A Foreign Policy, Falling Apart

It will take years to sort out all that went wrong in Iraq, but in a general way, an explanation is already available. The Bush administration was on notice months before 9/11 about the risks and requirements of deploying our forces for military action abroad, and it defied the warnings. They were contained in a most pragmatic memorandum from Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to President Bush. Rumsfeld wrote the memo in March 2001, at the very beginning of the new administration. Bob Woodward's 2002 book, "Bush At War," quotes briefly from it. The entire document, which Woodward provided, is haunting reading. Excerpts:

• "In fashioning a clear statement of the underpinning for the action, avoid arguments of convenience. They can be useful at the outset to gain support, but they will be deadly later."

• "There should be clear, well-considered and well-understood goals as to the purpose of the engagement and what would constitute success . . ."

• "The military capabilities needed to achieve the agreed goals must be available . . . "

• "Before committing to an engagement, consider the implications of the decision for the U.S. in other parts of the world . . . . Think through the precedent that a proposed action, or inaction, would establish."

• "Finally -- honesty: U.S. leadership must be brutally honest with itself, the Congress, the public and coalition partners. Do not make the effort sound even marginally easier or less costly than it could become. Preserving U.S. credibility requires that we promise less, or no more, than we are sure we can deliver. It is a great deal easier to get into something than to get out of it!"

In other words, Rumsfeld laid out the standards for a serious, pragmatic strategy. The only obviously missing element in his memo was a recognition that military actions inevitably have political components that also require careful planning and shrewd execution.

But when it came time to wage war against Iraq, Rumsfeld ignored his own guidelines. He developed no real strategy for what to do after ousting Saddam Hussein. As James Fallows has reported in the Atlantic Monthly, Rumsfeld actually banned Defense Department officials from participating in CIA- and State Department-led meetings on postwar Iraq. When those meetings produced extensive recommendations, which included warnings about nearly every pitfall we have since fallen into, the Pentagon simply ignored them. We went to war with no political plan for ending it.

As George Will and others have argued, administration policy has been "neoconservative," rather than hard-headed and just plain conservative. A neoconservative believes that certain things must happen, Will wrote, whereas rational conservatives would only say that those things can happen. In his recent column on these subjects, Will pleaded for more reliance on empirical evidence -- in other words, on pragmatism: "This administration needs a dose of conservatism without the prefix."

One prominent member of the empirical school on Iraq is retired Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni. From 1997 to 2000, Zinni was the commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, the job held by Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks in the recent war, and by Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Early in this administration, Zinni was Bush's envoy for the Middle East peace process. As a consultant to the CIA, he retained his access to top secret intelligence until shortly before the Iraq war began.

For reasons he feels have been confirmed by events over the last 14 months, Zinni opposed the war in Iraq. He said the United States was successfully containing Saddam Hussein. Speaking to the Center for Defense Information on May 14, Zinni laid out America's "ten crucial mistakes" in Iraq. Four are particularly noteworthy:

• "The strategy was flawed. I couldn't believe what I was hearing about the benefits of this strategic move -- that the road to Jerusalem [i.e., to an Israeli-Palestinian peace] led through Baghdad, when just the opposite is true . . . [Or] the idea that we will walk in and be met with open arms . . . The idea that strategically we will reform, reshape and change the Middle East by this action -- we've changed it all right! All those that believed this [war] was going to be the catalyst for some kind of positive change . . . didn't understand the region, the culture, the situation and the issues."

• "We had to create a false rationale for going in to get public support. . . . The books were cooked, in my mind. The intelligence was not there . . . . The rationale that we faced an imminent threat, or a serious threat, was ridiculous."

• "We underestimated the task. And I think those of us that knew that region, former commanders in chief . . . beginning with General Schwarzkopf, have said you don't understand what you're getting into [in Iraq] . . . . I can't understand why there was an underestimation when you look at a country that has never known democracy, that has been in the condition it's been in, that has the natural fault lines that it has, and the issues it has. And to look at the task of reconstructing this country, not only reconstructing it, but the idea of creating Jeffersonian democracy almost overnight, is almost ridiculous, in concept . . ."