Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired United States Army soldier and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson is an adjunct professor at the College of William & Mary where he teaches courses on US national security. He also instructs a senior seminar in the Honors Department at the George Washington University entitled “National Security Decision Making.”
Series of interviews with Paul Jay of the Real News network here.
War is not About Truth, Justice and the American Way
The next moment in my life was at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, where I was introduced to Vom Kriege, Clausewitz’s seminal book on war, and introduced to a team of professors who more or less stripped war of its truth, justice, and the American way and gave it its real face, not just in terms of the battlefield but also stripped it of its, shall we say, particularly in America, its hyperbole, its passion, its you’ve got to do this for the country, you’ve got to defend the shores, and so forth, and boiled it down to its basics. This is all about politics and power. This is all about getting your way over someone else–or someone else plural–who wants to prevent you from getting your way, whether it’s territory, whether it’s resources, whether it’s a way of belief, ideology, or whatever. That’s what war’s really all about. It’s not about truth and justice. It never has been, never will be.
I think there’s a clear understanding in the American schools that commerce, trade, is a big part of what a soldier is all about. That is to say, there is some aspect of Smedley Butler’s I never fought a war that wasn’t commercial purposes that every military officer realizes. There’s a different aspect to it, though, when you bring other aspects of power to bear on the problem, nuclear weapons, for example. You’re not going to contemplate using nuclear weapons, or no one in his sane mind is going to contemplate nuclear weapons for commercial purposes. Nor is anyone going to probably contemplate deploying core-sized formations, army-sized formations out strictly for commercial purposes. There’s got to be some other reason. So what do leaders do when they understand this? They conjure up a Saddam Hussein. They conjure up weapons of mass destruction. They conjure up connections between al-Qaeda and Baghdad. They conjure these things so that the unwashed American public will feel passionate and ideological about the reasons that they’re sending increasingly fewer and fewer of their sons and daughters to die for state purposes. And so it becomes something that you grasp and deal with as a senior military officer, or it becomes something–and I’ve seen this happen–that repels you, and you wind up leaving, you wind up leaving the service, because you see this is not at all about truth, justice, and the American way, it’s all about achieving the power purposes of a certain coterie of leaders who happen to be, by ballot box, occupying Washington for the time being.
Decline of the Empire
We’re trying to stop what Harry Truman called at the end of World War II not a demobilization but a disintegration of the Armed Forces. That’s what Powell’s purpose was. He was trying to say there’s going to be a hell of a demand for a peace dividend. There is going to be one heck of a reaction by the American people, by the Congress, and they’re going to want to take the military forces apart because the bear is dead. This is 1989. So we want to do this carefully. And when he becomes chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, of course, he does this very carefully. He builds beneath Dick Cheney and George H. W. Bush, he builds what he calls the base force, which is more or less a military structure below which we did not want to go. And we did not want to go below it, because he built a strategy behind that force that said we needed to be able to do a war in North Korea–he said Northeast Asia–a war in Southwest Asia–Iraq or whatever–and possibly a little peacekeeping or a job like that at the same time. And in order to do that, you had to had to have a certain force.
It’s the same thing for me, up until probably about two years into my time as chief of staff in the State Department, when I began to question the whole thing and I began to see that it wasn’t just the inadequacies, the stupidities, the inanities, the power grabs of the Bush administration, that though that was a rare exemplar of the worst side of America, it nonetheless emanated from something that was happening at the very heart of our democratic federal republic, a contamination of that republic that had been happening perhaps since 1950 and had taken on a new acceleration, a new few catalyst elements, perhaps, with Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. But nonetheless–and I’ll give you an idea of what I mean here–I was very reluctant to cast a vote for President Obama, not from the point of view that he was different from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney–he was–but from the point of view of I was increasingly convinced that it didn’t matter who the man was, it didn’t matter who the people were around the man; the country was headed in a direction that Democrat or Republican, independent or whatever, could not turn the country around from. We’re owned by the corporate interest. We’re owned by the military-industrial-congressional complex. We’re owned by the financial interests. I mean, you just take your pick of the bogeyman you want to look at that day. And you do not have a leadership in any party that can do much about this. And part of this, of course, is this fascination for war that we’ve developed, because that’s generally what empires in decline do, whether the decline is financial, economic, spiritual, or whatever–and I think our decline is in all those dimensions. The attention begins to go to the management of trouble on the fringes of that empire to keeping people out interested in the fringes of empire, while the rot occurs at the very core. And that’s what’s happening to us right now.
