The Rise of the Proconsuls,
War for the Imperium
excerpted from the book
American Empire
The Realities and Consequences
of U.S. Diplomacy
by Andrew Bacevich
Harvard University Press, 2002,
paper
The Rise of the Proconsuls
p167
Elihu Root, October 1899
"The American soldier is different from all other soldiers
of all other countries since the world began... he is the advance
guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and
happiness."
p167
A greater reliance on coercion as an instrument of policy offered
only one manifestation of the increasing militarization of American
statecraft after the Cold War. Equally striking was the tendency
of serving officers to displace civilians in implementing foreign
policy. At the very top, civilians might remain the architects
of overall strategy, but just beneath them the military provided
the engineers who converted design into reality. The emergence
of a new class of uniformed proconsuls presiding over vast quasi-imperial
domains was only one development among many making the 1990s arguably
the most portentous and troubling period in the history of U.S.
civil-military relations.
p168
Operation Desert Storm fostered hopes that U.S. civil-military
relations, ruptured by the Vietnam War and never fully repaired,
might at last be restored to health. Ever since Vietnam, American
military leaders and their civilian masters had viewed each other
at best warily and at worst with barely disguised suspicion and
mistrust. More broadly, Vietnam had created a gulf separating
the armed services from American society as a whole. While the
Reagan administration, by disposition hypernationalistic and by
choice munificent in its defense spending, made headway toward
restoring civil-military comity, in the collective mindset of
the officer corps the basic problem remained.
For members of that officer corps, the
Persian Gulf War in a single stroke healed psychic wounds that
had festered for a generation. In the eyes of many military professionals,
chief among them General Cohn Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, the manner in which the United States conducted and
concluded the war and the way that Americans generally responded
to the crisis exorcised the demons of Vietnam. Thanks to Operation
Desert Storm, Powell believed, "the American people fell
in love again with their armed forces." Indeed, references
to "the troops"-a term for which politicians, pundits,
and network anchors all took a sudden liking-conveyed a not-so-subtle
shift in attitude toward soldiers, suggesting a level of empathy,
respect, and even affection absent and even unimaginable since
the late 1960s. Buoyed by their sense of having achieved a remarkable
battlefield victory, soldiers accepted these expressions of appreciation
and regard as their due-indeed, as long overdue.
p171
... the officer corps of the 1990s not only possessed convictions;
its members intended to act on them. The new military leadership
embodied by Cohn Powell-wise in the ways of Washington, cozy with
the media, disdaining the provincialism of the typical just-in-from-the
-hustings elected official-no longer acknowledged an obligation
to restrict itself to proffering advice and then quietly following
orders. Nor did it see any need to limit its attention to matters
falling within the military sphere, the boundaries of which in
any case were increasingly difficult to discern. On an ever-widening
array of foreign policy issues-where the United States should
engage, how, and for what purposes-the military functioned as
an independent and powerful policy advocate that civilian officials
ignored at their peril.
p172
Politicians pretended to issue orders, and soldiers pretended
to accept them unquestioningly, but both were reciting lines scripted
in advance through a delicate process of negotiation. Whether
this meant that the military was careening "Out of Control,"
as one famous essay suggested, or whether the "American Military
Coup of 2012" beckoned, as another speculated, comfortable
assumptions that civilian control of the military was an absolute
no longer held true (and perhaps never had).23 In the post-Cold
War era, the terrain where civilian interests, values, and fears
intersected with those of the military became fiercely contested.
At the mass level, the problem was not
so much one of Vietnam-era alienation-according to opinion polls,
the military commanded widespread popular respect and admiration-but
of growing public indifference. Increasingly, the high regard
that middle-class Americans accorded to those volunteering for
military service was akin to that which American Catholics felt
for fellow believers who embraced the celibacy of religious life:
a choice worthy of the highest respect, it was also peculiar to
the point of being unfathomable. For most people, that choice
was one that they preferred to see someone else's son or daughter
make.
p172
Never acknowledged officially, civil-military tension persisted
throughout the Clinton era. Official Washington seemingly took
the view that the best way to treat the disease was to ignore
the symptoms. In fact, continuing civil-military turmoil measurably
loosened the bonds of civilian control. Seizing upon this opening,
a select group of senior officers used it as an opportunity to
accrue unprecedented additional authority in matters involving
the formulation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy. These
officers acted with the acquiescence if not the outright encouragement
of their political masters. The emergence of a new class of military
viceroys stemmed in part from the ineffectiveness of civilian
agencies charged with making policy, above all the State Department,
and from unintended and unforeseen consequences of defense reforms
implemented in the latter part of the Cold War. But transcending
these two factors was a third: the military's growing influence
in matters relating to foreign policy reflected the underlying
logic of American grand strategy and the role of military power
in advancing the prospects of openness and integration.
