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Eagles and Owls

Oderint dum metuant.
(Let them hate as long as they fear.)

—Emperor Caligula

The course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others.

—President George W. Bush, 20031

In terrorism’s shadow, the United States today is torn between the temptation to reassert its natural right to independence (whether expressed as splendid isolation or unilateralist intervention) and the imperative to risk new and experimental forms of international cooperation. The desire to reassert hegemony and declare independence from the world emanates from hubris laced with fear; it aims at coercing the world to join America—“you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists!” Call the goal of this desire Pax Americana, a universal peace imposed by American arms: fear’s empire founded in right’s good name, because it matters not if they hate us as long as they fear us. Pax Americana, like the imperial Roman hegemony (Pax Romana) on which it models itself, envisions global comity imposed on the world by unilateral American military force—with as much cooperation and law as does not stand in the way of unilateral decision making and action.

The imperative to risk innovation and forge cooperation, to seek an alternative to Pax Americana, arises out of realism: it issues in strategies aimed at allowing America to join the world. Call this alternative lex humana, universal law rooted in human commonality. Call it preventive democracy. Lex humana works for global comity within the framework of universal rights and law, conferred by multilateral political, economic, and cultural cooperation—with only as much common military action as can be authorized by common legal authority, whether in the Congress, in multilateral treaties, or through the United Nations.

Pax Americana reasserts American sovereignty, if necessary over the entire planet; lex humana seeks a pooling of sovereignties (Europe is one example) around international law and institutions, recognizing that interdependence has already rendered sovereignty’s national frontiers porous and its powers ever less sufficient. Following successful military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq (and before them, in Yugoslavia), the Pax Americana strategy would appear to have the upper hand. But history suggests that American policy is cyclic, and interdependence argues (as will I) that lex humana is the better long-term strategy.

In its diplomatic history, America has pursued both foreign policy on horseback (The “Lone Ranger” approach typified by Teddy Roosevelt) and a “Concert of Nations” approach stressing multilateral cooperation. Since 9/11 at least, the Bush administration (as well as both congressional political parties and a great number of Americans) have seemed to veer ambivalently between the two—approaching the Iraq question, for example, with a dizzying ambivalence that left America as a unilateralist scourge of international law, multilateralism, and the United Nations on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and their multilateralist savior on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Just a few weeks before the American war on Iraq began, polls suggested nearly two-thirds of the American public supported a war only if it was fought with the approval of the United Nations. A couple of weeks into the campaign, two-thirds approved of war without U.N. support.

For all of President Bush’s fervent unilateralist conviction, the country, and to some degree even Bush’s own administration, is divided into antagonistic camps of what I will call not hawks and chickens (or chickenhawks and doves) but eagles and owls. The eagle is a patriotic predator of a particular kind—one, in my metaphor, that takes its prey at midday without much forethought. The owl, though it too is a hunter, is keen-sighted even in a world of shadows and farseeing even at night. Like Hegel’s celebrated Owl of Minerva, it takes flight only at dusk, when it can see the shape of things at the end of the day. The eagles inside the Bush administration include obvious members of the war party such as Vice-President Richard Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, but many others too, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, former Pentagon Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, and Undersecretary of State John Bolton. The owls include not only Secretary of State Colin Powell but the Joint Chiefs of State as well as much of the traditional foreign policy establishment and career officials at the State and Defense Departments.

When the President heeds the cautioning voices of owlish insiders like former chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of State Colin Powell or owlish outsiders like Generals Anthony Zinni and Brent Scowcroft, the eagles can be cajoled into multilateralist cooperation. But they are preternaturally impatient. They are fixed on the sovereign right of an independent United States and of its “chosen people” to defend itself where, when, and how it chooses against enemies it alone has the right to identify and define. Far from clinging blindly to sovereignty, they know the clock is running out on its prerogatives and so they seek to impose America precipitously on the world by all means available including military threats, assassination, and preemptive and preventive war, along with traditional multilateral deterrence and containment. They know what fear can do to America and seek instead to make it America’s weapon.

