Threat Confusion and its Penalties 51
Threat Confusion and its
Penalties
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Jeffrey Record
During the first half of the Cold War, the United States postulated a
monolithic threat to its security in the form of a centrally directed,
international communist conspiracy. The postulation conflated all communist
states, Third World ‘wars of national liberation’ and the ideology of
communism itself into an undifferentiated enemy. The postulation ignored
critical national differences and antagonisms within the communist bloc,
assuming, in fact, that communism and nationalism were incompatible. It
also dismissed the influence and uniqueness of local circumstances as well as
the inherent differences in the strategic significance of various parts of the
non-communist world.
Such reasoning propelled the United States into the Vietnam War, which
was the product not of global conspiracy but of local circumstances.
The Vietnamese communists were communist, to be sure, but they were
Vietnamese first and foremost – a fiercely nationalistic people who were
fighting to expel detested foreign power and influence from their homeland.
They took orders from no one, not Moscow, not Beijing; on the contrary,
they played the Soviets and Chinese off against one another with
consummate skill, never permitting considerations of international
communist solidarity to thwart pursuit of Vietnam’s national interest. After
defeating the Americans, the Vietnamese communists went on to invade
communist Cambodia, and were in turn punished for doing so by a Chinese
communist invasion of Vietnam. So much for the communist monolith.
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Jeffrey Record is a former professional staff member of the Senate Armed Services
Committee. He is the author of twenty books and monographs on national security topics,
including Bounding the Global War on Terrorism (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College, 2003), and
the forthcoming Dark Victory, America’s Second War with Iraq (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute
Press, forthcoming). The views expressed in this paper are the author’s alone, and do not
necessarily reflect those of any other person, agency, or institution.
Survival, vol. 46, no. 2, Summer 2004, pp. 51–72 © The International Institute for Strategic Studies
52 Jeffrey Record
Vietnamese communism in the 1960s posed no threat to the United
States. Its ambitions never extended beyond Indochina, a poor, preindustrial backwater of marginal strategic significance to the United
States. A Vietnam unified even under communist auspices posed more of
a threat to Chinese security interests in southeast Asia than it did to US
interests in the region. The Vietnamese not only overthrew the Chinesebacked Khmer Rouge in Cambodia but also entered into a formal military
alliance with the Soviet Union (complete with a Soviet naval base at Cam
Ranh Bay) that was designed, among other things, to contain Chinese
expansionism in southeast Asia.
Threat discrimination is essential to sound strategy, which is about
making intelligent choices within the constraints of limited resources.
Failure to discriminate between greater and lesser threats, and between
immediate and distant threats, invites disastrous
miscalculation and even strategic exhaustion. It
encourages entry into unnecessary wars of choice
against lesser, distant threats at the expense of wars of
necessity against manifestly deadly threats. This is
what happened to the United States in the 1960s,
when it mistook a local insurgent war in a small
southeast Asian country for a challenge to the
architecture of its security interests worldwide.
This is also what happened to the United States in 2003, when it
mistook a vicious but deterred and contained rogue state for an extension
of an undeterrable global terrorist threat and proceeded to invade and
occupy Iraq. Osama bin Laden somehow morphed into Saddam Hussein,
and the United States went after Iraq in the name of the war on
terrorism. The result was a debilitating war-of-choice detour from the
war of necessity against al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda-inspired terrorism.
The story begins with the al-Qaeda attacks on the United States on
11 September 2001. In their wake, the George W. Bush administration
declared a ‘war on terrorism of global reach’. Subsequently and repeatedly,
the president and other administration officials used the terms ‘global war
on terrorism’, ‘war on global terrorism’, ‘war on terrorism’, and, most
commonly, the ‘war on terror’. The president defined all terrorism as evil
and the war on terrorism as a Manichaean struggle between ‘civilisation
and barbarism’, ‘freedom and fear’, ‘light and darkness’, ‘evil and good’,
and ‘us versus them’.1 ‘It’s the calling of our time’, he said less than three
months after 11 September, ‘to rid the world of terror’.2
In a series of presidential documents, speeches and press conferences
stretching from 11 September through the end of major combat operations
in Iraq, the administration also postulated the specifics of a broad
Threat
discrimination
is essential to
sound strategy
Threat Confusion and its Penalties 53
international terrorist threat encompassing both terrorist organisations and
so-called rogue states.3 According to the administration’s February 2003
National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, all terrorist organisations, be they
national, regional, or global in scope, are threats to the United States
because they are deemed to be components of a ‘flexible, transnational
terrorist structure, enabled by modern technology and characterized by
loose interconnectivity both within and between groups’.4 Interconnectivity
of national, regional and global terrorists includes direct linkage through
such operational cooperation as
sharing intelligence, personnel, expertise, resources, and safe havens’, and indirect
linkage through ‘promot[ion of] the same ideological agenda and reinforce[ment] of
each other’s efforts to cultivate a favorable international image for their ‘cause’.5
Accordingly, the United States
must pursue them across the geographic spectrum to ensure that all linkages between
the strong and the weak organisations are broken, leaving each of them isolated,
exposed, and vulnerable to defeat.6
In other words, the nexus of national, regional and global terrorism is
such that terrorism of global reach – such as that practiced by al-Qaeda –
cannot be defeated without simultaneous counter-terrorism operations
against its regional and national supporting props. This judgement is
emphasised in a schematic appearing in National Strategy for Combating
Terrorism, which depicts the progressive severance of linkages between
global and regional – and then between regional and national –
organisations and the concomitant destruction or disappearance of all but
a few mostly low-threat state-level terrorist organisations.7
Thus the war on terrorism is, at least conceptually, a war on any and
all terrorist organisations regardless of whether they actually pose a
threat to US interests. It is not only a war on al-Qaeda, but also, at least
in principle, a war against the Middle Eastern Hamas, Japan’s Aum
Shinrikyo, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Jewish Kahane Chai,
the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the Sri Lankan Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eelam, Columbia’s National Liberation Army, the Real Irish
Republican Army, Peru’s Sendero Luminoso and other US-designated
terrorist organisations. To be sure, resource constraints will compel some
measure of discrimination, but the official definition is dizzying in what
it includes.