The defense reform at issue was the Goldwater-Nichols
Department of Defense Reorganization Act, a landmark measure passed
with bipartisan support over Pentagon objections in 1986.29 Among
the several purposes of this legislation, two stand out. First,
in an effort to sharpen the quality of professional military advice
provided to the president and secretary of defense, Goldwater-Nichols
designated the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as their
sole military adviser and gave the chairman exclusive control
of the Joint Staff. This had the effect of elevating the chairman's
profile at the expense of the service chiefs. Heretofore the chairman
had stood as first among equals; henceforth, if he chose to use
the prerogatives of his office to the fullest, he was the boss.
Second, the legislation sought to enhance the prerogatives of
the commanders-in-chief of the various unified and specified commands-the
"warfighting" CINCs. The intent here was to ensure that
the priorities of those charged with implementing war plans received
due attention back in Washington.
p174
Colin Powell was not the first post-Goldwater-Nichols chairman,
but he was the first incumbent to exploit that legislation to
its full potential. Credited (rightly or not) with having performed
brilliantly during the successive interventions in Panama and
the Persian Gulf, Powell by 1992 had become easily the most powerful
JCS chairman in the history of that office. By the time Bill Clinton
became president, the photogenic general was widely regarded as
the second-most influential figure in Washington, held in high
esteem by the public at large and considered prime timber for
virtually any office to which he might aspire. In the early days
of the Clinton administration, Powell used that clout to complicate
the president's life appreciably, opposing the commander-in-chief
on gays, attempting to drive the military strategy train,"
and maneuvering to avert direct U.S. military involvement in the
Balkans.
For the Clinton administration, the expiration
of Powell's term in the fall of 1993 came as a godsend. Powell's
retirement from active duty offered a ready-made opportunity to
relieve the president of having to accommodate a JCS chairman
enjoying the status of semiautonomous potentate. The solution:
choose a successor possessing none of his qualities, thereby reducing
the likelihood that he would exercise comparable influence.
p182
Kosovo qualifies in equal measure as a "proconsul's war,"
with the proconsul in this case being General Wesley K. Clark,
then serving both as chief of United States European Command and
as NATO's supreme allied 'Commander.
... To Clark and to senior officials of
the Clinton administration, the chief obstacle to peace in the
Balkans was Slobodan Milosevic, the ultranationalist Serb and
president of what remained of Yugoslavia. During his service with
Holbrooke, Clark had met with Milosevic on many occasions. As
a result, he was supremely confident that he knew what made the
Serb president tick. Clark "had learned his fear"-the
prospect of attack by American air power. In his capacity as a
strategic commander, he intended to exploit that fear, maneuvering
Milosevic into ending his repression of the Kosovar Albanians
while also coaxing him to embrace democracy-the only sure way
to guarantee Balkan stability.
Well before NATO initiated Operation Allied
Force in March 1999, Clark was hard at work selling his "strategic
vision" to Washington. Modeling his tactics after Hoibrooke's
in Bosnia, Clark favored what he called a "carrot and stick
approach." The stick-the threat of bombing-would bring Milosevic
to the negotiating table. The carrot would come once serious talks
were under way: Clark wanted "subtly to embed in the negotiations
measures to promote the return of democracy to Serbia."
p185
In short order it became clear that Clark-though not he alone-had
miscalculate . A defiant Milosevic did not fold. The first several
days' bombing succeeded only in stoking the fires of Serb nationalism
and in providing Belgrade with the excuse to accelerate its ethnic
cleansing of Kosovo. Ethnic Albanian refugees poured out of Kosovo
into neighboring Macedonia and Albania, a development that caught
NATO flatfooted. Despite this evidence of a full-fledged war,
high officials in Washington continued to characterize the operation
as a "humanitarian intervention," launched in response
to Serb-perpetrated genocide.
