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September 2004 World War
IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win Norman Podhoretz A Note to the Reader This past spring, when it seemed that everything that could
go wrong in Iraq was going wrong, a plague of amnesia began sweeping through
the country. Caught up in the particulars with which we were being assaulted
24 hours a day, we seemed to have lost sight of the context in which such
details could be measured and understood and related to one another. Small
things became large, large things became invisible, and hysteria filled the
air. Since then, of course, and especially after the hand over
of authority on June 30 to an interim Iraqi government, matters have become
more complicated. But the relentless pressure of events, and the continuing
onslaught both of details and of their often tendentious or partisan
interpretation, have hardly let up at all. It is for this reason that, in
what follows, I have tried to step back from the daily barrage and to piece
together the story of what this nation has been fighting to accomplish since
September 11, 2001. In doing this, I have drawn freely from my own past
writings on the subject, and especially from three articles that appeared in
these pages two or more years ago.1 In some instances, I have
woven sections of these articles into a new setting; other passages I have
adapted and updated. Telling the story properly has required more than a
straight narrative leading from 9/11 to the time of writing. For one thing, I
have had to interrupt the narrative repeatedly in order to confront and clear
away the many misconceptions, distortions, and outright falsifications that
have been perpetrated. In addition, I have had to broaden the perspective so
as to make it possible to see why the great struggle into which the United
States was plunged by 9/11 can only be understood if we think of it as World
War IV. My hope is that telling the story from this perspective
and in these ways will demonstrate that the road we have taken since 9/11 is
the only safe course for us to follow. As we proceed along this course,
questions will inevitably arise as to whether this or that move was necessary
or right; and such questions will breed hesitations and even demands that we
withdraw from the field. Some of this happened even in World War II, perhaps
the most popular war the United States has ever fought, and much more of it
in World War III (that is, the cold war); and now it is happening again,
notably with respect to Iraq. But as I will attempt to show, we are only in the very
early stages of what promises to be a very long war, and Iraq is only the
second front to have been opened in that war: the second scene, so to speak,
of the first act of a five-act play. In World War II and then in World War
III, we persisted in spite of impatience, discouragement, and opposition for
as long as it took to win, and this is exactly what we have been called upon
to do today in World War IV. For today, no less than in those titanic conflicts, we
are up against a truly malignant force in radical Islamism and in the states
breeding, sheltering, or financing its terrorist armory. This new enemy has
already attacked us on our own soil—a feat neither Nazi Germany nor Soviet
Russia ever managed to pull off—and openly announces his intention to hit us
again, only this time with weapons of infinitely greater and deadlier power
than those used on 9/11. His objective is not merely to murder as many of us
as possible and to conquer our land. Like the Nazis and Communists before
him, he is dedicated to the destruction of everything good for which America
stands. It is this, then, that (to paraphrase George W. Bush and a long
string of his predecessors, Republican and Democratic alike) we in our turn,
no less than the "greatest generation" of the 1940’s and its
spiritual progeny of the 1950’s and after, have a responsibility to uphold
and are privileged to defend. Out of the Blue The attack came, both literally and metaphorically, like
a bolt out of the blue. Literally, in that the hijacked planes that crashed
into the twin towers of the World Trade Center on the morning of September
11, 2001 had been flying in a cloudless sky so blue that it seemed unreal. I
happened to be on jury duty that day, in a courthouse only a half-mile from
what would soon be known as Ground Zero. Some time after the planes reached
their targets, we all poured into the street—just as the second tower
collapsed. And this sight, as if it were not impossible to believe in itself,
was made all the more incredible by the perfection of the sky stretching so
beautifully over it. I felt as though I had been deposited into a scene in
one of those disaster movies being filmed (as they used to say) in glorious
technicolor. But the attack came out of the blue in a metaphorical
sense as well. About a year later, in November 2002, a commission would be
set up to investigate how and why such a huge event could have taken us by
surprise and whether it might have been prevented. Because the commission’s
public hearings were not held until the middle of this year’s exceptionally
poisonous presidential election campaign, they quickly degenerated into an
attempt by the Democrats on the panel to demonstrate that the administration
of George W. Bush had been given adequate warnings but had failed to act on
them. Reinforcing this attempt was the testimony of Richard A.
Clarke, who had been in charge of the counterterrorist operation in the
National Security Council under Bill Clinton and then under Bush before
resigning in the aftermath of 9/11. What Clarke for all practical purposes
did—both at the hearings and in his hot-off-the-press book, Against All
Enemies—was to blame Bush, who had been in office for a mere eight months
when the attack occurred, while exonerating Clinton, who had spent eight long
years doing little of any significance in response to the series of terrorist
assaults on American targets in various parts of the world that were launched
on his watch. The point I wish to stress is not that Clarke was
exaggerating or lying.2 It is that the attack on 9/11 did indeed
come out of the blue in the sense that no one ever took such a possibility
seriously enough to figure out what to do about it. Even Clarke, who did
stake a dubious claim to prescience, had to admit under questioning by one of
the 9/11 commissioners that if all his recommendations had been acted upon,
the attack still could not have been prevented. And in its final report,
released on July 22 of this year, the commission, while digging up no fewer
than ten episodes that with hindsight could be seen as missed
"operational opportunities," thought that these opportunities could
not have been acted on effectively enough to frustrate the attack. Indeed
not—not, that is, in the real America as it existed at the time: an America
in which hobbling constraints had been placed on both the CIA and the FBI; in
which a "wall of separation" had been erected to obstruct
communication or cooperation between law-enforcement and national-security
agents; and in which politicians and the general public alike were still
unable and/or unwilling to believe that terrorism might actually represent a
genuine threat. Slightly contradicting itself, the commission said that
"the 9/11 attacks were a shock, but they should not have come as a
surprise." Maybe so; and yet there was no one, either in government or
out, to whom they did not come as a surprise, either in general or in the
particular form they took. The commission also spoke of a "failure of
imagination." Maybe so again; and yet the word "failure" seems
inappropriate, implying as it does that success was possible. Surely a
failure so widespread deserves to be considered inevitable. To the New York Times, however, the failure was
not at all inevitable. In a front-page editorial disguised as a
"report," the Times credited the commission’s final report
with finding that "an attack described as unimaginable had in fact been
imagined, repeatedly." But not a shred of the documentary evidence cited
by the Times for this categorical statement actually predicted that al
Qaeda would hijack commercial airliners and crash them into buildings in New
York and Washington. Moreover, all of the evidence, such as it was, came from
the 1990’s. Nevertheless, the Times "report" contrived to
convey the impression that in the fall of 2000 the Bush administration—then
not yet in office—had received fair warning of an imminent attack. To bolster
this impression, the Times went on to quote from a briefing given to
Bush a month before 9/11. But the document in question was vague about
details, and in any case was only one of many intelligence briefings with no
special claim to credibility over conflicting assessments. Thus the Bush administration, which had just been
excoriated in hearings held by the Senate Intelligence Committee for having
invaded Iraq on the basis of faulty intelligence, was now excoriated by some
of the 9/11 commissioners for not having acted on the basis of even sketchier
intelligence to head off 9/11 itself. This contradiction elicited a mordant
comment from Charles Hill, a former government official who had been a
regular "consumer" of intelligence: Intelligence collection and
analysis is a very imperfect business. Refusal to face this reality has
produced the almost laughable contradiction of the Senate Intelligence
Committee criticizing the Bush administration for acting on third-rate
intelligence, even as the 9/11 commission criticizes it for not acting on
third-rate intelligence.3 However, the point I most wish to stress is that there
was something unwholesome, not to say unholy, about the recriminations on
this issue that befouled the commission’s public hearings and some of the
interim reports by the staff. It therefore came, so to speak, both as a shock
and as a surprise that this same unholy spirit was almost entirely exorcised
from the final report. In the end the commission agreed that no American
President and no American policy could be held responsible in any degree for
the aggression against the United States unleashed on 9/11. Amen to that. For the plain truth is that the sole and
entire responsibility rests with al Qaeda, along with the regimes that
provided it with protection and support. Furthermore, to the extent that
American passivity and inaction opened the door to 9/11, neither Democrats
nor Republicans, and neither liberals nor conservatives, are in a position to
derive any partisan or ideological advantage. The reason, quite simply, is
that much the same methods for dealing with terrorism were employed by the
administrations of both parties, stretching as far back as Richard Nixon in
1970 and proceeding through Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan (yes,
Ronald Reagan), George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and right up to the pre-9/11
George W. Bush. A "Paper
Tiger" The record speaks dismally for itself. From 1970 to 1975,
during the administrations of Nixon and Ford, several American diplomats were
murdered in Sudan and Lebanon while others were kidnapped. The perpetrators
were all agents of one or another faction of the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO). In Israel, too, many American citizens were killed by the
PLO, though, except for the rockets fired at our embassy and other American
facilities in Beirut by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
(PFLP), these attacks were not directly aimed at the United States. In any
case, there were no American military reprisals. Our diplomats, then, were for some years already being
murdered with impunity by Muslim terrorists when, in 1979, with Carter now in
the White House, Iranian students—with either the advance or subsequent
blessing of the country’s clerical ruler,Ayatollah Khomeini—broke into the
American embassy in Tehran and seized 52 Americans as hostages. For a full
five months, Carter dithered. At last, steeling himself, he authorized a
military rescue operation which had to be aborted after a series of mishaps
that would have fit well into a Marx Brothers movie like Duck Soup if
they had not been more humiliating than comic. After 444 days, and just hours
after Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981, the hostages were finally
released by the Iranians, evidently because they feared that the hawkish new
President might actually launch a military strike against them. Yet if they could have foreseen what was coming under
Reagan, they would not have been so fearful. In April 1983, Hizbullah—an
Islamic terrorist organization nourished by Iran and Syria—sent a suicide
bomber to explode his truck in front of the American embassy in Beirut,
Lebanon. Sixty-three employees, among them the Middle East CIA director, were
killed and another 120 wounded. But Reagan sat still. Six months later, in October 1983, another Hizbullah
suicide bomber blew up an American barracks in the Beirut airport, killing
241 U.S. Marines in their sleep and wounding another 81. This time Reagan
signed off on plans for a retaliatory blow, but he then allowed his Secretary
of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, to cancel it (because it might damage our
relations with the Arab world, of which Weinberger was always tenderly
solicitous). Shortly thereafter, the President pulled the Marines out of
Lebanon. Having cut and run in Lebanon in October, Reagan again
remained passive in December, when the American embassy in Kuwait was bombed.