A policy based on this view encourages the enlistment of new antiAmerican terrorist enemies and positively invites state repression of
many diverse forms of internal resistance in the name of the war on
terrorism. Take, for example, the US failure to draw a clear distinction
54 Jeffrey Record
between its own war against al-Qaeda and Israel’s war against
Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon claims is just another front in the global war on
terrorism. Together with Israel’s employment of US military technologies
to assassinate key Palestinian leaders, the result has been to encourage
Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organisation and provider of de facto
governmental services to many Palestinians, to expand its target list to
include US interests in the Middle East and perhaps even to targets in
the American homeland itself.8
Added to this conflation of all terrorist organisations worldwide is yet
another component of the supposed generic terrorist threat: rogue states.
These are defined as states that ‘brutalize their own people’, ‘threaten
their neighbors’, ‘are determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction
… to be used offensively’, ‘sponsor terrorism around the globe’, and
‘reject basic human values and hate the United States and everything for
which it stands’.9
The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, issued by
the White House in September 2002, identified Iraq, Iran and North
Korea as rogue states and declared: ‘We must be prepared to stop rogue
states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use
weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and
friends’.10 And this means, ‘[g]iven the goals of rogue states and
terrorists, the United States can no longer solely rely on a reactive
posture as we have in the past’.11 Because our enemies see WMD not as
means of last resort, but rather ‘as weapons of choice …[as] tools of
intimidation and military aggression’, the ‘United States will, if
necessary, act preemptively’.12
The core of the terrorist threat is thus the potential marriage of
political/religious extremism and WMD, or what President Bush has
called ‘the crossroads of radicalism and technology’, and the threat is so
grave that ‘America will act against such emerging threats before they
are fully formed’.13 In his West Point speech of June 2002, the president
elaborated: ‘When the spread of chemical and biological and nuclear
weapons, along with ballistic missile technology – when that occurs, even
weak states and small groups could attain a catastrophic power to strike
great nations’.14 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld subsequently
spoke of a ‘nexus between terrorist networks, terrorist states, and
weapons of mass destruction … that can make mighty adversaries of
small or impoverished states and even relatively small groups of
individuals’.15
The Bush administration has correctly identified the combination of
radicalism and technology, specifically terrorism and WMD, as a grave
Threat Confusion and its Penalties 55
and unprecedented threat to the security of the United States. It certainly
would be nothing less than criminally irresponsible to base a post-11
September security strategy on the assumption that al-Qaeda or any
other suicidal terrorist organisation would hesitate to use WMD if they
could get their hands on them. The United States must do everything in
its power to prevent the intersection of terrorism and WMD from
materialising.
But it was a mistake to conflate all terrorist organisations into a
general, undifferentiated mass, and another mistake to lump together
Iraq, Iran and North Korea as a common enemy. Most terrorist
organisations have local agendas and pose no threat to
US security interests, and a strategy that gratuitously
picks fights where none exist is a recipe for endless
and unnecessary conflict (what purpose would be
served by taking on, for example, the Basque ETA?).
Terrorism as a method of violence may be morally
reprehensible, but not all terrorists threaten the
United States. (In the realm of realpolitik, supposed
moral clarity is the enemy of strategic clarity.
Pakistan, an essential ally in the war against al-Qaeda,
patronised the Taliban, provided critical assistance to
North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme, sponsored terrorism in
Kashmir and still plays host to thousands of fundamentalist schools –
madrassas – that brainwash and recruit young boys for Islamic terrorism
worldwide.16)
Critical differences also separate rogue states. Iran (and Syria) sponsor
far more terrorism beyond their borders than North Korea and Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq ever did, and rogue state political agendas are hardly in
league with one another. Among other things, Iraq and Iran are historic
enemies and fought each other in the longest major conventional war of
the twentieth century, a war, it might be noted, in which the United
States, for sound geopolitical reasons, became a de facto co-belligerent
with Saddam Hussein. (The Reagan administration’s strategic courtship
of Saddam Hussein was initiated in December 1983 by the dispatch of
then-Middle East envoy Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad for talks with the
Iraqi dictator, after which Rumsfeld cabled Washington that his meeting
‘marked [a] positive milestone in development of US–Iraqi relations and
will prove to be of wider benefit to US posture in the region’.)17
If, however, it was a mistake to conflate terrorist organisations with
one another and rogue states with one another, it was a strategic error of
the first order to conflate terrorist organisations and rogue states,
especially al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime. That the administration
A strategy that
gratuitously
picks fights is
a recipe for
endless conflict
56 Jeffrey Record
has done so is evident in both its rhetoric on the war on terrorism and its
invasion and occupation of Iraq in the name of that war. Administration
spokesmen have repeatedly used the term ‘terrorist states’ to describe
rogue states and have used ‘terrorist states’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist
groups’ more or less interchangeably. They have also lumped together
rogue states and terrorist organisations as foes that share an immunity to
traditional deterrence – thus the necessity for preventive war as a
substitute. The National Security Strategy states:
In the Cold War, we faced a generally status-quo, risk-averse adversary. Deterrence
was an effective defence. But deterrence based only on the threat of retaliation is less
likely to work against leaders of rogue states more willing to take risks, gambling with
the lives of their people, and the wealth of their nations.
Traditional concepts of deterrence will not work against a terrorist enemy whose
avowed tactics are wanton destruction and the targeting of the innocents; whose socalled soldiers seek martyrdom in death and whose most potent protection is
statelessness.18
As it approached war with Iraq, the administration insisted on coconspiratorial links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda; repeatedly
raised the spectre of the dictator’s transfer of WMD to al-Qaeda; and
encouraged the view that Saddam Hussein had a hand in the 11
September attacks. At war’s end, it hailed the regime’s destruction as a
victory in the war on terrorism. Within days of the 11 September attacks,
according to Bob Woodward’s undisputed account, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were pushing for
military action against Iraq.19 Then-Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill
recounts his reaction to Wolfowitz’s argument at a meeting of the
National Security Council on 13 September 2001:
I thought what Wolfowitz was asserting about Iraq was a reach, and I think others in
the room did, too. It was like changing the subject … I was mystified. It’s like a
bookbinder accidentally dropping a chapter from one book into the middle of another
one. The chapter is coherent, in its way, but it doesn’t seem to fit in this book.20
Indeed, there is substantial testimony that key administration officials
were Iraq-obsessed and saw the terrorist attacks on the United States as
an opportunity to mobilise support for forcible regime change in Iraq
even absent evidence of Iraqi complicity in 11 September.21 As early as
January 2002, President Bush declared:
States like [Iraq], and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten
the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a
grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them
Threat Confusion and its Penalties 57
the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail
the United States.22
In a formal news conference on 6 March 2003, just days before he
launched Operation Iraq Freedom, the president linked the case for war
against Iraq to the 11 September attacks, implying that Saddam Hussein
would replicate them once he got nuclear weapons. ‘Saddam is a threat.
