A Screech of Hawks

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Let's begin with a provocation: ever since Vietnam, the hawks have almost always been right on major questions of national security. Ronald Reagan was right to insist on placing Pershing missiles in Europe, right to disdain the nuclear-freeze movement, right to push ahead with Star Wars, right to call the Soviet Union an "evil empire." George H.W. Bush was right to liberate Kuwait (and wrong not to push on to Baghdad when he had the world on his side). Even after the hawks and doves changed parties during the Clinton years, Democratic hawks were right about the use of force in Bosnia and Kosovo. And in 1998 bipartisan hawks--a group that included such disparate spirits as Paul Wolfowitz and John Kerry--were probably right that Saddam Hussein's unwillingness to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspections was intolerable, a casus belli.

So why does hawkishness seem so intemperate now? Two reasons, I suspect--one psychological and one political. The psychological reason has everything to do with Sept. 11. We now know that an attack on Iraq may lead to terrorist counterattacks. Even the business community, usually a fairly tough-minded precinct, seems jelly-kneed at the prospect. "I have never seen such unanimity on any foreign policy issue," says Leslie H. Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who made a speaking tour of mostly business audiences in the Midwest and on the West Coast in December. "They want a smoking gun. It doesn't make a difference when I point out that we have a smoking forest, that it's clear Saddam has these weapons and doesn't want to disarm."

This raises the larger, more distressing political question. The Bush Administration has seemed to hurtle thoughtlessly toward this moment of truth, in a lather of righteous arrogance and dim-witted machismo. From the start of his Administration, the President has made clear his skepticism about diplomatic niceties. "We've scared the bejeezus out of the world," says Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA and National Security Council Middle East expert, whose book The Threatening Storm: The Case for War Against Iraq is often cited by the Administration's hawks. "We've left the impression that Iraq is, as Richard Perle has said, 'the first of many' American military campaigns. I'm still in favor of taking action. We've gone too far down the road. It's now or never." He paused and sighed. "But I don't feel very comfortable about that. We haven't prepared the ground diplomatically."