The making of a hawk

From Kuwait to Kosovo to Kabul, American firepower has been on the right side of history. The odyssey of a former dove.

By David Talbot

Jan 3, 2002 | From the Gulf War on, the hawks have been on the right side in all the major debates about U.S. intervention in the world's troubles. The application of American military power -- to drive back Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, stop Slobodan Milosevic's genocidal campaigns in the Balkans, and destroy the terrorist occupation of Afghanistan -- has not just protected U.S. interests, it has demonstrably made the world safer and more civilized. Because of the U.S.-led allied victory in the Persian Gulf, Saddam -- the most blood-stained and dangerous dictator in power today -- was blocked from completing a nuclear bomb, taking control of 60 percent of the world's oil resources and using his fearsome arsenal (including biological and chemical weapons) to consolidate Iraq's position as the Middle East's reigning force. Because of the U.S.-led air war against Milosevic, the most ruthless "ethnic cleansing" program since the Holocaust was finally thwarted -- first in Bosnia and then in Kosovo -- and the repulsive tyrant is now behind bars in the Hague. And in Afghanistan, the apocalyptic master plan of the al-Qaida terror network was shattered by America's devastatingly accurate bombing campaign, along with the medieval theocracy that had thrown a cloak of darkness over the country.

These demonstrations of America's awesome firepower were clearly on the right side of history. In fact, the country's greatest foreign policy disasters during this period occurred because the U.S. government failed to assert its power: when President George H. W. Bush aborted Operation Desert Storm before it could reach Baghdad and finish off Saddam (whose army had only two weeks of bullets left) and when he failed to draw a line against Milosevic's bloody plans for a greater Serbia; and when President Bill Clinton looked the other way while a genocidal rampage took the lives of a million people in Rwanda and when he failed to fully mobilize the country against terrorism after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the later attacks on American targets abroad -- a failure that extended through the first eight months of Bush II.

Despite their eventual success, each U.S. military response in the past decade -- even to the brazen sky terrorism that leveled the World Trade Center and devastated the Pentagon -- has sparked passionate opposition in political, media and cultural circles. Conservative commentators like Andrew Sullivan, Charles Krauthammer and the Wall Street Journal editorial board have blamed current antiwar resistance on the left and its tradition of pacifism and criticism of American hegemony. And it's true, any liberal who came of age during the Vietnam War, as I did, feels some kinship with these implacable critics of American policy, even a lingering sense of alienation from our own country's world-straddling power. But most of us, at some point during the last two decades, made a fundamental break from this pacifistic legacy. For me, it came during the savage bombing of Sarajevo, whose blissfully multi-ethnic cosmopolitanism was, like New York would later become, an insult to the forces of zealous purity. Most liberals of my generation, however, feel deeply uneasy about labeling themselves hawks -- to do so conjures images for them of Gen. Curtis "Bombs Away" LeMay, it suggests a break from civilization itself, a heavy-footed step backwards, toward the bogs of our ancestors. What I have come to believe, however, is that America's unmatched power to reduce tyranny and terror to dust is actually what often makes civilization in today's world possible. I want to retrace my journey here, for those who might be wrestling with similar thoughts these days.

In truth, the opposition to assertive American foreign policy over the past decade has come from liberals and conservatives alike (as has support for interventionism), and while the Susan Sontags and Noam Chomskys have become convenient targets for pro-war pundits in recent months, the most effective critiques of American power since Vietnam have come not from Upper East Side salons and Berkeley's ivory towers but from within the government itself, including even the Pentagon.

Ever since the Vietnam War, the foreign policy establishment has been suffering from what the astute analyst Robert Kagan calls a "loss of nerve." This failure of will within the foreign policy elite -- and Washington's struggle to escape the shadow of Vietnam -- is the theme of David Halberstam's recent bestseller, "War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals." As in his Vietnam classic, "The Best and the Brightest," Halberstam builds his new book around portraits of key policymakers. But unlike his Vietnam book -- which laid the blame for the debacle on arrogant interventionists like Robert MacNamara and the Bundy brothers -- Halberstam's new book is clearly sympathetic toward foreign policy boldness. The irony here has not escaped observers like Kagan, who in a withering essay in last month's New Republic pinned much of the establishment's loss of confidence on popular critics like Halberstam himself. According to Kagan, prominent writers like Halberstam "fixed it in the popular mind, and in the elite mind, that 'the best and the brightest' were dangerous. To be among the best and the brightest was to stand accused of criminal incompetence. And what did that mean about America? If our best and brightest could not be trusted not to destroy us, then we were doomed. Could American power be wielded with a measure of confidence? No, it was impossible to wield power at all. Was national greatness a possibility if the best among us were fools?"