And we’re not going to wait until he does attack’, he declared. ‘Saddam
Hussein and his weapons [of mass destruction] are a direct threat to this
country’, he reiterated,
If the world fails to confront the threat posed by the Iraqi regime … free nations would
assume immense and unacceptable risks. The attacks of September 11, 2001, showed
what the enemies of America did with four airplanes. We will not wait to see what …
terrorist states could do with weapons of mass destruction.23
Later in the same speech, he stated:
Saddam Hussein is a threat to our nation. September 11 changed the … strategic
thinking, at least as far as I was concerned, for how to protect the country … used to
be that we could think that you could contain a person like Saddam Hussein, that
oceans would protect us from his type of terror. September 11 should say to the
American people that we’re now a battlefield, that weapons of mass destruction in the
hands of a terrorist organization could be deployed here at home.24
When asked about the possible human and financial costs of a war with
Iraq, the president answered, ‘The price of doing nothing exceeds the
price of taking action …The price of the attacks on America on September
11 [was] enormous … And I’m not willing to take that chance again’.25
On 1 May 2003, the president, in declaring an end to major combat
operations in Iraq, stated that the ‘battle of Iraq is one victory in the
war on terror that began on September 11, 2001 – and still goes on’.
He added:
The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We’ve
removed an ally of al-Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding. And this much
is certain: No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi
regime, because the regime is no more. In this 19 months [since the 11 September
attacks] that changed the world, our actions have been focused and deliberate and
proportionate to the offense … With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters
declared war on the United States. And war is what they got.26
As late as mid-September 2003, notwithstanding the absence of any
disclosed evidence, at least one prominent administration spokesman was
still attempting to link Saddam Hussein with the 11 September attacks.
Vice-President Dick Cheney, appearing on NBC’s show Meet the Press on
58 Jeffrey Record
27 April 2003, called Iraq ‘the geographic base of the terrorists who have
had us under assault for years, but most especially on 9/11’.27
Unfortunately, stapling together rogue states and terrorist
organisations, including Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al-Qaeda, ignores
strategically critical differences between the two. It is true that terrorist
organisations and rogue states both embrace violence
and are hostile to the existing international order.
Many share a common enemy in the United States
and, for most rogue states and terrorist organisations
in the Middle East, a common enemy in Israel. As
international pariahs they are often in contact with one
another and at times even cooperate. But the scope
and endurance of such cooperation is highly contingent on local
circumstances. More to the point, terrorist organisations and rogue states
are fundamentally different in character and vulnerability to deterrence
and US military attack.
Take Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda as
examples. The former was a secular, neo-Stalinst police state with
traditional imperial ambitions, whereas the latter remains a fanatically
anti-secular, elusive non-state actor with secret cells in reportedly 60
countries. Osama and Saddam were oil and water. As two Middle East
terrorism experts observed in the context of the National Security
Council staff’s examination of who was behind the 1998 bombings of US
embassies in East Africa:
Osama and
Saddam were
oil and water
[Osama bin Laden] was deeply contemptuous of Saddam Hussein. For believers like
bin Laden, Saddam was the second coming of Gamel Abdel Nasser, a secular
pharaonic ruler who had destroyed the religion and oppressed the umma [the
community of Muslim faithful]. There is little evidence that Saddam viewed bin Laden
and his ilk any differently than Egypt’s secular rulers viewed [Islamist activists]
Sayyid Qutb, Shuqri Mustafa, and their successors – as religious extremists who
would enjoy nothing more than to see secular rule toppled. However attractive their
anti-Americanism, they could only be handled with caution. There was nothing in the
record to suggest that a central precept of the state sponsors had changed: never get in
bed with a group you cannot control. Both the Iranians and the Iraqis appeared to be
reluctant to cooperate with an organization that might commit some enormity that
could be traced back to them. The NSC analysts found it difficult to accept that alQaeda acted alone, but no other conclusion was warranted.28
Indeed, for what it’s worth, two high-ranking al-Qaeda leaders in US
custody, Abu Zubaydah and the reportedly very talkative Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, al-Qaeda chief of operations until his capture on 1 March
2003, told the CIA in separate interrogations that the terrorist
Threat Confusion and its Penalties 59
organisation did not work with the Saddam Hussein regime. Though the
idea had been discussed among al-Qaeda’s leadership, Osama bin Laden
rejected it because he did not want to be indebted to Saddam Hussein.29
This testimony is certainly consistent with the judgement of experts on
al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein30 as well as with the failure to date
(April 2004) of US intelligence authorities to discover ‘smoking gun’
documentation of an operational relationship between al-Qaeda and the
Iraqi regime.
The fact that it was al-Qaeda and not Iraq that attacked the United
States on 11 September underscores the most obvious, albeit officially
ignored, difference between the two: one was able and willing to attack
the United States, whereas the other was neither. And the reason for this
difference was simple: one was undeterred, while the other was
deterred. Shadowy, fleeting non-state entities, terrorist organisations
possess little in the way of assets that can be held hostage; as The National
Security Strategy points out, a terrorist enemy’s ‘most potent protection is
statelessness’.31 The strategy for dealing with terrorist organisations is
thus essentially the strategy of the hunt, which places a premium on
reliable intelligence and painstaking police work, and only occasionally
on military power. In contrast, rogue states are sovereign entities defined
by specific territories, populations, governmental infrastructures and
other fixed assets; as such, they are much more exposed to decisive
military attack. The United States knocked off Saddam Hussein’s regime
in three weeks; the war against al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist
organisations will last years, even decades.
One does not for a moment doubt that al-Qaeda, had it possessed a
deliverable nuclear weapon on 11 September, would have used it. But the
record for rogue states – so far – is clear: none has ever used WMD
against an adversary capable of inflicting unacceptable retaliatory damage.
