The Clinton Doctrine

...The administration only narrowly escaped being saddled with responsibility for a messy operation for which the American public had little appetite...

...Although it had only destroyed part of one building along with janitorial staff, the administration declared it “a devastating blow to Iraq’s ability to plan and carry out [terrorist] operations in the future,” in the words of Vice President Al Gore...

...Perhaps such sensitivity reflects genuinely heightened moral awareness...

...the inflated expectations of success to be gained from “surgical” strikes...

...Two years later President Clinton launched Tomahawk missiles into Bosnia with the intent of sending a similar signal to intransigent Bosnian Serbs...

...Downplaying the significance of the Croat ground offensive that coincided with the missile strikes and had a far more punishing impact, administration officials later asserted that this display of American air power alone had induced the warring factions to begin serious peace talks at Dayton...

...Nor is that all...

...Lawrence F. Kaplan is a Merrill Fellow of Strategic Studies at SAIS...

...The Clinton Doctrine obliges the president and his chief associates to offer assurances that any military action mounted by the United States will endanger as few lives as possible...

...The Clinton Doctrine abjures both...

...For the would-be war managers in the White House, there is no such thing as claiming victory too soon...

...soldiers to help implement a peace agreement brokered in Dayton...

...Writing as early as 1993, Thomas Friedman observed, “Whether in Iraq, Somalia, or Bosnia, America’s military commitments are increasingly being defined by the risk free weapons available, not just strategic goals...

...A year after that, the United States invaded and occupied Haiti to restore JeanBertrand Aristide to power...

...Hardly had the cruise missiles struck their targets than the administration began making the case that the action was a huge success...

...After all, the Clinton national security team had entered office persuaded that the only solution to harnessing the military establishment about which they felt profoundly ambivalent lay in the embrace of “assertive multilateralism...

...Convenience and accessibility supplanted all other criteria...

...During the ensuing ceremonies, the president proudly declared Operation Restore Hope a resounding success...

...Within a month, U.N...

...After the 1993 missile strike on a Baghdad intelligence facility, Clinton was quick to assert that the attack “did in fact cripple the Iraqi intelligence capacity...

...Rather than destroy the forces that had been conducting a reign of terror, the White House gave the green light for an “air offensive” that targeted radio towers, antennas, and air defense systems...

...Opponents of Clinton’s foreign policy, loath to credit the administration with coherence in any enterprise apart from campaigning for reelection, dismiss any suggestion that the administration’s use of force evidences pattern or consistency—that it, in short, represents a new foreign-policy doctrine...

...The tit-for-tat use of force encourages adversaries like Saddam to conclude that they enjoy more room to maneuver than American rhetoric would suggest— as indeed under the Clinton Doctrine they do...

...It follows the June 1993 missile attack on Baghdad in retribution for the Iraqi plot to assassinate former president George Bush...

...These sorts of operations are very much the business of the Air Force and the Navy...

...Rather, the utility of force lies in its capacity to influence, to prod an adversary to see the error of his ways, to encourage him to modify his future behavior...

...In one fell swoop, the fiasco of Somalia demolished the appeal of this theory...

...As for the Army—especially tanks and heavy artillery—the Clinton Doctrine accords it the status of stepchild, rarely permitted to venture far from home and even then, as in Bosnia, kept on a tight leash to preclude it from causing embarrassment...

...The proclaimed effectiveness of military operations conceived under the auspices of the Clinton Doctrine is contrived and largely fanciful...

...This experience provided the template for what became Operation Deliberate Force, the U.S.-led air campaign in Bosnia initiated in the summer of 1995...

...What explains the alacrity with which the Clinton administration uses or threatens to use force...

...This, too, has been evident in the administration’s packaging of the most recent U.S...

...munitions flung at Iraqi air defense sites...

...In its essentials, the Clinton Doctrine resurrects theories tested and found wanting three decades ago...

...the resort to military action as a surrogate for strategic coherence...

...This is hardly surprising: The Clinton Doctrine is not about war...

...In the Balkans, this tactic proved ineffectual for over two years as the Bosnian Serbs repeatedly called the administration’s bluff...

...Whether administration initiatives have terminated the North Korean nuclear program and had any lasting effect in curbing Chinese military adventurism is likewise at least open to dispute...

