge comes slowly.

That said, I had no clear sense of what my new calling might be. I had spent countless hours planning training exercises and tactical operations. I had no plan for my own life and my family’s future, however.

I knew I liked to write. And I felt vaguely drawn to that life of the mind that I had long ago glimpsed under Mr. Burke’s tutelage. Might these inclinations enable me to make a living? Buoyed by the generosity of friends and the kindness of strangers willing to take a chance on me, I now tested that proposition.

As a direct result, I gained entry into academic life, albeit through the side door. A stint at Johns Hopkins served as an apprenticeship of sorts during which I learned how to teach (finally) and started writing for wider audiences. In 1998, Boston University offered me a senior faculty appointment, an unearned and undeserved opportunity with transformative implications. I accepted with alacrity. Our wandering days now finally ended. We became New Englanders.

As a serving officer, I had remained studiously apolitical. Now, however, I was no longer a servant of the state. Prior inhibitions about expressing my own views regarding the state of American politics, statecraft, and culture fell away. Soon enough, events drew me to four broad issues that with the passing of the Cold War deserved far more critical attention than they were receiving, at least in my view.

The first of those issues related to changes in the prevailing understanding of what freedom should permit, require, or disallow. The second dealt with the tensions between America’s conception of itself as freedom’s principal champion and its proper role as a global power. The focus of the third issue was the use of US military might, not infrequently justified by citing the nation’s ostensible duty to advance the cause of freedom. Finally, there was the system devised to raise and sustain the nation’s armed forces, thereby fostering a specific (and to my mind problematic) relationship between soldiers and society.

By the time I took up my position at Boston University, these were already becoming central to my writing agenda. Yet in ways that I had not anticipated, moving to Boston sharpened my thinking. To escape from the orbit of Washington was to see its narrowly partisan preoccupations and imperial pretensions for what they were. With distance came clarity and focus.

Given the terms of my appointment, I had no need to worry about tenure or promotion. So I could write what I wanted and publish where I wanted without having to consider whether I was chalking up the requisite number of scholarly points. Here was freedom, indeed.

Much to my surprise, invitations to write books materialized. Beginning soon after 9/11 and continuing over the course of the next decade-and-a-half, I published a series of volumes, along with dozens of articles and reviews, that critically assessed American imperialism, militarism, civil-military relations, and the changing meaning of freedom. I developed an abiding interest in understanding why the United States does what it does in the world and concluded that the answers were to be found by looking within rather than abroad. No doubt US policy draws on multiple sources. Yet ultimately it expresses the conviction that we are God’s new Chosen People.

Roughly midway through that period my only son was killed in action in Iraq. Just about everyone sooner or later suffers the loss of loved ones. Certainly, I had. While I was still attending West Point, my father had died in an accident. My wife’s brother, my closest friend in high school, had died much too soon, having been badly wounded in Vietnam and never thereafter really getting his life on track. But my son’s death was excruciatingly painful, not only for me, but also for my wife and our daughters. Nor did I find it a faith-enhancing experience. But we endured.

I had by this time become accustomed to describing myself as a conservative. That said, I had little use for what passed for conservatism in the Republican Party or among pundits of an ostensibly conservative persuasion. I had over the years come to my own understanding of the term by reading a mix of thinkers not easily pigeon-holed as belonging exclusively to the Right or the Left. These included Henry Adams, Randolph Bourne, Charles Beard, Dorothy Day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Evelyn Waugh, Reinhold Niebuhr, C. Wright Mills, James Baldwin, William Appleman Williams, Walker Percy, and Christopher Lasch.

The position I eventually staked out for myself was as a non-partisan conservative who saw much to admire among progressives. That from time to time I was able to publish in periodicals associated with the Left pleased me to no end.

