Exclusive: Having It Both Ways: A Review of Campbell and O’Hanlon’s Hard Power: The New Politics of National Security
Jeff Breinholt


Author: Jeff Breinholt

Date Published: 2007-07-18


Fighting global terrorism and wars requires a variety of weapons which both political parties historically have used.  In his review of “Hard Power,” FSM Contributing Editor Jeff Breinholt reveals the book’s view whether either party has emerged as a winner in this arena and, importantly, what we should do now. 

 

Having It Both Ways

A Review of Campbell and O’Hanlon’s

Hard Power: The New Politics of National Security

 

By Jeff Breinholt

 

In discussions of American counterterrorism efforts, I have argued a concept so often that I sometimes feel like the town crier.  Because my efforts have generated so little discussion, I often feel more like the village idiot.  The concept has to do with the multi-tool nature of the U.S. national security arsenal, where these tools do not obtain their full expression unless we train our tool masters to push hard internally for the opportunity to employ them. The best illustration of what I have been saying might come from the following hypothetical exchange:

 

Q:         Is international terrorism a military or a law enforcement problem?

A:         Yes.

 

This exchange is designed to show that counterterrorism is not an “either/or” proposition, and that we need not choose between the various tools by mistaking them as being mutually-exclusive.  Certain challenges - like the presence of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan sworn to frustrate U.S. efforts to dislodge Osama Bin Laden - cry out for military options.  Others - the detection of an American citizen in Cleveland plotting to blow up a building, for example - look like law enforcement problems.  However, we are free to mix and match its tools as we see fit.   We can even mix and match against the same target.  We can both indict Bin Laden and treat him as a fugitive from justice, while we continue our military campaign in Afghanistan.  Terrorism can be an object for both military and law enforcement action at the same time.  There is no advantage in having masters of certain tools stand down. They are, after all, free to remain in place and draw a government salary.

 

Viewed this way, I tend to cringe when I hear complaints that one political party has historically viewed terrorism as “merely” a law enforcement problem, and not just because I am trained as a prosecutor.  The allegation makes the mistake of viewing counterterrorism as a game where one of the players must announce before it starts the particular tool on which he will rely throughout the play, and that the players can never deviate as circumstances change.  In reality, there is no referee waiting to throw a flag.  We have the ability to use our tools simultaneously.  That is what they are designed for.

 

I have a similar negative reaction to claims that the U.S. lost the war in Iraq.  To be clear, we won the war in spades.  In fact, we never came close to losing it.  The American military, in its Shock and Awe campaign, did exactly what it wanted to do, with little pushback from the enemy army.  Saddam Hussein was routed from his power, and his Baathist regime handily defeated.  It was only after we won the war in Iraq that things started falling apart.  We did not lose the war, as much as we lost the peace, because we did not choose the right people and appropriate levers of statecraft to assure victory.  That is, we did not act like a country that can do many things well at the same time.

 

These observations are promoted in book I was grateful to receive as a gift from my kids on Father’s Day 2007: Hard Power: The New Politics of National Security, by Kurt M. Campbell and Michael E. O’Hanlan (Basic Books 2006).  It comes close to what I have been arguing for some time, both about the advantage of various tools of statecraft and the Iraq War.  I liked it so much I read it in one sitting.

 

Hard Power is a cool assessment of what we need to do now, as acrimony between the two major American political parties over Iraq drives us further into the quagmire.  Although it seems designed to give advice to the Democratic Party in order for it to attain electoral dominance once again, I would not describe it as a particularly partisan tract.  What Campbell and O’Hanlan describe as having occurred over the last decade goes a long way towards explaining how both parties got into this mess.  More significantly, their prescriptions, if followed, offer a way out.

 

So we won the war in Iraq, but lost the peace.  Why did this happen? To the authors, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are entirely blameless.

