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December 05, 2005
We’re in it ‘til “Victory”
President Bush has out and said it, and his message was clear and quickly repeated: the United States will stay the course to “victory” in Iraq. Given the recent widespread calls for a scale-down if not full withdrawal of the American military presence in the country, the tide of critique and outrage that quickly followed the president’s policy announcement should be of little surprise to even the least avid news watcher. So that’s it, two more years in Iraq – Right? In fact, due to the landscape of the coming Democratic and Republican primaries, these primaries’ most likely results, and the rhetorical ambiguity – and therefore, political utility -- of the term “victory,” this development arguably means that the United States will be in Iraq for the long-haul, ‘til perhaps even the staunchest neo-cons find cause to ring the bells of “victory.”
Reason 1: McCain Won’t Walk Away and Others Will Follow His Lead
Many democrats fall down due to the jelly-ness of their foreign policy – it’s almost trite to say as much. Republicans have and will likely continue to win national elections in part due to their perceived sure-footed, tough-mindedness on the use and maintenance of American might. Even beyond this though, the front-runner Republican nominee for President, Arizona Senator John McCain, possesses not only unrivaled foreign policy credentials, wide-spread adoration as a tough-minded independent, but also a long voting and speaking record that shows his general alignment with the President on the topic of American withdrawal from Iraq. In the campaign, John McCain can politically not – and is personally unlikely to -- commit to a withdrawal from Iraq that could in any way be cast as hasty. Under McCain we’d stay the course – and against McCain, very few other potential Republican candidates would likely use a “strategy of withdrawal” as a way to differentiate their political planks. Thus, if a Republican wins – be it McCain or otherwise – the ensuing administration would be in promise, if not outright belief, bound to stay the course in Iraq.
Reason 2: The Frontrunner Democratic Contenders Wouldn’t Pull Out Either, Even if They Could
Arguably, there are two lead contenders for the Democratic nomination for President: Senator Hillary Clinton and Virginia Governor Mark Warner. This is not to say that other Dems won’t toss their hats into the ring, but these two will likely be two of the first to do so, and at our early vantage point, seem best positioned to take the nomination. Ignoring for a moment that both will have to play to a moderate base to hope to win against McCain or a likewise-positioned Republican candidate, HRC would, for one, likely (a) come out neutral on the topic of American withdrawal on Iraq or (b) argue to stay the course – both because to-date she’s largely supported the war, and won’t want to be cast, Kerry-style, as wobbly and because she may actually think that staying the course is the right thing to do. As to Warner? Well, blessed with the clean foreign policy slate that equally blesses and curses many a hopeful Governor, it’s rather tough to say. His only public indications on the topic seem to put him in the withdrawl upon "vistory" camp. In a recent public address he argued, "To set an arbitrary deadline or specific date is not appropriate...It is incumbent on the president to set milestones for what he believes will be the conclusion." Given the ambiguity and infrequency of statements like these, it seems tough to argue that he has a firm commitment to staying in or getting out of Iraq in the near-term, meaning that out of his record alone he could chose as his personal beliefs and political connivances direct him. Lacking a window onto his worldview, one can only speculate as to how political craftiness would influence his stated goals: in the lead up to the Democratic nomination, he might be tempted to distance himself from the war – and from candidates who support or are wishy-washy on it – to win less hawkish moderates and adamant neo-con haters. This choice might be risky for the general election, however, where Republican tacticians might very well combine a stated desire for withdrawal with Warner’s general foreign and military policy inexperience into a dangerous “untried yet still weak” message. As such, Warner – and any Democratic candidate with thin or debatable foreign policy and security credentials – may very likely come out neutral or steadfast on Iraq as well.
Reason 3: The Rhetoric of Victory is Powerful
“Victory” is slippery – especially for a war that has already been declared as “won.” Victory over what? Whom? Seemingly, victory is what vocal and powerful policy makers and observers will make of it – and it will happen when they call it. And they won’t act in unison. “Victory” is a reasonable aspiration, but a difficult, metric-less standard by which to gauge and set policy. Politically, it will define the debate over the war for a long time to come, because the opposite of victory is “defeat,” and no politician can bear to accept defeat or to be labeled with defeatism. Thus, for rhetorical reasons alone, the United States seems bound to stay deeply involved in Iraq until a broad set of influential people have strong reason to believe and argue that victory is now – and it isn’t now, nor by most analysts’ best estimate is it likely soon to come.