In a 2008 article, urging principled conservatives to vote for Barack Obama rather than John McCain in the upcoming presidential election, I offered my own list of conservative tenets. They included the following:

• a commitment to individual liberty, tempered by the conviction that genuine freedom entails more than simply an absence of restraint;

• a belief in limited government, fiscal responsibility, and the rule of law;

• veneration for our cultural inheritance combined with a sense of stewardship for creation;

• a reluctance to discard or tamper with traditional social arrangements;

• respect for the market as the generator of wealth combined with a wariness of the market’s corrosive impact on humane values;

• a deep suspicion of utopian promises, rooted in an appreciation of the sinfulness of man and the recalcitrance of history.

I should have added recognition of a collective responsibility to promote the common good. But apart from that omission, I stand by what I wrote (and, given the alternatives on offer, have no regret for having twice voted for Obama).

In 2014, I retired from teaching. Whether my students knew it or not, I was going stale and they deserved better than I was able to give. Besides, I wanted to spend time with my wife, while turning to new writing projects. On matters of particular interest to me, there is much that I still want to say and that needs to be said, even if the likelihood of making a dent in prevailing opinion appears negligible.

I could hardly have anticipated the political earthquake triggered by the election held to choose Obama’s successor. Yet in retrospect, a series of tremors—some large, others small—had offered ample warning. The essays reprinted below recall and reflect on some of those tremors dating back to 9/11. Yet they by no means constitute the last word. There remains much more that needs saying.

Walpole, Massachusetts

January 2018

PART 1

Poseurs and Prophets

1

A Letter to Paul Wolfowitz

Occasioned by the Tenth Anniversary of the Iraq War

(2013)

Dear Paul,

I have been meaning to write to you for some time, and the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war provides as good an occasion as any to do so. Distracted by other, more recent eruptions of violence, the country has all but forgotten the war. But I won’t and I expect you can’t, although our reasons for remembering may differ.

Twenty years ago, you became dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and hired me as a minor staff functionary. I never thanked you properly. I needed that job. Included in the benefits package was the chance to hobnob with luminaries who gathered at SAIS every few weeks to join Zbigniew Brzezinski for an off-the-record discussion of foreign policy. From five years of listening to these insiders pontificate, I drew one conclusion: people said to be smart—the ones with fancy résumés who get their op-eds published in the New York Times and appear on TV—really aren’t. They excel mostly in recycling bromides. When it came to sustenance, the sandwiches were superior to the chitchat.

You were an exception, however. You had a knack for framing things creatively. No matter how daunting the problem, you contrived a solution. More important, you grasped the big picture. Here, it was apparent, lay your métier. As Saul Bellow wrote of Philip Gorman, your fictionalized double, in Ravelstein, you possessed an aptitude for Great Politics. Where others saw complications, you discerned connections. Where others saw constraints, you found possibilities for action.

Truthfully, I wouldn’t give you especially high marks as dean. You were, of course, dutiful and never less than kind to students. Yet you seemed to find presiding over SAIS more bothersome than it was fulfilling. Given all that running the place entails—raising money, catering to various constituencies, managing a cantankerous and self-important faculty—I’m not sure I blame you. SAIS prepares people to exercise power. That’s why the school exists. Yet you wielded less clout than at any time during your previous two decades of government service.

So at Zbig’s luncheons, when you riffed on some policy issue—the crisis in the Balkans, the threat posed by North Korean nukes, the latest provocations of Saddam Hussein—it was a treat to watch you become so animated. What turned you on was playing the game. Being at SAIS was riding the bench.

Even during the 1990s, those who disliked your views tagged you as a neoconservative. But the label never quite fit. You were at most a fellow traveler. You never really signed on with the PR firm of Podhoretz, Kristol, and Kagan. Your approach to policy analysis owed more to Wohlstetter Inc.—a firm less interested in ideology than in power and its employment.

I didn’t understand this at the time, but I’ve come to appreciate the extent to which your thinking mirrors that of the nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter. Your friend Richard Perle put the matter succinctly: Paul thinks the way Albert thinks. Wohlstetter, the quintessential defense intellectual, had been your graduate-school mentor. You became, in effect, his agent, devoted to converting his principles into actual policy. This, in a sense, was your life’s work.