(Nor is there evidence of rogue state transfer of WMD to terrorist
groups.)32 Saddam Hussein did use chemical weapons in the 1980s against
helpless Kurds and Iranian infantry; however, he refrained from
employing such weapons against either US forces or Israel during the Gulf
war of 1991, and he apparently abandoned even possession of such
weapons sometime later in the decade.33 For its part, post-armistice North
Korea, far better armed with WMD and ballistic missiles than Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq, has for decades repeatedly threatened war against South
Korea, Japan and the United States, but has yet to initiate one.
How is the inaction of Saddam Hussein and North Korea explained
other than by successful deterrence? There is, of course, no way of proving
this; the success of deterrence is measured by events that do not happen
as opposed to those that do, and one can never be sure of the cause of a
60 Jeffrey Record
non-event. But there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein ever intended to
initiate hostilities with the United States once he acquired a nuclear
weapon. Blackmail and aggression are not the only reasons rogue states
seek WMD; they may also see in such weapons a means of deterring, or at
least raising the price of, US military action against themselves.
Condoleezza Rice, just a year before she became President Bush’s national
security adviser, voiced confidence in deterrence as the best means of
dealing with the Iraqi dictator. In January 2000 she published an article in
Foreign Affairs in which she declared, with respect to rogue states, ‘the first
line of defense should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence – if
they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any
attempt to use them will bring national obliteration’. She added that
rogue states ‘were living on borrowed time’ and that ‘there should be no
sense of panic about them’.34 If statelessness is, as The National Security
Strategy rightly points out, a terrorist enemy’s ‘most potent protection’,
then is not ‘stateness’ a rogue state’s most potent strategic liability?
To be sure, rogue states are inherently aggressive and threaten
regional stability. Moreover, there can be no guarantee that rogue state
leaders will not fall prone to recklessness, even madness, although in
the case of Saddam Hussein, pre-war accusations of recklessness and
certainly madness were considerably overstated.35 (Saddam Hussein
always loved himself more than he hated the United States.) The point is
that rogue state behaviour so far provides no convincing evidence of
immunity to deterrence via the credible threat of unacceptable retaliation,
and therefore no justification for preventive war. Rogue states may in fact
be more risk-prone than governments of ‘normal’ states, but does that
mean they do not value their own survival and are incapable of making
rational calculations of ends and means?
Philip Bobbitt, in his magisterial 2002 work, The Shield of Achilles: War,
Peace, and the Course of History, has questioned the argument that rogue
states are not deterrable. Discussing the wisdom of ballistic missile
defences, which have been sold, like preventive war, on the grounds of
rogue state undeterrability (such defences are in fact designed to prevent
rogues from deterring the United States)36, Bobbitt asks:
Is it really sensible to think that providing the great states of the West with ballistic
missile defenses would actually discourage a ‘rogue state’ to a greater degree than
the assurance of nuclear annihilation that would surely follow such an attack [which]
already deters them today? To believe this assumes a psychological hypersensitivity to
the mere possibility of failure on the part of the leaderships of Iraq, Iran, and North
Korea that seems incompatible with their characters … and an indifference to survival
that these leaders, though they make seek it in their recruits, do not prominently
display themselves.37
Threat Confusion and its Penalties 61
None of this is to argue that maintaining credible deterrence is easy or
that deterrence is foolproof. It is simply to recognise that the record of
deterrence of WMD use by rogue states has been impressive, and that
deterrence is a far more attractive and less risky option than preventive
war –a judgement vindicated by the American experience in Iraq.
In conflating Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda
as an undifferentiated threat, the administration needlessly expanded the
fight against al-Qaeda by launching a preventive war38 against a state that
was not at war with the United States and that posed no direct or
imminent threat to the United States. Deterrence and containment of Iraq
had been working effectively for 12 years when Operation Iraqi Freedom
was launched in March 2003: Saddam Hussein was not preparing to
attack the United States, and he was too weak militarily to credibly
threaten his neighbours, all but one of which – Kuwait – opposed the US
invasion of Iraq and two of which – Kuwait and Turkey – had US
security guarantees. Observes Benjamin Barber:
To apply a national security doctrine developed for ‘stateless martyrs’, who have
actually started a war through terrorist acts, to a territorial state otherwise innocent of
an explicit aggressive act is more than just incoherent: it is defective, inefficacious,
even perverse.39
Opponents of preventive war against Iraq, including former national
security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski and former
secretary of state Madeleine Albright, made a clear distinction between
the character, aims and vulnerabilities of al-Qaeda and Iraq, arguing that
the al-Qaeda threat was much more immediate, dangerous and difficult
to defeat. They feared that a war of choice against Iraq would weaken
the war of necessity against al-Qaeda by distracting America’s strategic
attention to Iraq, gobbling up money and resources better applied to
homeland defence. Also, given the profound, widespread unpopularity
of an American war on Iraq – especially among Muslims – it could
weaken the willingness of key countries to share intelligence information
so vital to winning the war on al-Qaeda.40 They were right. What they
did not foresee – few did – was the emergence, in the wake of the
declared termination of major combat operations, of growing insurgent
warfare against US occupation forces and Iraqi reconstruction targets,
including sabotage of key infrastructure and assassination of Iraqis
collaborating with US policy.
Given the nature of Saddam Hussein’s regime and its manifest
vulnerability to traditional deterrence, and given the failure to establish
Iraqi complicity in the attacks of 11 September and to discover any WMD
in Iraq, to say nothing of a reconstituted nuclear weapons programme,
62 Jeffrey Record
Operation Iraqi Freedom was a distraction from, not a victory in, the war on
terrorism. And a very costly one at that, especially if the United States
fails to establish order and to forge legitimate and competent governance
in Iraq. By establishing an American military force presence in an Arab
heartland, a force presence large enough to overthrow the Saddam
Hussein regime but arguably insufficient to impose order and stability
and to control Iraq’s borders, the United States saddled itself with a
strategic albatross that not only compromises the war on terrorism but
also could undermine the credibility of American defence commitments
elsewhere, notably in Korea.