...The possibility of actual American battlefield losses sets the top brass maneuvering inside the Beltway to ensure that the political leaders, not the military commanders, take the fall...

...3 attack on Iraq...

...mission to Somalia was “over...

...and the faux moral posturing of those who profess shock at the discovery of blood on their hands: We have seen these before...

...So where does this leave the other branches of the armed services...

...At the simplest level, the explanation is fairly straightforward: Contemporary history has confounded the widespread, if naive, expectation that American victory in the Cold War would give way to an era of international peace and harmony...

...Pinprick attacks serve another purpose as well...

...They encompass all people...

...FOR THE WOULD-BE WAR MANAGERS IN THE CLINTON WHITE HOUSE, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS CLAIMING VICTORY TOO SOON...

...Consistent with the original plan of the Bush administration, the United States had transferred formal control of the Somalia operation to the United Nations...

...Finally, there is the issue of presumptuousness...

...The public outcry following that tragedy led the White House to lose control of policy and forced the president to jettison the entire Somalia mission...

...An aversion to bloodshed reflects the accumulation of past experiences rather than the response to any single incident...

...Combat, after all, implies casualties, and according to the reigning conventional wisdom, the American people have zero tolerance for battlefield losses...

...The extended national saga that followed the downing and eventual rescue of one American pilot further muted the enthusiasm for large-scale intervention in Bosnia...

...What does this surprising penchant for military engagement signify for the future...

...Throw in additional episodes like the war scare with North Korea over that country’s shadowy nuclear capability, U.S...

...Four years ago, the idea that smart weapons would provide the foundations for a liberal framework for the unilateral use of military power seemed absurd...

...The actual purpose has been far more modest: to educate...

...Even the idea that a genocide might be underway in Europe could not stir the United States...

...Our mission has been achieved,” Clinton declared within 24 hours of the first missile strike, citing reports that “there has been a withdrawal of the forces, a dispersal of the forces” to bolster his claim...

...Even in conflicts viewed as broadly legitimate, questions of who may be killed and how many killed in the pursuit of a particular aim have become increasingly controversial— recall, for example, the sensitivities aroused by images of the so-called Highway of Death in the waning hours of the Persian Gulf War...

...To contend that military actions conceived and undertaken by this administration have “restored” hope to Somalia, “restored” democracy to Haiti, preserved the integrity of Bosnia, or deterred Saddam Hussein is plainly inconsistent with the facts...

...Thus, the Clinton administration has been presented with a series of challenges that it could hardly have anticipated and to which it has perforce been obliged to respond...

...Although the Clinton Doctrine may not be the product of principled analysis—in matters of national security the president may entertain certain proclivities or inclinations, but he can hardly be said to have evinced firm principles— it is nonetheless real...

...It threatens to ensnarl the United States in troubling moral complications to which it will provide no adequate response...

...We are really powerless to conduct air strikes,” defense secretary William Perry solemnly explained in November 1994, because “the United Nations has not been asking for air strikes...

...Assertive multilateralism” would remove that taint by guaranteeing that henceforth the United States would employ its power only in concert with and on behalf of the “world community...

...The objects of sympathetic consideration are confined not simply to “friendlies,” nor to bystanders, nor even to civilians...

...The purpose of the attacks, according to one senior administration official, was to “send the Serbs a message that we are serious...

...And it has supplanted the Weinberger/Powell Doctrine that moments ago epitomized American practice regarding the use of force...

...In May 1993, U.S...

...Perhaps it is simply an effort to disprove the contention that raison d’?tat and the demands of humanity are inherently at odds with one another...

...In Bosnia, the president launched a quasi-sustained bombing campaign and subsequently dispatched 20,000 U.S...

...The dust-up with Iraq is the latest in a record of frenetic military activism...

...For all these reasons, when it comes to means, the Clinton Doctrine shows a clear preference for what is known as a “stand-off attack...

...Indeed, it is rooted in a determination to unshackle decision makers from war’s iron logic, to devise a new methodology for employing American military power purposefully and effectively and yet with minimal risk and minimal uncertainty...

...But such analysis is mistaken...

...Either “the objective is to overthrow the enemy—to render him politically helpless or militarily impotent . . . or [it is] merely to occupy his frontier districts . . . so we can use them for bargaining at the peace negotiations...

