AT WAR: Not-So-Special Operation: Bush adopts the Clinton way of war

National Review, Nov 19, 2001 by ANDREW J. Bacevich

When it comes to America's ongoing war to destroy al-Qaeda and topple the Taliban, any outcome short of decisive victory is simply unacceptable. But as President Bush and other members of his administration have repeatedly emphasized, the present conflict is not simply an isolated challenge to be confronted and overcome so that life can return to normal. There will be no such return. Colin Powell has rightly noted that, after just slightly more than a decade, the prodigal era that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall has ended. The events of September 11 plunged the United States into a menacing new age of insecurity, in which we are destined to live out our days.

Thus, the ongoing Afghan war not only marks the Pentagon's response to the attack of September 11; it also provides a preliminary assessment of the nation's capacity to address the dangers awaiting it in this new era. In that regard, the war's first weeks offer little cause for comfort. Based on the available evidence, it appears that the world's most generously endowed and best-trained military forces lack the tools-conceptual as well as material-to deal effectively with the enemies we face. The conceptual deficit may be greater than the material one; it is not our weapons that have been found most seriously wanting in Afghanistan, but the ideas underpinning a deeply flawed "American Way of War."

President Bush has labeled the present struggle the "first war of the 21st century." Yet his administration's approach to waging that war does not differ appreciably from the methods on which the U.S. relied to wage the last wars of the previous century-namely, the sundry minor military adventures concocted by the Clinton administration during the '90s. In Operation Enduring Freedom, the Clinton legacy at its most pernicious lives on.

Beginning in 1993 with its failed war in Somalia and continuing until Bill Clinton's last day in office-an occasion coinciding with U.S. air strikes against Iraq, all but unnoticed because they had become so commonplace-the Clinton administration evolved a distinctive way of employing U.S. military power. The hallmarks of this Clinton Doctrine included the following: inflated expectations about the efficacy of air power, administered in carefully calibrated doses; a pronounced aversion to even the possibility of U.S. casualties, combined with an acute sensitivity to "collateral damage" (the media converted these into the chief criteria by which to "grade" any operation); a reliance on proxies to handle the dirty work of close combat (Croats in Bosnia, for example, or the Kosovo Liberation Army in the war against Yugoslavia); vagueness when it came to defining objectives (for example, bombing campaigns conducted not with expectations of actually achieving a decision, but with an eye toward "diminishing" an adversary's capabilities); and a tendency to convert limited commitments into permanent obligations (remember the solemn promise that the troops would be out of Bosnia within a year?).

Republicans found much to dislike about this doctrine. Adding to their irritation was the fact that the Clinton administration-its upper echelons salted with Vietnam-era draft evaders and antiwar protesters- had blithely discarded the hard-learned precepts regarding the use of force that had emerged from Vietnam and were codified during the Reagan years. Clinton and his lieutenants routinely violated the tenets of the Weinberger Doctrine, or the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine as it became known after the Gulf War had seemingly demonstrated its validity for all time. The conviction that force should be reserved for vital interests, the emphasis on overwhelming force, the crafting of precise military objectives, the attention paid to "end states" and "exit strategies"-all of these commander-in-chief Clinton chucked overboard during his peripatetic journey from Somalia to Haiti to Bosnia to Kosovo, with periodic excursions against Iraq.

Among the benefits expected to flow from the return of the Republican national-security professionals to power in January 2001 was that this silliness would end. A rational and principled use of force would once again become a hallmark of U.S. policy.

In point of fact, that has not occurred. Rather, seized by the notion that the war against terror is completely "different" and utterly "new," members of the Bush administration have themselves driven the last nails into the coffin bearing the remains of Weinberger-Powell.

Thus, for example, in the aftermath of September 11, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld instructed Americans to "Forget about 'exit strategies': We're looking at a sustained engagement that carries no deadlines. We have no fixed rules about how to deploy our troops." How will we know when we have won this sustained engagement? According to Rumsfeld, "victory is persuading the American people and the rest of the world that this is not a quick matter that is going to be over in a month or a year or even five years." That is, success lies in convincing Americans that real success will be a long time coming.