Nor did he hit back when, hard upon the withdrawal of the American Marines
from Beirut, the CIA station chief there, William Buckley, was kidnapped by
Hizbullah and then murdered. Buckley was the fourth American to be kidnapped
in Beirut, and many more suffered the same fate between 1982 and 1992 (though
not all died or were killed in captivity). These kidnappings were apparently what led Reagan, who
had sworn that he would never negotiate with terrorists, to make an
unacknowledged deal with Iran, involving the trading of arms for hostages.
But whereas the Iranians were paid off handsomely in the coin of nearly 1,500
antitank missiles (some of them sent at our request through Israel), all we
got in exchange were three American hostages—not to mention the disruptive
and damaging Iran-contra scandal. In September 1984, six months after the murder of
Buckley, the U.S. embassy annex near Beirut was hit by yet another truck bomb
(also traced to Hizbullah). Again Reagan sat still. Or rather, after giving
the green light to covert proxy retaliations by Lebanese intelligence agents,
he put a stop to them when one such operation, directed against the cleric
thought to be the head of Hizbullah, failed to get its main target while
unintentionally killing 80 other people. It took only another two months for Hizbullah to strike
once more. In December 1984, a Kuwaiti airliner was hijacked and two American
passengers employed by the U.S. Agency for International Development were murdered.
The Iranians, who had stormed the plane after it landed in Tehran, promised
to try the hijackers themselves, but instead allowed them to leave the
country. At this point, all the Reagan administration could come up with was
the offer of a $250,000 reward for information that might lead to the arrest
of the hijackers. There were no takers. The following June, Hizbullah operatives hijacked still
another airliner, an American one (TWA flight 847), and then forced it to fly
to Beirut, where it was held for more than two weeks. During those weeks, an
American naval officer aboard the plane was shot, and his body was
ignominiously hurled onto the tarmac. For this the hijackers were rewarded
with the freeing of hundreds of terrorists held by Israel in exchange for the
release of the other passengers. Both the United States and Israel denied
that they were violating their own policy of never bargaining with
terrorists, but as with the arms-for-hostages deal, and with equally good
reason, no one believed them, and it was almost universally assumed that
Israel had acted under pressure from Washington. Later, four of the hijackers
were caught but only one wound up being tried and jailed (by Germany, not the
United States). The sickening beat went on. In October 1985, the Achille
Lauro, an Italian cruise ship, was hijacked by a group under the
leadership of the PLO’s Abu Abbas, working with the support of Libya. One of
the hijackers threw an elderly wheelchair-bound American passenger, Leon
Klinghoffer, overboard. When the hijackers attempted to escape in a plane,
the United States sent Navy fighters to intercept it and force it down.
Klinghoffer’s murderer was eventually apprehended and sent to prison in
Italy, but the Italian authorities let Abu Abbas himself go.
Washington—evidently having exhausted its repertoire of military
reprisals—now confined itself to protesting the release of Abu Abbas. To no
avail. Libya’s involvement in the Achille Lauro hijacking
was, though, the last free pass that country’s dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, was
destined to get from the United States under Reagan. In December 1985, five
Americans were among the 20 people killed when the Rome and Vienna airports
were bombed, and then in April 1986 another bomb exploded in a discotheque in
West Berlin that was a hangout for American servicemen. U.S. intelligence
tied Libya to both of these bombings, and the eventual outcome was an
American air attack in which one of the residences of Qaddafi was hit. In retaliation, the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal
executed three U.S. citizens who worked at the American University in Beirut.
But Qaddafi himself—no doubt surprised and shaken by the American
reprisal—went into a brief period of retirement as a sponsor of terrorism. So
far as we know, it took nearly three years (until December 1988) before he
could pull himself together to the point of undertaking another operation:
the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in which a total
of 270 people lost their lives. Of the two Libyan intelligence agents who
were tried for planting the bomb, one was convicted (though not until the
year 2001) and the other acquitted. Qaddafi himself suffered no further
punishment from American warplanes. In January 1989, Reagan was succeeded by the elder George
Bush, who, in handling the fallout from the destruction of Pan Am 103, was
content to adopt the approach to terrorism taken by all his predecessors.
During the elder Bush’s four-year period in the White House, there were
several attacks on Americans in Turkey by Islamic terrorist organizations,
and there were others in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon. None of these was
as bloody as previous incidents, and none provoked any military response from
the United States. In January 1993, Bill Clinton became President. Over the
span of his two terms in office, American citizens continued to be injured or
killed in Israel and other countries by terrorists who were not aiming
specifically at the United States. But several spectacular terrorist
operations occurred on Clinton’s watch of which the U.S. was most
emphatically the target. The first, on February 26, 1993, only 38 days after his
inauguration, was the explosion of a truck bomb in the parking garage of the
World Trade Center in New York. As compared with what would happen on
September 11, 2001, this was a minor incident in which "only" six
people were killed and over 1,000 injured. The six Muslim terrorists
responsible were caught, tried, convicted, and sent to prison for long terms. But in following the by-now traditional pattern of
treating such attacks as common crimes, or the work of rogue groups acting on
their own, the Clinton administration willfully turned a deaf ear to outside
experts like Steven Emerson and even the director of the CIA, R. James Woolsey,
who strongly suspected that behind the individual culprits was a terrorist
Islamic network with (at that time) its headquarters in Sudan. This network,
then scarcely known to the general public, was called al Qaeda, and its
leader was a former Saudi national who had fought on our side against the
Soviets in Afghanistan but had since turned against us as fiercely as he had
been against the Russians. His name was Osama bin Laden. The next major episode was not long in trailing the
bombing of the World Trade Center. In April 1993, less than two months after
that attack, former President Bush visited Kuwait, where an attempt was made
to assassinate him by—as our own investigators were able to determine—Iraqi
intelligence agents. The Clinton administration spent two more months seeking
approval from the UN and the "international community" to retaliate
for this egregious assault on the United States. In the end, a few cruise
missiles were fired into the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, where they fell harmlessly
onto empty buildings in the middle of the night. In the years immediately ahead, there were many Islamic
terrorist operations (in Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Yemen, and
Israel) that were not specifically aimed at the United States but in which
Americans were nevertheless murdered or kidnapped. In March 1995, however, a
van belonging to the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, was hit by gunfire,
killing two American diplomats and injuring a third. In November of the same
year, five Americans died when a car bomb exploded in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia,
near a building in which a U.S. military advisory group lived. All this was trumped in June 1996 when another building
in which American military personnel lived—the Khobar Towers in Dhahran,
Saudi Arabia—was blasted by a truck bomb. Nineteen of our airmen were killed,
and 240 other Americans on the premises were wounded. In 1993, Clinton had been so intent on treating the World
Trade Center bombing as a common crime that for some time afterward he
refused even to meet with his own CIA director. Perhaps he anticipated that
he would be told things by Woolsey—about terrorist networks and the states
sponsoring them—that he did not wish to hear, because he had no intention of
embarking on the military action that such knowledge might force upon him.