His own bluff called, Clark needed to
make good on his threat to disrupt, degrade, devastate, and destroy
Milosevic's army. But the 366 aircraft assembled for Allied Force-the
majority provided by the United States-proved inadequate to the
task. Hampered by bad weather and difficult terrain, deprived
of lucrative targets as Serb units dispersed or hid in Kosovar
villages, allied aircrews proved unable even to impede Yugoslav
operations on the ground, much less to destroy the forces conducting
them.
p186
Having blundered into an open-ended conflict against an unpredictable,
surprisingly defiant foe and with the future of NATO hanging in
the balance, the United States found itself face to face with
the limitations of the Clinton doctrine. Unlike the periodic post-Gulf
War confrontations with Saddam Hussein or the retaliation for
the terrorist attacks on the U.S. embassies in Africa, in this
instance the United States could not lob a few pieces of ordnance,
declare the operation a success, and call it quits. Nor, apart
from the remnants of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)-a battered
and unsavory insurgent group known to be engaged in drug trafficking
and terror-were there any readily available proxies to throw into
the fray. Simply trying harder was not an option: as the number
of refugees streaming out of Kosovo mounted with each passing
day, the inadequacy of the initial limited bombing became obvious.
Clark's job was to find a way out of this
predicament. In practice, only two alternatives existed. One course
of action was to acknowledge that the war actually was a war and
to prosecute it accordingly. Doing so implied bringing the full
weight of allied military power to bear on Milosevic to force
him to submit-destroying his army, invading his territory, and,
if need be, occupying his capital. In practice, of course, "allied
power" meant for the most part American power.
Liberating Kosovo would entail serious
fighting and held the almost certain prospect of U.S. casualties.
But the Clinton administration-however misleadingly-had justified
intervention primarily on humanitarian grounds, and Mogadishu
had seemingly showed that Americans would not accept casualties
incurred during humanitarian operations. Furthermore, organizing
such a large-scale campaign would make it difficult to sustain
the grand conceit of the global age, namely that war itself had
become obsolete.
The second course of action called for
NATO to forgo any goals of liberation while intensifying and recasting
its bombing campaign. Even as it expressed continuing sympathy
for the plight of the Kosovars and maintained a pretense of going
after Yugoslav forces in the field, the alliance would shift the
weight of its air effort to Serbia proper. Targeting government
facilities, communications networks, the electrical grid, oil
refineries, factories, and infrastructure, allied aircrews would
wreak whatever level of havoc was required to convince Milosevic
that he had had enough. Put simply, instead of searching ineffectually
for Serb forces scattered among the villages of Kosovo, NATO would
go after downtown Belgrade. People might die as a result, but
few if any of them would be wearing the uniform of a NATO nation.
Furthermore, by averting the necessity of fighting on the ground,
this approach would help sustain the tissue-thin fiction that
this latest Balkan unpleasantness was not really a war, but simply
an action by the "international community" to enforce
the rules of a global age.
Yet Clark opted for the first alternative.
By the beginning of April, the general who had long touted Milosevic's
susceptibility to a little bit of bombing was pressing Washington
and Brussels to begin considering a possible invasion by ground
forces. As a first step in that direction, he urged the immediate
deployment of AH-64 Apache attack helicopters and rocket artillery-stationed
in Germany and already assigned to his own U.S. European Command.
In Clark's view, the firepower of these potent weapons would exact
a heavy toll on Yugoslav formations operating in Kosovo. If there
was some risk involved, he was willing to take it.
Militarily, Clark's preferred course of
action qualified as at least plausible. Morally, it was eminently
defensible. But politically, it was a nonstarter. Having become
a proponent of possible ground operations, America's proconsul
in Europe revealed himself in Washington's eyes to be a naïf
and a liability. With that, the jackals began to converge.
As SACEUR, Clark expected to be accorded
the respect and deference due to a supranational military figure.
As the successor to supreme commanders like Eisenhower, Alfred
M. Gruenther, and Lauris Norstad, whose influence at least approached
that implied by their magniloquent title, Clark expected, especially
in the midst of hostilities, to exercise real command authority
over the forces at his disposal. If nothing else, as a regional
CINC in the midst of a sticky situation, he expected that the
longstanding American tradition of backing field commanders to
the hilt would guarantee him the full support of his fellow four-stars
back in the Pentagon.
