RISE OF THE VULCANS:
The History of Bush's War Cabinet
by James Mann
Viking Press, 426 pp, $25.95
Although national security has dominated George W. Bush's presidency, it barely registered as an issue in the 2000 presidential debate. That was fortunate for Bush, because as a Texas governor who rarely traveled abroad and evinced little interest in world affairs, he was at a distinct disadvantage against his vastly more experienced rival, Vice President Al Gore.
Nonetheless, Bush had a ready answer when assailed for the thinness of his credentials as a potential commander in chief: "I've got one of the finest foreign policy teams ever assembled." Since results matter more than resumes, the jury is still out on that claim. But there's no doubt that in Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, and Condolezza Rice, Bush surrounded himself with the GOP's best and brightest on national security.
These are the "Vulcans," as they jokingly dubbed themselves, after the Roman god of fire and forge whose statue greets visitors to Birmingham, Ala., Rice's formerly steel-producing hometown.
According to veteran foreign correspondent James Mann, the Vulcans are not merely the architects of the Bush administration's aggressive security policies; they also have been instrumental to a sweeping transformation over the past 35 years: America's ascent from the depths of post-Vietnam weakness and self-doubt to its current status as the world's sole superpower.
In Rise of the Vulcans: the History of Bush's War Cabinet, Mann, now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, traces the interlacing careers of the Vulcans to weave a gripping tale of that transformation. He renders vivid portraits of the main protagonists: Rumsfeld, a nimble, serenely confident and absolutely ruthless bureaucratic infighter; Cheney, opaque, secretive, and deeply conservative; Wolfowitz, the theorist who constructs the intellectual frameworks for security policy; Powell, a soldier and very political general who became the nation's most popular military figure since Eisenhower; Armitage, a barrel-chested Naval Academy graduate and intrepid warrior turned diplomat; and Rice, another academic turned policy maker and an African-American woman in a man's world.
The Vulcans' rise begins in the mid-1970s against the backdrop of Richard Nixon's resignation, the fall of Saigon, and Henry Kissinger's smothering dominance of American statecraft (he served briefly as both secretary of state and national security adviser to Gerald Ford.) In 1975, President Ford appointed Rumsfeld, 43, the youngest defense secretary and Cheney, 32, the youngest White House chief of staff in U.S. history. Skeptical of detente with the Soviet Union, the duo worked effectively to undermine Kissinger, the gloomy realist who believed that in its weakened state America would have to accommodate other major powers.
During Jimmy Carter's presidency, Paul Wolfowitz, a young Pentagon analyst, helped reorient U.S. security policy for the first time around the goal of preventing any hostile power from dominating the Persian Gulf's oil reserves. Meanwhile, Colin Powell was beginning his meteoric ascent from a disillusioned Vietnam company commander to the top of the Pentagon's pecking order and the White House. During the early 1980s, he and Armitage worked at the Pentagon, where Powell helped Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger craft a new set of principles governing the use of U.S. military power. Designed to prevent a repeat of the Vietnam debacle, the Powell Doctrine, as it came to be known, called for the overwhelming application of military power for clearly defined objectives and an explicit exit strategy. After the Iran-Contra scandal prompted a shake-up of Ronald Reagan's security team, Powell was named national security adviser. Condoleeza Rice made her debut later, as a protigi of Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush.
In the first Bush administration, all the Vulcans except Rumsfeld held key national security posts. As the Soviet Union unraveled, they began drawing the outlines of America's post-Cold War security strategy. With Cheney as defense secretary and Powell as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Vulcans planned and executed the first large-scale U.S. military operations since the Vietnam war. The 1989 intervention in Panama, says, Mann, was a watershed. About 20,000 U.S. troops invaded the country, quickly overwhelming resistance, nabbing the drug-dealing dictator Manuel Noreiga, and restoring democracy to boot. That unalloyed success helped to pave the way for the Persian Gulf War, which turned out to be the mother of all confidence-reviving battles for the U.S. military. After a six-week bombing campaign, a U.S.-led coalition routed supposedly formidable Iraqi ground forces in just 100 hours, while suffering negligible casualties. The world caught the first glimmerings of the new, "netcentric" style of warfare that would come to full bloom a decade later in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Pentagonese, netcentric means organizing U.S. forces not around weapons platforms but around a highly computerized network of satellite communications that allows for precise, real-time targeting and "information dominance" of the battlespace.