Now, in the wake of the bombing of the Khobar Towers, Clinton again handed
the matter over to the police; but the man in charge, his FBI director, Louis
Freeh, who had intimations of an Iranian connection, could no more get
through to him than Woolsey before. There were a few arrests, and the action
then moved into the courts. In June 1998, grenades were unsuccessfully hurled at the
U.S. embassy in Beirut. A little later, our embassies in the capitals of
Kenya (Nairobi) and Tanzania (Dar es Salaam) were not so lucky. On a single
day—August 7, 1998—car bombs went off in both places, leaving more than 200
people dead, of whom twelve were Americans. Credit for this coordinated
operation was claimed by al Qaeda. In what, whether fairly or not, was widely
interpreted, especially abroad, as a move to distract attention from his
legal troubles over the Monica Lewinsky affair, Clinton fired cruise missiles
at an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, where bin Laden was supposed to
be at that moment, and at a building in Sudan, where al Qaeda also had a
base. But bin Laden escaped harm, while it remained uncertain whether the
targeted factory in Sudan was actually manufacturing chemical weapons or was
just a normal pharmaceutical plant. This fiasco—so we have learned from former members of his
administration—discouraged any further such action by Clinton against bin
Laden, though we have also learned from various sources that he did authorize
a number of covert counterterrorist operations and diplomatic initiatives
leading to arrests in foreign countries. But according to Dick Morris, who
was then Clinton’s political adviser: The weekly strategy meetings at
the White House throughout 1995 and 1996 featured an escalating drumbeat of advice
to President Clinton to take decisive steps to crack down on terrorism. The
polls gave these ideas a green light. But Clinton hesitated and failed to
act, always finding a reason why some other concern was more important. In the period after Morris left, more began going on
behind the scenes, but most of it remained in the realm of talk or planning
that went nowhere. In contrast to the flattering picture of Clinton that
Richard Clarke would subsequently draw, Woolsey (who after a brief tenure
resigned from the CIA out of sheer frustration) would offer a devastating
retrospective summary of the President’s overall approach: Do something to show you’re
concerned. Launch a few missiles in the desert, bop them on the head, arrest
a few people. But just keep kicking the ball down field. Bin Laden, picking up that ball on October 12, 2000, when
the destroyer USS Cole had docked for refueling in Yemen, dispatched a
team of suicide bombers. The bombers did not succeed in sinking the ship, but
they inflicted severe damage upon it, while managing to kill seventeen
American sailors and wounding another 39. Clarke, along with a few intelligence analysts, had no
doubt that the culprit was al Qaeda. But the heads neither of the CIA nor of
the FBI thought the case was conclusive. Hence the United States did not so
much as lift a military finger against bin Laden or the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan, where he was now ensconced and being protected. As for Clinton,
so obsessively was he then wrapped up in a futile attempt to broker a deal
between the Israelis and the Palestinians that all he could see in this
attack on an American warship was an effort "to deter us from our
mission of promoting peace and security in the Middle East." The
terrorists, he resoundingly vowed, would "fail utterly" in this
objective. Never mind that not the slightest indication existed that
bin Laden was in the least concerned over Clinton’s negotiations with the
Israelis and the Palestinians at Camp David, or even that the Palestinian
issue was of primary importance to him as compared with other grievances. In
any event, it was Clinton who failed, not bin Laden. The Palestinians under
Yasir Arafat, spurning an unprecedentedly generous offer that had been made
by the Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak with Clinton’s enthusiastic
endorsement, unleashed a new round of terrorism. And bin Laden would soon
succeed all too well in his actual intention of striking another brazen blow
at the United States. The sheer audacity of what bin Laden went on to do on
September 11 was unquestionably a product of his contempt for American power.
Our persistent refusal for so long to use that power against him and his
terrorist brethren—or to do so effectively whenever we tried—reinforced his
conviction that we were a nation on the way down, destined to be defeated by
the resurgence of the same Islamic militancy that had once conquered and
converted large parts of the world by the sword. As bin Laden saw it, thousands or even millions of his
followers and sympathizers all over the Muslim world were willing, and even
eager, to die a martyr’s death in the jihad, the holy war, against the
"Great Satan," as the Ayatollah Khomeini had called us. But, in bin
Laden’s view, we in the West, and especially in America, were all so afraid
to die that we lacked the will even to stand up for ourselves and defend our
degenerate way of life. Bin Laden was never reticent or coy in laying out this
assessment of the United States. In an interview on CNN in 1997, he declared
that "the myth of the superpower was destroyed not only in my mind but
also in the minds of all Muslims" when the Soviet Union was defeated in
Afghanistan. That the Muslim fighters in Afghanistan would almost certainly
have failed if not for the arms supplied to them by the United States did not
seem to enter into the lesson he drew from the Soviet defeat. In fact, in an
interview a year earlier he had belittled the United States as compared with
the Soviet Union. "The Russian soldier is more courageous and patient
than the U.S. soldier," he said then. Hence, "Our battle with the
United States is easy compared with the battles in which we engaged in
Afghanistan." Becoming still more explicit, bin Laden wrote off the
Americans as cowards. Had Reagan not taken to his heels in Lebanon after the
bombing of the Marine barracks in 1983? And had not Clinton done the same a
decade later when only a few American Rangers were killed in Somalia, where
they had been sent to participate in a "peacekeeping" mission? Bin
Laden did not boast of this as one of his victories, but a State Department
dossier charged that al Qaeda had trained the terrorists who ambushed the
American servicemen. (The ugly story of what happened to us in Somalia was
told in the film version of Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down, which
reportedly became Saddam Hussein’s favorite movie.) Bin Laden summed it all up in a third interview he gave
in 1998: After leaving Afghanistan the
Muslim fighters headed for Somalia and prepared for a long battle thinking
that the Americans were like the Russians. The youth were surprised at the
low morale of the American soldiers and realized, more than before, that the
American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat. Miscalculation Bin Laden was not the first enemy of a democratic regime
to have been emboldened by such impressions. In the 1930’s, Adolf Hitler was
convinced by the failure of the British to arm themselves against the threat
he posed, as well as by the policy of appeasement they adopted toward him, that
they were decadent and would never fight no matter how many countries he
invaded. Similarly with Joseph Stalin in the immediate aftermath
of World War II. Encouraged by the rapid demobilization of the United States,
which to him meant that we were unprepared and unwilling to resist him with
military force, Stalin broke the pledges he had made at Yalta to hold free
elections in the countries of Eastern Europe he had occupied at the end of
the war. Instead, he consolidated his hold over those countries, and made
menacing gestures toward Greece and Turkey. After Stalin’s death, his successors repeatedly played
the same game whenever they sensed a weakening of the American resolve to
hold them back. Sometimes this took the form of maneuvers aimed at establishing
a balance of military power in their favor. Sometimes it took the form of
using local Communist parties or other proxies as their instrument. But
thanks to the decline of American power following our withdrawal from
Vietnam—a decline reflected in the spread during the late 1970’s of
isolationist and pacifist sentiment, which was in turn reflected in severely
reduced military spending—Leonid Brezhnev felt safe in sending his own troops
into Afghanistan in 1979. It was the same decline of American power, so uncannily
personified by Jimmy Carter, that, less than two months before the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan, had emboldened the Ayatollah Khomeini to seize and
hold American hostages. To be sure, there were those who denied that this
daring action had anything to do with Khomeini’s belief that the United
States under Carter had become impotent. But this denial was impossible to
sustain in the face of the contrast between the attack on our embassy in
Tehran and the protection the Khomeini regime extended to the Soviet embassy
there when a group of protesters tried to storm it after the invasion of
Afghanistan. The radical Muslim fundamentalists ruling Iran hated Communism
and the Soviet Union at least as much as they hated us—especially now that
the Soviets had invaded a Muslim country. Therefore the difference in
Khomeini’s treatment of the two embassies could not be explained by
ideological or political factors. What could and did explain it was his fear
of Soviet retaliation as against his expectation that the United States,
having lost its nerve, would go to any lengths to avoid the use of force. And so it was with Saddam Hussein. In 1990, with the
first George Bush sitting in the White House, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait
in what was widely, and accurately, seen as a first step in a bid to seize
control of the oil fields of the Middle East. The elder Bush, fortified by
the determination of Margaret Thatcher, who was then prime minister of
England, declared that the invasion would not stand, and he put together a
coalition that sent a great military force into the region. This alone might
well have frightened Saddam Hussein into pulling out of Kuwait if not for the
wave of hysteria in the United States about the tens of thousands of
"body bags" that it was predicted would be flown home if we
actually went to war with Iraq. Not unreasonably, Saddam concluded that, if
he held firm, it was we who would blink and back down. The fact that Saddam miscalculated, and that in the end
we made good on our threat, did not overly impress Osama bin Laden. After
all—dreading the casualties we would suffer if we went into Baghdad after
liberating Kuwait and defeating the Iraqi army on the battlefield—we had
allowed Saddam to remain in power. To bin Laden, this could only have looked
like further evidence of the weakness we had shown in the ineffectual policy
toward terrorism adopted by a long string of American Presidents. No wonder
he was persuaded that he could strike us massively on our own soil and get
away with it. Yet just as Saddam had miscalculated in 1990-91, and
would again in 2002, bin Laden misread how the Americans would react to being
hit where, literally, they lived. In all likelihood he expected a collapse
into despair and demoralization; what he elicited instead was an outpouring
of rage and an upsurge of patriotic sentiment such as younger Americans had
never witnessed except in the movies, and had most assuredly never
experienced in their own hearts and souls, or, for those who enlisted in the
military, on their own flesh. In that sense, bin Laden did for this country what the
Ayatollah Khomeini had done before him. In seizing the American hostages in
1979, and escaping retaliation, Khomeini inflicted a great humiliation on the
