The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq
Kenneth M. Pollack. New York: Random House, 2002. 494 pp. Bib. Index. $25.95.
Unfinished Business: Afghanistan, the Middle East and Beyond-Defusing the Dangers That Threaten America's Security
Harlan Ullman. Sacramento, CA: Citadel, 2002. 300 pp. Bib. Index. $25.95.
Reviewed by Thomas J. Hirschfield
These two recent books about meeting present-day threats are well worth a look. Kenneth Pollack makes a carefully argued case for going to war with Iraq—sooner rather than later—and Harlan Ullman offers ideas on how to organize U.S. efforts against a broader set of post-Cold War troubles.
Pollack observed Iraq for many years as an intelligence analyst for the CIA and was a National Security Council staffer responsible for the Persian Gulf region. He also has written another work on Arab armies (Arabs at War [Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2002]). The Threatening Storm begins by recapping the history of U.S.-Iraqi relations and describing Saddam Hussein's regime, its operation, and what threat it represents. Of particular interest is the author's description of how Saddam's weapons of mass destruction programs and their missile delivery systems serve the central purpose of internal control, and not just for impressing neighbors and outsiders. Pollack describes post-Gulf War Iraqi conventional forces as adequate for internal control and deterring neighbors, and doubts that the tactics used to beat the Taliban will be effective against Iraq. He also is skeptical about containment over the long run, and notes that indifference and external pressure erode sanctions, as happened after the Gulf War.
This book's central conclusion is that Saddam needs to be removed before he acquires a nuclear weapon. The nukes that he does not have, but wants, are the key issue-not the chemical and biological weapons he already possesses. Pollack's case rests on: Saddam's long and very costly effort to acquire nukes and the unlikelihood of his ever willingly abandoning that goal; Saddam's view that owning a bomb reduces the likelihood of his elimination by external force; the notion that irrational-seeming adventures are possible because Saddam's judgment is warped by egotism, ignorance, ambition, and inadequate information; and once he has a nuclear weapon, Saddam would brandish it to intimidate his neighbors and use it against Israel or the Gulf oil fields if threatened or otherwise adequately inspired. In short, preemptive war is justified because of the horrid things that could happen if we do not act before Saddam gets a bomb.
The Threatening Storm also advocates devoting attention to the Arab-Israeli problem before attacking Saddam to improve prospects for all-important cooperation from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Gulf states, and Turkey. Pollack contends these governments could be convinced to cooperate if they were sure the war would end quickly and Saddam would be ousted. In Pollack's view, a long-term U.S. commitment to Iraq would be necessary after the war to ensure internal stability and external defense. He fails, however, to detail the difficulties and dangers of a war followed by a long and presumably large continuing U.S. military involvement to the same extent as he does the dangers presented by Saddam's longed-for bomb. This makes the overall advantages and disadvantages of going to war difficult to balance against each other, an unfortunate limitation and the book's significant weakness.
A retired naval officer, former Naval War College professor, and sometime Pentagon official, Harlan Ullman addresses the inadequacies of U.S. national security planning and coordination for the post-Cold War world. Unfinished Business attempts to show how today's security problems came about and suggests ways for U.S. institutions to address them better. The chapter "Paradox of Freedom," which describes the tensions between individual rights and government responsibility in times of crisis, is of particular interest and poses the central problem. The book's apparent defense-oriented perspective gives more attention to military options and operations at the expense of other considerations. This becomes clear in early chapters that select events from past decades to describe the dangers to U.S. security in the post-Cold War world to illustrate the need for organizational and policy adjustments.
The recap of the Clinton administration, for example, mixes various Balkan crises, Somalia, and Haiti with irrelevant events that annoyed the armed forces, such as regulations about gays and the effects of an instance of dating between ranks on Joint Chiefs of Staff appointments. But his description of the Clinton presidency fails to mention a major event, the 1993 Korea crisis and subsequent "framework agreement" with Pyongyang. Lively and entertaining explanatory asides throughout the narrative make the book very readable, although a few footnotes to justify or identify the many passing judgments might have helped convince the occasionally more skeptical reader.