Conclusion: Lessons from History Are Easily Forgotten and Misapplied
In the December 4th New York Times op-ed piece, Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argue that President Bush should take a cue from a beloved President of whom we’ve been long-bereft: John F. Kennedy, in his belief and gradual articulation of how the United States must get out of Vietnam. Without getting into the ongoing counterfactual debate of “what Kennedy would have done,” it is useful to illustrate (which Sorensen and Schlesinger hint at but don’t fully address) how tied Kennedy’s hands really were in the unraveling situation in Southeast Asia, and how incremental military escalation in the region almost irrecoverably bound the United States to stay out its bloody intervention under President Johnson. As they write of one option available to Kennedy: “Renege on the previous Eisenhower commitment, which Kennedy had initially reinforced, to help the beleaguered government of South Vietnam with American military instructors and advisors? No, he knew the American people would not permit him to do that.” Beneath Kennedy’s sense that the American people would not permit a withdrawal, lies a clear (and elsewhere-documented) concern that withdrawal would undermine his candidacy for a second term. He was committed – and commitments are hard to break, for reasons of credibility internationally, as well as domestically. Bush is now likewise committed, and this commitment may very well bind the hands of all those who can reasonably hope to succeed Bush in 2008. Bound to "victory."
Posted by Sam Hodges at 11:02 PM
December 04, 2005
Commendation and caution long overdue
A Nobel for an Influential Scholar and a Word of Caution for Today
Earlier this year the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Thomas Schelling, in recognition of his work in the area of applied game theory – and specifically deterrence theory. Schelling, still an academically-active Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, has been an influential scholar policy advisor since the late 1950s. In the 1960s he was an intellectual architect for the core pillar of American defense policy -- deterrence by nuclear and conventional means. Indeed, it is largely due to this influence that his reception of the prize has been so widely heralded. Wrote the Washington Times, “Mr. Schelling used game theory to explain how the Cold War could be prevented from turning into a hot war waged at the nuclear level.” Less well known is how his theories influenced military planning at the conventional and guerilla levels. His arguments, rapidly infused into Defense and State Department thinking during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, were actualized in American policy toward Southeast Asia – and Vietnam in particular. Without questioning the merit of the Nobel commendation, the lesson of his influence, his forceful -- and at times detrimentally applied – arguments must sound a warning note for us, witnesses and participants in a perilous set of foreign policy decisions, on the danger of theory misapplied.
The Illogic of Deterrence in Application
As Alexander George writes in Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice, “[i]n its most general form, deterrence is simply the persuasion of one’s opponent that the costs and/or risks of a given course of action he might take outweigh its benefits.” Deterrence theory, in turn, is the body of theory which scholars and policy makers developed to address how best to ‘deter.’ Deterrence theory fits within the rubric of ‘game theory’ as applied in mixed-motive international interactions where there is a genuine possibility for the use of force. The use of ‘deterrence’ involves a high degree of communication (both implicit and explicit) between the ‘players’ in this ‘game.’ As an early developr of this area of foreign policy thinking, Schelling wrote, “[d]eterrence…is concerned with influencing the choices that another party will make, and doing it by influencing his expectations of how we will behave. It involves confronting him with evidence for believing that our behavior will be determined by his behavior.”
Above all else, ‘deterrence theory’ is concerned with how states can best use threats to get their way, while avoiding the ‘need’ to act upon these threats. As Schelling wrote, “a theory of deterrence would be, in effect, a theory of the skillful nonuse of military forces, and for this purpose deterrence requires something broader than military skills.” What are those skills? Because successful deterrence (conventional or nuclear) relies not only on the ability to inflict harm, but also the ability to effectively communicate the threat of such harm, deterrence’s successful implementation relies on the effective communication of threats. Communicating threats is challenging for deterrence ‘users’ because it requires careful signaling regarding potential ‘consequences,’ should these threats go ignored. In most situations where deterrence might be used, channels for such precise signaling are often lacking; furthermore, different states will receive and construe threats in different ways depending on their leaders’ views, these leaders’ perception of the hopeful deterring state, and a multitude of other factors. Thus, the first challenge for achieving ‘deterrence’ is one of threat communication.
