Book Review: Pinning the tail on the donkey

Who Lost Iraq

When taking responsibility for the disastrous attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro with Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs in April, 1961, the newly-elected President John F. Kennedy commented "Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan." There is a growing consensus in Washington (and almost complete consensus in the world beyond) that the Iraq venture is looking like a serious strategic defeat for the United States. And this defeat will be no orphan.

A range of authors have already been named, from President George Bush, vice-president Dick Cheney, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his aides Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, the massed ranks of neo-conservatives and British prime minister Tony Blair.

Now some new targets are emerging. After their impassioned assault ('America Alone; the neo-conservatives and the global order') on the neo-con putsch that captured the commanding heights of the Bush administration's foreign policy, Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke have turned their sights on the co-conspirators and enablers who cheered Bush into the Iraqi quagmire.

Their new book, "The Silence of the Rational Center; why American foreign policy is failing" (Basic Books, $26.95) comes with strong credentials. Halper served in the Reagan and first Bush administrations and now teaches at Cambridge, England, and Clarke was a veteran British diplomat with particular knowledge of intelligence. With sharp pen-portraits and a host of citations that testify to their researches, they describe the way that the breathless simplifications of TV cable news combined with fame-seeking academics, partisan think-tanks and advocacy journalism to weaken the critical faculties of Washington's policy-making intelligentsia.

They aim their fire in all directions. Economist Paul Krugman, who is better known as an anti-war New York Times columnist, is condemned for stepping outside his specialty, just as Professors Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington get it in the neck for over-simplifying and sensationalizing their own erudition.

Partisan think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute are slammed as cheerleaders for war, while the more objective institutions like Brookings, Carnegie Endowment and the Center for Strategic and International Studies are criticized for equivocation and for their near silence as the Bush administration headed for war.

The prestigious Council on Foreign Relations is accused of "institutional failure" for standing "mute on the matter of opposition." And the entire panoply of Washington's think-tanks are said to be "failing as a collective" in a city dominated by 'empty, slogan-based exchange that simplifies the variables and suppresses detailed discussion."

"The effect was to suppress the rational centre and the debate that was needed to form effective policy," they write. "Put another way, if policy is formed without the benefit of full debate, then one of the nation's most remarkable and indispensable treasures - its free-flowing intellectual energy - has simply been abandoned."

So far, so good. This kind of hindsight-powered polemic is a useful reminder of the dangers of the groupthink that gripped much of Washington's intellectual community (and Congress and much of the U.S. population) after the shock of the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

And the authors are right to say that the American superpower deserves better of its policy intelligentsia, although there were important figures like Zbigniew Bzrezinski and Brent Scowcroft, two former White House national security advisers, and former national security Agency chief General William Odom who sounded dire warnings as the momentum gathered for the war to topple Saddam Hussein.

Halper and Clarke buttress their argument by suggesting that the American system is unusually vulnerable to a "Big Idea" that can be expressed in a pungent phrase like President Bush's "axis of evil." They cite the high-mindedly patriotic slogans that have caught the national imagination from "Manifest Destiny" to Abraham Lincoln's "Last Best Hope on Earth" and the "Domino Theory" that was deployed to justify America's misadventure in Vietnam .Such simplicities can turn sour, as they did with Senator Joe McCarthy's Red Scare.

And yet there have been some American Big Ideas that turned out admirably. Without the "bastion of democracy' in World War Two, Nazism might not have been defeated. And the grand strategy of the Cold War, to hold the line short of war while building up the economies of its European and Asian allies, proved robust enough to survive setback in Korea and humiliation in Vietnam while helping to spread an unparalleled prosperity throughout the West.

Halper and Clarke decry Bush's Big Idea of "Freedom on the March," the hitherto botched attempt to spread modernization and democracy in the Middle East and the Islamic world. And yet the United National Development Program's seminal Arab Human Development report of 2002, written by Arab intellectuals, suggests that Bush's Big Idea might deserve thoughtful consideration rather than mockery. There is no doubt that Bush's rhetorical support for democracy in the world of Islam has so far produced few results. But that is not to say that it is wrong, or that the goal should be simply abandoned, or that in more capable hands it might not prove beneficial.

The authors prefer to race on to their own Big Idea, that the disasters of policy-making over Iraq must now teach the essential lesson for the greater strategic challenge of managing the rise of China. "The far-reaching and perhaps catastrophic error would be a China policy built on a Big Idea and laced with passion. Perhaps we can avoid it, but the record is not encouraging," they suggest, adding "There is no room for error."

They suggest that the Bush team has been like France's Bourbon dynasty who when restored to power after the French Revolution "remembered everything and learned nothing." But in working with China on North Korea and with the Europeans and the UN on Iran, the merits of consultative diplomacy do not seem entirely lost on the Bush White House. Perhaps the Bush team has learned its lesson in Iraq, or perhaps new escalations lie in store for Iran. Whatever the decisions to come in the last two years of Bush's lame-duck presidency, Halper and Clarke are right to stress that the U.S. media, academics, think-tanks and policy-makers will all have to do a great deal better than their wretched performance on Iraq.