Bomb Saddam?

Imagine for a moment that you're President George W. Bush. At some point in the next several months you will have to decide whether to overthrow Saddam Hussein – not just to threaten and saber-rattle and hope something gives, but actually to pull the trigger on what could be a very costly and risky military venture. How precisely will you make that decision? 

It will almost certainly come down to a choice between which of two groups of advisers you choose to believe. One side is comprised of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, most of the career military, nearly every Middle East expert at the State Department, and the vast majority of intelligence analysts and CIA operations officers who know the region. These folks generally think that the idea of attacking Saddam is questionable at best, reckless at worst.

On the other side are a few dozen neoconservative think tank scholars and defense policy intellectuals. Few of them have any serious knowledge of the Arab world, the Middle East, or Islam. Fewer still have served in the armed forces. In other words, to give the go-ahead to war with Iraq, you'd have to decide that the experienced hands are all wrong, and throw in your lot with a bunch of hot-headed ideologues. Oh, and one other thing: The last few times, the ideologues have turned out to be right.

To anyone who's followed foreign affairs for the last couple of decades, the names of the neoconservative hawks will be familiar – or, if you're a liberal, chilling. Their eminence grise is Richard Perle, who serves simultaneously as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, a heretofore somnolent committee of foreign policy old-timers that Perle has refashioned into a key advisory group. Of all the hawks, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz probably has the most powerful job inside the Bush administration. A dozen others hold key posts at the State Department and the White House. Most are acolytes of Perle, and also Jewish, passionately pro-Israel, and pro-Likud. And all are united by a shared idea: that America should be unafraid to use its military power early and often to advance its interests and values. It is an idea that infuriates most members of the national security establishment at the Pentagon, State, and the CIA, who believe that America's military force should be used rarely and only as a last resort, preferably in concert with allies.

The neocons have been clashing with the establishment since the 1970s. Back then, the consensus view among foreign policy elites was that the Cold War was an indefinite or perhaps even a permanent fact of world politics, to be managed with diplomacy and nuclear deterrence. The neocons argued for deliberately tipping the balance of power in America's direction. Ronald Reagan championed their ideas, and brought a number of neocons into his administration, including Perle and Wolfowitz. Reagan's huge defense buildup and harsh, even provocative, rhetoric contributed significantly to running the Soviet military-industrial complex into the ground.The president went for the Hail Mary pass – whatever the dangers – and it worked.

During the Gulf War, the hawks urged President George H.W. Bush to ignore the limits of his U.N. mandate, roll the tanks into Baghdad, and bring down Saddam Hussein's regime. Bush sided with the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell (the embodiment of the establishment, who had advised Bush against liberating Kuwait), and left Saddam in power. The neocons have been saying I told you so ever since.

In the 1990s, as the Balkans descended into civil war, this same establishment urged President Clinton to proceed with caution. After several years of carnage, Clinton finally broke with the experts and launched air strikes against Bosnia, then Kosovo. Many conservative Republicans criticized Clinton at the time, but the neocons, despite their loathing for the president, supported his efforts. And rightly so: American action ended the bloodshed and brought stability to a key region of Europe with practically no loss of American life.