Head and Heart, Competing in Iraq

Looking back on this turbulent year, how should Americans make sense of the war in Iraq and the foreign-policy traumas that surrounded it? What went right, what went wrong -- and why?

Historians will be pondering these questions for years. One can already imagine a long queue of books that will dissect this year of Iraq in the way David Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest" helped us understand the people and ideas that produced Vietnam.

Some tentative answers to these big questions can be found in a remarkable essay by Dimitri K. Simes that appears in the November-December issue of Foreign Affairs. Titled "America's Imperial Dilemma," it's the best brief analysis I've yet seen on where we are at the end of 2003 and how we got here.

Simes's basic thesis is that American foreign policy has become decoupled from its traditional framework, which was a careful calculation of U.S. national interests. The new values-based approach culminated in President Bush's war against Iraq, whose clearest justification was in the moral imperative to oust Saddam Hussein, rather than in controlling Iraqi oil, disarming the country of weapons of mass destruction or other pragmatic goals.

What's intriguing about Simes's argument is that he finds the stirrings of this moralistic foreign policy in Bill Clinton's nation-building crusades in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. Perhaps this is Simes's unkindest cut of all for the Bush administration -- the suggestion that its foreign policy is in some respects Clintonian.

Simes speaks for what has come to be called the "realist" school of conservative foreign-policy analysts. He's president of the Nixon Center in Washington, and he's appropriately Nixonian (if that can now be used as a term of approval) in evoking the hardheaded pragmatism of the old, pre-Reagan Republican establishment.

One obvious target of Simes's critique is the neoconservatives -- a loosely defined group that is often identified by its most articulate members, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Pentagon adviser Richard Perle. Though Simes doesn't really define their strategic view, I would argue that the neocons share a belief in transformation -- that is, they believe America is now powerful enough to transform threatening nations and regions rather than tinker with a flawed status quo.

This neoconservatism merged with the moralism of President Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. They spoke of foreign policy largely in the language of right and wrong -- as a struggle between the forces of freedom, meaning the United States, and what Bush described as "evildoers," such as Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

This alliance of moralism and transformational strategy gave rise to the Iraq War. The Nixonian tradition in the Middle East had been classically status quo -- playing off Israelis and Arabs, making dubious deals with corrupt dictators, stressing the national interest in having secure oil supplies. But after Sept. 11, Bush and his advisers concluded that this status quo was deadly. They believed that by toppling Hussein, they would begin to transform the Arab world in ways that would make it freer, more democratic and less threatening.

Though described at the time in the sober language of national security, it was really a gambler's choice.

"American foreign policy moved away from its generally high-minded but interest-based roots to espouse a form of global social engineering," argues Simes. "In this environment, a new utopian vision was born, the notion that the United States is both entitled and obliged to promote democracy wherever it can -- by force if necessary."

The value of Simes's essay is that he poses the question clearly and starkly: Is America prepared, politically or culturally, to play the imperial role that the transformationalists want?

Simes argues the realist case: "It is time for a hardheaded assessment of American interests to play a greater role in Washington's foreign policy calculus."

But what does President Bush think? He has many advisers with roots in the realist world of his father, who epitomized the old, "wouldn't-be-prudent" Republican establishment. As the Iraq war began to turn dark last August, George W. seemed to be tilting toward the realist camp, whose emerging champion may be Iraq occupation chief L. Paul Bremer. But at the same time, he increased his rhetorical commitment to the agenda of Arab political transformation espoused by the neocons.

Listening to Bush speak a week ago about his personal conviction that America has a mission to spread freedom in the world, you could not doubt that he is a moralist at heart. That is the most eloquent and compelling side of Bush, but if Simes is correct, it is also the most dangerous.

One senses that head and heart are in conflict within the administration at year's end. That's a healthy tension.

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