4: SELLING A FAILING FOREIGN POLICY
1. He added: “Why forgo the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand on foreign ground?” See “Washington’s Farewell Address, 1796,” at http://
2. Quoted in Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2016), p. 6.
3. See George Stephanopoulos, All Too Human: A Political Education (Boston: Little Brown., 1999), p. 214.
4. See John A. Thompson, “The Exaggeration of American Vulnerability: The Anatomy of a Tradition,” Diplomatic History 16, no. 1 (1992), p. 38.
5. Prominent examples of this argument are Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Dan Reiter and Allan Stam, Democracies at War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
6. One 2010 source estimated that the U.S. government has classified more than a trillion pages of material since the late 1970s. See Peter Grier, “WikiLeaks’ Trove Is a Mere Drop in Ocean of U.S. Classified Documents,” Christian Science Monitor, December 21, 2010; at www
7. See Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo, “Classified Report on the C.I.A.’s Secret Prisons Is Caught in Limbo,” The New York Times, November 9, 2015.
8. See Chaim Kaufmann, “Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas: The Selling of the Iraq War,” International Security 29, no. 1 (Summer 2004); Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush’s America (New York: Penguin, 2006); John Schuessler, Deceit on the Road to War: Presidents, Politics, and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), pp. 105–09; and John J. Mearsheimer, Why Leaders Lie: The Truth about Lying in International Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 49–55. See also Eric Alterman, When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences (New York: Penguin, 2004).
9. For a devastating chronology of the Bush administration’s false statements (along with evidence showing that they were aware that their assertions were untrue), see “Lie by Lie by Lie: A Timeline of How We Got Into Iraq,” Mother Jones, at www
10. See John Schuessler, Deceit on the Road to War, p. 3.
11. See Bob Woodward, “McChrystal: More Forces or Mission Failure,” The Washington Post, September 21, 2009, at www
12. In addition to the well-known case of Chelsea Manning, the army corporal who gave WikiLeaks a trove of diplomatic documents, the U.S. government has also prosecuted the journalist James Risen of The New York Times (who allegedly disclosed classified information about the NSA), former NSA official William Drake, former CIA official John Kiriakou (who served a prison term for confirming to journalists that the agency had tortured prisoners), former State Department employee Peter Van Buren (who put a link to a previously released WikiLeaks report on his blog), former TSA air marshal Robert MacLean (who gave reporters unclassified information about a TSA decision to cancel heightened security measures), and former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General James “Hoss” Cartwright (who pleaded guilty to confirming the U.S. cyber campaign against Iran to a journalist and lying to the FBI and was subsequently pardoned by President Obama). On these various cases, see Peter Van Buren, “Leaking War: How Obama’s Targeted Killings, Leaks, and the Everything-Is-Classified State Have Fused,” TomDispatch, at www
13. David Pozen argues that this behavior is an “adaptive response to key external liabilities—such as the mistrust generated by presidential secret-keeping and media manipulation—and internal pathologies—such as overclassification and fragmentation across a sprawling bureaucracy—of the modern administrative state.” See David Pozen, “The Leaky Leviathan: Why the Government Condemns and Condones Unlawful Disclosures of Information,” Harvard Law Review 127 (December 2013), p. 518.
14. See Benjamin I. Page with Marshall Bouton, The Foreign Policy Disconnect: What Americans Want from Our Leaders but Don’t Get (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 220.
15. As Page and Bouton put it, “[E]ven electorally mindful politicians [may] slight the preferences of the mass public and instead respond to the intense preferences of well-organized interest groups, activists, and money givers. The diffuse and uncertain threat posed by foreign policy–oriented voters may often be less intimidating … than concentrated pressure and tangible threats of retribution from party activists, interest groups, financial contributors, and business threatening disinvestment from the United States,” Foreign Policy Disconnect, p. 221.
16. Groups opposing the deal were far better funded (with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its allies reportedly spending upward of $40 million to counter the deal), but pro-agreement organizations such as the antinuclear Ploughshares Fund were able to organize a potent coalition of experts and former officials to support it. See Elizabeth Drew, “How They Failed to Block the Iran Deal,” New York Review of Books, October 22, 2015.