Most Americans today have never heard of Wohlstetter and wouldn’t know what to make of the guy even if they had. Everything about him exuded sophistication. He was the smartest guy in the room before anyone had coined the phrase. Therein lay his appeal. To be admitted to discipleship was to become one of the elect.

Wohlstetter’s perspective (which became yours) emphasized five distinct propositions. Call them the Wohlstetter Precepts.

First, liberal internationalism, with its optimistic expectation that the world will embrace a set of common norms to achieve peace, is an illusion. Of course virtually every president since Franklin Roosevelt has paid lip service to that illusion, and doing so during the Cold War may even have served a certain purpose. But to indulge it further constitutes sheer folly.

Second, the system that replaces liberal internationalism must address the ever-present (and growing) danger posed by catastrophic surprise. Remember Pearl Harbor. Now imagine something orders of magnitude worse—for instance, a nuclear attack from out of the blue.

Third, the key to averting or at least minimizing surprise is to act preventively. If shrewdly conceived and skillfully executed, action holds some possibility of safety, whereas inaction reduces that possibility to near zero. Eliminate the threat before it materializes. In statecraft, that defines the standard of excellence.

Fourth, the ultimate in preventive action is dominion. The best insurance against unpleasant surprises is to achieve unquestioned supremacy.

Lastly, by transforming the very nature of war, information technology—an arena in which the United States has historically enjoyed a clear edge—brings outright supremacy within reach. Of all the products of Albert Wohlstetter’s fertile brain, this one impressed you most. The potential implications were dazzling. According to Mao, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Wohlstetter went further. Given the right sort of gun—preferably one that fires very fast and very accurately—so, too, does world order.

With the passing of the Cold War, global hegemony seemed America’s for the taking. What others saw as an option you, Paul, saw as something much more: an obligation that the nation needed to seize, for its own good as well as for the world’s. Not long before we both showed up at SAIS, your first effort to codify supremacy and preventive action as a basis for strategy had ended in embarrassing failure. I refer here to the famous (or infamous) Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, drafted in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm by the Pentagon policy shop you then directed. Before this classified document was fully vetted by the White House, it was leaked to the New York Times, which made it front-page news. The draft DPG announced that it had become the first objective of US policy to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival. With an eye toward deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role, the United States would maintain unquestioned military superiority and, if necessary, employ force unilaterally. As window dressing, allies might be nice, but the United States no longer considered them necessary.

Unfortunately, you and the team assigned to draft the DPG had miscalculated the administration’s support for your thinking. This was not the moment to be unfurling grandiose ambitions expressed in indelicate language. In the ensuing hue and cry, President George H. W. Bush disavowed the document. Your reputation took a hit. But you were undeterred.

The election of George W. Bush as president permitted you to escape from academe. You’d done yeoman work tutoring candidate Bush in how the world works, and he repaid the debt by appointing you to serve as Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy atop the Pentagon hierarchy. You took office as Osama bin Laden was conspiring to attack. Alas, neither Rumsfeld nor you nor anyone else in a position of real authority anticipated what was to occur. America’s vaunted defense establishment had left the country defenseless. Yet instead of seeing this as evidence of gross incompetence requiring the officials responsible to resign, you took it as an affirmation. For proof that averting surprise through preventive military action was now priority number one, Americans needed to look no further than the damage inflicted by nineteen thugs armed with box cutters.

You immediately saw the events of 9/11 as a second and more promising opening to assert US supremacy. When riding high a decade earlier, many Americans had thought it either unseemly or unnecessary to lord it over others. Now, with the populace angry and frightened, the idea was likely to prove an easier sell. Although none of the hijackers were Iraqi, within days of 9/11 you were promoting military action against Iraq. Critics have chalked this up to your supposed obsession with Saddam. The criticism is misplaced. The scale of your ambitions was vastly greater.

