The Revenge of Geography (5 page)

Yet, in fact, the 1990s was less a decade of military power overall than it was specifically a decade of air power. Air power had been crucial to ousting Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991: though geography, in this case, made high-tech war easy, as operations were conducted over a featureless desert where it rarely rained. Air power was also a factor in ending the war in Bosnia four years later, and with all
its demonstrated limitations, carried the day against Milosevic in Kosovo four years after that. The ethnic Albanian refugees ultimately returned to their homes, even as Milosevic was weakened to the extent that he fell from power the following year in 2000.
We Don’t Do Mountains
, went the phrase summarizing the U.S. Army’s initial resistance to sending troops to Bosnia and Kosovo. But it turned out that as long as we owned the air, the Army
did mountains
rather well. Geography had reared its head all right in the Balkans, but air power quickly overcame it. Then there were the Air Force and Navy fighter jets patrolling the Iraqi no-fly zones, keeping Saddam in his box throughout the decade and beyond. Consequently, segments of the elite, awestruck at the American military’s might, became infused with a sense of moral indignation against the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations for not using the military in time to save a quarter of a million people from genocide in the Balkans (not to mention the million in Rwanda). It was a mind-set that at least for some could lead to adventurism, which it did. That, in turn, would lead in the next decade to the partial undoing of the Munich analogy, and restore to geography some of the respect that it had lost in the 1990s. The 1990s saw the map reduced to two dimensions because of air power. But soon after the three-dimensional map would be restored: in the mountains of Afghanistan and in the treacherous alleyways of Iraq.

In 1999, articulating a sentiment increasingly common among liberal intellectuals, Wieseltier wrote:

It was as if the imaginary borders of Central Europe were limitless, extending unto Mesopotamia. Things would turn out differently, of course. But in 2006, during the worst of Iraq’s sectarian carnage, following the collapse of the state, which may have rivaled the violence that Saddam had inflicted on the country, Wieseltier had the grace to confess an “anxiety about arrogance.” He admitted to having nothing useful to say despite his support of the war. He would not be among those supporters of the invasion who were toiling strenuously in print to vindicate themselves.
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I, too, supported the Iraq War, in print and as part of a group that urged the Bush administration to invade.
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I had been impressed by the power of the American military in the Balkans, and given that Saddam had murdered directly or indirectly more people than had Milosevic, and was a strategic menace believed to possess weapons of mass destruction, it seemed to me at the time that intervention was warranted. I was also a journalist who had gotten too close to my story: reporting from Iraq in the 1980s, observing how much more oppressive Saddam’s Iraq was than Hafez al-Assad’s Syria, I became intent on Saddam’s removal. It would later be alleged that a concern for Israel and a championing of its territorial aggrandizement had motivated many of those in support of the war.
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But my experience in dealing with neoconservatives and some liberals, too, during this time period was that Bosnia and Kosovo mattered more than Israel did in their thinking.
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The Balkan interventions, because they paid strategic dividends, appeared to justify the idealistic approach to foreign policy. The 1995 intervention in Bosnia changed the debate from “Should NATO Exist?” to “Should NATO Expand?” The 1999 war
in Kosovo, as much as 9/11, allowed for the eventual expansion of NATO to the Black Sea.

For quite a few idealists, Iraq was a continuation of the passions of the 1990s. It represented, however subconsciously, either the defeat of geography or the utter disregard of it, dazzled as so many were with the power of the American military. The 1990s was a time when West African countries such as Liberia and Sierra Leone, despite their violence, and despite being institutionally far less developed than Iraq, were considered credible candidates for democracy. But it was the power of the military, and in particular that of the Air Force, which was the hidden hand that allowed universalist ideas to matter so much more than terrain and the historical experience of people living on it.

Munich, too, was at work in approaching the dilemma of Saddam Hussein after 9/11. Though the United States had just suffered an attack on its soil comparable to Pearl Harbor, the country’s experience with ground war had been, for a quarter-century, minimal, or at least not unpleasant. Moreover, Saddam was not just another dictator, but a tyrant straight out of Mesopotamian antiquity, comparable in many eyes to Hitler or Stalin, who harbored, so it was believed, weapons of mass destruction. In light of 9/11—in light of Munich—history would never forgive us if we did not take action.

When Munich led to overreach, the upshot was that other analogy, thought earlier to have been vanquished: Vietnam. Thus began the next intellectual cycle of the Post Cold War.

In this next cycle, which roughly corresponded with the first decade of the twenty-first century and the difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the terms “realist” and “pragmatist” became marks of respect, signifying those who were skeptical from the start of America’s adventure in Mesopotamia, while “neoconservative” became a mark of derision. Whereas in the 1990s, ethnic and sectarian differences in far-off corners of the world were seen as obstacles that good men
should strive to overcome—or risk being branded as “fatalists” or “determinists”—in the following decade such hatreds were seen as factors that might have warned us away from military action; or should have. If one had to pick a moment when it became undeniable that the Vietnam analogy had superseded the one of Munich, it was February 22, 2006, when the Shiite al-Askariyah Mosque at Samarra was blown up by Sunni al Qaeda extremists, unleashing a fury of inter-communal atrocities in Iraq, which the American military was unable to stop. Suddenly, our land forces were seen to be powerless amid the forces of primordial hatreds and chaos. The myth of the omnipotent new United States military, born in Panama and the First Gulf War, battered a bit in Somalia, then repaired and burnished in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, was for a time shattered, along with the idealism that went with it.