17. See Cindy Boren, “Report: At Least 50 Teams Were Paid by Department of Defense for Patriotic Displays,” The Washington Post, November 15, 2015; and John McCain and Jeff Flake, Tackling Paid Patriotism: A Joint Oversight Report, at www
18. Walter Lippmann, The Stakes of Diplomacy (New York: Henry Holt, 1915), p. 51.
19. Until very recently, anyone who questioned the U.S. embargo on Cuba or called for a sustained rapprochement with Iran was likely to be treated as a pariah as well.
20. A good example of this kind of misrepresentation is Richard Haass’s op-ed “The Isolationist Temptation,” The Wall Street Journal, August 6, 2016.
21. See Stephen M. Walt, “Give Peace a Chance,” Foreign Policy, October 10, 2015, at http://
22. See Leslie H. Gelb with Jeanne Paloma-Zelmati, “Mission Not Accomplished,” Democracy 13 (Summer 2009).
23. Between 2009 and 2013 McCain and Graham were the two most frequent guests on Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week, Fox News Sunday, and State of the Union, appearing ninety-seven and eighty-five times respectively. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Rogers were the fifth and sixth most frequent guests. The only frequent guest who consistently represented a noninterventionist perspective was The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, but she appeared a mere twenty-two times. See David Leonhardt, “The Upshot: Sunday Talk Show Guests,” at www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/05/upshot/05up-sundayguests.html?_r=0. See also: Derek Willis, “Congressional Conservatives Tip Scales to the Right on the Sunday Shows,” at www
24. It is revealing, for example, when a trio of New York Times columnists—Roger Cohen, David Brooks, and former managing editor Bill Keller—take to the op-ed pages to warn of the perils of isolationism, and the contributing writer Sam Tanenhaus hosts a video on the Times website comparing critics of U.S. intervention today to such isolationists as Charles Lindbergh and the antiwar presidential candidate George McGovern. See Bill Keller, “Our New Isolationism,” The New York Times, September 8, 2013; Roger Cohen, “An Anchorless World,” The New York Times, September 12, 2013; David Brooks, “The Leaderless Doctrine,” The New York Times, March 10, 2014; and “Think Back: America and Isolationism,” at www
25. See Patrick Porter, “Why U.S. Grand Strategy Has Not Changed: Power, Habit, and the Foreign Policy Establishment,” International Security 42, no. 4 (Spring 2018). Porter’s discussion of this point is based on Elliott Negin, “News Media Coverage of the Defense Budget,” in Leon V. Sigal, ed., The Changing Dynamics of U.S. Defense Spending (London: Praeger, 1999).
26. Michael Glennon, National Security and Double Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 93.
27. David Barstow, “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand,” The New York Times, April 20, 2008, and idem, “One Man’s Military-Industrial Complex,” The New York Times, November 30, 2008. See also Lee Fang, “Who’s Paying the Pro-War Pundits?” The Nation, September 12, 2014.
28. There is good evidence that embedded reporters portray the military more favorably than non-embedded reporters do, subtly reinforcing public support for military campaigns that may or may not be going as planned. See Michael Pfau, Elaine M. Wittenberg, Carolyn Jackson, Phil Mehringer, Rob Lanier, Michael Hatfield, and Kristina Brockman, “Embedding Journalists in Military Combat Units: How Embedding Alters Television News Stories,” Mass Communication and Society 8, no. 3 (2005); and Michael Pfau, Michel Haigh, Mitchell Gettle, Michael Donnelly, Gregory Scott, Dana Warr, and Elaine Wittenberg, “Embedding Journalists in Military Combat Units: Impact on Newspaper Story Frames and Tone,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 81, no. 1 (Spring 2004).