However, even after overcoming the challenges inherent in conveying ‘deterring threats,’ deterrence requires something more: threats must be seen as credible and ‘potent’ by the state that is to be deterred. As such, ‘deterrence credibility’ was one of the most important concerns of policy makers during apex of applied deterrence theory -- the 1960s and 1970s, including the Kennedy phase of the Vietnam War. About credibility’s role in deterrence, Ned Lebow writes, “[b]ecause deterrence places so much emphasis on the credibility of commitments, it assumes that statesmen engage in an ongoing effort to maintain the credibility of their own commitments and to monitor and periodically update and review their assessments of the commitments of others.” Thus, for deterrence to ‘work’ a state must show itself credible in the commitments it has already made. Because of this, within deterrence theory there is a direct relationship between upholding the commitments a state has already made – showing that state’s ‘credibility’ – and the effectiveness of its deterrent shield.
On a theoretical level the imperative of deterrence is clear enough: make commitments you can and will keep, and keep them, lest you undermine those you commitments (e.g. threats) you make in the future. In practice, however, these restrictions on decision can run counter to choosing the best – and most ‘rational’ –option. Following the logic of deterrence, we must bind ourselves to options we’d rather not chose, to demonstrate our resolve to keep promises we’ve not yet made. On entering Vietnam the United States bound itself to fight there, lest we signal our irresolve the world over.
From Games to Decisions
Beyond their theoretical work, Schelling and a set of other deterrence theorists possessed tremendous clout within the set of policymakers at the pinnacle of American foreign policy in the 1960s. Evidence to the depth of policy maker-to-deterrence theorist ties is provided by the list of consultants employed by the Departments of State and Defense at the time, which serve as a virtual role-call of political and economic scholars who had written, or were writing about deterrence. For example, in fall 1963, the Department of State listed Thomas Schelling at Harvard, R. Dahl from Yale, and (at think-tanks) Mort Halpern, Albert Wohlstetter and Herman Kahn on its payroll. Not only did these deterrence theorists serve as policy-consultants, some of them were charged with conceiving of and controlling the war games used to prepare American policy makers for the ‘challenges’ faced specifically in Indochina. Excellent example to such games are the February 1962 ones coordinated by Albert Wohlstetter, one of the intellectual architects of abstract deterrence theory. After designing and serving as the ‘control’ for an inter-departmental war-game, attended by high-level policy-makers from the State and Defense Departments, Wohlstetter wrote, in a State Department brief:
"Red [Communists] followed almost the same course that the NLF and North Vietnam were following; no escalation, but continual low-level hostilities and infiltration. [Blue’s, the Americans’] intentions was [sic] to convince Red that it would fight if necessary to prevent Communist control of Southeast Asia – that it viewed the situation in the area with greatest seriousness."
Given this ‘result’ for the game, it is of little surprise that, in the fact book he prepared for participants, Wohlstetter’s “Resume of the Importance of Indochina in World Politics” he set forth the ‘fact’ that:
"Like the proverbial house of cards, IndoChina is capable of a soft collapse. Any further loss of western (US) prestige could swing the pendulum of uncertain Asian newly-independent countries into the communist orbit, sucking in Indonesia and Burma, cutting the lines of communication between the Pacific and Africa, isolating a lonely Australia-New Zealand, looming darkly over the Philippines and Japan."
While none of the ‘top level’ decision makers for Vietnam – Kennedy, McNamara, Taylor, McGeorge Bundy – participated in Wohlstetter’s games, or seem to have been acutely aware of their results, many penultimate Vietnam policy makers did, and were. Roswell Gilpatric, Deputy Secretary of Defense, and an important Vietnam policy maker, for example, was responsible for summarizing the ‘lessons learned’ during Wohlstetter’s 1962 game in a report distributed within the State and Defense Departments.
The explosion of deterrence theory during this period aligned with what Bruce Jentleson, in his historical analysis of American foreign policy thinking since WWII, terms the institutionalization of a “global commitments theory” in American foreign policy. The central tenet of this ‘theory’ was that the U.S.’ commitments to third world allies serve two functions beyond the narrow objective to-be secured through a specific promise: First, such promises help stabilize the particular ally to whom a commitment is made. In providing stability, a commitment protects the American ‘interests’ at stake in good relations with that country. Second, and even more important for Vietnam policy under Kennedy, commitments, as a more general demonstration of American ‘resolve,’ were thought to enhance the credibility of American power, thereby contributing to, what Jentleson refers to as, “global deterrence against other potential threats to other allies.”