 

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Democrats turned against the Vietnam War with such venom that today it is hard to remember that they were previously the party that reveled in exporting American values (and projecting military force), while the Republicans were dominated by isolationists.  How bad was this Democratic disaffection? In A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right and the 1960s, Rebecca Hatch recounts parallel lives of the student activists involved in the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), including what happened to them after the sixties ended.  Hatch quotes the reaction of a former SDS member at Stanford, thereafter employed as an IBM deliveryman, to the terrible events of 1975 Saigon, as South Vietnamese fell to their deaths trying to grab hold of the American choppers vacating the U.S. Embassy:

 

“Everywhere I turned the headlines were screaming… ‘Saigon Falls, Saigon Falls.’  So here I am this delivery truck driver, I mean [the war] utterly, completely changed my life in a dramatic fashion, other than getting killed, that I can remember.  I just spent the whole day crying.  I was just thrilled that the war was over, reflecting on what it had been ... Kind of like my childhood . . . this was indelibly etched.  It was [an] amazing day, amazing day . . . I was totally joyful.  It was like a complete victory for everything we had done.”

 

Was this former SDS member speaking for Democrats?  Probably not.  However, here I agree with Campbell and O’Hanlon:

 

The Vietnam War, probably more than any other foreign-policy issue, led to the remarkable reversals of fortune experienced by the Democrats and Republican parties on matters of national security ever since.  The war’s most ardent opponent, exemplified by intellectuals of the New Left, defied America’s “arrogance of power” and questioned the entire strategy of containment that had served as the lodestar of Democratic foreign policy since the Truman Administration.

 

Campbell and O’Hanlon note that George McGovern went down in flames in 1972, in part because the American public did not buy his cautionary tale about the dangers of American imperialism, knowing very well that the U.S. had never aspired to an “empire” and refusing to believe that we were as guilty as the Soviets in perpetrating the Cold War.  When Watergate led to the election of Jimmy Carter, his emphasis on human rights, nuclear cutbacks and negotiations combined with disastrous foreign policy failures, caused the public perception to be that Democrats were weak. The only Democratic president elected since then seemed to sidestep the issue by stressing the importance of the economy, and Bill Clinton promptly found his relationship with the military strained after he chose as his first major initiative the integration of open homosexuals into the ranks.  This chain of events culminated 2002, when only a small portion of the American public trusted the Democrats to handle terrorism sufficiently, and George W. Bush enjoyed a 73 to 18% advantage in popularity among active-duty military people.  John Kerry’s campaign mantra - “wrong war, wrong place, wrong time” - did not help.

 

            The Republicans, of course, were part of this dangerous loop, in part because what had worked for them in the past.  Reagan seized on these Carter failures, and succeeded in his ability to translate military strength into national pride.  In the process, he was not shy about insisting on American unilateralism, a legacy that would result in the GOP looking askance at such institutions as United Nations and such activities as peacekeeping.  This ethos was adopted by young neoconservatives who got their start in the Reagan years, and who found a way to discount Clinton's military successes like in Kosovo by pointing out that they were done under the auspices of such multilateral regimes.

 

How did this cause us to lose the peace in Iraq?  In 2003, the Republicans, including a President who carried states with the largest active-duty military populations, were loathe to have the military perform such non-military functions as stabilizing and reconstruction efforts for a conquered nation, or what is referred to in the U.N. as "nation building." Such work was considered "soft" by conservative think tanks, and beneath of the role of the American soldier - to win wars.

 

To Campbell and O’Hanlon, it was a recipe for disaster.   The Republicans share a large portion of the blame for the way the situation in Iraq has played out.  The Bush Administration tended to dismiss virtually every aspect of the Clinton administration legacy, even on issues such as nation-building and civil reconstruction where we enjoyed the benefit of some experience, even if it meant relying on members of a prior Administration or people who worked for NGOs and multilateral organizations.  To the authors, the deep division within the Administration was exacerbated by the President siding with the wrong people who were making wrong arguments.  As they note, “Invading another country with the intention of destroying its existing government, but without a serious strategy for providing security thereafter, defies logic and falls short of the proper professional military standards of competence. That the Bush Administration did this in Iraq was, in fact, unconscionable.” Because the Administration did not combine its initial application of military force with an integrated civilian plan of transition, the authors claim that it botched one of the most fundamental tests of wielding hard power in the 21st century.  In other words, they treated war fighting and nation building as mutually exclusive, not realizing that we can and should have it both ways.

 

The Democrats, however, are ignoring the obvious in their effort to cash in electorally by their “anything but Rumsfeld” strategy, and they are too focused mostly on missteps in Iraq and not the potential downsides of a precipitous American military withdrawal.  The Democratic success in the 2006 midterm election was, according to Campbell and O'Hanlon, based more on distrust of the Republican war managers rather than the forward-looking Democratic national security policy. They warn the Democrats that they risk worse than the lonely post-Vietnam years if they jigger with the consensus on the U.S. role in the world.  