29. See Paul Farhi, “At the Times, A Scoop Deferred,” The Washington Post, December 17, 2005; David Folkenflik, “New York Times’ Editor: Losing Snowden Scoop ‘Really Painful,’” NPR Online, June 5, 2014, at www
30. Prominent examples include James Risen, Ken Silverstein, Glenn Greenwald, Jane Mayer, Jeremy Scahill, and Dana Priest.
31. See Thompson, “Exaggerating American Vulnerability”; and Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). On this general phenomenon, see Peter Scoblic, Us vs. Them: How a Half-Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America’s Security (New York: Viking, 2008); Christopher Preble and John Mueller, eds., A Dangerous World?: Threat Perception and U.S. National Security (Washington, DC: CATO Institute, 2014); and Trevor Thrall and Jane Cramer, eds., American Foreign Policy and the Politics of Fear: Threat Inflation since 9/11 (New York: Routledge, 2009). “Threat-mongering” is also discussed in Mearsheimer, Why Leaders Lie; and Schuessler, Deceit on the Road to War.
32. See Samuel Wells, “Sounding the Tocsin: NSC-68 and the Soviet Threat,” International Security 4, no. 2 (1979).
33. The phrase was that of Richard Nixon, who justified the invasion of Cambodia in 1970 by saying, “If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.”
34. NSC-68 (“U.S. Objectives and Programs for National Security”), reprinted in John Lewis Gaddis and Thomas Etzold, eds., Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 404; also pp. 389, 414, and 434. I discuss balancing and bandwagoning at length in The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), especially chap. 5.
35. See Max Fisher, “The Credibility Trap,” Vox.com, at www
36. To be precise, Obama said that he would not strike Syria without congressional authorization. Prior to the vote, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) warned that a “vote against the resolution … would be catastrophic, because it would undermine the credibility of the United States of America and of the President of the United States.” See Zeke J. Miller, “McCain: Vote Against Syria Strike Would Be ‘Catastrophic,’” Time, September 2, 2013, at http://
37. See in particular Daryl Press, Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military Threats (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); and Jonathan Mercer, Reputation and International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).
38. The domino theory is perhaps the most obvious example of this type of reasoning: it argued that a single setback (or even a voluntary U.S. withdrawal) might trigger a lengthy cascade of defections and defeat and eventually leave the United States isolated and beleaguered. On its flaws, see Jerome Slater, “The Domino Theory and International Politics: The Case of Vietnam,” Security Studies 3, no. 2 (1993); idem, “Dominos in Central America: Will They Fall? Does It Matter?” International Security 12, no. 2 (Fall 1987).
39. See Walt, Origins of Alliances, chap. 8.
40. Nan Tian et al., “Trends in Military Expenditure 2016,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (2017), at www
41. Given prior U.S. actions in the region and its repeated threats to overthrow the clerical regime, it is hardly surprising that Iranian leaders have contemplated acquiring a nuclear deterrent. Iran could not do so as long as the JCPOA remained in force, however, and it would take upward of a year for it to build a nuclear bomb if it tried.
42. See Stephen M. Walt, “The Islamic Republic of Hysteria,” Foreign Policy (January/February 2018), at http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/01/16/the-islamic-republic-of-hysteria-iran-middle-east-trump/; and Michael Wahid Hanna and Dalia Dassa Kaye, “The Limits of Iranian Influence,” Survival 57, no. 5 (September 2015).
43. See John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart, Terror, Security, and Money: Balancing the Costs and Risks of Homeland Security (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); idem, Chasing Ghosts: The Policing of Terrorism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
44. “Hagel: ‘ISIS Beyond Anything We’ve Seen, U.S. Must Get Ready,’” Fox News, August 22, 2014, www
45. “Statement by Director Brennan as Prepared for Delivery Before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,” June 16, 2016, at www
46. Since 2014, “ISIS-related” attacks outside its home base have killed roughly two thousand people worldwide, mostly in the Middle East, and only sixty-five in North America. See “ISIS Goes Global: 143 Attacks in 29 Countries Have Killed 2,043,” at www
47. See Sam Mullins, “The Road to Orlando: Jihadist-Inspired Violence in the West, 2012–2016,” CTC Sentinel 9, no. 6 (2016).
