The now-famous shock-and-awe strategy, which appears for the time being to have shocked and awed the American media just a little more than the Iraqi Republican Guards, was fathered chiefly by one Harlan Ullman, a former Navy pilot who spent the mid-1990s as part of a Pentagon research team known as the Rapid Dominance Study Group.
Ullman was the lead author of the group's report, which recommended, well, rapid dominance as a way of minimizing casualties and shortening a war's duration. He points, improbably enough, to the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as responsible examples of the genre, arguing that not using atomic bombs would have prolonged the conflict and led to many more casualties on both sides. We can safely say that he is not a peacenik.
So guess who's against the war?
Ullman has given a passel of interviews since the bombs started dropping on Baghdad, but as far as I could find, it was only to The Guardian (in yesterday's edition) that he said: "Where we are is where we are, and this is not a criticism and don't write it as such, but if it had been up to me, I would have waited months, perhaps, to get a second resolution, when it would have been clear that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. I don't agree with the administration view that Iraq is a clear and present danger."
A quote such as that from a man such as Ullman makes clear something that ultra-hawks have turned somersaults trying to obscure or discredit: There is -- or was -- a diplomatic and political process on the one hand, and there's a fighting war on the other; and deploring the Bush administration's conduct of the former while supporting the speedy success of the latter now that it's under way is an entirely respectable and consistent position. Not only that, it's an important position to hold on to over the coming weeks.
The shooting will presumably be over soon enough, but diplomacy never ends, despite this administration's most energetic intentions to the contrary. It's on these shoals that the Bush gang's ship will finally splinter, and therefore it's also where the opposition should concentrate its arguments.
This may sound self-evident, but it feels like it needs saying because I'm picking up, as I browse some of the liberal Web sites and follow the protest actions, a certain "Aha!" mentality with regard to the alleged "quagmire" that now looms. The mentality is understandable on one level. To a considerable extent the hawks' credibility hangs heavily on a smashing and quick success. No reputation is more on the line than that of Donald Rumsfeld, who has spent the better part of the last year and a half pooh-poohing the career brass in the Pentagon and its quaint 20th-century ways. Seeing Rumsfeld and all his allies taken down a notch is a tempting thing to hope for, to say nothing of the more important fact that a quick success in Iraq will go some distance toward greasing the skids for Iran, North Korea or wherever they decide should come next.
But it's wrong to think this way, and not merely for the obvious reason that such a view amounts to hoping for more death and agony. First of all, the use of the word "quagmire" after five days is preposterous. Vietnam became a quagmire after about three and a half years. This war, even with the Iraqis displaying a stiffer upper lip than we'd been led to believe they would -- and even with the prospect of house-to-house combat in Baghdad -- is very unlikely to take more than three and a half months. (If it somehow should, I'd venture that George W. Bush will be in deep political trouble.) Besides which, one should not have opposed the Vietnam War because it became a quagmire. One should have opposed the 1965 escalation, if not the 1961 mini-escalation in the number of "advisers," on principle. Now, as then, concerns about a "quagmire" reflect a response to circumstances -- is the war going poorly or well? -- rather than an expression of principled belief.
So there will not, in all likelihood, be a quagmire. What there will be, though, is the question of America's relationship to the rest of the world. Under Bush, that relationship continues to deteriorate daily. France and Germany are starting to find (economic) ways to strike back against the yahooism this administration has so tastelessly encouraged. Tony Blair is due at Camp David this weekend, and while he'll be all smiles in public, we can be sure that once they shut the doors, he'll ask why he wasn't informed about the war's start and why Bush inserted those three little words -- "on my orders," as opposed to "the coalition's orders" -- into his speech announcing the war. And now Vladimir Putin -- whom we were once directed to trust because our fearless leader had peered into his decent soul and who, by the bye, commands a far heartier army than Saddam Hussein's -- has strolled into the administration's wide-ranging sights. And there's Turkey (the Kurdish and Cyprus questions), and Israel and the Palestinians, and Colombia. (Why is Colombia getting its small piece of the $74.7 billion war appropriation? Can you say "FARC" and "oil pipeline"?) And a lot more besides.
Diplomacy is this administration's real quagmire. The hawks managed to crash their way through the china shop once, when a) the arguments against the bad guy were clear as water and b) the likelihood of a relatively short war was equally clear. Will American public opinion endorse new rounds of belligerence and unilateralism even as other nations are finding ways to strike back at us? This question is far more likely to be in play in the fall of 2004 than in Iraq, and it's far less likely to benefit the incumbent than today's conventional wisdom would hold.
Michael Tomasky's columns appear every Wednesday at TAP Online.