But if the Gulf War, as the first President Bush said, heralded a "new world order" based on preponderant American power, it also presaged conflicts among the Vulcans that were to resurface during the second Bush administration. Reprising their 1990 roles, Cheney and Wolfowitz in 2002 were the most ardent advocates of invading Iraq, while Powell and Armitage, the Vulcans with actual combat experience, once again played the reluctant warriors. In fact, the Iraq invasion violated nearly every tenet of the Powell Doctrine: The invading force was small and fast, rather than overwhelming; the ostensible objective, dismantling weapons of mass destruction, morphed into regime change when those weapons failed to materialize; and, the White House committed itself to an open-ended mission of nation-building with no exit in sight.
As the internal tensions over Iraq make clear, the Vulcans are hardly monolithic
in their views. Mann's book, morever, belies the notion, propagated by conspiracy
theorists and glib media reports, that neoconservatives have hijacked U.S.
foreign policy. Of the Vulcans, only Wolfowitz truly fits the classic neoconservative
profile of staunchly anti-communist former Democrats and intellectuals (like
his friend Richard Perle) who clustered around the late Sen. Henry (Scoop)
Jackson (D-Wash.) in the late 1970s before defecting to Ronald Reagan in 1980.
While no less hawkish, Cheney and Rumsfeld are conservative nationalists who
do not seem fully to share the neocons' moral idealism, especially when it
comes to spreading democracy around the world.
In fact, the neocon preference for idealpolitik over realpolitik illuminates their roots in the muscular liberalism of Harry Truman and John Kennedy. As public confidence today erodes in the Bush administration's handling of Iraq, there's a growing rift between neocon theorists like William Kristol and Robert Kagan and more traditional conservatives who believe America should fight only to protect "hard" national interests, not for what they see as messianic visions of a world transformed by American power.
For all their experience, the Vulcans exhibit some curious blind spots. One is their almost total indifference to international economics. Another is their poor grasp of the limits of military power. During the 1980s and 1990s, with Russia weak and China still emerging as a potential great power, Wolfowitz and other GOP analysts began to propound a new doctrine calling for permanent American military superiority. With no peer competitor in sight, they said, the United States should assert its power to "shape the security environment." This strategy looked beyond the post-war edifice of alliances and collective security institutions toward a new way for America to lead the world -- by creating faits accomplis that other nations would have to accommodate. As Wolfowitz said in 1997: "A willingness to act unilaterally can be the most effective way of securing effective collective action." But in reality, as Mann points out, this theory has proved spectacularly wrong in the case of Iraq. "Stronger American policies," he notes, "produced stronger opposition."
In fact, a tendency for headstrong unilateralism marked the Bush administration even before the 9/11 terror attacks. Afterward, the hawkish Vulcans were determined to settle accounts with Saddam Hussein, whom they regarded as essentially a terrorist who controlled an entire oil-rich country. And they were convinced that by showing the requisite determination, they could overcome resistance from allies and the international community in general. Instead, they contributed to the worst breakdown in transatlantic relations since the Suez crisis, a split that has paralyzed the United Nations and contributed to an unprecedented wave of anti-American sentiment in the world.
As Mann notes, Iraq encapsulates key aspects of the Vulcan world view: the need for bold assertions of U.S. power, the belief that America is always on the right side of history, a somewhat naive optimism that others share that view, and a reluctance to let relationships with other countries constrain our strategic independence. The great question now, of course, is whether the Vulcan project will come to grief in Iraq.
Democrats are likely to object that Mann's account leaves them out almost entirely and gives the Vulcans far too much credit for the resurgence of American power. They have a point: the rebuilding of U.S. strength started late in the Carter years, and the armed forces that the Vulcans used to brilliant effect in Afghanistan and Iraq were modernized and strengthened on President Bill Clinton's watch. Nor did the New Democrats shrink from the vigorous use of U.S. power, intervening in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo without, as Mann points out, seeking any permission slips from the United Nations.
Still, the Vulcans' rise is a ringing reminder of the Republicans' post-Vietnam dominance of defense and foreign affairs. That advantage helps to explain their having won six of the nine presidential elections since 1968. With national security back in the center of U.S. politics, Democrats might consider cultivating some Vulcans of their own.