Worse still, the combination of a large US force presence and
continuing disorder in Iraq, including the prospect of that country’s
degeneration into civil war, creates a new target set and place of
operations for terrorists seeking to spill American blood and transform
the administration’s war on terrorism into a clash of civilisations. Retired
US Army general and former presidential aspirant Wesley Clark believes
that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq has ‘re-energized al-Qaeda
by attacking an Islamic state and presenting terrorists
with ready access to vulnerable US forces’, that
Operation Iraqi Freedom ‘serves as a rallying point for
anyone wishing to harm the United States and
Americans’.41 In the wake of the August 2003 bombing
of the United Nations headquarters in Iraq, terrorism
expert Jessica Stern warned that the bombing was ‘the
latest evidence that America had taken a country that
was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one’.
How ironic it would be that a war initiated in the name of the war on
terrorism may end up creating ‘precisely the situation the Bush
administration has described as a breeding ground for terrorists: a state
unable to control its own borders or provide for its citizens’ rudimentary
needs’.42 Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director of counterterrorism operations and analysis, Vincent Cannistraro, agrees: ‘There
was no substantive information linking Saddam to international terrorism
before the war. Now we’ve created the conditions that have made Iraq
the place to come to attack Americans’.43
The diversionary impact of Operation Iraqi Freedom and its post-war
aftermath on the war on terrorism is evident in the fiscal competition
between unexpectedly high Iraqi post-war outlays and the requirements
for effective homeland defence – a competition critically exacerbated by
exploding federal deficits, to which the US war and reconstruction effort
in Iraq is a major contributor.44 Indeed, adequately funded homeland
security is probably the greatest opportunity cost of the war on Iraq.
Iraq was a
distraction
from the war
on terrorism
Threat Confusion and its Penalties 63
In early September 2003, the White House informed congressional
leaders that it was preparing a new budget request of $60–70 billion to
cover mounting military and reconstruction costs in Iraq.45 President Bush
shortly thereafter announced an $87bn request to cover Iraq and
continuing US costs in Afghanistan, including $20.3bn for Iraq’s
reconstruction.46 In early October, a World Bank team of economic
specialists announced that the US-led reconstruction effort in Iraq would
require an additional $36bn over the coming four years – that is, over
and above the $20.3bn announced by the president.47 All of this came on
top of an earlier appropriation of $79bn to cover the costs of the war and
its immediate aftermath. In sum, as of April 2004, the Iraq war and postwar outlays already authorised, requested and estimated totalled about
$200bn – and this total did not include the costs of continued US military
operations in Iraq beyond fiscal year 2004.
The price tag of $200bn exceeds by over $100bn the estimated $98.4bn
shortfall in federal funding of homeland security-critical emergency
response agencies in the United States over the next five years. The
estimate is the product of an independent task force study sponsored by
the Council on Foreign Relations and completed in summer 2003. The
study, titled Emergency Responders: Drastically Underfunded, Dangerously
Unprepared, concluded that almost two years after 11 September,
the United States remains dangerously ill-prepared to handle a catastrophic attack on
American soil’ because of, among other things, ‘acute shortages of radios among
firefighters, WMD protective gear for police departments, basic equipment and
expertise in public health laboratories, and hazardous materials detection equipment
in most cities.48
But the consequences of threat conflation extend beyond costly and
unnecessary regime change in Iraq, strategic distraction from the war on
al-Qaeda, and concomitant disinvestment in homeland security. They also
include alienation of key friends and allies and the international political
isolation of the United States.
For over half a century, the United States laboured to create a
network of international institutions – the United Nations, the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization, the World Bank, the North American Free
Trade Association and so on – that advanced its security, economic wellbeing and political values while at the same time reassuring friends and
allies that they had nothing to fear from America’s unprecedented power
because it would be employed with restraint. From Franklin D. Roosevelt
through to Bill Clinton, American presidents, liberal and conservative,
Republican and Democrat, have understood that in an increasingly
globalised world no power, not even the United States, can achieve
security unilaterally.
64 Jeffrey Record
The doctrine of preventive war, however, proclaimed and exercised
against Iraq in defiance of world opinion and in the absence of any
international institutional legitimisation, undermines the very Americancreated world order that has served the United States so well. It leaves
the United States politically isolated in Iraq, just as it was almost four
decades ago in Vietnam. In both instances an arrogance of power was the
cause of America’s strategic misfortune. John Ikenberry comments:
America’s nascent neo-imperial grand strategy threatens to rend the fabric of the
international community and political partnerships precisely at a time when that
community and those partnerships are urgently needed [to wage war on terrorist
threats]. It is an approach fraught with peril and likely to fail. It is not only politically
unsustainable but diplomatically harmful. And if history is any guide, it will trigger
antagonism and resistance that will leave America in a more hostile and divided
world.49
We have ‘a special obligation to rest our policies on principles that
transcend the assertions of preponderant power’, wrote Henry Kissinger
in September 2002. ‘World leadership requires the acceptance of some
restraint even on one’s actions to ensure that others exercise comparable
restraint. It cannot be in either our national or the world’s interest to
develop principles that grant every nation an unfettered right of
preemption against its own definitions of threats to its security’.50 Even
more troubled by the embrace of unilateralism and preventive war was
Brent Scowcroft, President George H.W. Bush’s national security adviser.
Before the war he said:
Part of the Bush administration believes that as a superpower, we must take
advantage of this opportunity to change the world for the better, and we don’t need to
go out of our way to accommodate alliances, partnerships, or friends in the process,
because that would be too constraining. [But relying almost solely on ad hoc]
coalitions of the willing is fundamentally, fatally flawed. As we have seen in the debate
about Iraq, it’s already given us an image of arrogance and unilateralism, and we’re
paying a very high price for that image. If we get to the point where everyone secretly
hopes the United States gets a black eye because we’re so obnoxious, then we’ll be
totally hamstrung in the war on terror. We’ll be like Gulliver with the Lilliputians.51
Ironically, presidential candidate George W. Bush took the same view in
2000. ‘Our nation stands alone right now in terms of world power. And
that’s why we’ve got to be humble and project strength in a way that
promotes freedom’, he said in his second formal debate with Democratic
candidate Al Gore. ‘If we are an arrogant nation, they’ll view us that
way, but if we’re a humble nation, they’ll respect us’.52
Threat Confusion and its Penalties 65
No less ironically, for the Bush administration at least, the
unexpectedly onerous and open-ended military burden the United States
has incurred in Iraq has significantly limited the very freedom of military
action necessary to credibly threaten the overthrow of other rogue states
seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. It is said that those who fail to learn
the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them. The penalty of
threat conflation during the first half of the Cold War was disastrous US
military intervention in Vietnam. Unfortunately, that lesson appears to
have vanished from official consciousness in the wake of 11 September.