United States. But at the same time, he also exposed the foolishness of Jimmy
Carter’s view of the world. The foolishness did not lie in Carter’s
recognition that American power—military, economic, political, and moral—had
been on a steep decline at least since Vietnam. This was all too true. What
was foolish was the conclusion Carter drew from it. Rather than proposing
policies aimed at halting and then reversing the decline, he took the
position that the cause was the play of historical forces we could do nothing
to stop or even slow down. As he saw it, instead of complaining or flailing
about in a vain and dangerous effort to recapture our lost place in the sun,
we needed first to acknowledge, accept, and adjust to this inexorable
historical development, and then to act upon it with "mature
restraint." In one fell swoop, the Ayatollah Khomeini made nonsense
of Carter’s delusionary philosophy in the eyes of very large numbers of
Americans, including many who had previously entertained it. Correlatively,
new heart was given to those who, rejecting the idea that American decline
was inevitable, had argued that the cause was bad policies and that the
decline could be turned around by returning to the better policies that had
made us so powerful in the first place. The entire episode thereby became one of the forces
behind an already burgeoning determination to rebuild American power that
culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan, who had campaigned on the
promise to do just that. For all the shortcomings of his own handling of
terrorism, Reagan did in fact keep his promise to rebuild American power. And
it was this that set the stage for victory in the multifaceted cold war we
had been waging since 1947, when the United States under President Harry
Truman (aroused by Stalin’s miscalculation) decided to resist any further
advance of the Soviet empire. Few, if any, of Truman’s contemporaries would have
dreamed that this product of a Kansas City political machine, who as a
reputedly run-of-the-mill U.S. Senator had spent most of his time on taxes
and railroads, would rise so resolutely and so brilliantly to the threat
represented by Soviet imperialism. Just so, 54 years later in 2001, another
politician with a small reputation and little previous interest in foreign
affairs would be confronted with a challenge perhaps even greater than the
one faced by Truman; and he too astonished his own contemporaries by the way
he rose to it. Enter the Bush Doctrine In "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" (1947), the
theoretical defense he constructed of the strategy Truman adopted for
fighting the war ahead, George F. Kennan (then the director of the State
Department’s policy planning staff, and writing under the pseudonym
"X") described that strategy as a long-term, patient but firm
and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies . . . by the adroit
and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting
geographical and political points. In other words (though Kennan himself did not use those
words), we were faced with the prospect of nothing less than another world
war; and (though in later years, against the plain sense of the words that he
himself did use, he tried to claim that the "counterforce" he had
in mind was not military) it would not be an entirely "cold" one,
either. Before it was over, more than 100,000 Americans would die on the
far-off battlefields of Korea and Vietnam, and the blood of many others
allied with us in the political and ideological struggle against the Soviet
Union would be spilled on those same battlefields, and in many other places
as well. For these reasons, I agree with one of our leading
contemporary students of military strategy, Eliot A. Cohen, who thinks that
what is generally called the "cold war" (a term, incidentally,
coined by Soviet propagandists) should be given a new name. "The cold
war," Cohen writes, was actually "World War III, which reminds us
that not all global conflicts entail the movement of multimillion-man armies,
or conventional front lines on a map." I also agree that the nature of
the conflict in which we are now engaged can only be fully appreciated if we
look upon it as World War IV. To justify giving it this name—rather than,
say, the "war on terrorism"—Cohen lists "some key
features" that it shares with World War III: that it is, in fact, global;
that it will involve a mixture of violent and nonviolent efforts; that it
will require mobilization of skill, expertise, and resources, if not of vast
numbers of soldiers; that it may go on for a long time; and that it has ideological
roots. There is one more feature that World War IV shares with
World War III and that Cohen does not mention: both were declared through the
enunciation of a presidential doctrine. The Truman Doctrine of 1947 was born with the
announcement that "it must be the policy of the United States to support
free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or
by outside pressure." Beginning with a special program of aid to Greece
and Turkey, which were then threatened by Communist takeovers, the strategy
was broadened within a few months by the launching of a much larger and more
significant program of economic aid that came to be called the Marshall Plan.
The purpose of the Marshall Plan was to hasten the reconstruction of the
war-torn economies of Western Europe: not only because this was a good thing
in itself, and not only because it would serve American interests, but also
because it could help eliminate the grievances on which Communism fed. But
then came a Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. Following as it had upon the
installation by the Soviet Union of puppet regimes in the occupied countries
of East Europe, the Czech coup demonstrated that economic measures would not
be enough by themselves to ward off a comparable danger posed to Italy and
France by huge local Communist parties entirely subservient to Moscow. Out of
this realization—and out of a parallel worry about an actual Soviet invasion
of Western Europe—there emerged the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO). Containment, then, was a three-sided strategy made up of
economic, political, and military components. All three would be deployed in
a shifting relative balance over the four decades it took to win World War
III.4 If the Truman Doctrine unfolded gradually, revealing its
entire meaning only in stages, the Bush Doctrine was pretty fully enunciated
in a single speech, delivered to a joint session of Congress on September 20,
2001. It was then clarified and elaborated in three subsequent statements:
Bush’s first State of the Union address on January 29, 2002; his speech to
the graduating class of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on June 1,
2002; and the remarks on the Middle East he delivered three weeks later, on
June 24. This difference aside, his contemporaries were at least as startled
as Truman’s had been, both by the substance of the new doctrine and by the
transformation it bespoke in its author. For here was George W. Bush, who in
foreign affairs had been a more or less passive disciple of his father, talking
for all the world like a fiery follower of Ronald Reagan. In sharp contrast to Reagan, generally considered a
dangerous ideologue, the first President Bush—who had been Reagan’s Vice
President and had then succeeded him in the White House—was often accused of
being deficient in what he himself inelegantly dismissed as "the vision
thing." The charge was fair in that the elder Bush had no guiding sense
of what role the United States might play in reshaping the post-cold-war
world. A strong adherent of the "realist" perspective on world
affairs, he believed that the maintenance of stability was the proper purpose
of American foreign policy, and the only wise and prudential course to
follow. Therefore, when Saddam Hussein upset the balance of power in the Middle
East by invading Kuwait in 1991, the elder Bush went to war not to create a
new configuration in the region but to restore the status quo ante. And it
was precisely out of the same overriding concern for stability that, having
achieved this objective by driving Saddam out of Kuwait, Bush then allowed
him to remain in power. As for the second President Bush, before 9/11 he was, to
all appearances, as deficient in the "vision thing" as his father
before him. If he entertained any doubts about the soundness of the
"realist" approach, he showed no sign of it. Nothing he said or did
gave any indication that he might be dissatisfied with the idea that his main
job in foreign affairs was to keep things on an even keel. Nor was there any
visible indication that he might be drawn to Ronald Reagan’s more
"idealistic" ambition to change the world, especially with the
"Wilsonian" aim of making it "safe for democracy" by
encouraging the spread to as many other countries as possible of the
liberties we Americans enjoyed. Which is why Bush’s address of September 20, 2001 came as
so great a surprise. Delivered only nine days after the attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon, and officially declaring that the United
States was now at war, the September 20 speech put this nation, and all
others, on notice that whether or not George W. Bush had been a strictly
conventional realist in the mold of his father, he was now politically born
again as a passionate democratic idealist of the Reaganite stamp. It was also this speech that marked the emergence of the
Bush Doctrine, and that pointed just as clearly to World War IV as the Truman
Doctrine had to War World III. Bush did not explicitly give the name World
War IV to the struggle ahead, but he did characterize it as a direct
successor to the two world wars that had immediately preceded it. Thus, of
the "global terrorist network" that had attacked us on our own
soil, he said: We have seen their kind before.
They’re the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By
sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every
value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism,
and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it
ends in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies. As this passage, coming toward the beginning of the
speech, linked the Bush Doctrine to the Truman Doctrine and to the great
struggle led by Franklin D. Roosevelt before it, the wind-up section
demonstrated that if the second President Bush had previously lacked
"the vision thing," his eyes were blazing with it now. "Great
harm has been done to us," he intoned toward the end. "We have
suffered great loss. And in our grief and anger we have found our mission and
our moment." Then he went on to spell out the substance of that mission
and that moment: The advance of human freedom,
the great achievement of our time and the great hope of every time, now
depends on us. Our nation, this generation, will lift the dark threat of violence
from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our
efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will
not fail. Finally, in his peroration, drawing on some of the same
language he had been applying to the nation as a whole, Bush shifted into the
first person, pledging his own commitment to the great mission we were all
charged with accomplishing: I will not forget the wound to
our country and those who inflicted it. I will not yield, I will not rest, I
will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the
American people. The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is
certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and
we know that God is not neutral between them. Not even Ronald Reagan, the "Great
Communicator" himself, had ever been so eloquent in expressing the
"idealistic" impetus behind his conception of the American role in
the world.5 This was not the last time Bush would sound these themes.
