Help from the Hill?

As a rule, both the joint Chiefs of Staff and the Central Intelligence Agency's leadership prefer that Congress stay out of their affairs. Indeed, an ideal Congress for many denizens of this realm would be one that simply holds open the cash spigots while Langley and the Pentagon set their own agendas. That makes it particularly alarming to see that as the Bush administration lays its plans for Iraq, career military and intelligence officers are increasingly -- and desperately -- looking to Congress to help stave off what they fear will be a disaster.

A number of military and intelligence hands worry that the administration's proactive strategy against Iraq will prove fatally shortsighted. Not only is Congress the body with the constitutional mandate to declare war, say advocates of congressional intervention, but the complexity and volatility of the region fully warrants a serious debate in the Capitol. "Congress ought to be having a wide-ranging policy debate," says one veteran CIA official, "because pretty soon, if [President George W.] Bush takes the preemptive route, this will happen without any debate whatsoever, and all the debate will be post-action -- including debates over events that have potential for disaster in both the short and long term."

What has some senior military officials particularly concerned is that the Bush presidency appears willing to play fast and loose with the concept of grand strategy, or the overarching principles that guide how and where to engage other nations, whether militarily or diplomatically. For instance, John Boyd, the late Air Force colonel and founder of the military-reform movement, held that a key component of grand strategy was to "influence the uncommitted or potential adversaries so that they are drawn toward our philosophy and are empathetic toward our success."

In order to achieve this, Boyd believed that the United States had to contend with "the underlying self-interests, critical differences of opinion, internal contradictions, frictions, [and] obsessions" that would likely drive the actions and perceptions of both hostile and neutral states. Bush's war hawks have willfully ignored such considerations -- not just with adversaries and the uncommitted, but with allies. And as far as the grand idea worth fighting for, one of Boyd's colleagues, retired Air Force Reserve Col. Chet Richards, has argued that the U.S. Constitution will do nicely -- but going to war without meaningful congressional deliberation certainly seems to undermine that vision.

A congressional debate, presumably, would air the questions of unilateralism, relations with neighboring countries and the long-term ramifications of American belligerence in Arab lands. These are the same concerns that currently bedevil some in the military and intelligence communities, who see the administration's emerging plans as disturbingly divorced from reality. They are troubled by the notion of Iraq as an example of the dubious new Bush doctrine of "preemption." One article that has been making the rounds among career military officials -- and that should be fodder for a wider public debate -- argues that preemption may be something worse than a bad idea.

"Is Preemption a Nuclear Schlieffen Plan?" asks a veteran defense analyst, who writes under the nom de plume "Dr. Werther" for the Defense and the National Interest Web site, which is widely read in defense circles. The article takes aim at the "vainglory, worship of force, and threat-mongering" that has characterized U.S. foreign policy rhetoric in the wake of the Cold War and which has been "pumped to epidemic levels" since September 11. Likening the "preemptive strike" policy toward Iraq to "Germany's neurotic obsession with hostile encirclement" by France in the early 20th century, Werther notes that Kaiser Wilhelm II did away with the careful foreign policy of Bismarck's era, taking instead as Germany's central military tenet the dubious idea that France would have no hesitation about violating Belgian neutrality. In the event of war, Germany would then implement the general staff chief Alfred von Schlieffen's plan, which meant first taking over Belgium and immediately knocking out the French.