An excellent example of a scholarly argument that buttressed such deterrence-based defense policy is provided in Schelling’s Arms and Influence, when he argued that:
"the main reason why we are committed in many of these places [including Vietnam] is that our threats are interdependent. Essentially, we tell the Soviets we have to react here because, if we did not, they would not believe us when we say that we will react there."
In the years since Kennedy’s administration this argument for commitments’ importance has fallen under significant critique. For example, Robert Johnson, who was on the National Security Council Staff from 1952-62, and on the State Department’s Policy Planning staff from 1962-67, argued that, “[c]oncern with credibility itself defines U.S. interests and plays the major role in determining the particular commitments the United States undertakes and the resolve with which it carries out those commitments; the specific situation is relatively less influential.” Operating under the ‘global commitments’ theory, the United States model of national interest during the period often became: Credibility --> Commitments --> Resolve --> Interests. The desire for overarching credibility drove American foreign policy makers to extend defensive commitments, oftentimes in the form of deterrent threats, whose keeping was transformed into a national ‘interest’ in its own right. In turn, the reason why ‘credibility’ drove this process was that U.S. foreign policy makers believed both that they needed to provide ‘global deterrence’ against potential threats from communist aggression upon the United States and its allies, and that broadly showing American credibility would do just this.
Moreover, even beyond their consulting positions, some of these theorists – including Schelling -- had a direct line to the most powerful members of the Kennedy administration. On the end of one such line was John McNaughton, Secretary McNamara’s top civilian advisor in the Department of Defense. Under President Johnson, McNaughton drafted a memo in which he recalled the original reason for going into Vietnam was 70 percent to “avoid a humiliating US defeat [emphasis mine].” However, not only did he view Vietnam as a mere test of wills between the ideologically opposed powers, he also incorporated Schelling’s work directly into his policy recommendations; before his Defense Department stint McNaughton had befriended the game-theorist and defense intellectual, while they were both teaching at Harvard. During the same period, Schelling wrote that, “face is one of the few things worth fighting for;” though “few parts of the world are intrinsically worth the risk of serious war by themselves… defending them or running them may preserve one’s commitments to actions in other parts of the world and at later times.” This argument quickly found policy ‘legs,’ through incorporation into McNaughton’s and the Bundy brothers,’ as well as many other civilian planners,’ policy recommendations.
In sum, at the same time as American defense policy began calling for greater military response flexibility across the spectrum from nuclear to sub-limited war, the deterrence theory spun by Schelling and others was gaining prominence in academic foreign policy circles. In turn many of these deterrence theorists, Schelling especially, were gaining new influence in the Whitehouse, State and Defense Departments. For all of these reasons, the need to maintain the ‘credibility’ of American deterrence against Communist ploys – at all levels of possible military conflict, from nuclear to sub-limited – was brought to the forefront of American foreign policy. Due to this, Vietnam was seen by many influential foreign policy makers as a critical test of the United States’ deterring credibility. The implication of this thinking was the steady escalation of United States’ involvement in Vietnam, from under 1000 advisors and troops in 1961, to around 16,000 at the time of Kennedy’s assassination. The Johnson administration, unmitigated heir to much of the thinkers and analysis of Kennedy-era foreign policy was mired -- in mind and in mud -- from the outset.
Schelling’s Continued Legacy: Several Wars and a Noble Later
A study of Schelling’s legacy is useful beyond the limited realm of ‘American policy formation toward Vietnam 1961-63.’ In the lead-up to the United States near-unilateral, and ‘pre-emptive’ 2003 invasion of Iraq, there were two primary components of public U.S. argument: (1) that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction; (2) that it had direct ties to terrorists, including Al Qaeda, was harboring terrorists within its borders, and was interested in sponsoring future acts of ‘terror’ – in short, that it was a ‘terrorist state.’ As U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell argued before the U.N. Security Council on February 5th, 2003:
My friends, the information I have presented to you about these terrible weapons…links to a subject I now want to spend a little bit of time on. And that has to do with terrorism. Our concern is not just about these illicit weapons. It's the way that these illicit weapons can be connected to terrorists and terrorist organizations that have no compunction about using such devices against innocent people around the world.