Two-and-a-half years later, at a moment when things seemed to be going badly
in the war, it was with the same ideas he had originally put forward on
September 20, 2001 that he sought to reassure the nation. The occasion would
be a commencement address at the Air Force Academy on June 2, 2004, where he
would repeatedly place the "war against terrorism" in direct
succession to World War II and World War III. He would also be unusually
undiplomatic in making no bones about his rejection of realism: For decades, free nations
tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In
practice, this approach brought little stability and much oppression, so I
have changed this policy. And again, even less diplomatically: Some who call themselves realists question whether the
spread of democracy in the Middle East should be any concern of ours. But the
realists in this case have lost contact with a fundamental reality: America
has always been less secure when freedom is in retreat; America is always more
secure when freedom is on the march. To top it all off, he would go out of his way to assert
that his own policy, which he properly justified in the first place as a
better way to protect American interests than the alternative favored by the
realists, also bore the stamp of the Reaganite version of Wilsonian idealism: This conflict will take many
turns, with setbacks on the course to victory. Through it all, our confidence
comes from one unshakable belief: We believe in Ronald Reagan’s words that
"the future belongs to the free." The first pillar of the Bush Doctrine, then, was built on
a repudiation of moral relativism and an entirely unapologetic assertion of
the need for and the possibility of moral judgment in the realm of world
affairs. And just to make sure that the point he had first made on September
20, 2001 had hit home, Bush returned to it even more outspokenly and in
greater detail in the State of the Union address of January 29, 2002. Bush had won enthusiastic plaudits from many for the
"moral clarity" of his September 20 speech, but he had also
provoked even greater dismay and disgust among "advanced" thinkers
and "sophisticated" commentators and diplomats both at home and
abroad. Now he intensified and exacerbated their outrage by becoming more
specific. Having spoken in September only in general terms about the enemy in
World War IV, Bush proceeded in his second major wartime pronouncement to
single out three such nations—Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—which he described
as forming an "axis of evil." Here again he was following in the footsteps of Ronald
Reagan, who had denounced the Soviet Union, our principal enemy in World War
III, as an "evil empire," and who had been answered with a
veritably hysterical outcry from chancelleries and campuses and editorial
pages all over the world. Evil? What place did a word like that have in the
lexicon of international affairs, assuming it would ever occur to an
enlightened person to exhume it from the grave of obsolete concepts in any
connection whatsoever? But in the eyes of the "experts," Reagan was
not an enlightened person. Instead, he was a "cowboy," a B-movie
actor, who had by some freak of democratic perversity landed in the White
House. In denouncing the Soviet empire, he was accused either of signaling an
intention to trigger a nuclear war or of being too stupid to understand that
his wildly provocative rhetoric might do so inadvertently. The reaction to Bush was perhaps less hysterical and more
scornful than the outcry against Reagan, since this time there was no
carrying-on about a nuclear war. But the air was just as thick with the old
sneers and jeers. Who but an ignoramus and a simpleton—or a fanatical
religious fundamentalist, of the very type on whom Bush was declaring
war—would resort to archaic moral absolutes like "good" and
"evil"? On the one hand, it was egregiously simple-minded to brand
a whole nation as evil, and on the other, only a fool could bring himself to
believe, as Bush (once more like Reagan) had evidently done in complete and
ingenuous sincerity, that the United States, of all countries, represented
the good. Surely only a know-nothing illiterate could be oblivious of the
innumerable crimes committed by America both at home and abroad—crimes that
the country’s own leading intellectuals had so richly documented in the
by-now standard academic view of its history. Here is how Gore Vidal, one of those intellectuals,
stated the case: I mean, to watch Bush doing his
little war dance in Congress . . . about "evildoers" and this "axis
of evil". . . I thought, he doesn’t even know what the word axis means.
Somebody just gave it to him. . . . This is about as mindless a statement as
you could make. Then he comes up with about a dozen other countries that have
"evil" people in them, who might commit "terrorist acts."
What is a terrorist act? Whatever he thinks is a terrorist act. And we are
going to go after them. Because we are good and they are evil. And we’re
"gonna git ’em." This was rougher and cruder than the language issuing from
editorial pages and think tanks and foreign ministries and even most other
intellectuals, but it was no different from what nearly all of them thought
and how many of them talked in private.6 As soon became clear, however, Bush was not deterred. In
subsequent statements he continued to uphold the first pillar of his new
doctrine and to affirm the universality of the moral purposes animating this
new war: Some worry that it is somehow
undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and wrong. I disagree.
Different circumstances require different methods, but not different
moralities. Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in
every place. . . . We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America
will call evil by its name. Then, in a fascinating leap into the great theoretical
debate of the post-cold-war era (though without identifying the main
participants), Bush came down squarely on the side of Francis Fukuyama’s
much-misunderstood view of "the end of history," according to which
the demise of Communism had eliminated the only serious competitor to our own
political system 7: The 20th century ended with a
single surviving model of human progress, based on non-negotiable demands of
human dignity, the rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for
women and private property and free speech and equal justice and religious
tolerance. Having endorsed Fukuyama, Bush now brushed off the
political scientist Samuel Huntington, whose rival theory postulated a
"clash of civilizations" arising from the supposedly incompatible
values prevailing in different parts of the world: When it comes to the common
rights and needs of men and women, there is no clash of civilizations. The
requirements of freedom apply fully to Africa and Latin America and the
entire Islamic world. The peoples of the Islamic nations want and deserve the
same freedoms and opportunities as people in every nation. And their
governments should listen to their hopes. The Second Pillar If the first of the four pillars on which the Bush
Doctrine stood was a new moral attitude, the second was an equally dramatic
shift in the conception of terrorism as it had come to be defined in standard
academic and intellectual discourse. Under this new understanding—confirmed over and over
again by the fact that most of the terrorists about whom we were learning
came from prosperous families—terrorism was no longer considered a product of
economic factors. The "swamps" in which this murderous plague bred
were swamps not of poverty and hunger but of political oppression. It was
only by "draining" them, through a strategy of "regime
change," that we would be making ourselves safe from the threat of
terrorism and simultaneously giving the peoples of "the entire Islamic
world" the freedoms "they want and deserve." In the new understanding, furthermore, terrorists, with
rare exceptions, were not individual psychotics acting on their own but
agents of organizations that depended on the sponsorship of various
governments. Our aim, therefore, could not be merely to capture or kill Osama
bin Laden and wipe out the al Qaeda terrorists under his direct leadership.
Bush vowed that we would also uproot and destroy the entire network of
interconnected terrorist organizations and cells "with global
reach" that existed in as many as 50 or 60 countries. No longer would we
treat the members of these groups as criminals to be arrested by the police,
read their Miranda rights, and brought to trial. From now on, they were to be
regarded as the irregular troops of a military alliance at war with the
United States, and indeed the civilized world as a whole. Not that this analysis of terrorism had exactly been a
secret. The State Department itself had a list of seven state sponsors of
terrorism (all but two of which, Cuba and North Korea, were predominantly
Muslim), and it regularly issued reports on terrorist incidents throughout
the world. But aside from such things as the lobbing of a cruise missile or
two, diplomatic and/or economic sanctions that were inconsistently and even
perfunctorily enforced, and a number of covert operations, the
law-enforcement approach still prevailed. September 11 changed much—if not yet all—of that; still
in use were atavistic phrases like "bringing the terrorists to justice."
But no one could any longer dream that the American answer to what had been
done to us in New York and Washington would begin with an FBI investigation
and end with a series of ordinary criminal trials. War had been declared on
the United States, and to war we were going to go. But against whom? Since it was certain that Osama bin
Laden had masterminded September 11, and since he and the top leadership of
al Qaeda were holed up in Afghanistan, the first target, and thus the first
testing ground of this second pillar of the Bush Doctrine, chose itself. Before resorting to military force, however, Bush issued
an ultimatum to the extreme Islamic radicals of the Taliban who were then
ruling Afghanistan. The ultimatum demanded that they turn Osama bin Laden and
his people over to us and that they shut down all terrorist training camps
there. By rejecting this ultimatum, the Taliban not only asked for an
invasion but, under the Bush Doctrine, also asked to be overthrown. And so,
on October 7, 2001, the United States—joined by Great Britain and about a
dozen other countries—launched a military campaign against both al Qaeda and
the regime that was providing it with "aid and safe haven." As compared with what would come later, there was
relatively little opposition either at home or abroad to the opening of this
first front of World War IV. The reason was that the Afghan campaign could
easily be justified as a retaliatory strike against the terrorists who had
attacked us. And while there was a good deal of murmuring about the dangers
of pursuing a policy of "regime change," there was very little
sympathy in practice (outside the Muslim world, that is) for the Taliban. Whatever opposition was mounted to the battle of
Afghanistan mainly took the form of skepticism over the chances of winning
it. True, such skepticism was in some quarters a mask for outright opposition
to American military power in general. But once the Afghan campaign got under
way, the main focus shifted to everything that seemed to be going awry on the
battlefield. For example, only a couple of weeks into the campaign,
when there were missteps involving the use of the Afghan fighters of the
Northern Alliance, observers like R.W. Apple of the New York Times
immediately rushed to conjure up the ghost of Vietnam. This restless spirit,
having been called forth from the vasty deep, henceforth refused to be
exorcised, and would go on to elbow its way into every detail of the debates
over all the early battles of World War IV. On this occasion, its message was
that we were falling victim to the illusion that we could rely on an
incompetent local force to do the fighting on the ground while we supplied
advice and air support. This strategy would inevitably fail, and would suck
us into the same "quagmire" into which we had been dragged in
Vietnam. After all, as Apple and others argued, the Soviet Union had suffered
its own "Vietnam" in Afghanistan—and unlike us, it had not been
hampered by the logistical problems of projecting power over a great distance.