48. See Kenneth Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York: Random House, 2002). Pollack also wrote several op-eds and made numerous media appearances supporting the invasion. For a critique, see John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, “An Unnecessary War,” Foreign Policy, November–December 2002.
49. See “Ex-CIA Head: Iran Is Genocidal, Theocratic, Imperialistic, Totalitarian,” June 5, 2105, at www
50. Bernard Lewis, “August 22,” The Wall Street Journal, August 6, 2006.
51. For examples, see Walt, Taming American Power, pp. 83–98.
52. Quoted in Leslie H. Gelb, “In the End, Every President Talks to the Bad Guys,” The Washington Post, April 27, 2008.
53. For an overview, see Robert S. Litwak, Rogue States and U.S. Foreign Policy: Containment After the Cold War (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000).
54. W. Anthony Lake, “Confronting Backlash States,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 2 (March–April 1994).
55. See David Frum, The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 232–33.
56. See in particular Norman Podhoretz, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism (New York: Vintage, 2008).
57. See Carl Conetta and Charles Knight, “Post–Cold War US Military Expenditure in the Context of World Spending Trends,” Briefing Memo No. 10, Project on Defense Alternatives (1997), at www
58. See, for example, Matthew Kroenig, “Time to Attack Iran,” Foreign Affairs 91, No. 1 (January-February 2012).
59. During its initial campaign to oust the Taliban and capture Osama bin Laden, for example, the Bush administration preferred to run the war on its own and reject proffered help from NATO. This decision was rooted in the experience of the Kosovo War, when many U.S. commanders felt their ability to prosecute the war was undermined by the need to obtain approval from America’s NATO allies. As one Pentagon official put it in 2002, “The fewer allies you have, the fewer permissions you have to get.” See Elaine Sciolino and Steven Lee Myers, “Bush Says ‘Time Is Running Out’: U.S. Plans to Act Largely Alone,” The New York Times, October 7, 2001.
60. The situation reverses balance-of-power logic: the more (weak) allies the United States acquires, the more places it has to protect and the more its military requirements grow. Nowhere is this clearer than with NATO’s new Baltic members, who are militarily weak and difficult to defend. The pledge to defend them was undertaken on the assumption that it would never have to be honored. Let us hope so.
61. See Erich Lichtblau, “FBI Steps Up Use of Stings in ISIS Cases,” The New York Times, June 7, 2016; Glenn Greenwald, “Why Does the FBI Have to Manufacture Its Own Plots If Terrorism and ISIS Are Such Grave Threats?” The Intercept, February 26, 2015; Risa Brooks, “Muslim ‘Homegrown’ Terrorism in the United States,” International Security 36, no. 2 (Fall 2011); John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart, “How Safe Are We?” Foreign Affairs 95, no. 5 (September/October 2016); and idem, “Misoverestimating ISIS: Comparisons with Al Qaeda,” Perspectives on Terrorism 10, no. 4 (August 2016).
62. In 2012, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned that a cyberattack could “shut down the power grid across large parts of the country,” and other experts warned of a “cyber Pearl Harbor” and other devastating attacks that could damage key civilian infrastructure or inflict a decisive military defeat. See Ted Koppel, “Where Is America’s Cyberdefense Plan?” The Washington Post, December 7, 2015; Nicole Perlroth, “Infrastructure Armageddon,” The New York Times, October 15, 2015; and Richard Clarke and Robert Knake, Cyberwar: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It (New York: Ecco, 2010).
63. Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum, The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones, Confronting a New Age of Threat (New York: Basic Books, 2015), pp. 6–7.
64. For a sober and serious analysis of the cyber domain and its impact on world politics, see Lucas Kello, The Virtual Weapon and International Order (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017).
65. See Scott Shane, “The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election,” The New York Times, September 7, 2017; Mike Isaac and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Russian Influence Reached 126 Million Through Facebook Alone,” The New York Times, October 30, 2017.