What is interesting about this two-part, ‘weapons and terror,’ justification, is that there were – and, of course, still are – many other countries in the world with nuclear weapons, including the United States and many of its ‘allies.’ Likewise, there were many countries in the process of developing weapons of mass destruction. India and Pakistan, of course, already had nukes, but there was little question that both were expanding these arsenals and their arsenals of other weapons, as well as their numbers and types of weapon delivery systems. True, the United States was working with leaders from India and Pakistan to encourage scale-backs in WMD development programs, but in spring 2003 the U.S. administration was not arguing – not in any public forum at least – that the ‘free world’ should do what was ‘necessary’ by military means to ensure that Indian and Pakistan states gave up their bombs, or their development programs.
Thus, what made Iraq different for American foreign policy was that it was a ‘terrorist state.’ Because it was thought to possess WMDs, the fact that Iraq ‘was’ a ‘terrorist state’ made it threatening to U.S. interests. Merely the ‘fact’ (which now appears to have been untrue, or, at least, grossly overstated) that it had weapons and was developing more would not – standing without the terrorist charge – would not have justified the argument that it posed a clear and present threat to American interests. Thus, a key question for those who study American policy arguments for Iraq in the fall of 2003 is: what justifications were used for the argument that Iraq was a ‘terrorist state?’ In turn, why did the identity and position of Iraq necessitate a pre-emptive military attack? These are much the same questions as: what justifications were used by policy makers under Kennedy to argue that guerillas in South Vietnam were part of some global communist plot to test American credibility at the level of limited war? And, why did the identity and positioning of the involved actors there necessitate a demonstration of American ‘resolve?’
Thus, for scholars forty years from now – and hopefully far earlier than that – this study, of deterrence theory and theorists in Vietnam, reinforces the notion that it might be helpful to ask: what concept binds together the vast array of policy arguments made in the Departments of State and Defense, Whitehouse, and various intelligence agencies in the lead-up to the U.S. assault on Iraq? What conception of national interest – defined in terms of ‘security’ – was shared by these arguments? Indeed, might there be some way to crystallize a shared understanding that explains how – long before Iraq was brought to trial before the American people or the UN Security Council – Iraq came to be thought of as a “terrorist state requiring pre-emption” in policy arguments? These are, of course, questions for another place – and, perhaps, for another time as well, after spring 2003 policy arguments become accessible for analysis.
As President Bush argued in January 2004: “We can no longer take gathering threats for granted. If we see a threat gathering overseas, the lesson of September the 11th says, we must pay attention to it…We cannot assume that oceans protect us anymore.” In the same address Bush even admitted, “[September 2001] affected our psychology in America.” Not surprising is that in a public address urging that the U.N. Security Council approve of sending troops Bush argued:
Saddam Hussein has longstanding, direct and continuing ties to terrorist networks. Senior members of Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda have met at least eight times since the early 1990s. Iraq has sent bomb-making and document forgery experts to work with al Qaeda. Iraq has also provided al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training…We also know that Iraq is harboring a terrorist network, headed by a senior al Qaeda terrorist planner. The network runs a poison and explosive training center in northeast Iraq, and many of its leaders are known to be in Baghdad…On September the 11th, 2001, the American people saw what terrorists could do, by turning four airplanes into weapons. We will not wait to see what terrorists or terrorist states could do with chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons.
As Ivo Daadler and James Lindsay argue in America Unbound, in this speech – as in many others – Bush conflated, “terrorism, tyrants, and technologies of mass destruction.” Might the world now be seeing the memory of September 11th hardening into some ‘logic of American pre-emption, relying on this threat ‘identification?’ If so, this would be particularly interesting in light of this study: ‘pre-emption’ is an instrumental antithesis of ‘deterrence.’ However, only future scholars will be able to tell whether policy arguments made internally within Bush’s administration functioned along assumptive vectors drawn out by a few policy elite.
The lesson of Schelling (and others who have been positioned like him) must make us question the direct application of broad, deep and ill-transferable ideas directly into the policy papers that direct American lives and power. Thus, in honoring Schelling, those in the world of defense and policy might also ask: who are the ghost writers of our current policy? In what way have their arguments, uprooted from their theoretical or historical planes, been construed and potentially misapplied?
Posted by Sam Hodges at 08:45 PM
