In the Gap, There is No Exit Strategy
Here is a portion of a transcript (I encourage you to read the entire thing) between Hugh Hewitt and Thomas Barnett about a chapter in his new book. Here are other interviews regarding previous chapters.
HH: Dr. Barnett, the most arresting part of Chapter 3, and it may be in the entire book, is where you flatly declare that there is no exiting the gap militarily, there is no such thing as an exit strategy, no exit means no exit strategy. What do you mean by that? What should political leaders take away from that reality?
TB: Well, I like to explain that by counter-posing it to the Powell doctrine, which we had across the 1990’s. And if you think about the Powell doctrine, it really came out of the generational experience of the Army officers who came out of Vietnam convinced that mission creep, and nation building, and getting involved in more than they could handle themselves, and the difficulties and the complexities of counterinsurgency, which we’re back at in Iraq, I would note, their way of distancing themselves from that over-commitment, as they saw it, was to say we’re only going to go to do very specific things, and we’re going to use very overwhelming force. And once we do those very specific things, we’re going to leave as quickly as possible, and we’re going to declare that to be a victory, okay? And that was their way of saying I don’t want to get caught up in long term quagmires that they thought had really destroyed the U.S. Army across Vietnam. And it was their way of kind of inculcating a new professional outlook for the all-volunteer force that came out of that experience. You take that mindset, it was very attractive to the American public in the early days of the post-Cold War era, because we weren’t sure, exactly, what measure, because we didn’t have containment anymore, we’re dealing with the Soviets, so how do we decide where to go, and how much we should care about it, and what should be our objective, and how long we should stay, and how fast we should get back. But what we found with the Powell doctrine, which is attractive to all political stripes, and it made the American public feel good, and made the military feel good, frankly made the world feel good, because we were the world’s sole superpower, and they were nervous about under what conditions we were going to use it. We had this series of experiences where we went in, did our short business, basically rounding up the bad guys, shooting the place up, grabbing a few bad guys, leaving as quickly as possible, and then declaring victory. And then we found, boom, five, six years later, we’re back in the same country, same situation, inescapably dealing with the same state failure that gave rise to the violence and the threat or the danger, the genocide or the disaster or whatever. So we found we weren’t fixing things by doing that. And even that didn’t seem to matter to us until 9/11 sort of said you know what? These dangerous, broken, screwed up places are not just creating violence for that country and maybe refugees for the next country over, they’re creating a new breed of transnational terrorists, or giving the opportunities for those sorts of terrorists to thrive and find sanctuary. And those terrorists can eventually reach out and touch you on that basis. So at that point, my argument, and I think the Bush administration’s argument was pretty clear, we can’t put up with this kind of danger anymore. And that’s why I make the argument it’s really the disconnectedness of these countries, and the lack of the legal rule sets that gives rise to the danger.
Laissez-faire about foreign policy? Look, we can't be engaged in the world and hold the clutch in at the same time.
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