From the WSJ Opinion Archives
WRITTEN ON WATER
Failing the Test of September 11
Why is George W. Bush a president more of word than of deed?
Last Wednesday, the president was everywhere. But on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, FDR worked quietly in the White House as America battled Japan on Guadalcanal, U-boats on the Atlantic, and Rommel in Tunisia. In the previous 365 days we had quadrupled defense spending and military production, doubled military manpower, turned the Battle of the Atlantic, invaded North Africa in history's then largest amphibious assault, begun the Burma Road, engaged Hirohito's air force, bombed Tokyo, checked the expansion of the Japanese Empire, and triumphed at Midway and in the Coral Sea.
A year after Pearl Harbor, FDR exemplified the probity of an America that knew its enemies had yet to be dislodged from their citadels. Contrast this with the aftermath of the campaign in Afghanistan, a nation on the verge of collapse to which we sent matériel, air power, and a few thousand valorous soldiers to tip the balance of stalemate among primitive armies. Upon our victory there, the hurricanes of self-congratulation and immodesty were equaled only by the vacuum that followed, as the "War on Terrorism" turned into a series of bureaucratic absurdities that attempt little, achieve nothing, and protect no one.
The president has failed the test of Sept. 11. Other than benefiting from the normal intervals between terrorist strikes, and disrupting terrorist networks built to weather disruption, he has done little to change the dynamic that brought us that day. His gratuitous deference to hostile enemy and inconstant ally, his indecision, irresolution, and delay have exposed the nation he dearly loves to unprecedented danger. How can this be?
You cannot lead a nation in war unless you are willing to put the nation on a war footing. The last and only war that we thought we could win without full commitment was the war in Vietnam, which we lost. Strategically, we were forced to half measures by the existence of great and proximate powers--Russia and China--who backed the enemy. No such backers stand behind the enemy now. During Vietnam, we committed the economy to the provision of all that American forces might need. Now they must fight on the cheap, and part of the reason they have not been active is that their echelons, equipment, readiness, and reserves are inadequate to many of the tasks the public has been led to believe they can accomplish effortlessly.
Though the president campaigned to restore the military, he has not. His first defense budget represented virtually no change; the second--after Sept. 11--a minuscule increase; and the third, though much trumpeted, a wholly insufficient one. In the peacetime years of the latter half of the 20th century, the U.S. annually spent an average of 5.7% of GNP on defense; in wartime, 13.3%. Less the purely operational costs of the "war," the president's third budget is 3.1% of GDP. The Clinton administration directed a larger share of America's resources to defense even as it severely degraded the military of which President Bush is supposedly the savior.
When required action does not materialize, delusion often takes its place. It is delusional for this nation, which cannot summon the will even to inspect the baggage in its airplanes, to believe it is capable of remaking the Arab world by reforming its governments, politics, and culture after an imagined conquest by small expeditionary forces equipped with revolutionary weapons that do not yet exist in full. We are at the threshold of a revolution in military affairs that even in its maturity will not obviate the more prosaic infrastructure of which it is a part. The Clinton administration used the promise of one to cheat the reality of the other, and the Bush administration follows suit.
When the president failed to go before Congress in its first joint session after the attack, when he subsequently appeared and failed to ask for a declaration of war, when he failed in that terrible hour to ask for all he needed to win a war that had been foisted upon us, he excited the contempt of our enemies and encouraged them to fight on.
He did not ask America to sacrifice or fight, but to shop. In the days following Sept. 11, he was sitting on a great war horse ready to run, and he dismounted. And every time he was pushed back up by a people rightly incensed and eager to mobilize, he slid off the saddle and started talking. Never have so many war plans been discussed so openly and so long for so little. And we have been checked by the left at home and abroad not only because of the delay but because, from the beginning, the president has staked his positions inexplicably close to theirs. Like his father, who listened to clerks rather than to the rules of war, and broke off the attack, the son has wasted momentum, virtually assuring that the next battle will be fought on the enemy's terms. But this should not be surprising. What kind of war can you fight if you cannot even bring yourself to declare it?
You cannot lead a nation in war if you dare not recognize the enemy. The Islamic world, no stranger to war for the faith, has tentatively renewed its energy of expansion and given rise to those within it who have begun to rekindle its ancient conflict with the West. How far the extremists will carry and extend their base depends upon our reactions, and with each of our equivocations they count a victory.
Among these equivocations is the failure to recognize Saudi Arabia as the ideological, diplomatic, financial, organizational, and strategic center of the new terrorism: ideological in its exportation of intolerant Wahhabism; diplomatic in coordinating opposition to American military action in the Gulf; financial in its subsidy of al Qaeda and other terrorists; organizational in providing personnel, infrastructure, and access to the U.S.; and strategic in that it is the depository of great wealth, the center of mass, and the blocker of crucial routes of invasion.