...fusillade directed at Iraqi air defenses provides the clearest illustration of the new American thinking about the role the United States currently assigns its military strength...

...and after pausing briefly the Bosnian Serbs would resume their depredations...

...As a rapid-response force for short-term emergencies—the evacuation of Americans embroiled in civil wars, for example—the Marine Corps retains some modest utility...

...Such self-congratulatory bravado—a theme repeated following the showdown with North Korea and the occupation of Haiti—has been most pronounced in the case of Bosnia...

...More than that, it obliged Clinton to endure sustained public humiliation...

...Moreover, the mere prospect of serious combat is enough these days to activate latent civil-military tensions...

...Since the Gulf War, American defense professionals have entertained themselves with tantalizing visions of an emerging military revolution that will “change the very nature of warfare...

...Days later, in a handsomely conceived photo-op, President Clinton strode across the South Lawn accompanied by a cadre of U.S...

...A. J. Bacevich is executive director of the Foreign Policy Institute at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS...

...Thus, the Clinton Doctrine’s third salient characteristic: When it comes to using American military forces, define success in the narrowest conceivable terms...

...The Clinton Doctrine treats that revolution as fact and as the exclusive property of the United States...

...Launching precision missile strikes from a suitably safe remove, using manned aircraft with precision-guided munitions to destroy fixed installations such as bridges and command posts—while taking care to minimize casualties on the ground—the administration enjoyed what it saw as its greatest military triumph...

...Seemingly tailor-made for an era of post-modern politics, precision weapons also have the potential to increase the propensity of political leaders to resort to violent means...

...According to Clausewitz, war can have one of two purposes...

...and disengage before events have a chance to turn sour...

...Prior to last year’s deployment of ground forces to enforce the Dayton agreement, administration policy adhered to a recurring pattern...

...Clinton’s enthusiasm for precision-guided weapons is extremely ironic...

...It is casebycase-ism,” Richard N. Haass said of the initial action in Iraq...

...Missiles would inform Saddam that his meddling about in Kurdish affairs in northern Iraq was unacceptable, letting him know, according to President Clinton, “that reckless acts have consequences...

...Ultimately, however, this preoccupation with tactical effects undermines U.S...

...Nor is White House thinking about the utility of force simply the product of this latest encounter with Saddam Hussein...

...Our missiles sent the following message to Saddam Hussein,” remarked the president in his statement announcing the Sept...

...Violence, strictly controlled and carefully limited, becomes akin to a communiqu?, albeit one rendered with particular sharpness...

...Almost inevitably, combat involving American forces triggers the much-feared “CNN effect,” with hordes of reporters converging to cover the next Big Story in spectacular, gory detail—and to shape the story to suit their own preconceived notions...

...Indications that the United States restricts itself to what Charles Krauthammer has aptly characterized as “metal-onmetal” attacks undercut the effectiveness of the “message...

...ambassador Madeleine Albright, was “a message directed at Iraq . . . a message about terrorism and the fact that we will not allow it...

...When you abuse your own people or threaten your neighbors, you must pay a price...

...Yet in a more fundamental sense, the wider scope of action permitted by this modest definition of purpose is illusory...

...Bacevich and Lawrence F. Kaplan Quietly, fitfully, but progressively, President Clinton has developed a distinctive doctrine governing the use of force by the United States...

...From that revolution, the Clinton administration has extracted a single maxim: the certainty that the United States has been endowed with a unique ability to use force in a precisely calibrated and antiseptic fashion...

...What happens after the United States and its allies leave is beside the point...

...Nor have the ensuing strategic upheaval in northern Iraq and the near collapse of the allied coalition persuaded the president to budge from that claim...

...Neither the end of the Cold War nor victory in the Gulf had eliminated the sentiment on the left that the awesome military power of the United States was somehow tainted, marred by past American support for too many unsavory dictators and past involvement in too many suspect conflicts, above all the Vietnam War...

...For now, this much at least is evident: By advancing the fiction that its military initiatives are distinct from war per se, the Clinton Doctrine in some measure forfeits the state’s traditional claim that it possesses authority to kill...

...declare your objectives achieved as soon as possible...

...The Somalia debacle accounts for much, but not all, of the administration’s hypersensitivity to casualties...

...The administration had no stomach for risking large-scale casualties in the Balkans...