Nevertheless, Ullman's detailed understanding of government, notably the defense establishment and the armed forces, underpins imaginative suggestions about how to organize national security efforts in the face of cultural and structural domestic inertia. His call for a better focus, and for more attention and cooperation at home, is timely and well taken. So are some of his ideas about how to manage U.S. actors to get there. His suggestions about how to influence the inimical elements of the outside world are less compelling. His prescriptions for what to do with foreign actors (e.g., somehow democratize Saudi Arabia and Egypt) largely amount to calls for carefully crafted long-term strategies that otherwise are largely unspecified. And even if the U.S. aid budget grows to $100 billion, as he suggests, the relationship between aid increases and eliminating the likes of Osama bin Laden remains undemonstrated. In the author's defense, others plowing that field have not done much better—so far.
Mr. Hirschfield is a retired State Department senior foreign service officer and a former arms control negotiator. He was a member of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff in the Ford and Carter administrations and was senior analyst with RAND Corporation and the Center for Naval Analyses.
Chinese Grand Strategy and Maritime Power
Thomas M. Kane. Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2002. 158 pp. Photos. Notes. Bib. Index. $49.50.
Reviewed by Rear Admiral Eric A. McVadon, U.S. Navy (Retired)
This book, like recent reports from the Pentagon and Capitol Hill, provokes useful thought about Chinese strategy and the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy—and the relations of these to China's neighbors and the United States. The final three of the seven chapters in this short book serve that purpose well and are readable-something far less true for the first four chapters. Those who see China as a threat will find their convictions supported; those who feel less antagonistic toward China will be provoked and annoyed with Thomas Kane's conclusions.
The successful final three chapters nevertheless have failings of which the reader should be warned. There are times when Kane's sense of reality and logic seem impaired. To choose just one example, he relies on a single news report to assert that China sent 700,000 men to Sudan to intervene there in the summer of 2000. Typical of the strange flights of logic, he goes on to state, "China's forces arrived by aircraft and ship.... China's intervention in Sudan represents a milestone in the PRC's development as a global power. . . . [T]his action announces China's commitment to East Africa in a way that neither China's potential allies nor China's potential enemies can ignore." Kane neglects to suggest the implications for his theory of the tale's being largely an absurdity.
In summing up an otherwise useful description of the current Chinese Navy, Kane grossly exaggerates the purchase plans for Russian Kilo-class submarines, calls the Chinese Air Force's Su-27 fighter a maritime strike aircraft, and states wrongly that China will produce 300 MiG-31 interceptors. The author and his sources are not the sole culprits in fostering such errors. The Chinese are culpable because of their lack of transparency and excessive penchant for military secrecy. These combined failures of Kane, his sources, and the Chinese make it essential for the reader to be alert to the footprints of an author stumbling through minefields of informational tidbits of all sorts, from the valid to the blatantly preposterous.
One option is to start reading at chapter 5 rather than slogging through 60 pages of historical strategy commentary that are, at best, tangentially relevant to modern China and are very tedious reading, even when he links Alfred Thayer Mahan and other favorites of his to China. Imagine going back to the pharaohs to set the scene for today's Egyptian naval strategy. For strategy and ancient history buffs, start with chapter 3 and the 14th-century Ming Dynasty. But the minefields are thicker in these chapters. For example, after citing three modern Chinese leaders, Kane somehow strangely concludes that China "will need to protect its interests in every part of the world, and to threaten potential opponents in every part of the world as well. In other words, its ambitions require an ocean-going navy." He seems oblivious to the fact that the Chinese leaders, as cited, describe only the importance of the oceans and their resources to China but hardly suggest a need to threaten potential opponents around the world.
Kane is similarly oblivious that many Chinese, when writing about future warfare, are describing developments the United States is bringing to fruition and not necessarily where their own forces are going. It is one thing for these Chinese writers to describe the threats they might face or the environment in which their navy may have to function, and quite another to suggest these writings depict the future shape of the PLA Navy.
This book is the 16th volume in the Frank Cass naval policy and history series. The series editor's preface states that the book will be of interest to the world's China watchers, but this might be an exaggeration. The last three chapters of the book warrant more attention because they contain thought-provoking, if unmindfully opinionated, words on how we should think about dealing with China—a terribly important issue.
Admiral McVadon was the defense and naval attaché in Beijing and is now a consultant on East Asia security affairs and a frequent lecturer in Asia on China and regional security.