How could we expect to do better? When, however, the B-52’s and the 15,000-pound
"Daisy Cutter" bombs were unleashed, they temporarily banished the
ghost of Vietnam and undercut the fears of some and the hopes of others that
we were heading into a quagmire. Far from being good for nothing but
"pounding the rubble," as the critics had sarcastically charged,
the Daisy Cutters exerted, as even a New York Times report was forced
to concede, "a terrifying psychological impact as they exploded just
above ground, wiping out everything for hundreds of yards." But the Daisy Cutters were only the half of it. As we
were all to discover, our "smart-bomb" technology had advanced far
beyond the stage it had reached when first introduced in 1991. In Afghanistan
in 2001, such bombs—guided by "spotters" on the ground equipped
with radios, laptops, and lasers, and often riding on horseback, and also
aided by unmanned satellite drones and other systems in the air—were both
incredibly precise in avoiding civilian casualties and absolutely lethal in
destroying the enemy. It was this "new kind of American power,"
added the New York Times report, that "enabled a ragtag
opposition" (i.e., the same Northern Alliance supposedly dragging us
into a quagmire) to rout the "battle-hardened troops" of the
Taliban regime in less than three months, and with the loss of very few
American troops. In the event, Osama bin Laden was not captured and al
Qaeda was not totally destroyed. But it was certainly damaged by the campaign
in Afghanistan. As for the Taliban regime, it was overthrown and replaced by
a government that would no longer give aid and comfort to terrorists.
Moreover, while Afghanistan under the new government may not have been
exactly democratic, it was infinitely less oppressive than its totalitarian
predecessor. And thanks to the clearing of political ground that had been
covered over by the radical Islamic extremism of the Taliban, the seeds of
free institutions were being sown and given a fighting chance to sprout and
grow. The campaign in Afghanistan demonstrated in the most
unmistakable terms what followed from the new understanding of terrorism that
formed the second pillar of the Bush Doctrine: countries that gave safe haven
to terrorists and refused to clean them out were asking the United States to
do it for them, and the regimes ruling these countries were also asking to be
overthrown in favor of new leaders with democratic aspirations. Of course, as
circumstances permitted and prudence dictated, other instruments of power, whether
economic or diplomatic, would be deployed. But Afghanistan showed that the
military option was open, available for use, and lethally effective. The Third Pillar The third pillar on which the Bush Doctrine rested was
the assertion of our right to preempt. Bush had already pretty clearly
indicated on September 20, 2001 that he had no intention of waiting around to
be attacked again ("We will pursue nations that provide aid or safe
haven to terrorism"). But in the State of the Union speech in January
2002, he became much more explicit on this point too: We’ll be deliberate, yet time is
not on our side. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not
stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will
not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s
most destructive weapons. To those with ears to hear, the January speech should
have made it abundantly clear that Bush was now proposing to go beyond the
fundamentally retaliatory strike against Afghanistan and to take preemptive
action. Yet at first it went largely unnoticed that this right to strike, not
in retaliation for but in anticipation of an attack, was a logical extension
of the general outline Bush had provided on September 20. Nor did the new
position attract much attention even when it was reiterated in the plainest
of words on January 29. It was not until the third in the series of major
speeches elaborating the Bush Doctrine—the one delivered on June 1, 2002 at
West Point to the graduating class of newly commissioned officers of the
United States Army—that the message got through at last. Perhaps the reason the preemption pillar finally became
clearly visible at West Point was that, for the first time, Bush placed his
new ideas in historical context: For much of the last century,
America’s defense relied on the cold-war doctrines of deterrence and
containment. In some cases, those strategies still apply. But new threats
also require new thinking. Deterrence—the promise of massive retaliation
against nations—means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no
nation or citizens to defend. This covered al Qaeda and similar groups. But Bush then
proceeded to explain, in addition, why the old doctrines could not work with
a regime like Saddam Hussein’s in Iraq: Containment is not possible when
unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those
weapons or missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies. Refusing to flinch from the implications of this
analysis, Bush repudiated the previously sacred dogmas of arms control and
treaties against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as a means
of dealing with the dangers now facing us from Iraq and other members of the
axis of evil: We cannot defend America and our
friends by hoping for the best. We cannot put our faith in the word of
tyrants, who solemnly sign nonproliferation treaties, and then systematically
break them. Hence, Bush inexorably continued, If we wait for threats to fully
materialize, we will have waited too long. . . . [T]he war on terror will not
be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his
plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we
have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation
will act. At this early stage, the Bush administration was still
denying that it had reached any definite decision about Saddam Hussein; but
everyone knew that, in promising to act, Bush was talking about him. The
immediate purpose was to topple the Iraqi dictator before he had a chance to
supply weapons of mass destruction to the terrorists. But this was by no
means the only or—surprising though it would seem in retrospect—even the
decisive consideration either for Bush or his supporters (or, for that
matter, his opponents).8 And in any case, the long-range strategic rationale
went beyond the proximate causes of the invasion. Bush’s idea was to extend
the enterprise of "draining the swamps" begun in Afghanistan and then
to set the entire region on a course toward democratization. For if
Afghanistan under the Taliban represented the religious face of Middle
Eastern terrorism, Iraq under Saddam Hussein was its most powerful secular
partner. It was to deal with this two-headed beast that a two-pronged
strategy was designed. Unlike the plan to go after Afghanistan, however, the
idea of invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein provoked a firestorm
hardly less intense than the one that was still raging over Bush’s insistence
on using the words "good" and "evil." Even before the debate on Iraq in particular, there had
been strong objection to the whole idea of preemptive action by the United
States. Some maintained that such action would be a violation of
international law, while others contended that it would set a dangerous
precedent under which, say, Pakistan might attack India or vice-versa. But
once the discussion shifted from the Bush Doctrine in general to the question
of Iraq, the objections became more specific. Most of these were brought together in early August 2002
(only about two months after Bush’s speech at West Point) in a piece entitled
"Don’t Attack Iraq." The author was Brent Scowcroft, who had been
National Security Adviser to the elder President Bush. Scowcroft asserted,
first, that there was scant evidence to tie Saddam to
terrorist organizations, and even less to the September 11 attacks. Indeed,
Saddam’s goals have little in common with the terrorists who threaten us, and
there is little incentive for him to make common cause with them. That being the case, Scowcroft continued, "An attack
on Iraq at this time would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy, the global
counterterrorist campaign we have undertaken," the campaign that must
remain "our preeminent security priority." But this was not the only "priority" that to
Scowcroft was "preeminent": Possibly the most dire
consequences [of attacking Saddam] would be the effect in the region. The
shared view in the region is that Iraq is principally an obsession of the
U.S. The obsession of the region, however, is the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. Showing little regard for the American
"obsession," Scowcroft was very solicitous of the regional one: If we were seen to be turning
our backs on that bitter [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict . . . in order to go
after Iraq, there would be an explosion of outrage against us. We would be
seen as ignoring a key interest of the Muslim world in order to satisfy what
is seen to be a narrow American interest. This, added Scowcroft, "could well destabilize Arab
regimes in the region," than which, to a quintessential realist like
him, nothing could be worse. In coming out publicly, and in these terms, against the
second President Bush’s policy, Scowcroft underscored the extent to which the
son had diverged from the father’s perspective. In addition, by lending
greater credence to the already credible rumor that the elder Bush opposed
invading Iraq, Scowcroft’s article belied what would soon become one of the
favorite theories of the hard Left—namely, that the son had gone to war in
order to avenge the attempted assassination of his father. On the other hand, by implicitly assenting to the notion
that toppling Saddam was merely "a narrow American interest,"
Scowcroft gave a certain measure of aid and comfort to the hard Left and its
fellow travelers within the liberal community. For from these circles the cry
had been going out that it was the corporations, especially Halliburton
(which Vice President Dick Cheney had formerly headed) and the oil companies
that were dragging us into an unnecessary war. So, too, with Scowcroft’s emphasis on resolving "the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict"—a standard euphemism for putting pressure
on Israel, whose "intransigence" was taken to be the major obstacle
to peace. By strongly insinuating that the Israeli prime minister Ariel
Sharon was a greater threat to us than Saddam Hussein, Scowcroft provided a
respectable rationale for the hostility toward Israel that had come
shamelessly out of the closet within hours of the attacks of 9/11 and that
had been growing more and more overt, more and more virulent, and more and
more widespread ever since. To the "paleoconservative" Right, where
the charge first surfaced, it was less the oil companies than Israel that was
mainly dragging us into invading Iraq. Before long, the Left would add the
same accusation to its own indictment, and in due course it would be
imprinted more and more openly on large swatches of mainstream opinion. A cognate count in this indictment held that the invasion
of Iraq had been secretly engineered by a cabal of Jewish officials acting
not in the interest of their own country but in the service of Israel, and
more particularly of Ariel Sharon. At first the framers and early spreaders
of this defamatory charge considered it the better part of prudence to
identify the conspirators not as Jews but as "neoconservatives." It
was a clever tactic, in that Jews did in fact constitute a large proportion
of the repentant liberals and leftists who, having some two or three decades
earlier broken ranks with the Left and moved rightward, came to be identified
as neoconservatives. Everyone in the know knew this, and for those to whom it
was news, the point could easily be gotten across by singling out only those
neoconservatives who had Jewish-sounding names and to ignore the many other
leading members of the group whose clearly non-Jewish names might confuse the
picture. This tactic had been given a trial run by Patrick J.