66. See Alexis Madrigal, “What Facebook Did to American Democracy (and why it was so hard to see it coming),” The Atlantic, October 12, 2017, at www
67. Paul Pillar, “Russia Had a Lot to Work With: The Crisis in American Democracy,” The National Interest, January 9, 2017, at http://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/russia-had-plenty-work-the-crisis-american-democracy-18999?page=3.
68. This incident provided the title for Ronald Suskind’s The One-Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).
69. See Jack L. Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), p. 72.
70. See Chase Madar, “The Anti-Warrior,” The American Conservative, March 18, 2014.
71. Steven Erlanger, “Saudi Prince Criticizes Obama Administration, Citing Indecision in Mideast,” The New York Times, December 15, 2013.
72. As one Japanese defense expert put it, “The Obama administration is not doing such a good job maintaining its credibility … [Obama’s blurred “red line” in Syria showed] “a lack of commitment, determination, coherence and consistency … If you are a superpower symbolism is very important.” See John Lash, “Calling America, from Asia,” Star-Tribune, April 18, 2014, at www
73. He added, “I think the Saudis, the Emirates, the Egyptians, many in that part of the world no longer have confidence in the United States.” See ABC News, “This Week Transcript with Former Vice-President Dick Cheney,” October 27, 2013, at http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/week-transcript-vice-president-dick-cheney/story?id=20687048. Yet all these states continued to rely on U.S. support and protection.
74. See Haass, “Isolationist Temptation.”
75. According to the Obama administration’s 2015 National Security Strategy, “there is no shortage of challenges that demand continued American leadership. The potential proliferation of weapons of mass destruction … poses a grave risk … [M]ore diffuse networks of al-Qa’ida, ISIL, and affiliated groups threaten U.S. citizens, interests, allies, and partners … Fragile and conflict-affected states incubate and spawn infectious disease, illicit weapons and drug smugglers, and destabilizing refugee flows … The danger of disruptive and even destructive cyber-attack is growing, and the risk of another global economic slowdown remains … These complex times have made clear the power and centrality of America’s indispensable leadership in the world.” See National Security Strategy 2015, pp. 1–2.
76. Drezner notes several other discredited rationales for military predominance, including claims that it can provide a Keynesian stimulus, that military R & D is an efficient source of technological innovation, or that dominant powers can extract wealth by controlling an “informal empire.” In his words, these arguments “can be dispatched quickly.” See his “Military Dominance Doesn’t Pay (Nearly as Much as You Think),” International Security 38, no. 1 (Summer 2013), pp. 57–58.
77. Thus, the 2010 trade agreement between the United States and South Korea is no more favorable than South Korea’s trade deal with the EU, even though South Korea is a formal U.S. ally and protected (in part) by thousands of U.S. troops. See Drezner, “Military Dominance Doesn’t Pay,” pp. 64–65.
78. An exception is Carla Norrlof, America’s Global Advantage: U.S. Hegemony and International Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), which argues that U.S. security commitments have “purchased goodwill and provided Great Powers with an interest in preserving an American-centered world order” (p. 10).
79. See in particular G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); and Stephen G. Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, and William C. Wohlforth, “Don’t Come Home, America: The Case against Retrenchment,” International Security 37, no. 3 (Winter 2012/13).
80. See Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).
81. The academic theory of “hegemonic stability” argues that open economic orders require a single dominant power that can provide liquidity or generate demand after a slump, but subsequent research has cast significant doubt on this theory. See Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); and Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). For various critiques see Duncan Snidal, “The Limits of Hegemonic Stability Theory,” International Organization 39, no. 4 (1985), and Timothy McKeown, “Hegemonic Stability Theory and 19th Century Tariff Levels in Europe,” International Organization 37, no. 1 (Winter 1983). Drezner concludes that “the literature rejects the notion that hegemony is a necessary condition for an open global economy,” and adds “the existence of a liberal hegemon alone is not a sufficient condition” either. See “Military Primacy Doesn’t Pay,” p. 70.