Once again, a failure of threat discrimination has propelled the United
States into an unnecessary military intervention overseas, an intervention
whose course bears increasing comparison to key aspects of the American
experience in Vietnam.
66 Jeffrey Record
Notes
1
2
3
We Will Prevail: President George W.
Bush on War, Terrorism, and Freedom,
selected and edited by the National
Review (New York: Continuum
International Publishing Group, Inc.,
2003), pp. 17, 24, 32, 39, 62, 72, 85, 117,
122.
Ibid., p. 78.
The two most important documents
are George W. Bush, The National
Security Strategy of the United States of
America (Washington DC: The White
House, September 2002), and National
Strategy for Combating Terrorism
(Washington DC: The White House,
February 2003). Key presidential
statements include President Bush’s
Address to a Joint Session of
Congress, 23 September 2001; speech
to the United Nations General
Assembly, New York, 10 November
2001; speech to Citadel cadets,
Charleston, South Carolina, 11
December 2001; State of the Union
Address, 29 January 2002; speech to
US military personnel, Anchorage,
Alaska, 16 February 2002; speech to
the Iowa Republican Party Victory
Luncheon, 1 March 2002; speech to
the George C. Marshall ROTC Award
Seminar on National Security at the
Virginia Military Institute, Lexington,
Virginia, 17 April 2002; speech to the
Bundestag, Berlin, Germany, 23 May
2002; address to the graduating class
of the US Military Academy at West
Point, New York, 1 June 2002; speech
at the Massachusetts Victory 2002
reception, 4 October 2002; speech at
the Cincinnati Museum Center, 7
October 2002; campaign speech in
Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 3
November 2002; State of the Union
Address, 28 January 2003; statement
regarding the United Nations Security
Council and Iraq, 6 February 2003;
radio address to the nation, 8 March
2003; address to the nation, 17 March
2003; and speech aboard the USS
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
Lincoln off the coast of San Diego,
California, 1 May 2003. These and
other presidential statements on the
war on terrorism and Iraq are
compiled in We Will Prevail: President
George W. Bush on War, Terrorism, and
Freedom.
National Strategy for Combating
Terrorism, p. 8.
Ibid., p. 9.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 13. Also see p. 9.
See David R. Sands, ‘Israel’s Killing of
Yassin Puts US in Line of Fire’,
Washington Times, 23 March 2004;
James Bennet, ‘Palestinians Swear
Vengeance for Killing of Cleric by
Israelis’, New York Times, 23 March
2004. To distinguish between the
causes and political contexts of alQaeda and Palestinian terrorism is not
to condone terrorism as a means to
an end; it is simply to recognise that
the US war against al-Qaeda and
Israel’s war against Hamas are not be
confused in terms of origins,
legitimacy and efficacy of political
solution.
The National Security Strategy of the
United States of America, p. 14.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 15.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. iii.
Remarks by President Bush at the
2002 Graduation Exercise of the
United States Military Academy at
West Point, http://
www.whitehouse.gov/news/
releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html
Donald Rumsfeld, ‘The Price of
Inaction Can be Truly Catastrophic’,
Asahi Shimbun, Japan, 10 September
2002.
See Tim McGirk and Massimo
Calabresi, ‘Is Pakistan Friend of Foe?’,
Time, 29 September 2003; Andrew
Koch, ‘The Nuclear Network:
Khanfessions of a Proliferator’, Jane’s
Defense Weekly, 3 March 2004; Arnaud
Threat Confusion and its Penalties 67
17
18
19
20
21
22
de Borchgrave, ‘What Did Musharraf
Know?’, Washington Times, 3 March
2004; and Seymour M. Hersh, ‘The
Deal’, New Yorker, 8 March 2004.
Quoted in James Mann, Rise of the
Vulcans, The History of Bush’s War
Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), p.
124.
The National Security Strategy of the
United States of America, p. 15.
Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), pp.
49, 83–85. Also see Kenneth M.
Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The
Case for Invading Iraq (New York:
Random House, 2002), p. 105.
Quoted in Ron Suskind, The Price of
Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White
House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill
(New York: Simon and Schuster,
2004), p. 188.
In addition to the Woodward and
O’Neill accounts, see Mann, Rise of the
Vulcans, The History of Bush’s War
Cabinet, pp. 82–83, 190–191, 236–238,
302–310, and 362–364; Richard A.
Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside
America’s War on Terror (New York:
Free Press, 2004), pp. ix, 30–33, 227–
228, 231–132, 237–238, 241–242, 264–
265, 268–270, 273, and 284; and
Kenneth Pollack, The Threatening
Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New
York: Random House, 2002), p. 105.
State of the Union Address, 29
January 2002, cited in We Will Prevail:
President George W. Bush on War,
Terrorism, and Freedom, p. 108.
Presidential threat-conflation
continued: ‘One of the most
dangerous things that can happen in
the future is that these kinds of
terrorist organizations hook up with
nations that develop weapons of mass
destruction’, speech to US military
personnel in Alaska, 16 February
2002, cited in ibid., p. 121; ‘We cannot
let … terrorist organizations team up
with nations that want to develop
weapons [of mass destruction]’,
speech to Iowa Republican Party
Victory Luncheon, 1 March 2002, cited
in ibid., p. 128; ‘A small number of
outlaw regimes today possess and are
developing chemical and biological
weapons … and at the same time
[are] cultivating ties to terrorist
groups. In their threat to peace, in
their mad ambitions … these regimes
constitute an axis of evil’, speech to
the George C. Marshall ROTC Award
Seminar in National Security at the
Virginia Military Institute, 17 April
2002, cited in ibid., p. 144; ‘The authors
of terror are seeking nuclear,
chemical, and biological weapons.