He was disappointed on all counts. To
his political masters in Washington, Clark's support for a proposition
so wildly at odds with the president's stated policy was unacceptable.
Moreover, they were adamant that the White House and the Pentagon
would make the key decisions. Nor were Clark's military peers
in the Pentagon sympathetic: an advocate of using "military
power to back diplomacy" had stumbled into a full-fledged
shooting war-in their view an unnecessary one. Now Clark seemed
determined to make things worse by enmeshing U.S. forces in a
ground campaign of unknown cost and duration. They were determined
to prevent him from doing so.
In essence, Washington opted for the lesser
evil: a strategic bombing campaign to bring the Serb regime and,
if need be, the Serb nation to its knees.
p190
By the first week of June, strategic bombing-that is, attacks
designed to inflict maximum pain on the Serb economy and the Serb
people-began to take its toll. Since mid-May 85 percent of Serbs
had been without electric power. Russia, the closest thing that
Serbia could claim as a meaningful ally, signaled Belgrade that
it was time to quit. For its part, NATO quietly backed off from
elements of the Rambouillet formula that Serbs had found most
offensive. A resurgent KLA, with indirect American encouragement
and support, began operating out of base camps in Albania to harass
Yugoslav units in Kosovo proper. By no means least of all, British
Prime Minister Tony Blair, most hawkish of NATO's European leaders,
was on the verge of going public with plans to invade Kosovo,
if need be without the Americans. And the White House announced
that Bill Clinton had invited the Joint Chiefs of Staff to consult-the
president's first session with the JCS since the hostilities had
begun. According to press reports, the purpose of the meeting
was to provide cover for Clinton to announce that he, too, now
accepted the necessity of preparing a ground option.
At this juncture, Milosevic indicated
through intermediaries that Yugoslavia sought an end to the hostilities.
Over a period of several days, after much wrangling, Yugoslav
and NATO officers signed off on an agreement paving the way for
the introduction "in Kosovo under UN auspices of effective
international civil and security presences." Implicit in
this stilted phrasing was that the peacekeeping operation would
not be exclusively a NATO one, a major concession to the Serbs.
Prominent among the non-NATO nations scheduled to participate
was Russia.
On June 9-after seventy-eight days, just
over 38,000 sorties, and the expenditure of 28,236 weapons amounting
to 12,000 tons of munitions-the bombing ceased. In the days that
followed, Serb forces, showing surprisingly little wear and tear,
affected an orderly, at times almost impudent, withdrawal from
Kosovo.° As the Serbs departed, the lead elements of KFOR,
the NATO-led peacekeeping force, entered the province. The deployment
became the occasion of Clark's final and most public humiliation.
Clark's plan for occupying Kosovo divided
the province into five sectors, each assigned to a NATO member
nation. Irked at the prospect of its own contingent's reporting
to a subordinate NATO commander, Moscow took matters into its
own hands: it would get its own troops into Kosovo first and carve
out a distinctive Russian sector. With that end in mind, the Russian
peacekeeping brigade in Bosnia dispatched a small armored column
toward Pristina with orders to seize the main provincial airport
there. If Russian troops could gain control of the airport, others
could pile on to reinforce, presenting the allies with a fait
accompli.
Viewing Moscow's move as a "strategic
challenge" to NATO, Clark ordered the commander of KFOR,
Lieutenant General Sir Michael Jackson, to beat the Russians to
Pristina by whatever means necessary. When the Russians won the
race anyway, Clark ordered Jackson to block the runways to prevent
the arrival of reinforcements. Jackson bluntly refused. "I'm
not starting World War Hi for you," the British general told
Clark in an emotional outburst that captured the attention of
the press. More telling, however, is Clark's own account of the
exchange. Jackson asked by what authority Clark was issuing his
order.
"By my authority, as SACEUR."
"You don't have that authority."
