The Jungle Grows Back by Robert Kagan

Author:Robert Kagan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

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The decade of the 2000s delivered a series of powerful blows both to the liberal order and to the United States, and the United States inflicted some on itself. The result was a substantial collapse of public support for the postwar grand strategy and a further weakening of the liberal order that strategy was designed to uphold.

The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, in which more Americans were killed on American soil than at any time since Pearl Harbor, led to an understandable panic about the threat of radical Islamic terrorism. The invasion of Afghanistan to remove al Qaeda bases and the Taliban regime that supported them, which the Clinton administration had shied away from in its last year, was launched. Then the Bush administration launched an invasion to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. The motives behind the first war seemed obvious—they were a response to the terrorist attack and an effort to prevent others. The motives behind the war in Iraq were more complicated. They were a blend of post-9/11 and pre-9/11 concerns.

Iraq in the 1990s had been principally a problem of world order management, albeit with elements of direct risk to the United States. The George H. W. Bush administration had bequeathed to the Clinton administration a wounded but defiant Saddam Hussein determined to get out from under the oppression of American power and extend his hegemony in the Middle East. Prior to his defeat in 1991, he had pursued those ambitions in wars with neighboring Iran and Kuwait and had launched programs to create nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that would extend his power and make him immune to Iranian, Israeli, and American attack. His nuclear program was sufficiently advanced in 1981 to prompt an Israeli attack to destroy it, and at the end of the Gulf War in 1991, American intelligence agencies were shocked to discover that those programs had advanced further than they had suspected. The first Bush administration imposed an inspections regime to ensure they were destroyed, but over the course of the 1990s Saddam did his best to inhibit the inspectors’ work, and in 1998 he had thrown the inspectors out, prompting the Clinton administration to launch a four-day campaign of bombing and missile strikes on suspected facilities. Thereafter, American intelligence was essentially blind, unable to determine exactly what programs Saddam possessed and how far along they were. Instead, the intelligence community had been forced to speculate. In retrospect, it appears that having earlier erred in underestimating the extent of Iraq’s programs, they now erred in overestimating them. In 2000 the Clinton CIA produced two reports warning that Iraq was “steadily producing WMD capabilities,” and Saddam himself made every effort to portray his programs, including his nuclear weapons program, as further advanced than they turned out to be, presumably to deter the Americans, Iran, and even his own people from moving against him.130

President Clinton and his top advisers regarded the threat posed by Saddam Hussein much as the

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