82. In recent years the United States has devoted as much effort to sanctioning oil producers such as Iraq, Libya, Iran, and Russia as it has to keeping oil and gas flowing. These policies remind us that there is still ample slack in global energy markets and suggest that U.S. officials were not very concerned about access to Middle East energy supplies.
83. On this general point, see Eugene Gholz and Daryl G. Press, “Protecting the Prize: Oil and the U.S. National Interest,” Security Studies 19, no. 3 (2010).
84. On the role of liberal ideology in shaping U.S. foreign policy goals, see Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the 20th Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
85. The evolution of Francis Fukuyama’s views on this subject is instructive. A learned and influential public intellectual, Fukuyama argued in the early 1990s that the entire world would eventually converge on some version of liberal democratic capitalism. By 2016 he was writing increasingly dark and sober essays on U.S. political dysfunction and suggesting that addressing the ills of U.S. democracy would require far-reaching reforms. See in particular “America in Decay: The Sources of Political Dysfunction,” Foreign Affairs 93, no. 5 (September/October 2014).
86. Brooks, Ikenberry, and Wohlforth, “Don’t Come Home, America”; Steve Coll, “Global Trump,” The New Yorker, April 11, 2016.
87. See Sarah E. Kreps, Taxing Wars: The American Way of War Finance and the Decline of Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
88. See Thomas Oatley, The Political Economy of American Hegemony: Buildups, Booms, and Busts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
89. Fareed Zakaria, “The New American Consensus: Our Hollow Hegemony,” The New York Times Magazine, November 1, 1998.
90. See “The Obama Doctrine,” The Atlantic, April 2016.
91. “An Oral History of the Bush White House,” Vanity Fair (February 2009); Eric Schmitt, “Threats and Responses: Pentagon Contradicts Army General on Iraq Occupation Force’s Size,” The New York Times, February 28, 2003.
92. Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq War (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008); and Linda Bilmes, “The Financial Legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan: How Wartime Spending Decisions Will Constrain Future National Security Budgets,” HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series RWP13-006, March 2013 at https://
93. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” Speech to the American Association of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953.
94. Haass admits that a smarter foreign policy would yield domestic benefits, but the central focus of his book is the need to preserve the foundations of U.S. global power. He also points out that focusing on the need for domestic reform “borders on heresy” within the foreign policy establishment. See Foreign Policy Begins at Home: The Case for Putting America’s House in Order (New York: Basic Books, 2013), pp. 1, 8.
95. See The All-Volunteer Military: Issues and Performance (Washington, DC: Congressional Budget Office, 2007), pp. 8–9.
96. See Pew Research Center, “The Military-Civilian Gap: War and Sacrifice in the Post 9/11 Era” (Washington, DC: Pew Social and Demographic Trends, October 5, 2011).
97. See Michael C. Horowitz and Matthew S. Levendusky, “Drafting Support for War: Conscription and Mass Support for War,” Journal of Politics 73, no. 2 (April 2011).
98. See Jeffrey Record, “Force Protection Fetishism: Sources, Consequences, and (?) Solutions,” Aerospace Power Journal 14, no. 2 (Summer 2000).
99. See Tim Harper, “Pentagon Keeps War Dead Out of Sight,” Toronto Star, November 5, 2003; and “Pentagon Lifts Media Ban on Coffin Photos,” Associated Press, February 26, 2009. Harper’s original story mistakenly claimed that the Pentagon had replaced the term “body bag” with the euphemistic “transfer tube”; see Ben Zimmer, “How Does the Pentagon Say ‘Body Bag’?” Slate.com, April 4, 2006, at www
100. See Christopher Gelpi, Peter Feaver, and Jason Reifler, Paying the Human Costs of War: American Public Opinion and Casualties in Military Conflicts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
101. U.S. Department of Army, Field Manual 100-5 (Operations), pp. 1-2; downloaded from www
102. General Tommy Franks’s failure to deploy sufficient U.S. troops at the Battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan, which allowed Osama bin Laden to escape, is an obvious example. See Senator John Kerry, Tora Bora Revisited: How We Failed to Get Bin Laden and Why It Matters Today, Report to Members of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 111th Congress, 1st sess. (Washington, DC: U.S. G.P.O., 2009); and Peter Bergen, “The Account of How We Nearly Caught Bin Laden in 2001,” The New Republic, December 30, 2009.
