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VORTEX OF CONFLICT

Stanford University Press

Contents

Preface and acknowledgments...........................................................xi1 From Cold war to war on Terror......................................................32 The United States and Islamic Countries.............................................93 Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the United States........................................304 Iraq: From Cradle of Civilization to republic of Fear...............................535 The Development of Terrorism, 1991–2001.......................................716 The Bush Doctrine...................................................................917 Assumptions.........................................................................1118 Intelligence........................................................................1279 War Plans...........................................................................15310 Postwar Reconstruction.............................................................17111 Policymaking.......................................................................18912 Allies.............................................................................20713 Strategy...........................................................................22514 Lessons and Legacies: Twenty-Six articles..........................................247A Maps of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and the Middle East Region.....................269B Chronology..........................................................................274C Bibliography........................................................................288Notes.................................................................................335Index.................................................................................379

Chapter One

It is always difficult to evaluate the legacies, lessons, and implications of the wars in which the United States has been involved, and for a number of reasons this is even more difficult with the wars on terrorism and in Afghanistan and Iraq. In many ways, world war I set the stage for the ensuing drama of the twentieth century; the empires of the Romanovs in Russia, the Hohenzollerns in Prussia, the ottomans in Turkey, and the Habsburgs of Austria-Hungary were destroyed by the war, and new technologies—the "revolution of military affairs" of that day—both prolonged the war and made it more devastating than previous wars. The conclusion of the war halted the fighting and killing, but it did not bring peace to the world. Woodrow Wilson's attempt to establish a new system and organization for managing power in international relations, the League of Nations, faltered and ultimately failed due in part to the refusal of the United States to join the new international organization.

The vindictive peace treaty following world war I contributed to the onset of the worldwide depression and the crippling of the international economy and the rise of hyperinflation, which, in turn, increased the desperation that led the people of one of the most advanced countries in the world, Germany, to turn to a marginally sane, racist megalomaniac, Adolf Hitler. The "second Thirty Years War" (1914–45) ended with the detonation of the most destructive weapons ever invented over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the shadow of the nuclear mushroom clouds, the doctrine of nuclear deterrence was developed which, contrary to the predictions of many, resulted in the "long peace" of the cold war. Nuclear deterrence was supplemented by the farsighted programs of the Marshall Plan, which enabled the victorious and vanquished countries of Europe to rebuild and develop, contributing to the cohesion and stability of the western alliance of democratic, capitalist states.

For more than four decades, the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union dominated the attention of policymakers, academics, analysts, and members of the public. As observers of the U.S. at least since the time of Alexis de Tocqueville have noted, most Americans are neither knowledgeable about nor interested in international relations. U.S. cold war policy, however, provided a simple equation for understanding foreign policy: communists were bad, and anticommunists were good. One did not need to know where a particular communist country was or even who its leader was; the important thing was whether it was communist or part of, as it was known during the cold war, the Free world.

The central objective of American cold war policy was to contain the spread of communist influence throughout the world. In pursuit of this goal, the United States concluded both bi- and multilateral alliances with many noncommunist countries, the most important of which was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). When North Korea attacked South Korea, a U.S. ally, in June 1950, the United States and the United Nations responded by sending troops. This was the first modern, limited war in which the U.S. was involved, and it resulted in a stalemate. In fact, even today the war has not formally been ended; only an armistice exists. Ultimately, more than 36,000 Americans were killed in the Korean War.

Despite warnings from many quarters, the U.S. became involved in a second major war in Asia during the cold war, Vietnam, and although the stalemated outcome of the Korean War was frustrating to Americans, the loss of the Vietnam War was even more traumatic. Up until that time, the Vietnam War had been "America's longest war," and it was the first war that the United States had lost. The outcome of the war had a number of implications. More than 58,000 Americans were killed in this war, which was costly in both human and economic terms: it literally and figuratively broke the American military. It took more than a decade to repair the damage that was done. In addition, it affected, as all wars do, the way that Americans thought about war. To many, the Vietnam War showed that the U.S. should not intervene in foreign conflicts in almost any circumstances. The war, in the words of General David Petraeus, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the lessons of the war, was "indelibly etched in the minds" of those who had fought in it.

After more than four decades, the internal stresses and strains of communism, ironically the very things that Marx would have called the "internal contradictions" of capitalist countries, resulted in genuine proletariat revolutions, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 followed by the disintegration of the world's first communist state, the Soviet Union, in December 1991. With these two events, the four and a half decades–long cold war came to an end, and academics and policy analysts scrambled and competed with one another to develop a new paradigm for explaining and prescribing the next U.S. strategy for dealing with the rest of the world. These new ways of thinking included Francis Fukuyama's "end of history," Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations," Kenneth Waltz's "neo-realism," Robert Keohane's and Joseph Nye's "neo-liberalism," and other approaches as well. Although each of these approaches had its supporters, none gained majority support. As a result, the period following the disintegration of the cold war was known for what it was...