The Bombing: Over-the-Top Statecraft

By Andrew J. Bacevich
Sunday, March 28, 1999; Page B01 of Washington Post

The involvement of the United States in two simultaneous air wars--one in the no-fly zones over Iraq, the second, the current offensive against Yugoslavia--lays bare the troubling implications of the Clinton administration's thinking about the use of force after the Cold War.

Ever since the demise of the Soviet Union deprived the United States of a major adversary, policymakers have wrestled with the problem of how best to employ America's undeniable military preponderance. As Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright famously observed to Gen. Colin Powell in 1993, "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" America's two latest military endeavors reflect this effort to adapt U.S. military power to the conditions of this era: a presidency endowed with quasi-imperial prerogatives, beguiled by the ever-expanding capabilities of air power, and eager to use force for purposes far removed from traditional requirements of national security.

The White House would insist adamantly that neither of the current air campaigns qualifies as a real war. After all, in the gilded decade of the 1990s, the purpose of the United States is not to wage war, but (in the president's words) to harness "the inexorable process of globalization," thereby laying the foundation of a new age of world peace and prosperity. Thus, to define the latest American-led NATO offensive as an act of war is to misconstrue the nature of U.S. intentions. Indeed, the administration's justification for the onslaught against Yugoslavia derives from expectations that it will prevent war. We bomb on behalf of peace; we bomb to change minds.

Despite its ostensible devotion to peace, the Clinton administration has made the use of force routine. Beginning with a cruise missile assault against Baghdad in June 1993 (the first of several all-but-forgotten pinprick attacks against Iraq), Clinton has fought (and lost) a sharp skirmish with Mohammed Farah Aideed in Somalia; occupied Haiti; bombed Bosnian Serbs who defied American efforts to broker a Balkan peace; placed U.S. troops at the forefront of a NATO-led incursion into Bosnia; inaugurated a highly publicized war on terror by obliterating a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan; threatened, postponed and then in December 1998 executed a "major" air campaign against Iraq, the prelude to a war of attrition that has continued ever since; threatened, postponed and now executed a large-scale bombing campaign to punish Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for not signing the peace agreement proffered last month in Rambouillet, France.

By almost any measure, this list of events (which omits confrontations with China and North Korea) constitutes a striking record of military activism in an era of relative peace. What are the implications of all this frenetic activity? An examination of the ongoing two-front air war suggests three important points about how American policy and practice regarding the use of force has evolved.

The first concerns presidential authority in decisions relating to war and peace. Clinton has demonstrated singular agility in discovering some basis for legitimizing his decisions to employ force. For the current operation in the Balkans, the approval of NATO suffices to send U.S. forces into action. In the skies over Iraq, U.N. Security Council resolutions dating from the Persian Gulf crisis of 1990 and '91 provide the necessary mandate. Elsewhere--as with the attack on the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory--powers inherent in the office of the commander in chief provide sufficient authority.

The one place the president studiously avoids looking to sanction military action is the U.S. Congress. Despite the constitutional provision assigning to the legislative branch responsibility to declare war, Congress--as events of the past week amply demonstrate--finds itself all but excluded from decisions regarding the use of force. The job of the House and Senate--not altogether unlike the parliaments in Baghdad and Belgrade--is to endorse presidential orders.

When Bill Clinton came to office, few observers expected that he would be an especially assertive commander in chief. Since 1994, moreover, the president has faced a Congress controlled by a notably antagonistic opposition party and has suffered through a humiliating impeachment. Yet, when it comes to matters of war and peace, Congress today finds itself consigned to a role of passing resolutions to "support the troops." This marginalization of Congress will have large implications. Clinton has established a plethora of precedents regarding the use of force. We can expect that his successors in the Oval Office will exploit those precedents to suit their needs. Demolishing any prospect that a post-Cold War Congress might check the propensity of the executive branch to intervene abroad, Clinton has ensured that the war-making authority of the imperial presidency will endure indefinitely.

Mindful of the need to preserve the prerogatives of that office as well as his own freedom of action, this president has developed a new military doctrine. That is the second point manifested by the ongoing campaigns over Iraq and in the Balkans: The core of that doctrine assigns a vastly expanded role to air power as an instrument of foreign policy.

Befitting the present-day American infatuation with technology and aversion to casualties of any sort, this new doctrine relies not on brute force, but on using high-tech weapons to conduct carefully calibrated, long-range strikes. Precision-guided munitions, whether cruise missiles or bombs lofted from warplanes all but invulnerable to enemy air defenses, have become the administration's weapons of choice.