That Jackson spoke the truth soon became
evident even to Clark: wary of a confrontation that could derail
the ongoing occupation, senior Pentagon officials, starting with
Shelton, sided with the British three-star against the American
four-star. There would be no blocking of runways. As a gauge of
Clark's impoverished standing as SACEUR, a more telling incident
could scarcely be conceived. The proconsul had been hung out to
dry.
p192
If in the post-Cold War era the ideal conflict is one in which
no Americans get hurt and every American gets rich, then the war
for Kosovo, in its own perverse way, approached perfection. In
the end, the United States and its allies prevailed-albeit over
a pint-sized nation whose entire gross national product amounted
to one-sixteenth of the Pentagon's budget-without losing a single
soldier killed in action. 96 During the air campaign, critics
had lambasted the Clinton administration for its lackluster conduct
of the war. But this amounted to just so much hot air. As long
as there were no body bags coming home, the administration's actual
control of policy was never seriously called into question.
No less noteworthy, the war came and went
without causing Wall Street more than passing anxiety. Indeed,
Operation Allied Force coincided with a stock rally of epic proportions.
During the first week the Dow Jones industrial average closed
above 10,000 points for the first time; barely a month later,
with the bombs still falling, it surpassed 11,000. Never during
U.S. involvement in a war had American stock portfolios fattened
so generously and so quickly. President Clinton himself received
scant credit for his Balkan victory-his standing in the polls
actually dropped a bit-but he had seemingly stumbled into a formula
enabling the United States to fight wars without engaging the
passions of the American people. For a self-indulgent democracy
in a postheroic age eager to maintain its global preeminence but
disinclined to sacrifice, such a formula was likely to find future
application.
The legal and political consequences of
Operation Allied Force were more problematic. With regard to international
law, the intervention qualified in at least two respects as a
Precedent-setting event. In going to war over Belgrade's treatment
of Kosovo, the United States and its allies demolished any lingering
notion about the claims of sovereignty rendering internal matters
off-limits to outsiders. Russia and China numbered among the nations
viewing that precedent with alarm.
In addition, although NATO had justified
its resort to force as an action undertaken on behalf of the entire
"international community," the body normally considered
to represent that community had by no means given its approval.
Indeed, given its inability to get the United Nations to authorize
intervention-in the Security Council neither Russia nor China
would concur-the alliance had in fact arrogated to itself the
authority to act. That the world's only superpower could henceforth
use a regional organization that it dominated to legitimate its
own use of force did not find universal favor.
Politically, the war left relations between
Washington and Moscow strained and between Washington and Beijing
on the verge of a complete rupture-largely as a result of an errant
U.S. bomb that pulverized the Chinese embassy in Belgrade on May
7, 1999. The successful conclusion of the war also did little
to enhance NATO's own solidarity. Although nominally the alliance
had demonstrated a hitherto-untapped capacity to venture "out
of area" and even "out of charter," in the eyes
of many observers, the war's chief lesson was never, ever to risk
another such enterprise. A second such stressful event could well
mean NATO's dissolution.
To make matters worse, with Operation
Allied Force having demonstrated anew how far allied military
capabilities lagged behind those of the United States, the European
Union began talk of creating a separate defense identity, enabling
it, if necessary, to act independently. Whether Europe possessed
either the collective political will or the resources to reconfigure
and modernize its forces remained to be seen, but the mere prospect
did not bode well for American claims to leadership on that continent.
But all of this was as nothing in comparison
with Kosovo's moral and ethical implications. Indeed, on these
matters, the events during and after the conflict left a long
skein of confusion trailing in their wake. Problems began at the
moment of the war's conception. The United States and its allies
publicly justified intervention as a necessary response to the
horrors of ethnic cleansing. But once the shooting began, they
took no meaningful action to protect the Kosovar Albanians, whose
plight actually worsened as NATO proceeded with its attack. It
was as if America actually had entered World War II to save the
Jews and then still abandoned them to their fate.
Throughout the campaign, the American
aversion to casualties remained acute. Combined with an unbridled
infatuation with technology, this preoccupation yielded morally
insidious effects. With airmen recycling old theories of strategic
bombing, now larded with expansive assurances that precision weapons
released from afar could achieve remarkable results at minimal
risk to Americans, the principle of noncombatant immunity received
short shrift.
The essence of war is a bloody interaction.