The Iraq war was a leading example of the eagles’ militancy, but their new strategic doctrine has consequences that go far beyond Iraq. Whatever else it may be called, the Iraq strategy was no onetime adventure predicated on “wag the dog” styles of reasoning. Saddam did not suddenly become our mortal adversary because of oil, because of Israel, because the president wished to avenge his father, because the Republican Party knew how a war would play in diverting attention from the declining economy in the fall ’02 elections and beyond. Rather, the administration’s approach to Saddam Hussein (whose power and so-called weapons of mass destruction previous American administrations helped to secure) was present as a concept well before 9/11 and is rooted in a deep and abiding conception of America’s world as a place of danger for Americans.2

The new strategy predicts war unending: where intimidation (fear’s first option) fails, a succession of armed interventions in country after country after country, from Iraq’s axis of evil partners in Iran and North Korea to countries where shadowy terrorist relationships are intimated, from Syria and Somalia to Indonesia and the Philippines—to which the United States committed a thousand men including three hundred combat soldiers in February 2003. It predicts picking off adversaries wherever they are found, whether in hostile regimes or among friends and allies with terrorist associations such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. It predicts strikes—even “sledgehammer” tactical nuclear strikes—against nuclear powers including countries with million-man armies like North Korea.3 In short, it predicts a war made permanent by a perverse strategy that targets inappropriate but visible national stand-ins (rogue states and evil regimes, for example) in place of appropriate but invisible terrorist enemies.

The administration’s most forceful eagle is neither Vice-President Dick Cheney nor Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, nor the far right wing of the Republican Party, but President Bush himself, a man motivated by an overriding belief in the potency of missionary rationales for and military solutions to the challenges of global insecurity. President Bush has said over and over again since 9/11 that his presidential mandate is defined in his own mind almost exclusively by the war for American security in a perilous world. He has defined that war in terms of a vision of exceptional American virtue and a countervision of foreign malevolence that may strike outsiders as self-righteous and even Manichaean (dividing the world into camps of the good and the evil) but which is powerfully motivating within the United States and which gives to his policies an uncompromising militancy invulnerable to world public opinion.

In the epoch-defining speech he gave at the National Cathedral a few days after 9/11, the president said: “We are here in the middle hour of our grief. But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” At the conclusion of his speech, as Bob Woodward describes it in his semihagiographic account Bush at War, the congregation “stood and sang ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ ” Whether the president “was casting his mission and that of the country in the grand vision of God’s master plan,”4 as Woodward has it, or merely deploying a familiar American moralism, his religious rhetoric has been galvanizing both to his backers and his adversaries. The “axis of evil” phrase was as productive within the United States as it was counterproductive in the rest of the world.5 Where others feared an unprovoked war, President Bush saw a wholly provoked campaign against “evil ones,” a campaign in the name of liberty: “either you believe in freedom and want to—and worry about the human condition, or you don’t.”6

When President Bush was told by CIA Director George Tenet that if he really wanted to take on the countries that supported or harbored terrorists, he’d be facing a “sixty country problem,” the president replied “we’ll pick them off one at a time”7—Pax Americana by gradualist means. This has turned out to be crucial to the Bush administration’s implementation of its new national security doctrine and should give pause to those who believe Iraq is a special case of no predictive value for future American strategy. In truth, the Bush administration has refused to be drawn into a new struggle until it has “picked off” its current adversary. Pressing as Iraq was, it was only a year after 9/11 and well after the military phase of the Taliban campaign was concluded that Saddam Hussein became America’s primary obsession. During the Iraq phase, North Korea was shoved to the side, even when doing so made America’s policy seem incoherent and hypocritical. But impatient eagles were already developing their contingency plans for Korea and perhaps Iran and Syria as well,8 and they were undertaking contingency planning for more remote theaters of possible terrorist war in places like Indonesia and the Philippines. “One at a time” suggests a deeper coherence to what otherwise seems a jumbled set of competing initiatives. It suggests that the Iraq war was not a special case but part of a preventive war plan whose compass was and is the world.