The appeal of air power derives less from its proven operational utility in adjudicating civil wars or bringing dictators to heel than from the political advantages it offers to an administration operating with one eye fixed on the opinion polls. Relying on air power both reduces the risks of large-scale American casualties, and all but precludes the nightmare of another Mogadishu. Employed with appropriate care and discrimination, air power entails minimal collateral damage of the sort that might complicate relations with squeamish allies or the president's core constituency. Unlike operations by ground forces, air campaigns do not involve enduring commitments or responsibilities. Finally, air power provides assurances that the United States will not be drawn unawares into some quagmire from which it cannot easily extract itself. In essence, as bomber in chief, the president never surrenders his control of the abort mechanism. Should an air campaign fail to live up to its advance billing, he can always declare victory, break station and head for home.

Once persuaded that employing American air power in situations such as Iraq and the Balkans does not qualify as war, the administration likewise absolves itself of the requirement to design its air campaigns with clear military goals in mind. In fact, military objectives become an impediment to new applications for air power; discarding such old-fashioned considerations allows the American military to shift its focus from winning battles to new tasks such as signaling, suasion, punishment and the manipulation of political conditions. This is the third point that the current twin conflicts illustrate.

Although studiously avoiding the vocabulary, the architects of present-day American military strategy in the Persian Gulf are once again flirting with the concepts of controlled escalation and attrition, presumed to have been permanently discredited as a result of the Vietnam War, when Hanoi failed to give in to continued U.S. punishment. But the lessons of Vietnam no longer apply. In the aftermath of Operation Desert Fox, December's much-ballyhooed but modest air offensive, the United States has embarked upon a protracted campaign of limited air action that gradually increases in scope and intensity, and intends over time to contribute--in ways not altogether discernible--to Saddam Hussein's eventual overthrow.

This campaign, we are assured, has been effective. In a narrow sense of ordnance accurately delivered, that may be true. According to Pentagon reports, American air action since Desert Fox has made a shambles of Iraq's air defense system. According to Gen. Anthony Zinni, commander of U.S. Central Command, concentrating on "the part of the system that's most dangerous to us," American and British fighter bombers have disrupted communications links, destroyed radar installations and taken out missile sites--all without sustaining a single loss.

Yet the relationship between this impressive tactical success and the achievement of stated U.S. political objectives remains tenuous at best. Do the Iraqi military assets "most dangerous to us" necessarily correspond to those most valued by Baghdad? Are the targets most vulnerable to U.S. precision munitions those that sustain Saddam's hold on power?

Proponents of the new strategy in Iraq gloss over such awkward questions. Surely, they insist, the losses inflicted on the Iraqi army must hurt. And if the present effort does not suffice, the United States retains the option of using some Iraqi transgression as a pretext to up the ante. Opportunities to escalate, as Kennedy's national security adviser McGeorge Bundy once memorably observed, come along like streetcars: All that's required is patience.

Similarly, although the installations targeted by NATO aircraft in Serbia and Kosovo may belong to the Yugoslav army, the purpose of the campaign is chiefly psychological. The primary purpose of putting the squeeze on Belgrade, according to Clinton, is to convey to Milosevic "the imperative of reversing course," persuading him to reconsider his rejection of the Rambouillet peace agreement. The true aiming point for NATO air crews is the mind of Milosevic (or, alternatively, the minds of his associates who might find it in their own interests to remove Milosevic from power). As Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen has taken pains to emphasize, Operation Allied Force will cease as soon as Milosevic "embraces the principles of Rambouillet."

But what if Milosevic and his lieutenants refuse to buckle? A serious military plan to defuse what Clinton has called a "powder keg at the heart of Europe" would involve readying additional forces and preparing follow-up operations. Consistent with the administration's military doctrine, however, the president has categorically ruled out the possibility of any ground offensive. Instead, the administration is laying the rhetorical groundwork for an alternative, more modest interpretation of its purpose in the Balkans. If bombing fails to budge Milosevic, the administration will declare that its real intention all along was simply to "limit" Yugoslavia's capability of continuing its war of repression against Kosovo. Reminiscent of Operation Desert Fox's squishy objective of "reducing" Saddam Hussein's ability to produce weapons of mass destruction, this is really a face-saving tactic to permit the White House and the Pentagon to suspend operations without actually admitting failure.

Among Republicans and Democrats alike, there are those who find much to applaud in the approach to using force revealed by Clinton's dual air campaigns: a chief executive eager to tap the robust powers of his office, pursuing an assertive foreign policy and willing to flex America's muscle by capitalizing on the high-tech arsenal that embodies the nation's strong suit. Those inclined toward such a view can take heart from the fact that the doomsayers were mostly wrong to predict that Clinton's earlier military adventures would end in disaster. Those failed predictions no doubt have contributed to the public perception, confirmed by recent polls, that the president is a master of statecraft. Maybe so. The rest of us are left wondering, however, when Clinton's luck--and America's--will run out.

Andrew Bacevich is a professor of international relations at Boston University.