Though he doesn't concede his thinking has undergone any revision, Halberstam's views have clearly changed with time. The heroes in "War in a Time of Peace" are the hawks in the Clinton administration -- Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Balkans negotiator and later U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, and Kosovo air war commander General Wes Clark. Both Holbrooke, who served as a young diplomat in Saigon, and Clark, who commanded an Army company and was wounded four times in one battle, were shaped by Vietnam. But unlike other future political and military leaders who came of age in the crucible of that jungle war, neither of these men was incapacitated by it. Despite America's failure in Vietnam, both men recognized how important it was for the country to play a strong global role -- and their hawkish views of the Milosevic killing machine in the Balkans finally helped convince Clinton to strike back at the dictator, who despite all the dire predictions from GOP doves like Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich (and perennial Vietnam-era peace crusaders like Tom Hayden) promptly wilted.

But, as Halberstam makes clear, the hawks were an embattled minority during the Clinton years -- as they were during most of the senior Bush's administration. Whether it was the cynical James Baker, who famously concluded that America did not "have a dog in that fight" and thereby allowed the Balkans war to take its savage course, or the ineffectual Warren Christopher ("Dean Rusk without the charisma," as Democratic Party insiders mordantly summed up Clinton's choice for secretary of state), America's foreign policy was led during these years by men who believed it must operate within very narrow constraints.

The man who gave this limited foreign policy a name was Colin Powell, whose high-level service has stretched from the first Bush administration to Clinton's to that of the junior Bush. With its demand that no military action commence unless it faced certain and swift victory, the Powell Doctrine placed the bar so high it nearly assured U.S. paralysis. As one of George H. W. Bush's presiding commanders, Powell had emerged from the Gulf War a national hero. But in fact, as Halberstam observes, it was Bush himself who had to push Powell and his other reluctant advisers into the war with Saddam. Powell had advised the president to forfeit Kuwait and draw a line of defense around Saudi Arabia. And after Saddam's army was defeated, Powell urged Bush to conclude the war with Saddam's regime still intact. As Clinton's top military commander, Powell continued to play the "reluctant warrior" (a term Halberstam says was used against him by one critic but which he happily embraced), using his stature to intimidate the young, inexperienced president. He scared the Clinton team away from intervening against Milosevic -- as he had the Bush administration -- with his chilling predictions of a Balkans quagmire. "Under Bush, and again under Clinton, when the top civilians asked what it might cost to intervene militarily, Powell would show his lack of enthusiasm by giving them a high estimate, and they would quickly back off," writes Halberstam. "The figure never went under two hundred thousand troops." Powell was similarly dismissive of what air power could do against the Serb dictator -- despite its decisive role during the Gulf War. "When I hear someone tell me what airpower can do, I head for a bunker," he snorted after a meeting with civilian Bush officials. Years later, as the decade came to a close, Milosevic's military machine would finally be broken by U.S. air power after just 10 weeks of bombing. By then, some 200,000 people had been killed in the region and 3 million made homeless.

Powell's skepticism about armed action was widely shared within the military's high command, which was more scarred by Vietnam than perhaps any other arm of government. Indeed, if hawkish commentators are looking for the headquarters of American pacifism, they need look no farther than the Pentagon. "There the memory of Vietnam was a little longer, because almost all of the top army people, unlike those at State, had served directly in that war and the experience had been a bitter one in almost all instances," writes Halberstam. "The Pentagon had an all too personal understanding of what happens, first, when the architects of an interventionist policy underestimate the other side, and second, when so many of those in the political process who were its architects soon orphan their own handiwork and go on to other jobs, leaving the military to deal with a war that no one could get right."

The most telling showdown between the hawk and dove factions of the U.S. government came during the Clinton administration debate on Balkans intervention, when then-U.N. Ambassador Albright -- who as a child of Europe's tragic history was painfully aware of the threat posed by Milosevic -- confronted the cautious Powell. "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" she burst out. "I thought I would have an aneurysm," Powell later recalled in his autobiography. "American G.I.s were not toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of global game board." (This confrontation illustrates the political tension over military policy that has characterized the past decade. In the shrewd assessment of conservative commentator Bruce Herschensohn, as cited by Halberstam: "The Democrats always want a small army, but want to send it everywhere, while the Republicans want a very big army and don't want to use it at all.")

Next Page: Unless a hawk is prepared to die or send his children to die, he's hollow

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