The eagles are unilateralists with attitude, because their self-righteous wrath is steeped in the lore of American exceptionalism. Believing the United States is unique allows hawkishness to roost in virtue, uses innocence to excuse righteous war, and employs sovereign independence to rationalize strategic unilateralism. Thus, in rationalizing the war in Iraq after it was over, President Bush told Coast Guard graduates:

Because America loves peace. America will always work and sacrifice for the expansion of freedom. The advance of freedom is more than an interest we pursue. It is a calling we follow. . . . As a people dedicated to civil rights, we are driven to define the human rights of others. We are the nation that liberated continents and concentration camps. We are the nation of the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift and the Peace Corps. We are the nation that ended the oppression of Afghan women, and we are the nation that closed the torture chambers of Iraq. . . . America seeks to expand, not the borders of our country, but the realm of liberty.9

The anxious owls, seers of the new interdependence, insist that neither safety nor liberty can any longer be secured by even the most powerful of nations if it operates alone and relies exclusively on sovereign military might. However much they prize sovereignty, the owls believe its essence was compromised long before the attacks of 9/11. However much they understand the uses of force, they know its ends must be in conformity with law if its true purposes are to be served. However much they appreciate fear’s hold over men, they know that its power can be used by both terrorists and legitimate states while democracy’s influence belongs to democratic societies alone. And so they pursue diplomacy, cooperation, democratization, and collective security not because they are dovish but because they are realist. At President Bush’s war cabinet meetings, Colin Powell was as fierce in his militancy as anyone after the 9/11 attacks: “This is not just an attack against America, this is an attack against civilization,” he proclaimed. “This is a long war and a war we have to win.” But he spoke as an owl, and added a note of prudence: “We are engaging with the world. We want to make this a long-standing coalition.”10 As wisely as the owls sometimes can speak about the new world of interdependence, they are not always clearly heard in the clamor of patriotic eagles calling for the vindication of sovereign independence and a rule of fear advanced by strategies of shock and awe. When Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and his assistant Paul Wolfowitz started campaigning for an assault on Iraq before the war against the Taliban was even in the planning stage, Powell said to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “What the hell, what are these guys thinking about? Can’t you get these guys back in the box?”11

The eagles’ impatience sometimes outruns the “one at a time” corollary to the preventive war doctrine; for the eagles have sharp, if limited, vision and cannot easily be put back in “the box.” They too may recognize the reality of interdependence, but they regard it with skepticism, being no longer the tough-minded realists of the Cold War years when the delicate balance of nuclear terror dictated prudence and patience: to contain rather than to interdict, to deter aggressive acts rather than to transform aggressive regimes. They have become the new idealists—idealists of unilateralism, and war—believing hegemonic power gives them the means to strike quickly and decisively. In their romantic enthusiasm, they are absolutely certain they can overwhelm interdependence through acts of sovereign self-assertion, override global complexity with nationalist daring, liberate people in bondage by bombing them into submission, democratize women and men who have never known freedom by executing their rulers.

Surprisingly, it is the owls—aging old birds, strategic toughs, and wary veterans—who are the new realists. To them interdependence is less an aspiration, the world as they wish it were, than a pressing reality that mandates working with others through the law because that is the only way interdependence can be survived. They are not awed by fear, whether they use it or experience it used against them. They are less convinced of its efficacy than Machiavelli once was, perhaps because they understand that terrorists live beyond fear’s empire, in a place where death is preferred to life and being dispatched by America’s hegemonic military machine is a badge of honor.