Regimes that sponsor terror are
developing these weapons and … [if]
these regimes and their terrorist allies
were to perfect these capabilities, no
inner voice of reason, no hint of
conscience would prevent their use’,
speech before the Bundestag, Berlin,
23 May 2002, cited in ibid., p. 154; ‘You
can’t distinguish between al-Qaeda
and Saddam Hussein when you talk
about the war on terrorism. They’re
both equally as bad, and equally as
evil, and equally as destructive …
[T]he danger is that al-Qaeda becomes
an extension of Saddam’s madness
and his hatred and his capacity to
extend weapons of mass destruction
around the world’, response to
questions from the press, 25
September 2002, quoted in Mike
Allen, ‘Bush: Hussein, Al Qaeda
Linked’, Washington Post, 26
September 2003; ‘Terror cells and
outlaw regimes … are different faces
of the same evil … If the Iraqi regime
is able to produce, buy, or steal an
amount of highly enriched uranium a
little larger than a single softball, it
could have a nuclear weapon in less
than a year … and be in position to
pass nuclear technology to terrorists’,
speech at the Cincinnati Museum
Center, 7 October 2002, cited in We
Will Prevail: President George W. Bush
68 Jeffrey Record
23
24
25
26
27
on War, Terrorism, and Freedom, pp.
195, 196; and ‘He [Saddam Hussein]
would like nothing better than to
hook up with one of these shadowy
terrorist networks like al-Qaeda,
provide some weapons and training
to them, let them come and do his
dirty work, and we wouldn’t be able
to see his fingerprints on his action’,
campaign speech in Sioux Falls, South
Dakota, 3 November 2002, cited in
ibid., p. 203.
State of the Union Address, 29
January 2002, cited in We Will Prevail:
President George W. Bush on War,
Terrorism, and Freedom.
Ibid.
All excerpts from President Bush’s
news conference of 6 March 2003, are
extracted from the transcript
reprinted in ‘’We’re Calling for a
Vote’ at the UN, Says Bush’,
Washington Post, 7 March 2003.
Quoted in Dana Milbank and Claudia
Dean, ‘Hussein Link to 9/11 Lingers
in Many Minds’, Washington Post, 6
September 2003.
Quoted in Dana Priest and Glenn
Kessler, ‘Iraq, 9/11 Still Linked by
Cheney’, Washington Post, 29
September 2003. Only after Vice
President Cheney’s remark, and for
the first time since the 11 September
attacks, did the administration admit
there was no evidence to support a
Saddam-11 September link. On 16
September, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld stated, ‘I’ve not
seen any indication that would lead
me to believe that I could say that
Saddam Hussein was involved in the
September 11 attacks’. National
Security Adviser Condoleezza agreed:
‘[W]e have never claimed that
Saddam Hussein had either …
direction or control of 9/11’. The next
day, the president himself declared:
‘We have no evidence that Saddam
Hussein was involved with the
September 11 attacks’. Rumsfeld, Rice
28
29
30
31
32
and Bush quoted in Daniel Schorr, ‘A
War Still in Search of a Rationale’,
Christian Science Monitor, 26
September 2003, and Jimmy Breslin,
‘They Told Lies and Many Brave
Soldiers Died’, Long Island Newsday, 23
September 2003.
Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon,
The Age of Sacred Terror (New York:
Random House, 2002), p. 264.
James Risen, ‘Captives Deny Qaeda
Worked With Baghdad’, New York
Times, 9 June 2003.
See, for example, Yossef Bodansky,
Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War
on America (New York: Prima Press,
1999); Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al
Qaeda: Global Network of Terror (New
York: Columbia University Press,
2002); Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda: Casting a
Shadow of Terror (New York: I. B.
Tauris, 2003); Jane Corbin, Al-Qaeda,
In Search of the Terror Network That
Threatens the World (New York:
Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003); Jerrold
M. Post and Amatzia Baram, Saddam
is Iraq: Iraq is Saddam (Maxwell AFB,
AL: US Air Force
Counterproliferation Center,
November 2002); and Eric D. Shaw,
‘Saddam Hussein: Political
Psychological Profiling Results
Relevant to His Possession, Use, and
Possible Transfer of Weapons of Mass
Destruction (WMD) to Terrorist
Groups’, Studies in Conflict and
Terrorism, vol. 26, no. 5, September/
October 2003, pp. 347–364.
The National Security Strategy of the
United States of America, p. 15.
Pakistan and North Korea have
shared WMD and supporting ballistic
missile technologies with each other,
but neither has provided them to
non-state actors. Sharon A. Squassoni,
Weapons of Mass Destruction: Trade
Between North Korea and Pakistan,
Congressional Research Service
Report for Congress, updated 11
March 2004, http://www.fas.org/
Threat Confusion and its Penalties 69
33
34
35
spp/starwars/crs/RL31900.pdf
See Nancy Gibbs and Michael Ware,
‘Chasing a Mirage’, Time, 6 October
2003; Walter Pincus and Dana Priest,
‘Hussein’s Weapons May Have Been
Bluff’, Washington Post, 1 October
2003; Rolf Ekeus, ‘Iraq’s Real
Weapons Threat’, Washington Post, 29
June 2003; Bob Drogin, ‘The
Vanishing’, New Republic, 21 July 2003;
John Barry and Michael Isikoff,
‘Saddam’s Secrets’, Newsweek, 30 June
2003; Walter Pincus and Kevin
Sullivan, ‘Scientists Still Deny Iraqi
Arms Programs’, Washington Post, 31
July 2003; Michael R. Gordon,
‘Weapons of Mass Confusion’, New
York Times on the Web, 1 August 2003,
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/
01/international/worldspecial3/
01CND-GORDON.html; David
Kelley, ‘Regime’s Priority Was
Blueprints, Not Arsenal, Defector
Told’, Los Angeles Times, 26 April 2003
; and Joseph Curl, ‘Bush Believes
Saddam Destroyed Arms’, Washington
Times, 26 April 2003.
Condoleezza Rice, ‘Promoting the
National Interest’, Foreign Affairs
(January/February 2000), p. 61,
See Richard K. Betts, ‘Suicide from
Fear of Death?’, Foreign Affairs
(January/February 2003), pp. 34–43;
and John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen
M Walt, ‘An Unnecessary War’,
Foreign Policy (January/February
2003), pp. 50–59. Mearsheimer and
Walt point out that Saddam Hussein’s
record on starting wars in the region
was no worse than that of Israel or
Egypt, and that his invasion of Iran in
1980 was in part a defensive response
to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s
attempted fomentation of an Iraqi
Shi’ite rebellion to overthrow the
Iraqi dictator. He also had reason to
believe that Iran, then in the throes of
revolutionary turmoil, was weak and
vulnerable. In the case of Iraq’s
invasion of Kuwait a decade later,
36
37
38
Saddam Hussein had little reason to
believe that the United States would
react the way it did; indeed, the
George H.W. Bush administration
may have inadvertently given
Saddam Hussein a green or at least an
ambiguous amber light. See the
author’s Hollow Victory, A Contrary
View of the Gulf War (Washington DC:
Brassey’s Inc., 1993), pp. 23–34; and
Janice Gross Stein, ‘Deterrence and
Compellance in the Gulf, 1990–91’,
International Security, Fall 1992) pp.