While Munich is about universalism, about taking care of the world and the lives of distant others, Vietnam is domestic in spirit. It is about taking care of one’s own, following the 58,000 dead from that war. Vietnam counsels that tragedy is avoided by thinking tragically. It decries incessant fervor, for it suggests how wrong things can go. Indeed, it was an idealistic sense of mission that had embroiled the United States in that conflict in Southeast Asia in the first place. The nation had been at peace, at the apex of its post–World War II prosperity, even as the Vietnamese communists—as ruthless and determined a group of people as the twentieth century produced—had murdered more than ten thousand of their own citizens before the arrival of the first regular American troops. What war could be more just? Geography, distance, our own horrendous experience in the jungles of the Philippines in another irregular war six decades previously at the turn of the twentieth century were the last things in people’s minds when we entered Vietnam.

Vietnam is an analogy that thrives following national trauma. For realism is not exciting. It is respected only after the seeming lack of it has made a situation demonstrably worse. Indeed, just look at Iraq, with almost five thousand American dead (and with over thirty thousand seriously wounded) and perhaps hundreds of thousands of
Iraqis killed, at a cost of over a trillion dollars. Even were Iraq to evolve into a semi-stable democracy and an implicit ally of the United States, the cost has been so excessive that, as others have noted, it is candidly difficult to see the ethical value in the achievement. Iraq undermined a key element in the mind-set of some: that the projection of American power always had a moral result. But others understood that the untamed use of power by any state, even a freedom-loving democratic one like America, was not necessarily virtuous.

Concomitant with a new respect for realism came renewed interest in the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who extols the moral benefits of fear and sees violent anarchy as the chief threat to society. For Hobbes, fear of violent death is the cornerstone of enlightened self-interest. By establishing a state, men replace the fear of violent death—an all-encompassing, mutual fear—with the fear that only those who break the law need face. Such concepts are difficult to grasp for the urban middle class, who have long since lost any contact with man’s natural condition.
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But the horrific violence of a disintegrating Iraq, which, unlike Rwanda and Bosnia in some respects, was not the result of a singularly organized death machine, but of the very breakdown of order, allowed many of us to imagine man’s original state. Hobbes thus became the philosopher of this second cycle of the Post Cold War, just as Berlin had been of the first.
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And so this is where the Post Cold War has brought us: to the recognition that the very totalitarianism that we fought against in the decades following World War II might, in quite a few circumstances, be preferable to a situation where nobody is in charge. There are things worse than communism, it turned out, and in Iraq we brought them about ourselves. I say this as someone who supported regime change.

In March 2004, I found myself in Camp Udari in the midst of the Kuwait desert. I had embedded with a Marine battalion that, along with the rest of the 1st Marine Division, was about to begin the overland journey to Baghdad and western Iraq, replacing the Army’s 82nd
Airborne Division there. It was a world of tents, pallets, shipping containers, and chow halls. Vast lines of seven-ton trucks and Humvees stretched across the horizon, all headed north. The epic scale of America’s involvement in Iraq quickly became apparent. A sandstorm had erupted. There was an icy wind. Rain threatened. Vehicles broke down. And we hadn’t even begun the several-hundred-kilometer journey to Baghdad that a few short years before, those who thought of toppling Saddam Hussein as merely an extension of toppling Slobodan Milosevic, had dismissed as easily done. Vast gravel mazes that smelled of oil and gasoline heralded the first contractor-built truck stop, one of several constructed along the way to service the many hundreds of vehicles headed north, and to feed the thousands of Marines. Engines and generators whined in the dark. It took days of the most complex logistics—storing and transporting everything from mineral water bottles to Meals Ready to Eat to tool kits—to cross the hostile desert till we arrived in Fallujah west of Baghdad.
A mere several hundred kilometers
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And this was the easy, nonviolent part of an American military occupation across the whole country. It was surely wrong to suggest that physical terrain no longer mattered.

The debacle of the early years in Iraq has reinforced the realist dictum, disparaged by idealists in the 1990s, that the legacies of geography, history, and culture really do set limits on what can be accomplished in any given place. Yet those who were opposed to Iraq should be careful about taking the Vietnam analogy too far. For that analogy can be an invitation to isolationism, just as it is to appeasement and, in the words of the Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami, to the easy prejudice of low expectations. Remember that the Munich conference occurred only twenty years after the mass death of World War I, making realist politicians like Neville Chamberlain understandably hell-bent on avoiding another conflict. Such situations are perfectly suited for the machinations of a tyrannical state that knows no such fears: Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Vietnam is about limits; Munich about overcoming them. Each analogy on its own can be dangerous. It is only when both are given
equal measure that the right policy has the best chance to emerge. For wise policymakers, while aware of their nation’s limitations, know that the art of statesmanship is about working as close to the edge as possible, without stepping over the brink.
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