 

There does appear to be a consensus about this role, even if it is hard to notice.  When I drive around the suburbs of Boston, for example, I notice a number of lawn signs with the words “Not On Our Watch,” a slogan adopted by those who advocate American-led relief in Darfur.  Plenty of people in those homes are surely critical of the Bush Administration’s adventures in Iraq and favor an immediate withdrawal.  When I point out the inconsistency, critics of the Bush Administration tend to say that we did not start the genocide in the Sudan.  In terms of a being a factor in whether we have a moral obligation, I am not sure which way that cuts.

 

            Campbell and O’Hanlon recommend that the Democrats go back to their pre-Vietnam tradition, emulate part of the neoconservative playbook, reemphasizing the value of soft power tools, while understanding the need to couple diplomacy with the threat of military force.  To them in Iraq, there was a real case for overthrowing Saddam Hussein, and the basic decision to confront him was not unreasonable.  They are against setting a time-line for military withdrawals, and insist that we are going to need some component of military on the ground in Iraq for a long time.  They claim we can still succeed, if we move quickly.

 

What should happen long-term?  For one, the U.S. should develop the capacity to engage in stabilization and reconstruction of war-torn countries, and be prepared to use it unilaterally.  This means more resources devoted to counterinsurgency - something Campbell and O’Hanlon note is distrusted by the military, because it is so inherently political  - policing the streets, guarding weapons depots, protecting key infrastructure, maintaining public order policing, institution building, and education.   These are the “soft power” complements to military remedies.  We have these capabilities stateside.  We should use them.

 

Where would these resources come from?  The authors discuss the prospects of reinstituting the draft, but they ultimately conclude that an all-volunteer military remains the way to go.  They argue for building a large, permanent State Department peacekeeping force, which would take these away from the Pentagon.  Mandatory national service is a possibility.  Can we afford it?  Being the world’s last superpower carries obligations as well as benefits, and the authors note that our current spending in Iraq is not much more than what the U.S. incurred on a per capita basis with the Marshall Plan.  In a dangerous world, it may be more costly not to go this way.  In Israel, mandatory service is a great equalizer.  Here, it would likely do wonders to a society that is increasingly fractured along socioeconomic lines. 

 

I can easily envision a large cadre of enthusiastic young people, especially if their service was incentivized with a generous program of college education financial assistance. In my profession, I can easily see young people jumping at the chance to have their college and law school education paid for by the government, in exchange for a commitment to serve as prosecutors or public defenders, or to help the U.S. export its legal system across the world.  These jobs currently have more applicants than positions open.  What prevents us from creating new positions to reward public service?

 

The Democrats also need to embrace the military, which remains one of the most respected of all American institutions, and among the most progressive in hiring and promotion policies.  They need to stop treating people who choose careers in the military as curiosities, or worse.  Is this possible?  Campbell and O’Hanlon note that there is some nostalgia among top military brass for the 1990s, when civilian overseers in a Democratic administration took their recommendations seriously.  Today, two-thirds of the deployable global military consists of U.S. forces.  Meanwhile, peacekeepers typically come from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, in part because their role was not taken seriously by the last remaining superpower.  The recommendations of Hard Power would go a long way towards solving that problem.

 

            Campbell and O’Hanlon are not the only people talking about this solution.  Hard Power offers many of the same solutions as Peter Beinhart offered last year in The Good Fight (although he was more openly partisan, and offered fewer policy specifics), and currently by Dennis Ross in Statecraft (though he refers to the solution as “neoliberalism”).  For my money, Campbell and O’Hanlon are more clear-eyed and persuasive in concluding that the answer lies in unilaterally taking advantage of our multi-tool counterterrorism arsenal, and in ceasing in our tendency to view military solution and the rule of law as mutually exclusive.  Indeed we can have it both ways.  Maybe I can stop feeling like an idiot for constantly pointing that out.

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FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Jeff Breinholt is a Senior Fellow and Director of National Security Law at the International Assessment and Strategy Center (www.strategycenter.net.)  Jeff blogs on the Counterterrorism Blog. 

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