103. See Mearsheimer and Walt, Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, pp. 65–67.
104. The published report mentions bin Laden’s oft-repeated complaints about U.S. support for Israel, the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, and U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq, but it suggests that his opposition “may have started in reaction to specific U.S. policies but quickly became far deeper.” The cochairs of the commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, later admitted that protests from other commission members led them to downplay the connection between U.S. support for Israel and bin Laden’s anti-Americanism. Moreover, by linking bin Laden and Al Qaeda to anti-Western thinkers such as Sayyid Qutb and tracing its emergence to broader social, economic, and political trends in the Arab world, the report minimizes the extent to which the 9/11 plot was a direct response to specific U.S. policy choices. See The 9/11 Commission Report (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), pp. 48–54; Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission (New York: Knopf, 2006), pp. 284–85; and Ernest May, “When Government Writes History: The 9/11 Commission Report,” History News Network, at http://
105. See Murtaza Hussain and Cora Currier, “U.S. Military Operations Are Biggest Motivation for Homegrown Terrorists, FBI Study Finds,” The Intercept, October 11, 2016, at https://
106. Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), pp. 8–11.
107. As Tim Arango and Eric Schmitt of The New York Times noted in August 2014, “Mr. Baghdadi’s rise has been shaped by the United States’ involvement in Iraq—most of the political changes that fueled his fight, or led to his promotion, were born directly from some American action.” See Tim Arango and Eric Schmitt, “U.S. Actions in Iraq Fueled Rise of a Rebel,” The New York Times, August 10, 2014. On the origins of the Islamic State, see Will McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State (New York: St. Martin’s, 2015).
108. See John Tirman, The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
109. See Phil Stewart and Warren Strobel, “U.S. to Halt Some Arms Sales to Saudi, Citing Civilian Deaths in Yemen Campaign,” Reuters, December 13, 2016.
110. See John M. Broder, “A Nation at War: The Casualties; U.S. Military Has No Count of Iraqi Dead in Fighting,” The New York Times, April 2, 2003; and Mark Thompson, “Should the Military Return to Counting Bodies?” Time, June 2, 2009.
111. Quoted in Anna Badkhen, “Critics Say 600,000 Iraqi Dead Doesn’t Tally,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 12, 2006.
112. See Sabrina Tavernise and Andrew Lehren, “A Grim Portrait of Civilian Deaths in Iraq,” The New York Times, October 22, 2010.
113. Gilbert Burnham et al., “Mortality After the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cross-Sectional Cluster Sample Survey,” The Lancet, October 11, 2006. For a summary of conflicting totals, see C. Tapp et al., “Iraq War Mortality Estimates: A Systematic Review,” Conflict and Health 2, no. 1 (2008).
114. See Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal, “The Uncounted,” The New York Times Magazine, November 16, 2017.
115. See Rob Malley and Stephen Pomper, “An Accounting for the Uncounted,” The Atlantic, December 16, 2017, at www
116. See Tim McGurk, “Collateral Damage or Civilian Massacre in Haditha,” Time, March 19, 2006. One U.S. Marine was eventually prosecuted for the incident; he was convicted of “dereliction of duty” but served no jail time. See Tirman, Deaths of Others, pp. 302–07.
117. Washington also rejected a demand by Médicins sans Frontières for an independent international inquiry into the incident. See Siobhan O’Grady, “Washington and Kabul Stand in the Way of International Probe into Kunduz Attack,” Foreign Policy, October 14, 2015, at https://
118. See Matthew Rosenberg, “Pentagon Details Chain of Errors in Strike on Afghan Hospital,” The New York Times, April 29, 2016.