Buchanan in opposing the first Gulf war of 1991. Buchanan had then already
denounced the Johnny-come-lately neoconservatives for having hijacked and
corrupted the conservative movement, but now he descended deeper into the
fever swamps by insisting that there were "only two groups beating the
drums . . . for war in the Middle East—the Israeli Defense Ministry and its
amen corner in the United States." Among those standing in the
"amen corner" he subsequently singled out four prominent hawks with
Jewish-sounding names, counterposing them to "kids with names like
McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown" who would actually do the
fighting if these Jews had their way. Ten years later, in 2001, in the writings of Buchanan and
other paleoconservatives within the journalistic fraternity (notably Robert
Novak, Arnaud de Borchgrave, and Paul Craig Roberts), one of the four hawks
of 1991, Richard Perle, made a return appearance. But Perle was now joined in
starring roles by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, both occupying high
positions in the Pentagon, and a large supporting cast of identifiably Jewish
intellectuals and commentators outside the government (among them Charles
Krauthammer, William Kristol, and Robert Kagan). Like their predecessors in
1991, the members of the new ensemble were portrayed as agents of their
bellicose counterparts in the Israeli government. But there was also a
difference: the new group had managed to infiltrate the upper reaches of the
American government. Having pulled this off, they had conspired to manipulate
their non-Jewish bosses—Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and George W. Bush
himself—into invading Iraq. Before long, this theory was picked up and circulated by
just about everyone in the whole world who was intent on discrediting the
Bush Doctrine. And understandably so: for what could suit their purposes
better than to "expose" the invasion of Iraq—and by extension the
whole of World War IV—as a war started by Jews and being waged solely in the
interest of Israel? To protect themselves against the taint of anti-Semitism,
purveyors of this theory sometimes disingenuously continued to pretend that
when they said "neoconservative" they did not mean "Jew."
Yet the theory inescapably rested on all-too-familiar anti-Semitic
canards—principally that Jews were never reliably loyal to the country in
which they lived, and that they were always conspiring behind the scenes,
often successfully, to manipulate the world for their own nefarious purposes.
9 Quite apart from its pernicious moral and political
implications, the theory was ridiculous in its own right. To begin with, it
asked one to believe the unbelievable: that strong-minded people like Bush,
Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Rice could be fooled by a bunch of cunning
subordinates, whether Jewish or not, into doing anything at all against their
better judgment, let alone something so momentous as waging a war, let alone
a war in which they could detect no clear relation to American interests. In the second place, there was the evidence uncovered by
the purveyors of this theory themselves. That evidence, to which they
triumphantly pointed, consisted of published articles and statements in which
the alleged conspirators openly and unambiguously advocated the very policies
they now stood accused of having secretly foisted upon an unwary Bush
administration. Nor had these allegedly secret conspirators ever concealed
their belief that toppling Saddam Hussein and adopting a policy aimed at the
democratization of the entire Middle East would be good not only for the
United States and for the people of the region but also for Israel. (And
what, an uncharacteristically puzzled Richard Perle asked a hostile
interviewer, was wrong with that?) Which brings us to the fourth pillar on which the Bush
Doctrine was erected. The Fourth Pillar Listening to the laments of Scowcroft and many others,
one would think that George W. Bush had been ignoring "the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict" altogether in his misplaced
"obsession" with Iraq. In fact, however, even before 9/11 it had
been widely and authoritatively reported that Bush was planning to come out
publicly in favor of establishing a Palestinian state as the only path to a
peaceful resolution of the conflict; and in October, after a short delay
caused by 9/11, he became the first American President actually to do so. Yet
at some point in the evolution of his thinking over the months that followed,
Bush seems to have realized that there was something bizarre about supporting
the establishment of a Palestinian state that would be run by a terrorist
like Yasir Arafat and his henchmen. Why should the United States acquiesce,
let alone help, in adding yet another state to those harboring and sponsoring
terrorism precisely at a time when we were at war to rid the world of just
such regimes? Presumably it was under the prodding of this question
that Bush came up with an idea even more novel in its way than the new
conception of terrorism he had developed after 9/11. This idea was broached
only three weeks after his speech at West Point, on June 24, 2002, when he
issued a statement adding conditions to his endorsement of a Palestinian
state: Today, Palestinian authorities
are encouraging, not opposing terrorism. This is unacceptable. And the United
States will not support the establishment of a Palestinian state until its
leaders engage in a sustained fight against the terrorists and dismantle
their infrastructure. But engaging in such a fight, he added, required the
election of "new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror," who
would embark on building "entirely new political and economic
institutions based on democracy, market economics, and action against
terrorism." It was with these words that Bush brought his
"vision" (as he kept calling it) of a Palestinian state living
peacefully alongside Israel into line with his overall perspective on the
evil of terrorism. And having traveled that far, he went the distance by
repositioning the Palestinian issue into the larger context from which Arab
propaganda had ripped it. Since this move passed almost unnoticed, it is
worth dwelling on why it was so important. Even before Israel was born in 1948, the Muslim countries
of the Middle East had been fighting against the establishment of a sovereign
Jewish state—any Jewish state—on land they believed Allah had reserved
for those faithful to his prophet Muhammad. Hence the Arab-Israeli conflict
had pitted hundreds of millions of Arabs and other Muslims, in control of
more than two dozen countries and vast stretches of territory, against a
handful of Jews who then numbered well under three-quarters of a million and
who lived on a tiny sliver of land the size of New Jersey. But then came the
Six-Day war of 1967. Launched in an effort to wipe Israel off the map, it
ended instead with Israel in control of the West Bank (formerly occupied by
Jordan) and Gaza (which had been controlled by Egypt). This humiliating
defeat, however, was eventually turned into a rhetorical and political
victory by Arab propagandists, who redefined the ongoing war of the whole
Muslim world against the Jewish state as, instead, a struggle merely between
the Palestinians and the Israelis. Thus was Israel’s image transformed from a
David to a Goliath, a move that succeeded in alienating much of the old
sympathy previously enjoyed by the outnumbered and besieged Jewish state. Bush now reversed this reversal. Not only did he
reconstruct a truthful framework by telling the Palestinian people that they
had been treated for decades "as pawns in the Middle East
conflict." He also insisted on being open and forthright about the
nations that belonged in this larger picture and about what they had been up
to: I’ve said in the past that
nations are either with us or against us in the war on terror. To be counted
on the side of peace, nations must act. Every leader actually committed to
peace will end incitement to violence in official media and publicly denounce
homicide bombs. Every nation actually committed to peace will stop the flow
of money, equipment, and recruits to terrorist groups seeking the destruction
of Israel, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hizbullah. Every nation
committed to peace must block the shipment of Iranian supplies to these
groups and oppose regimes that promote terror, like Iraq. And Syria must
choose the right side in the war on terror by closing terrorist camps and
expelling terrorist organizations. Here, then, Bush rebuilt the context in which to
understand the Middle East conflict. In the months ahead, pressured by his
main European ally, the British prime minister Tony Blair, and by his own
Secretary of State, Colin Powell, Bush would sometimes seem to backslide into
the old way of thinking. But he would invariably recover. Nor would he ever
lose sight of the "vision" by which he was guided on this issue,
and through which he had simultaneously made a strong start in fitting not
the Palestinian Authority alone but the entire Muslim world,
"friends" no less than enemies, into his conception of the war
against terrorism. With the inconsistency thus removed and the resultant
shakiness repaired by the addition of this fourth pillar to undergird it, the
Bush Doctrine was now firm, coherent, and complete. Saluting the Flag Again Both as a theoretical construct and as a guide to policy,
the new Bush Doctrine could not have been further from the "Vietnam
syndrome"—that loss of self-confidence and concomitant spread of
neoisolationist and pacifist sentiment throughout the American body politic,
and most prominently in the elite institutions of American culture, which
began during the last years of the Vietnam war. I have already pointed to a
likeness between the Truman Doctrine’s declaration that World War III had
started and the Bush Doctrine’s equally portentous declaration that 9/11 had
plunged us into World War IV. But fully to measure the distance traveled by
the Bush Doctrine, I want to look now at yet another presidential
doctrine—the one developed by Richard Nixon in the late 1960’s precisely in
response to the Vietnam syndrome. Contrary to legend, our military intervention into
Vietnam under John F. Kennedy in the early 1960’s had been backed by every
sector of mainstream opinion, with the elite media and the professoriate
leading the cheers. At the beginning, indeed, the only criticism from the
mainstream concerned tactical issues. Toward the middle, however, and with
Lyndon B. Johnson having succeeded Kennedy in the White House, doubts began
to arise concerning the political wisdom of the intervention, and by the time
Nixon had replaced Johnson, the moral character of the United States was
being indicted and besmirched. Large numbers of Americans, including even
many of the people who had led the intervention in the Kennedy years, were
now joining the tiny minority on the Left who at the time had denounced them
for stupidity and immorality, and were now saying that going into Vietnam had
