The Rise of the Vuleans: the History of Bush's War Cabinet

Parameters, Autumn, 2004 by Richard Halloran

The Rise of the Vuleans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet. By James Mann. New York: Viking Press, 2004. 426 pages. $25.95.

James Mann, a longtime news correspondent in Beijing and Washington, gets right to the point in this thoroughly researched and incisively written book that could gainfully be read by everyone who wants to know how the Administration of President George W. Bush fashions its policies in foreign affairs and national security. In his introduction, Mann says that when the President and his senior advisers on the nation's security posture took office in January 2001, this was no ordinary transfer of power from a Democratic to a Republican government or even a continuation of earlier Republican regimes. Rather, he writes: "They represented an epochal change, the flowering of a new view of America's status and role in the world. The vision was that of an unchallengeable America, a United States whose military power was so awesome that it no longer needed to make compromises or accommodations (unless it chose to do so) with any nation or groups of countries."

The President's advisers called themselves the Vulcans, after the Roman god of fire, and were a team of a half-dozen veterans of Washington, all of whom had personal ties going back 30 years. They included Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and the President's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice.

Mann, who spent 20 years with the Los Angeles Times, calls them "the military generation" whose wellspring was the Pentagon, all having earlier served there--Cheney and Rumsfeld as Secretaries of Defense, Powell as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Wolfowitz as an Undersecretary of Defense, and Armitage as an Assistant Secretary of Defense. "Even Rice," Mann writes, "had started her career in Washington with a stint at the Pentagon, working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

Note that President Bush himself is not a Vulcan. His experience in foreign policy was so limited before coming to the White House, Mann asserts, "He was obliged to rely to an extraordinary extent on his advisers for ideas and for information. He could not have made decisions if the Vulcans had not laid out the choices."

"The decision to invade Iraq," in Mann's analysis, "encapsulated virtually all the key elements in the Vulcans' views of the world." The author defines five such elements:

* It began with their belief in the centrality of American military power. "No other military operation," Mann says, "could better have demonstrated the thirty-year rise in American military capabilities or the extent to which the United States had come to rely on those capabilities as America's principal tool in dealing with the world."

* The war against Iraq "reflected the Vulcans' belief in America as a force for good around the globe," Mann writes. "They portrayed Iraq as merely the first step in an effort to spread democracy throughout the Middle East."

* The author pointed to "the Vulcans' extraordinarily optimistic assessment of American capabilities." He says: "They had been arguing for thirty years that America was not in decline and that it had vastly more power in reserve for international affairs than others believed."

* "The decision to invade epitomized the Vulcans' reluctance to enter into agreements or accommodations with other countries," Mann asserts. "It was, in their view, far better to have few or no allies than to make a deal that would constrain America's freedom of action overseas."

* And, in an element pertinent to policy on China, the most serious issue for the United States in Asia, the Vulcans drew on the experience of defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War: "America would build up its military power to such an extent that it would be fruitless and financially crippling for any other country to hope to compete with it."

The first draft of the Pentagon's 1992 defense guidance articulated that principle. After it was leaked and stirred a bit of controversy, the draft was rewritten to suggest the need to "shape the future security environment." Iraq, Mann says, provided "a classic example of what that concept meant. The internal logic was simple. Terrorism had emerged as America's principal security threat; terrorism arose primarily in the Middle East; therefore 'shaping the future security environment' meant transforming the entire politics and social fabric of the Middle East."

After it was published in March 2004, Mann's book appeared to have been overshadowed in Washington by journalist Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, an account of the decisions to invade Iraq. That's rather too bad, as Mann's thoughtful and calm book does much to explain the wider vista of President Bush and the Vulcans who guide him on matters of national security.

Reviewed by Richard Halloran, formerly with The New York Times as a foreign correspondent in Asia and military correspondent in Washington, who writes about US and Asia relations from Honolulu.