Traditionally armies interact with-that is, wage war against-other
armies. But in Kosovo the U.S. government was, for all practical
purposes, unwilling to countenance the loss of a single American
soldier. Since making war on the Serb army meant putting soldiers
in harm's way-whether by sending troops in on the ground or flying
aircraft at lower operating altitudes-every American in a position
of authority (except Clark) understood the necessity of recalibrating
the terms of the interaction. In essence, the United States needed
to wage war in ways that deprived the enemy of any real opportunity
to shoot back. The role assigned to military forces in Allied
Force was not to fight battles but to deliver ordnance.
Thus did it become expedient to target
the Serb political and economic infrastructure, and inevitably
Serb civilians. This shift in priorities showed in the results
achieved. In contrast to their predecessors during Operation Desert
Storm, the aircrews who conducted Operation Allied Force showed
themselves markedly less efficient in killing enemy soldiers and
more efficient in killing noncombatants. To enemy observers,
such an outcome was anathema. Others-fired with the conviction
that the cause was just-disagreed. In any war, according to David
Rieff, a journalist of progressive bent, regrettable incidents
occurred: "you send your F- 15 to help the Kosovars and what
it does is it blows up a bunch of children in a hospital. It is
inevitable. That's what war is. We've made a lot of claims for
ourselves, for our societies and for our moral aspirations. But
without force or the threat of force, they're hollow ideas."
The disparity between professions of humanitarian
concern and the actual results achieved also pervaded the peacekeeping
phase of the operation. For KFOR, Clark laid down four new 'measures
of merit," chief among them a requirement to stop any crimes
of revenge or Serb ethnic cleansing." In the event, Kosovar
refugees returned home thirsting for revenge and wasted little
time slaking that thirst. A savage process of reverse ethnic cleansing
ensued, which KFOR did little to impede. '° Expectations that
a Kosovo purged of its ethnic Serb minority might become placid
did not materialize. Despite having agreed to disarm, a resurgent
KLA began agitating violently to unify all nearby ethnic Albanians
into a "Greater Kosovo." Albanian insurgents infiltrated
into Serbia and Macedonia, triggering border skirmishes that KFOR
found itself attempting ever so gingerly to suppress.
In the meantime, cautious American commanders
in Kosovo kept their well-armed troops battened down in Camp Bondsteel,
a sprawling, heavily defended base soon to be equipped with gymnasiums,
recreation centers, and a shopping-mall-style food court. Unlike
in Bosnia, no one even pretended that the mission would end anytime
soon: the troops settled in for a protracted stay. And whatever
Clark's stated intent, the paramount concern for each U.S. unit
that rotated through Kosovo, outweighing every other consideration,
became "force protection," keeping the troops from harm.
Whatever the moral justifications for
plunging Belgrade into darkness and for turning a blind eye as
the persecuted turned on the persecutors in Kosovo, these developments
left the very concept of a military professional ethic reeling.
Even the most sympathetic observer was hard pressed to find in
the allied assault on Serbia or in the peacekeeping efforts that
followed evidence of gallantry or derring-do or fraternal self-sacrifice-any
of the virtues that warring nations cite to imbue an otherwise
squalid business with a modicum of dignity. Critics, viewing these
events from afar rather than, say, from the cockpit of a fighter-bomber
streaking across the night sky toward Belgrade, expressed concern
that present-day soldiers appeared less eager to die for their
country than earlier generations had been. Less than a decade
after the high-water mark of Desert Storm, American military professionalism,
they lamented, showed unmistakable signs of decay.
The debates provoked by these moral and
ethical complications raised issues of profound importance to
a democratic and, in many respects, God-fearing society. For those
fancying that a star-spangled fist ought to enforce the rules
of a globalized world, the moral complications lying in wait appeared
formidable. Yet at the political center of things, these concerns
barely registered. At the center, the war's architects understood
that from the outset Operation Allied Force had never actually
been about doing the right thing in the right way. Its purpose
had been to sustain American primacy on a continent of vital /
importance to the United States, one that had advanced the furthest
( toward the openness and integration defining the ultimate goal
of J American grand strategy. The United States fought over Kosovo
not to protect Kosovars but to forestall the intolerable prospect
of Europe's backsliding.
Viewed from this perspective, the workmanlike
demolition of Serbia might not qualify as a feat worthy of comparison
with Gettysburg or the Normandy invasion, but it was what a great
power did to fend off perceived threats to its preeminence. If
Operation Allied Force did not rise to the level of a great moral
victory, it was a necessary strategic one, an example of the work
that goes along with running an empire.