In an instant, you grasped that the attacks provided a fresh opportunity to implement Wohlstetter’s Precepts, and Iraq offered a made-to-order venue. We cannot wait to act until the threat is imminent, you said in 2002. Toppling Saddam Hussein would validate the alternative to waiting. In Iraq, the United States would demonstrate the efficacy of preventive war.

So even conceding a hat tip to Albert Wohlstetter, the Bush Doctrine was largely your handiwork. The urgency of invading Iraq stemmed from the need to validate that doctrine before the window of opportunity closed. What made it necessary to act immediately was not Saddam’s purported WMD program. It was not his nearly nonexistent links to al-Qaeda. It was certainly not the way he abused his own people. No, what drove events was the imperative of claiming for the United States prerogatives allowed no other nation.

I do not doubt the sincerity of your conviction (shared by President Bush) that our country could be counted on to exercise those prerogatives in ways beneficial to all humankind—promoting peace, democracy, and human rights. But the proximate aim was to unshackle American power. Saddam Hussein’s demise would serve as an object lesson for all: Here’s what we can do. Here’s what we will do.

Although you weren’t going to advertise the point, this unshackling would also contribute to the security of Israel. To Wohlstetter’s five precepts you had added a silent codicil. According to the unwritten sixth precept, Israeli interests and US interests must align. You understood that making Israelis feel safer makes Israel less obstreperous, and that removing the sources of Israeli insecurity makes the harmonizing of US and Israeli policies easier. Israel’s most effective friends are those who work quietly to keep the divergent tendencies in US-Israeli relations from getting out of hand. You have always been such a friend. Preventive war to overthrow an evil dictator was going to elevate the United States to the status of Big Kahuna while also making Israelis feel just a little bit safer. This audacious trifecta describes your conception. And you almost pulled it off.

Imagine—you must have done so many times—if that notorious Mission Accomplished banner had accurately portrayed the situation on the ground in Iraq in May 2003. Imagine if US forces had achieved a clean, decisive victory. Imagine that the famous (if staged) photo of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad’s Al Firdos Square being pulled down had actually presaged a rapid transition to a pro-American liberal democracy, just as your friend Ahmed Chalabi had promised. Imagine if none of the ensuing horrors and disappointments had occurred: the insurgency; Fallujah and Abu Ghraib; thousands of American lives lost and damaged; at least 125,000 Iraqis killed, and some 3 million others exiled or displaced; more than a trillion dollars squandered.

You expected something different, of course. Shortly before the war, you told Congress,

It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam’s security forces and his army. Hard to imagine.

Your imagination led you to foresee a brief conflict, with Iraqis rather than US taxpayers footing the bill for any mess left behind.

After all, preventive war was supposed to solve problems. Eliminating threats before they could materialize was going to enhance our standing, positioning us to call the shots. Instead, the result was a train wreck of epic proportions. Granted, as you yourself have said, the world is better off with Saddam Hussein having met his maker. But taken as a whole, the cost-benefit ratio is cause for weeping. As for global hegemony, we can kiss it goodbye.

What conclusions should we draw from the events that actually occurred, rather than from those you hoped for? In a 2003 Boston Globe interview, Richard Perle called Iraq the first war that’s been fought in a way that would recognize Albert’s vision for future wars. So perhaps the problem lies with Albert’s vision.

One of Wohlstetter’s distinguishing qualities, you once told an interviewer, was that he was so insistent on ascertaining the facts. He had a very fact-based approach to policy. Albert’s approach was ruthlessly pragmatic. It derived from saying, ‘Here’s the problem, look at it factually, see what the questions are that emerged from the thing itself,’ so to speak. Then confront those questions.

One of the questions emerging from the Iraq debacle must be this one: Why did liberation at gunpoint yield results that differed so radically from what the war’s advocates had expected? Or, to sharpen the point, How did preventive war undertaken by ostensibly the strongest military in history produce a cataclysm?

Not one of your colleagues from the Bush Administration possesses the necessary combination of honesty, courage, and wit to answer these questions. If you don’t believe me, please sample the tediously self-exculpatory memoirs penned by (or on behalf of) Bush himself, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Tenet, Bremer, Feith, and a small squad of eminently forgettable generals.