Preoccupied with enforcement and persuaded (rightly) that law is meaningless in the absence of enforcement, the eagles privilege a muscular national sovereignty over treaty making and multilateral cooperation. They hope to rescue independence from the claims of interdependence by acts of sheer will punctuated by deeds of awesome power. When Secretary of State Powell warned President Bush that the coalition which supported his war against al-Qaeda might fall apart if he went after other terrorist groups or states like Iraq, the president—his eagle’s eye gleaming—replied that he was unwilling to be dictated to by other countries: “At some point we may be the only ones left. That’s okay with me. We are America.”12 When urged by allies to secure a second United Nations resolution to move against Iraq, he reminded them that America needed no nation’s permission to defend itself. In the revealing words of an unnamed Bush administration official on the day the Iraqi government submitted its report on weapons to the United Nations at the end of 2002, the United States would not be bound by that report or the UN’s reaction to it: the Iraq problem is not playing out in “a court of law,” he said, “this is a matter for national security.”13

The owls worry that the focus on enforcement will undermine the law it is supposed to strengthen. Just as overzealous cops in the inner city can undermine the law in whose name they swing their clubs, immoderate displays of American military power sap the very notion of the law in whose name that power is being invoked. Iraq’s national museum fell victim neither to Saddam nor the war that vanquished him but to the anarchy in which that war issued on the way (maybe) to democracy. Fear is a great motivator but its achievements are mostly negative. As Edmund Burke said of the terrorist sanctions by which the Jacobins tried to impose their religion of reason on France in 1789, “in the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.”14 The revolution made by the guillotine turned out to be a poor substitute for democracy.

The owls would prefer to rely on a muscular global law secured by cooperation and global governance, on enforced collective security measures rather than unilateral American might. Bob Woodward, “imagining” what Powell is thinking (this is Woodward’s “method”) after President Bush tells Powell he’s ready to go it alone, has Powell muse, “going it alone was precisely what he (Powell) wanted to avoid if possible. He thought that the President’s formulation was not realistic. Without partners, the United States could not launch an effective war even in Afghanistan, certainly not worldwide . . . tough talk might be necessary, but it should not be confused with policy.”15 Fear may elicit silence, even submission; it rarely produces lasting security.

Neither eagles nor owls lack conviction, and both possess compelling arguments. The eagles and owls within the Bush administration have even managed a degree of collaboration that has achieved some remarkable successes, making the obvious evident: power and law need each other if democratic outcomes are to be secured. But the eagles, left to themselves (which is where finally they want to be left) are wrong. Indeed, by virtue of their exceptionalist idealism, which puts them on the wrong side of history, they are wrong disastrously. The preventive war doctrine that is their signature strategy, although it has won bold short-term victories, is potentially catastrophic for America as well as for the world.

The owls are right, if only by dint of their new realism, a realism that recognizes that history can never again be on America’s side unless America is on the side of interdependence. It is not that law can manage without enforcement or that governance is possible without power. The important policy differences ultimately turn on whether power is guided by and conforms to law or aims simply to subdue, pacify, and dominate. In preventive war, it does not, and although the owls inside the administration have not said so explicitly, a realist and effective national security policy and preventive war are fundamentally incompatible.

What is compelling to the eagles (and in this they are right) is that the unrivaled global dominion of American military, economic, and cultural power means there can be no viable world without America: no prosperity for the poor, no rule of law for nations, no justice for peoples, no peace for humankind. Yet what is compelling for the owls (they too are right) is that American hegemony stands challenged by the ineluctable reality of interdependence—a reality signaled by the vulnerability of the most independent and powerful states in the face of globalization. That is to say, by the internationalization of jobs, production, financial capital, and consumption; by the transnational character of public health plagues like AIDS, SARS, and the West Nile virus; by transregional ecological threats like global warming and species extinction; by the globalization of information technology; and by the spread of nonstate-based systems of crime and terrorism. What this means is that there can be no viable America without the world: no safety for American civilians, no security for American investors, no liberty for American citizens, unless there is safety, security, and liberty for all.