Within the foreign policy elite, the relevant
lessons of Kosovo concerned not issues of conscience but practical
matters. By the end of the 1990s it became apparent to even the
most enthusiastic booster of globalization and of American "leadership"
that the enterprise to which the United States had committed itself
was proving to be an arduous one. If the forces of globalization
might one day perhaps render beggar-thy-neighbor politics obsolete,
that day had certainly not yet arrived. Whatever the hopes that
one day all the nations of the world would converge on the ideals
of pluralistic democratic liberalism, for the moment at least,
ethnic identity and cultural particularism remained ferociously
and disconcertingly alive.
Furthermore, if the United States undoubtedly
ranked as the greatest military power the world had ever seen,
its capacity to overawe fell far short of being absolute. Keeping
America's armed might in reserve would not suffice; using it necessarily
entailed new obligations and commitments and in some quarters
stoked greater opposition. With American citizens evincing little
eagerness to shoulder the burdens of empire (while accepting its
benefits as their due), innovative methods of imperial management
were needed. The alternative-allowing the nation's own cultural
maladies to circumscribe the exercise of American power-was simply
unacceptable. If, in the particular case of Kosovo, the American
proconsul had failed to fulfill his responsibilities, then the
appointment of a more responsive and capable replacement was in
order.
At the end of the 1990s, with the United
States at the zenith of its influence, Kosovo served as a reminder
that the obstacles to openness remained formidable. Overcoming
those obstacles was proving less easy than Bill Clinton and Madeleine
Albright had expected. Yet despite periodic posturing about America's
imminent slide back into isolationism, virtually no member of
the policy elite dissented from the proposition that the United
States had little choice strategically but to press on. The anticipated
consequences of doing otherwise-greater disorder abroad, diminished
prosperity at home, and, inevitably, retribution at the ballot
box-were simply too awful to contemplate. The consensus in favor
of "global leadership" remained firm.
On June 2, with the outcome of Operation
Allied Force still at issue, but with patience wearing thin and
criticism of the administration's handling of the crisis approaching
flood stage, President Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel
R. Berger, summoned a group of "wise men" to the White
House. To counter the perception that the president lacked the
mettle to see things through, Berger outlined for his listeners
"four irreducible facts": "One, we will win. Period.
Full stop. There is no alternative. Second, winning means what
we said it means. Third, the air campaign is having a serious
impact. Four, the president has said he has not ruled out any
option. So go back to one. We will win.
The national security adviser did not
speak idly. In Europe, NATO aircrews ratcheted up the punishment
visited upon the Serbs. In Washington, the White House girded
itself for the prospect of mounting an invasion. There would be
no backing down. At the end of the day, the United States would
do whatever was necessary to win.
Berger's crisp presentation serves as
a fitting end point for an ostensibly humanitarian intervention
that willy-nilly transformed itself into a full-fledged shooting
war. But it serves just as well to capture the irreducible bottom
line of U.S. grand strategy during the 1990s. Faced with opposition
and under duress, the United States would do whatever was necessary
to achieve its purposes. Period. Full stop.
Different Drummers, Same Drum
p200
In communicating to a wider public, the foreign policy elite prefers
oversimplification clichés, and caricature to candor, nuance,
or complexity.
... The quadrennial competition for the
White House-and the role foreign policy plays as a prop in that
contest-offers a case in point. Through tacit agreement, the two
major parties approach the contest for the presidency less as
an opportunity for assessing U.S. policies abroad than for striking
poses-a hallowed and inviolable bit of political kabuki. The parts
are prescribed, the players know their roles, and everyone sticks
to the script. The purpose of this ritual is not to undertake
any serious assessment or critique of American statecraft but
to sustain the fiction that in the forthcoming balloting the differences
separating the candidates are large and the stakes high.
p201
... some people actually make a living parsing the differences
between where Democrats and Republicans stand on foreign policy-indeed,
ideologues and those for whom the Washington Beltway defines the
epicenter of the universe have an abiding interest in portraying
those differences as acute. But whatever the satisfactions of
that effort in terms of scoring partisan points or hyping 'the
news," it really doesn't get you very far toward understanding
the essential nature of U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, it obscures
more than it illuminates.
War for the Imperium
p237
... the attack of September 11 evoked an enormous surge of patriotism.