Terrorism is not diffuse, but has refuges, points of concentration, and headquarters. Afghanistan was only a remote base of Saudi-inspired direct action, and now Saudi Arabia will not permit us to pass through it on our way to neutralize Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, because it must view them, much as we view Britain's nuclear arsenal, as an asset rather than a threat.
Enfolding the Saudis, Syrians, Iranians, and other sponsors of terror in the "coalition" (an ill-conceived attempt to ape the Gulf War, or perhaps a mindless extension of electoral tactics into an even less forgiving arena) assured the perversion and frustration of its aims. Bringing your enemies into coalition to counter them may seem brilliant, but only to some. As with those who are hostile, so with those who waver. Our catty and frightened NATO allies (who in World War II appeased or collaborated with the Germans, or, worse, who actually were the Germans) insist upon multilateralism, and yet they do not deliver it, by, for example, withdrawing support from the Palestinian Authority. The president knows that multilateralism is just another name for the preferences of the European Left, and yet he dignifies it in his consideration and surrenders to its terms rather than challenging them outright. Of course, he is forced to this, having neglected in his first three military budgets to strengthen the U.S. to the point where it could move ahead without endorsement, pulling easily in its wake all the endorsement it might need.
You cannot lead a nation in war unless you are willing to strike the enemy at his heart. With the exception of Afghanistan, the Bush-Powell doctrine of the last year has been: Ignore the enemy's center of gravity, avert your eyes from his citadel, do not go to his heart, busy yourself with lack of preparation, put rhetoric in place of action, and bravely show your paralysis.
U.S. intelligence learned six years ago that Saddam had at least four nuclear implosion devices lacking only fissile material to make them operational. In light of Iraq's multi-billion-dollar bankroll, its accomplished intelligence services, its longstanding relationships with the former KGB and Soviet military, the multiple and recurring traces of fissile-material smuggling, the fact that almost everything in Russia has at one time been for sale, and the successful clandestine transfer to Iraq of SSN-18 guidance systems, how likely is it that six or more years after Saddam got his implosion devices he would not have their cores? And in light of Saddam's history and the destructive potential of nuclear weapons, should not the burden of proof rest upon those who assume his innocence of such potential?
The president has reportedly overridden professional military advice stipulating a minimum of 250,000 troops and three months' buildup for an invasion of Iraq, in favor of 50,000 or so with a few weeks of staging. This is based on the refusal of Saudi Arabia and other Arab "allies" to host operations, and, as reported in The Wall Street Journal, "the hope that the regular Iraqi Army would abandon Mr. Hussein." No army should ever go into battle with even the thought that the enemy will fight for rather than against it. And to commit an expeditionary force of this size, at such a distance, in the face of rapidly forming Arab unity, with the possibility of enforced denial of overflight; the closure of Suez; and the naval, air, and ground-force participation of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and Egypt; plus the certainty of stressed and inadequate U.S. support because of the uncorrected degradation of our forces, would be the imprudent gift to Saddam of a chance he would not have were we to move in strength.
The crux of the problem is the provision of air support without localized basing. Even were we to surge five carriers to the Arabian Sea (putting Taiwan and South Korea at risk), the distance to Baghdad would make aircraft sortie rates insufficient to back up an invasion. Running carriers closer, in the Gulf, would be dangerous if the war spread, and still would not provide the deeper reserves of aircraft if events on the ground did not go according to plan.
We did not hesitate to invade Vichy France as a way to Berlin (or to keep the name of Overlord even were it to have irked some speakers of German), and if the Saudis, so dreadfully complicit in the attacks of Sept. 11, block our urgent purpose in Iraq, we should not hesitate to turn this obstruction and create a suitable base of operations. If they will not act as cooperative allies, they become not only a hindrance but a danger on the flanks of our lines of communication, supply, and attack. This should be unacceptable.
We fought for a year to save Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein. Why will Saudi Arabia, if it is not an enemy, not allow us the same bases from which we protected it, to protect ourselves? What relationship with them, exactly, do we wish to preserve? They are used to buying whatever they need, and over many years they have bought us in many ways. Immediately after Sept. 11, they dropped oil prices. This was more than anti-invasion insurance, it was blood money, and there is only one decent way to return blood money. Ask the widows, widowers, grieving parents, and orphans of Sept. 11. Ask them how grateful they are for the five-month $6 reduction of the price of a barrel of $24 OPEC oil. Ask them if they want to preserve the status quo and stable relations with the country of Osama bin Laden and 15 of his hijackers. And when you have their answer, which you already know, ask the president. Ask him whether he has run a war or built a mountain of paper. Ask why he stopped short after Afghanistan. And ask why, a year after Sept. 11, he is a president more of word than deed.
Mr. Helprin is a novelist, a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.
