;)
ort Leavenworth in midsummer is a sultry campus for the
Army's new leaders, American and allied majors on the fast track and
generals who have just earned their first star. When Paul D.
Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, steps out of an Air
Force Gulfstream into the Kansas heat, it is not just an overdue
courtesy call and not just a peace overture to a rankled service.
(He has just killed the Army's prized new $11 billion artillery
piece, the Crusader.) It is one more engagement in the war over the
coming war.
The subject of his remarks, which the former political-science
professor delivers seminar style to the majors and more formally to
the generals, is his recent visit to Afghanistan. But Iraq is never
far out of sight. Introducing Wolfowitz to an auditorium full of new
one-stars and their wives, General Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief
of staff, points out that as a young Pentagon analyst Wolfowitz
directed a secret assessment of Persian Gulf threats that marked
Iraq as a menace to its neighbors and to American interests. This,
Shinseki informs them with everything but a drumroll, was in 1979, a
dozen years before Desert Storm.
Wolfowitz then proceeds to use Afghanistan to illustrate how far
the military's pinpoint-targeting ability has advanced since that
war, when American air and ground forces, unable to communicate with
one another, succeeded in destroying only a single one of Saddam
Hussein's Scud missile emplacements (and that one was a harmless
decoy). The message is that next time around, if there is a next
time, what was demonstrated in Afghanistan -- that choreography of
unmanned aerial vehicles, precision-guided weapons, indigenous
insurgents and special-operations soldiers on the ground -- should,
in the first hours of an attack, prove far more adroit at disabling
Saddam's most fearsome weapons.
Soldiers tend to cock an eyebrow when civilians who have not
known combat talk confidently about the coming conquest, but the
closest thing to an open challenge this day comes during Wolfowitz's
session with the majors -- from a British officer who raises a hand
and asks about Scott Ritter, the former U.N. weapons inspector.
Ritter has been in London arguing that Iraq's destructive capability
is already neutralized. So where is the threat worth spending
American blood?
An exasperated look crosses Wolfowitz's wide, boyish face;
Ritter's comments are ''simply amazing,'' he says. Then he stops
himself. He acknowledges that Ritter knows something about Iraq and
concedes that Saddam has probably not been able to rebuild his
nuclear program, not yet. But he notes that when inspectors went in
after the gulf war, they found he was far closer than anyone
imagined, that in fact he was pursuing four separate avenues for
manufacturing a nuclear weapon. And chemical weapons, which he has
employed against his own people, or biological weapons are threat
enough, and much easier to construct in a secretive, fearsome police
state. This is, Wolfowitz tells the majors, a man who has been known
to have children tortured in front of their parents. (The line would
later turn up in the president's address to the U.N.)
Revisiting Ritter's argument a few days later in his Pentagon
office, Wolfowitz seems genuinely puzzled by the notion that we need
evidence of imminent danger to justify getting rid of Saddam. He has
encountered this argument earlier -- from the State Department and
the C.I.A., in fact, before President Bush stifled that particular
line of internal debate by declaring Saddam an intolerable threat,
end of story. By the conventions of American foreign policy, a
pre-emptive strike against an uncertain threat is perhaps the most
radical new security notion of the post-cold-war era. But Wolfowitz
says he believes Sept. 11 has awakened us to a world where certainty
is an expensive luxury.
''There's an awful lot we don't know, an awful lot that we may
never know, and we've got to think differently about standards of
proof here,'' Wolfowitz tells me. ''In fact, there's no way you can
prove that something's going to happen three years from now or six
years from now. But these people have made absolutely clear what
their intentions are, and we know a lot about their capabilities. I
suppose I hadn't thought of it quite this way, but intentions and
capabilities are the way you think about warfare. Proof beyond a
reasonable doubt is the way you think about law enforcement. And I
think we're much closer to being in a state of war than being in a
judicial proceeding.''
Wolfowitz is always careful to say that the president has not
decided exactly what to do about Iraq and that he himself is not
completely convinced yet that a military liberation of Baghdad is
worth the risk. But in an administration that is not exactly a
hotbed of Saddam coddlers, Wolfowitz has been on the case longer,
more consistently, more persistently, than anyone. His tenacity is
one reason that the internal debate has moved, astonishingly fast,
from a theoretical possibility to questions of method and timing. So
fast, in fact, that one argument some make for invading is that Bush
has already gone too far out on the limb to back down.
In the first days after Sept. 11, when Secretary of State Colin
L. Powell and others within the administration contended it was too
early to put Iraq on the agenda -- that there was a war to win in
Afghanistan first and that there was no evidence Iraq was complicit
in the attacks on the Pentagon and the twin towers -- Wolfowitz
argued that Iraq was at the heart of the threat. He suspected then
that those who were saying ''not yet'' really meant ''not ever.''
Now that the president has declared ''regime change'' the party
line, Wolfowitz says, he takes his more skeptical colleagues at face
value when they say ''not yet.'' But, he adds, ''it seems to me that
people who want to say, 'I'm in favor of a regime change, but not
now,' have a certain burden to answer the question, 'O.K., well,
when?'''
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