...ambassador Madeleine Albright had secured passage of a Security Council resolution calling for the capture of the Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid...

...And it is recklessly ahistorical...

...The present situation in Bosnia represents little more than a variant of this pattern...

...Following some Bosnian Serb outrage, American aircraft would plink a tank or two...

...A comparable disconnect between claims and reality has characterized almost every military venture the administration has undertaken...

...Later that year, the expansion of the peacemaking mission in Somalia culminated in the infamous firefight in the streets of Mogadishu...

...Neither formally promulgated nor as yet fully articulated, the Clinton Doctrine is nonetheless fast approaching something like full-fledged maturity...

...If a commander in chief earned a ribbon each time he ordered U.S...

...Marines’ evacuating foreign nationals trapped in Liberia’s seemingly endless civil war, and a grudging and belated humanitarian response to genocide in Rwanda, and the United States has experienced a flood tide of military activity...

...In a subsequent White House press release, he announced that the U.S...

...For the practice of statecraft throughout the West, this is an increasingly problematic issue, nowhere more so than among Clinton’s constituents on the left...

...It perpetuates our strategic bankruptcy...

...According to the administration’s scorecard, it is not the integrity of the coalition formed to contain Iraq nor the safety of the coalition-established Kurdish enclaves that matters, but the percentage of hits achieved by U.S...

...The administration finally solved its Bosnian dilemma by drawing on its experience during the 1993 Baghdad missile strike...

...While the destruction of these targets may have reduced the Bosnian Serb ability to threaten American planes, it did nothing to hamper the Serbs’ ability to slaughter the Bosnian Muslim population...

...According to the Clinton Doctrine, military force is not merely an extension of diplomacy...

...Chief among them was this one: To dawdle is to invite disaster...

...The statement remains disturbingly accurate—without the word “just...

...But this belief that Americans and only Americans have uncovered the secret of using violence without releasing the dogs of war is the deadliest illusion of all...

...Rather, it incorporates various lessons, positive and negative, accumulated over the course of four years in office...

...To begin with, the efficacy of the doctrine as thus far implemented is highly dubious...

...They were hallmarks of the disastrous policies devised during the era when Robert McNamara presided as chief architect of American military policy...

...Among its most fervent advocates, this prospective revolution has fed an obsession with technology as the defining element in modern warfare...

...The insistence on using force as a medium for negotiating between elites...

...Its carrot-and-stick approach avoided confrontation in North Korea and facilitated the uncontested occupation of Haiti...

...They involve little in the way of real combat...

...Its defects are numerous and irreparable...

...A few months ago, the administration deployed two carrier battle groups to the Taiwan Straits in direct response to Chinese saber-rattling...

...As the salvos launched against Iraq earlier this month suggest, the cruise missile has emerged as the weapon of choice, the governmentsanctioned equivalent of a letter bomb...

...If blowing holes in one building counted as a “devastating blow,” it was also cheap, an after-hours missile attack that not only precluded American casualties, but, as Warren Christopher hastened to point out, also “minimize[d] the loss of [Iraqi] life...

...operations in Somalia appeared to be on track...

...By signing on to an arbitrary one-year deadline for withdrawing American ground forces, the administration has all but ensured that Bosnia will plunge back into war once the peacekeepers depart...

...The essence of the Clinton Doctrine is to offer action in lieu of purpose...

...Under the terms of the Clinton Doctrine, force is employed neither to defeat nor even to coerce...

...Small numbers of manned attack aircraft—if supplemented by comprehensive efforts to suppress local air defenses— are the second-best option...

...The whole business reflects the administration’s insistence on substituting tactical scoring for genuine strategic measures of effectiveness...

...Whether measured in terms of purpose, means, or duration, the sporadic U.S...

...Once the justification for force derives from some basis other than the prerogative of one sovereign state to wage war against another, principles such as proportionality and discrimination lose their permissiveness...

...Ultimately, a doctrine that relies on antiseptic methods of warfare may prove dangerously seductive...

...The 1993 cruise missile attack on a Baghdad intelligence facility represents an early manifestation of the Clinton Doctrine of armed communication...

...Somalia taught the administration many lessons...

...The defects of the Clinton Doctrine—its lack of strategic underpinnings, its tenuous moral legitimacy, and its disdain for historical experience—bear a striking resemblance to an earlier and discredited approach to the use of force...