What would Albert Wohlstetter have done? After Iraq, would he have been keen to give the Bush Doctrine another go, perhaps in Iran? Or would he have concluded that preventive war is both reckless and inherently immoral? That, of course, had been the traditional American view prior to 9/11.

Would Albert endorse Barack Obama’s variant of preventive war, the employing of unmanned aircraft as instruments of targeted assassination? Sending a Hellfire missile through some unsuspecting jihadist’s windshield certainly fits the definition of being proactive, but where does it lead? As a numbers guy, Albert might wonder how many terrorists we’re going to have to kill before the Mission Accomplished banner gets resurrected.

And what would Albert make of the war in Afghanistan, now limping into its second decade? Wohlstetter took from Vietnam the lesson that we needed new ways to use our power discriminately and for worthy ends. In light of Afghanistan, perhaps he would reconsider that position and reach the conclusion others took from Vietnam: Some wars can’t be won and aren’t worth fighting.

Finally, would Albert fail to note that US and Israeli security interests are now rapidly slipping out of sync? The outcome of the Arab Spring remains unknown. But what the United States hopes will emerge from that upheaval in the long run differs considerably from what will serve Israel’s immediate needs.

Given the state of things and our own standing ten years after the start of the Iraq war, what would Albert do? I never met the man (he died in 1997), but my guess is that he wouldn’t flinch from taking on these questions, even if the answers threatened to contradict his own long-held beliefs. Neither should you, Paul. To be sure, whatever you might choose to say, you’ll be vilified, as Robert McNamara was vilified when he broke his long silence and admitted that he’d been wrong, terribly wrong about Vietnam. But help us learn the lessons of Iraq so that we might extract from it something of value in return for all the sacrifices made there. Forgive me for saying so, but you owe it to your country.

Give it a shot.

Andy

2

David Brooks

Angst in the Church of America the Redeemer

(2017)

Apart from being a police officer, firefighter, or soldier engaged in one of this nation’s endless wars, writing a column for a major American newspaper has got to be one of the toughest and most unforgiving jobs there is. The pay may be decent (at least if your gig is with one of the major papers in New York or Washington), but the pressures to perform on cue are undoubtedly relentless.

Anyone who has ever tried cramming a coherent and ostensibly insightful argument into a mere 750 words knows what I’m talking about. Writing op-eds does not perhaps qualify as high art. Yet, like tying flies or knitting sweaters, it requires no small amount of skill. Performing the trick week in and week out without too obviously recycling the same ideas over and over again—or at least while disguising repetitions and concealing inconsistencies—requires notable gifts.

David Brooks of the New York Times is a gifted columnist. Among contemporary journalists, he is our Walter Lippmann, the closest thing we have to an establishment-approved public intellectual. As was the case with Lippmann, Brooks works hard to suppress the temptation to rant. He shuns raw partisanship. In his frequent radio and television appearances, he speaks in measured tones. Dry humor and ironic references abound. And like Lippmann, when circumstances change, he makes at least a show of adjusting his views accordingly.

For all that, Brooks remains an ideologue. In his columns, and even more so in his weekly appearances on NPR and PBS, he plays the role of the thoughtful, non-screaming conservative, his very presence affirming the ideological balance that, until November 8 of last year, was a prized hallmark of respectable journalism. Just as that balance always involved considerable posturing, so, too, with the ostensible conservatism of David Brooks: it’s an act.

Praying at the Altar of American Greatness

In terms of confessional fealty, his true allegiance is not to conservatism as such, but to the Church of America the Redeemer. This is a virtual congregation, albeit one possessing many of the attributes of a more traditional religion. The Church has its own Holy Scripture, authenticated on July 4, 1776, at a gathering of fifty-six prophets. And it has its own saints, prominent among them the Good Thomas Jefferson, chief author of the sacred text (not the Bad Thomas Jefferson who owned and impregnated slaves); Abraham Lincoln, who freed said slaves and thereby suffered martyrdom (on Good Friday no less); and, of course, the duly canonized figures most credited with saving the world itself from evil: Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, their status akin to that of saints Peter and Paul in Christianity. The Church of America the Redeemer even has its own Jerusalem, located on the banks of the Potomac, and its own hierarchy, its members situated nearby in High Temples of varying architectural distinction.

