The coming storms
Scholars and pundits trade dark prophecies--and high hopes
Scenario. A dramatic instance of such doom-mongering appears in the January/February Atlantic in a piece penned by Richard Clarke, a counterterrorism specialist who worked in the past four administrations and leapt into the limelight with the publication of his book, Against All Enemies. If that book could have been subtitled "How We Failed to Prevent 9/11," the article "Ten Years Later" could be subtitled "How Everything We Have Done Since 9/11 Might Quite Possibly Lead to the Following Devastating Scenario." It all starts with a Southeast Asian couple--not Arab, therefore unnoticed--who set off explosives in a couple of Las Vegas casinos, followed almost immediately by attacks on various other pleasure-and-amusement centers around the country. The result: a cascade of depressing economic, social, and legal developments. All of them plausible. And why not? Clarke does what he and scores of fellow defense and security experts in Washington do all the time: He gins up one of the hundreds (or possibly thousands) of scenarios for how things might go wrong.
And according to this one, could things have played out differently? Here Clarke answers with a bravado that only a super-bureaucrat could muster: It could have if Bush had kept focused on al Qaeda by sending more troops into Afghanistan and by staying out of Iraq. And if he had done a half-dozen other things, from a better job at public diplomacy to real follow-through on his commitment to energy independence. Most important, Clarke asserts, a militarily beefed-up police action aimed at what were "at one time just a few radical jihadis " would have prevented the fulfillment of the neocons' prophecy of "an ongoing low-grade war between religions."
Readers who already agree with that conclusion may overlook the fact that this is a guess more than an argument. What is missing is any exploration of the origins of the conflict, a point on which Clarke might have scored points against World War IV boosters. And that is what Andrew Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University and a former Army officer, provides in the winter issue of the Wilson Quarterly . "The Real World War IV" takes strong exception to the neoconservative notion of the war's origins, both the timing and the larger causes. Instead of a lack of forceful U.S. military action in the Middle East before 9/11, Bacevich sees America's increasing reliance on force there in the two pre-9/11 decades as a major cause of the current war. "Designating the several U.S. military campaigns initiated in the aftermath of 9/11 as World War IV effectively absolves the United States of accountability for anything that went before," he writes.
What went before, he says, began in earnest under President Jimmy Carter in 1980. Before that year, Carter himself went along with his seven predecessors in seeking to secure stability in, and access to, the oil-rich gulf region with only a minimum of overt U.S. military force. But several things happened. First, he was slapped down for a 1979 speech urging Americans to seek happiness in areas other than material abundance. Defeatism in the face of an economic downturn, his critics screamed. Chastened, Carter almost simultaneously witnessed two developments in the Middle East that threatened access to the very oil that fueled Americans' quest for greater prosperity: the Iranian revolution and the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan. In his 1980 State of the Union address, Carter pledged that any effort by "any outside force" to threaten U.S. interests in the gulf region would be repelled "by any means necessary, including force." The Carter Doctrine, as it came to be known, launched World War IV, Bacevich says, and each successive president would ratchet up military operations in the region (sometimes simply by aiding and abetting dictators like Saddam Hussein), aggravating resentments and tensions as they did.
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