...By defining force as communiqu?, the Clinton Doctrine eliminates any obligation to link punishment to offense...

...Marines just returned from their mission of mercy...

...The Clinton Doctrine is also flawed in that it provides no morally persuasive basis for taking life...

...In fact, that mission was far from over and catastrophe rather than success loomed...

...Deliberate Force was Baghdad ’93 writ large...

...As a result, those who trivialize the Clinton administration’s military actions do so at the cost of discounting developments likely to have serious and lasting consequences for American national security policy...

...The absence of any intent to compel the adversary to do our will or to destroy the instrument of aggression—much less to pursue anything resembling an old-fashioned “victory”—seemingly offers political decision makers and military planners a long menu of options...

...Also in 1994, the United States mounted an energetic show of force in the Persian Gulf in response to Iraqi provocations near the Kuwait border...

...Thus does the Clinton Doctrine invite Americans to indulge in the conceit that the United States needs no grand strategy, that military prowess obviates the need for long-range thinking about purposes and policies...

...The anger of their youth having dissipated, their idealism now supplanted by hubris and ambition, the passionate children of the 1960s have after all grown up to be not unlike their fathers...

...Hence, in responding to the Iraqi attack on the northern city of Irbil by pummeling air defense sites scattered about the desert south of the Iraqi capital, the Pentagon was not behaving the least bit illogically...

...In its wake, the White House stumbled onto a liberal paradigm for the use of force—a doctrine seemingly respectful of the tenets of enlightened liberalism, that permits aggressive military measures only against inanimate objects...

...forces into action, Bill Clinton would be well on his way to acquiring a chestful...

...To put it another way: Given the precision weapons that the United States advertises as central to the new American military doctrine, how many people is it permissible to kill merely to send a message...

...the administration would declare the action a testimonial to American resolve...

...credibility...

...The ready availability of such weapons may tempt them to conclude that force need no longer remain the option of last resort, and induce them to employ their arsenal casually and without due reflection...

...Thus, terms like “signals” and “messages”—presumed after Vietnam to have been banished forever from the lexicon of military affairs—have once again returned to favor...

...Thus, the aim of the latest American attack has been neither to overthrow nor to bargain...

...The most recent application of the Clinton Doctrine— the latest confrontation with Saddam Hussein— is also the most instructive...

...No doubt, come December, the president will declare the Bosnia expedition complete, the mission itself a huge success...

...But the notion that the White House has simply reacted to events not of its making misses the underlying significance of the new American military activism...

...How, finally, are we to evaluate the Clinton Doctrine...

...The idea is to hit things without jeopardizing people...

...Taking the lessons of Somalia to heart, the administration took to combining threats of military action with the promise of rewards for cooperation, counting on the other side to cut a deal...

...The train of events leading to the pointless loss of 18 American lives had been set in motion...

...Beyond that, the Clinton Doctrine fails on three counts...

...by then, the troops will be safely home...

...Indeed, in doing so, according to one unnamed senior Pentagon official cited by the New York Times, “We have improved our strategic position...

...THE LATEST STRIKE ON IRAQ SUGGESTS THE CRUISE MISSILE HAS EMERGED AS THE GOVERNMENTSANCTIONED EQUIVALENT OF A LETTER BOMB...

...Directed in retaliation for an alleged Iraqi assassination attempt on George Bush, the punitive attack, according to U.N...

...Peace” came to Bosnia...

...Although Clinton’s aides later conceded that the attack had affected Iraq’s intelligence gathering networks only minimally, the administration stood firm in its insistence that the operation had been a success...

...Instead, force has become all but indistinguishable from diplomacy...

...military actions in Iraq...

...To deliver the message, one mailbox will serve just as well as another...

...the self-defeating preoccupation with casualties...

...Yet even Haiti was not so much a triumph as a bullet dodged at the last instant: Remember that the invasion was bloodless...

...Thus, in his Oval Office press conference on September 4, the president took pains to explain that the United States had designed its assault on Iraq so as “to have very limited damage to human beings...

...The foreign policy novice who made “the economy, stupid” the centerpiece of his campaign and came to power vowing to “focus like a laser” on domestic issues approaches the end of his first term having used force with greater frequency than any other president in recent memory...