Overnight, homes, businesses, college dormitories, automobiles,
and pickup trucks sprouted flags. The Stars and Stripes became
the season's number-one fashion accessory, appearing on T-shirts,
sweaters, tattoos, buttons, rhinestone-encrusted stickpins, and
various other gewgaws. For the moment, at least, overtly expressing
love of country was back in style. The relative merits of America
the Beautiful" and God Bless America" as anthems became
a subject of considerable discussion-The Star-Spangled Banner"
being oft sung but as ever not much loved.
But it was a curious patriotism-doubtless
heartfelt, but arguably wider than it was deep. As the United
States embarked upon its global war against terror, political
leaders carefully refrained from demanding much of individual
Americans. Apart from expressions of national unity (boosting
this president's popularity as the Gulf War had boosted his father's),
not very much was offered. The president ordered modest numbers
of national guardsmen to active duty-far fewer than in 1990-but
most citizen-soldiers called to the colors were assigned duties
no more hazardous than providing backup security inside airport
terminals. The primary responsibility of the average citizen for
the duration of the emergency remained what it had been in more
peaceful times: to be an engine of consumption. The Bush administration
called on Americans to get out and spend, energetically, for the
sake of the nation's economic well-being. "Get on board,"
urged the president. "Fly and enjoy America's great destination
spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families
and enjoy life." (Perhaps tellingly, among traditional patriotic
songs, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic with its explicit
summons to sacrifice-"as He died to make men holy, let us
die to make men free - did not enjoy a post-September 11 popular
revival.)
Meanwhile, those serving in uniform were
lionized. Cops, firefighters, and soldiers momentarily eclipsed
Hollywood celebrities and professional athletes as American heroes.
Whether any of this signified a permanent change in the prevailing
culture remained to be seen. Certainly, the war on terror did
not send youngsters stampeding to their local armed forces recruiting
stations. 18 Indeed, less than a month after the September 11
attack, the New York Times declared that pop culture was already
back in the saddle.
Without question, September 11 reinforced
the post-Cold War consensus for maintaining unquestioned military
superiority. As events in Afghanistan unfolded, the Congress voted
by huge margins the largest increase in defense spending in a
decade. The war on terror also lent further impetus to the militarization
of American policy. In the State Department, retired general Cohn
Powell designated retired general Anthony Zinni, former proconsul,
as his envoy to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process
. President Bush chose another retired general as his national
coordinator on counterterrorism. Not to be outdone, former governor
Tom Ridge, the first chief of homeland security, appointed a retired
four-star admiral to serve as his deputy. Still another retired
general became the State Department's ambassador at large for
counterterrorism. Meanwhile the four regional CINCs made the case
for adding Treasury and FBI agents to their staffs. Viewing this
as a bid to give each proconsul his own "miniature Washington-style
bureaucracy," some observers in the nation's capital worried
that further expanding the power of the CINCs would "ultimately
undercut the defense secretary's authority. " But public
interest in the issue was close to nil.
p244
America today is Rome, committed irreversibly to the maintenance
and, where feasible, expansion of an empire that differs from
every other empire in history. This is hardly a matter for celebration;
but neither is there any purpose served by denying the facts.
Governing any empire is a political, economic,
and military undertaking; but it is a moral one as well. Along
with principles, it demands foresight, consistency, and self-awareness.
Scaling imperial ambitions to fit imperial assets; balancing means
and ends; distinguishing between minor annoyances and large threats
and between the genuinely essential and the merely desirable,
coordinating near-term goals with long-term interests, fostering
military strength without forfeiting political responsibility,
navigating between the rocks of timidity and the shoals of hubris,
reconciling what is necessary with what is right: all pose daunting
challenges for any great power. But for a postmodern, postindustrial,
postheroic democracy bent on remaking the world in its own image
they pose greater challenges still.
The question that urgently demands attention-the
question that Americans can no longer afford to dodge-is not whether
the United States has become an imperial power. The question is
what sort of empire they intend theirs to be. For policymakers
to persist in pretending otherwise-to indulge in myths of American
innocence or fantasies about unlocking the secrets of history-is
to increase the likelihood that the answers they come up with
will be wrong. That way lies not just the demise of the American
empire but great danger for what used to be known as the American
republic.
American
Empire - Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy
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