This ecumenical enterprise does not prize theological rigor. When it comes to shalts and shalt nots, it tends to be flexible, if not altogether squishy. It demands of the faithful just one thing: a fervent belief in America’s mission to remake the world in its own image. Although in times of crisis Brooks has occasionally gone a bit wobbly, he remains at heart a true believer.

In a March 1997 piece for the Weekly Standard, his then-employer, he summarized his credo. Entitled A Return to National Greatness, the essay opened with a glowing tribute to the Library of Congress and, in particular, to the building completed precisely a century earlier to house its many books and artifacts. According to Brooks, the structure itself embodied the aspirations defining America’s enduring purpose. He called particular attention to the dome above the main reading room decorated with a dozen monumental figures representing the advance of civilization and culminating in a figure representing America itself. Contemplating the imagery, Brooks rhapsodized,

The theory of history depicted in this mural gave America impressive historical roots, a spiritual connection to the centuries. And it assigned a specific historic role to America as the latest successor to Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. In the procession of civilization, certain nations rise up to make extraordinary contributions. . . . At the dawn of the 20th century, America was to take its turn at global supremacy. It was America’s task to take the grandeur of past civilizations, modernize it, and democratize it. This common destiny would unify diverse Americans and give them a great national purpose.

This February, twenty years later, in a column with an identical title, but this time appearing in the pages of his present employer, the New York Times, Brooks revisited this theme. Again, he began with a paean to the Library of Congress and its spectacular dome with its series of monumental figures that placed America at the vanguard of the great human march of progress. For Brooks, those twelve allegorical figures convey a profound truth.

America is the grateful inheritor of other people’s gifts. It has a spiritual connection to all people in all places, but also an exceptional role. America culminates history. It advances a way of life and a democratic model that will provide people everywhere with dignity. The things Americans do are not for themselves only, but for all mankind.

In 1997, in the midst of the Clinton presidency, Brooks had written that America’s mission was to advance civilization itself. In 2017, as Donald Trump gained entry into the Oval Office, he embellished and expanded that mission, describing a nation assigned by providence to spread democracy and prosperity; to welcome the stranger; to be brother and sister to the whole human race.

Back in 1997, a moment of world supremacy unlike any other, Brooks had worried that his countrymen might not seize the opportunity that was presenting itself. On the cusp of the twenty-first century, he worried that Americans had discarded their pursuit of national greatness in just about every particular. The times called for a leader like Theodore Roosevelt, who wielded that classic big stick and undertook monster projects like the Panama Canal. Yet Americans were stuck instead with Bill Clinton, a small-bore triangulator. We no longer look at history as a succession of golden ages, Brooks lamented. And, save in the speeches of politicians who usually have no clue what they are talking about, America was no longer fulfilling its special role as the vanguard of civilization.

By early 2017, with Donald Trump in the White House and Steve Bannon whispering in his ear, matters had become worse still. Americans had seemingly abandoned their calling outright. The Trump and Bannon anschluss has exposed the hollowness of our patriotism, wrote Brooks, inserting the now-obligatory reference to Nazi Germany. The November 2016 presidential election had exposed how attenuated our vision of national greatness has become and how easy it was for Trump and Bannon to replace a youthful vision of American greatness with a reactionary, alien one. That vision now threatens to leave America as just another nation, hunkered down in a fearful world.

What exactly happened between 1997 and 2017, you might ask? What occurred during that moment of world supremacy to reduce the United States from a nation summoned to redeem humankind to one hunkered down in fear?

Trust Brooks to have at hand a brow-furrowing explanation. The fault, he explains, lies with an "educational system that doesn’t teach civilizational