progressed from a folly into a crime. To this new political reality the Nixon Doctrine was a
reluctant accommodation. As getting into Vietnam under Kennedy and Johnson
had worked to undermine support for the old strategy of containment,
Nixon—along with his chief adviser in foreign affairs, Henry
Kissinger—thought that our way of getting out of Vietnam could conversely
work to create the new strategy that had become necessary. First, American forces would be withdrawn from Vietnam
gradually, while the South Vietnamese built up enough power to assume
responsibility for the defense of their own country. The American role would
then be limited to providing arms and equipment. The same policy, suitably
modified according to local circumstances, would be applied to the rest of
the world as well. In every major region, the United States would now depend
on local surrogates rather than on its own military to deter or contain any
Soviet-sponsored aggression, or any other potentially destabilizing
occurrence. We would supply arms and other forms of assistance, but
henceforth the deterring and the fighting would be left to others. On every point, the new Bush Doctrine contrasted sharply
with the old Nixon Doctrine. Instead of withdrawal and fallback, Bush
proposed a highly ambitious forward strategy of intervention. Instead of
relying on local surrogates, Bush proposed an active deployment of our own
military power. Instead of deterrence and containment, Bush proposed
preemption and "taking the fight to the enemy." And instead of
worrying about the stability of the region in question, Bush proposed to
destabilize it through "regime change." The Nixon Doctrine had obviously harmonized with the
Vietnam syndrome. What about the Bush Doctrine? Was the political and
military strategy it put forward comparably in tune with the post-9/11 public
mood? Certainly this is how it seemed in the immediate aftermath
of the attacks: so much so that a group of younger commentators were quick to
proclaim the birth of an entirely new era in American history. What December
7, 1941 had done to the old isolationism, they announced, September 11, 2001
had done to the Vietnam syndrome. It was politically dead, and the cultural
fallout of that war—all the damaging changes wrought by the 1960’s and the
1970’s—would now follow it into the grave. The most obvious sign of the new era was that once again
we were saluting our now ubiquitously displayed flag. This was the very flag
that, not so long ago, leftist radicals had thought fit only for burning. Yet
now, even on the old flag-burning Left, a few prominent personalities were
painfully wrenching their unaccustomed arms into something vaguely resembling
a salute. It was a scene reminiscent of the response of some
Communists to the suppression by the new Soviet regime of the sailors’ revolt
that erupted in Kronstadt in the early 1920’s. Far more murderous horrors
would pour out of the malignant recesses of Stalinist rule, but as the first
in that long series of atrocities leading to disillusionment with the Soviet
Union, Kronstadt became the portent of them all. In its way, 9/11 served as
an inverse Kronstadt for a number of radical leftists of today. What it did
was raise questions about what one of them was now honest enough to describe
as their inveterately "negative faith in America the ugly." September 11 also brought to mind a poem by W.H. Auden
written upon the outbreak of World War II and entitled "September 1,
1939." Although it contained hostile sentiments about America, remnants
of Auden’s own Communist period, the opening lines seemed so evocative of
September 11, 2001 that they were often quoted in the early days of this new
war: I sit in one of the dives Auden’s low dishonest decade was the 1930’s, and its
clever hopes centered on the construction of a workers’ paradise in the
Soviet Union. Our counterpart was the 1960’s, and its less clever hopes
centered not on construction, however illusory, but on destruction—the
destruction of the institutions that made up the American way of life. For
America was conceived in that period as the great obstacle to any improvement
in the lot of the wretched of the earth, not least those within its own
borders. As a "founding father" of neoconservatism who
had broken ranks with the Left precisely because I was repelled by its
"negative faith in America the ugly," I naturally welcomed this new
patriotic mood with open arms. In the years since making that break, I had
been growing more and more impressed with the virtues of American society. I
now saw that America was a country in which more liberty and more prosperity
abounded than human beings had ever enjoyed in any other country or any other
time. I now recognized that these blessings were also more widely shared than
even the most visionary utopians had ever imagined possible. And I now
understood that this was an immense achievement, entitling the United States
of America to an honored place on the roster of the greatest civilizations
the world had ever known. The new patriotic mood therefore seemed to me a sign of
greater intellectual sanity and moral health, and I fervently hoped that it
would last. But I could not fully share the confidence of some of my younger
political friends that the change was permanent—that, as they exulted,
nothing in American politics and American culture would ever be the same
again. As a veteran of the political and cultural wars of the 1960’s, I knew
from my own scars how ephemeral such a mood might well turn out to be, and
how vulnerable it was to seemingly insignificant forces. In this connection, I was haunted by one memory in
particular. It was of an evening in the year 1960, when I went to address a
meeting of left-wing radicals on a subject that had then barely begun to show
the whites of its eyes: the possibility of American military involvement in a
faraway place called Vietnam. Accompanying me that evening was the late
Marion Magid, a member of my staff at COMMENTARY, of which I had recently
become the editor. As we entered the drafty old hall on Union Square in
Manhattan, Marion surveyed the 50 or so people in the audience, and whispered
to me: "Do you realize that every young person in this room is a tragedy
to some family or other?" The memory of this quip brought back to life some sense
of how unpromising the future had then appeared to be for that
bedraggled-looking assemblage. No one would have dreamed that these young
people, and the generation about to descend from them politically and
culturally, would within the blink of a historical eye come to be hailed as
"the best informed, the most intelligent, and the most idealistic this
country has ever known." Those words, even more incredibly, would
emanate from what the new movement regarded as the very belly of the beast:
from, to be specific, Archibald Cox, a professor at the Harvard Law School
and later Solicitor General of the United States. Similar encomia would flow
unctuously from the mouths of parents, teachers, clergymen, artists, and
journalists. More incredible yet, the ideas and attitudes of the new
movement, cleaned up but essentially unchanged, would within a mere ten years
turn one of our two major parties upside down and inside out. In 1961,
President John F. Kennedy had famously declared that we would "pay any
price, bear any burden, . . . to assure the survival and the success of
liberty." By 1972, George McGovern, nominated for President by Kennedy’s
own party, was campaigning on the slogan, "Come Home, America." It
was a slogan that to an uncanny degree reflected the ethos of the embryonic
movement I had addressed in Union Square only about a decade before. The New "Jackal
Bins" In going over this familiar ground, I am trying to make
two points. One is that the nascent radical movement of the late 1950’s and
early 1960’s was up against an adversary, namely, the
"Establishment," that looked unassailable. Even so—and this is my
second point—to the bewilderment of almost everyone, not least the radicals
themselves, they blew and they blew and they blew the house down. Here we had a major development that slipped in under the
radar of virtually all the pundits and the trend-spotters. How well I
remember John Roche, a political scientist then working in the Johnson White
House, being quoted by the columnist Jimmy Breslin as having derisively
labeled the radicals a bunch of "Upper West Side jackal bins." As
further investigation disclosed, Roche had actually said
"Jacobins," a word so unfamiliar to his interviewer that
"jackal bins" was the best Breslin could do in transcribing his
notes. Much ink has been spilled, gallons of it by me, in the
struggle to explain how and why a great "Establishment"
representing so wide a national consensus could have been toppled so easily
and so quickly by so small and marginal a group as these "jackal
bins." In the domain of foreign affairs, of course, the usual answer is
Vietnam. In this view, it was by deciding to fight an unpopular war that the
Establishment rendered itself vulnerable. The ostensible problem with this explanation, to say it
again, is that at least until 1965 Vietnam was a popular war. All the major
media—from the New York Times to the Washington Post, from Time
to Newsweek, from CBS to ABC—supported our intervention. So did most
of the professoriate. And so did the public. Even when all but one or two of
the people who had either directly led us into Vietnam, or had applauded our
intervention, commenced falling all over themselves to join the antiwar
parade, public opinion continued supporting the war. But it did not matter. Public opinion had ceased to
count. Indeed, as the Tet offensive of 1968 revealed, reality itself had
ceased to count. As all would later come to agree and some vainly struggled
to insist at the time, Tet was a crushing defeat not for us but for the North
Vietnamese. But Walter Cronkite had only to declare it a defeat for us from
the anchor desk of the CBS Evening News, and a defeat it became. Admittedly, in electoral politics, where numbers are
decisive, public opinion remained potent. Consequently, none of the doves
contending for the presidency in 1968 or 1972 could beat Richard Nixon. Yet
even Nixon felt it necessary to campaign on the claim that he had a
"plan" not for winning but for getting us out of Vietnam. All of which is to say that, on Vietnam, elite opinion
trumped popular opinion. Nor were the effects restricted to foreign policy.
They extended into the newly antagonistic attitude toward everything America
was and represented. It hardly needs stressing that this attitude found a home
in the world of the arts, the universities, and the major media of news and
entertainment, where intellectuals shaped by the 1960’s, and their acolytes
in the publishing houses of New York and in the studios of Hollywood, held
sway. But it would be a serious mistake to suppose that the trickle-down
effect of the professoriate’s attitude was confined to literature,
journalism, and show business. John Maynard Keynes once said that "Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." Keynes was referring |