147–179.
As stated by neo-conservatives
Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol,
‘The real rationale for missile defense
is that without it, an adversary armed
with long-range ballistic missiles can,
as Robert Joseph, President Bush’s
counterproliferation specialist at the
National Security Council argues,
“hold American cities hostage and
thereby deter us from intervention”.
In other words, missile defense is
about preserving America’s ability to
wield power abroad’. Lawrence F.
Kaplan and William Kristol, The War
Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and
America’s Mission (San Francisco, CA:
Encounter Books, 2003), p. 124.
Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles:
War, Peace, and the Course of History
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), p.
685.
Though Bush administration
spokesmen have used the terms
‘preemption’ and ‘preemptive
military action’ to describe the war on
Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom was in
fact a preventive war, which
historically has been indistinguishable
from aggression. The Defense
Department officially defines
preventive war as ‘a war initiated in
the belief that military conflict, while
not imminent, is inevitable, and that
to delay would involve greater risk’.
In contrast, preemption is ‘an attack
initiated on the basis of
70 Jeffrey Record
39
40
41
42
43
44
incontrovertible evidence that an
enemy attack is imminent’. Clearly,
there was no such evidence because
Iraq was not poised to attack.
Preemption has sanction under
international law; preventive war
does not. See Joint Publication 1-02,
DOD Dictionary of Military and
Associated Terms (Washington DC:
Department of Defense, 12 April
2001), pp. 333, 336.
Benjamin R. Barber, Fear’s Empire:
War, Terrorism, and Democracy (New
York: W.W. Norton and Company,
2003), p. 107
See, for example, Brent Scowcroft,
‘Don’t Invade Iraq’, Wall Street
Journal, 15 August 2002; and
Madeleine K. Albright, ‘Where Iraq
Fits In on the War on Terror’, New
York Times, 13 September 2002.
Wesley K. Clark, Winning Modern
Wars: Iraq, Terrorism, and American
Empire (New York: Public Affairs,
2003), pp. xv, 159.
Jessica Stern, ‘How America Created a
Terrorist Haven’, New York Times, 20
August 2003.
Quoted in John Walcott, ‘Some in
Administration Uneasy Over Bush
Speech’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 19
September 2003.
In August 2003 the Congressional
Budget Office (CBO) projected a
$480bn deficit for fiscal year 2004 and
a total cumulative deficit for the
decade of 2004–13 of $1.40 trillion.
These numbers minimise the
problem, however, because the CBO
is legally required to base its
projections only on existing laws.
Thus, the CBO projection assumes the
scheduled expiration of the huge 2001
and 2003 tax cuts, although most
observers believe they will be
extended. (Both the White House and
the Republican congressional
leadership favour making the cuts
permanent.) The CBO projection also
ignored the subsequent passage of
45
Medicare prescription drug benefit
and reformed alternative minimum
tax legislation. Altogether, these three
measures, according to a Washington
Post budget analysis, will add an
estimated $1.93 trillion to the total
2004–13 deficit. The CBO also assumes
that discretionary spending would
grow only at the rate of inflation,
projected to average 2.7% during the
next decade, when in fact it has risen
by an annual 7.7% over the past five
years. According to the Post analysis,
the sum of all these additions, plus the
additional interest on the debt, could
produce an estimated total 2004–13
deficit of $4.33 trillion, or almost four
times larger than the CBO projection.
An assessment by the Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities projected
an even greater deficit, $5.1 trillion.
See The Budget and Economic Outlook:
An Update August 2003 (Washington
DC: Congressional Budget Office,
August 2003, http://www.cbo.gov/
showdoc.cfm?index=4493&sequence=0;
and ‘Deficit Delusions’, Washington
Post, 29 August 2003. Also see
Edmund Andrews, ‘Congressional
Deficit Estimate May Exceed a HalfTrillion’, New York Times, 26 August
2003; Walter Shapiro, ‘Fiscal
Recklessness Means More Danger
Ahead’, USA Today, 27 August 2003;
Jonathan Weisman, ‘2004 Deficit to
Reach $480 Billion, Report Forecasts’,
Washington Post, 27 August 2003; and
David Firestone, ‘Dizzying Dive to
Red Ink Poses Stark Choices for
Washington’, Washington Post, 14
September 2003.
Glenn Kessler and Mike Allen, ‘Bush
to Seek $60 Billion or More for Iraq’,
Washington Post, 4 September 2003.
Also see Richard W. Stevenson, ‘78%
of Bush’s Postwar Spending Plan is
for the Military’, New York Times, 9
September 2003; and Warren Vieth
and Ester Schrader, ‘Iraqi Estimates
Were Too Low, US Admits’, Los
Threat Confusion and its Penalties 71
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
Angeles Times, 9 September 2003.
President Bush’s Address to the
Nation, 7 September 2003, reprinted
in ‘Bush: “We Will Do What Is
Necessary”’, Washington Post, 8
September 2003,
Michael M. Phillips and David Rogers,
‘Price of Rebuilding Iraq Is Put at $56
Billion Over Four Years’, Wall Street
Journal, 2 October 2003; and Steven R.
Weisman, ‘AID Assessments Say Iraq
Needs $55 Billion for Rebuilding’, New
York Times, 2 October 2003.
Emergency Responders: Drastically
Underfunded, Dangerously Unprepared
(New York: Council on Foreign
Relations, 2003), p. 1.
G. John Ikenberry, ‘America’s
Imperial Ambition’, Foreign Affairs,
September–October 2002, p. 45. Also
see Joseph S. Nye, Jr, The Paradox of
Power, Why the World’s Only
Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Henry Kissinger, ‘The Custodians of
the World?’, San Diego Union-Tribune,
8 September 2002.
Quoted in James Kitfield, ‘Fractured
Alliances’, National Journal, 8 March
2003, p. 721.
‘2nd Presidential Debate Between Gov.
Bush and Vice President Gore’, New
York Times, 12 October 2000.