Predatory Capitalism and War for Oil
Let me just back up a little bit and say that the first Gulf War, which of course was Powell’s first we’re going to cut it off and then we’re going to kill it with regard to the Iraqi army, opened my eyes to a certain extent about the Middle East and about the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf and about Saudi Arabia and others. The reason we fought that war was not to uphold UN mandates. It was not to prove that the new world order was going to be established well by George Herbert Walker Bush. It was to protect oil. The reason we put forces down in the desert early was to keep Saddam Hussein from turning right and going into Saudi Arabia. We knew if he did, his tanks would roll over the 82nd Airborne Division we’d put on the ground, but his tanks would be rolling over US soldiers, and that would be cassus belli for sure. So my eyes began to be opened even more in this pragmatic way as to why the United States was using force in the world these days. In this case it was all about oil. Of course, that would come back again in 2003 when we re-invaded Iraq and threw out all kinds of aspersions for reasons to the contrary, but we still were going back to oil, basically. So this is a continuity, if you will, that gets established in terms of abusing me of my naivete, what little was left, as to why the United States in the post-World War II period uses force so often.
We often commented that we were using the military, the Armed Forces more often in the post-Cold War than we did during the Cold War. And was that all because of the relaxation of there not being a superpower opponent out there? Or was it because the United States really was turning into a national security state that increasingly turned to the only element of its bureaucracy that it seemed to get to work for it, and that was the Armed Forces? I think it was a mixed answer at that time. It’s later, when I joined Powell at the State Department and see Bush-Cheney up close, Rumsfeld up close, that I begin to understand that indeed we have turned into a national security state. We do function for that national security state, for its interest, and the old federal democratic republic is dying. What we have today is not what we thought we would have post-World War II as we tried to design an apparatus to deal with the immense power we’d accumulated as a result of World War II.
It takes a very vivid look inside the Cheney-Bush administration to understand that decision-making had taken on a new tone and tint, if you will, with the Bushes, a tone and tint that President Obama has to some extent erased. But the basic structure is still there and the basic reason for operating the way we do is still there. We’re in four wars today. We’re in Afghanistan, we’re in Iraq, we’re in the so-called global war on terror (and don’t believe that’s over; we’re still fighting in certain countries), and we were in Libya. And my God, we could be in Syria tomorrow and Iran next week. This is crazy. This is what we do today. We do war. And increasingly we do it with less than 1 percent of the population, less than 1 percent. This is unconscionable. George Washington would not claim us today.
Cheney, 9/11 and The New American Century
JAY: Were you aware that this document, Project for a New American Century–you know the document now, but were you aware then of the document and what these guys that were grouping around Cheney had an agenda?
WILKERSON: I was aware of the document, because Rich Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, had signed the document. I didn’t think that the document was anything–well, I thought it was like most documents that come from think tanks: it sits on the shelf and gathers dust after it’s made money for the people who wrote it or the organization that promoted it. You don’t worry about those things too much. And I think there has been some hype about how influential it was in influencing the Bush administration to do what it did. I think it’s the other way around. I think the people and the type of people who participated in that project were the people who influenced the Bush administration from their place in office, or, like Richard Perle on the outside.
JAY: Yeah, I think that’s the point, that it’s an expression of what was in the minds of the people that came to power.
WILKERSON: And as Powell said to me one time when we were putting together–. We started out putting together the national security strategy in the State Department policy planning staff, and then Dr. Rice took it over on the NSC staff. And then we get a version of it back over. A contractor had written it, as I recall. And we get a version of it. And we’re looking at Section 5, which is the part that everybody looks at. It talks about preemptive war and so forth. And, you know, there was no real reaction on our part at that time, because we thought, well, this has always been our policy. Under Article 51 of the UN Charter you have the right to self-defense. If someone’s putting a rocket up and going to shoot it at you, you can knock it down. That’s how we looked at it at the time. We didn’t take it as being this all-consuming change in American national security strategy that would become the dominant aspect of that strategy, which some would argue the Iraq War in 2003 exemplified.
Now, you can say that you see that sort of strategy implemented in Iraq, and I’m not going to disagree with you there. And would it have gone on had we been more successful? Would we then have done Syria and Iran? And, you know, the ultimate target is Egypt and so forth, as some of the neocons held. I don’t know. I don’t think so, because I really believe Cheney’s hold on power and his influence over the president in terms of foreign policy and national security decision making was such that Iraq was it, and Iraq was oil. It was all about oil. Once you’re in Iraq, once you got boots on the ground in Iraq, you’re in the middle of the oil. You’re there. And so you don’t need the other places. I really don’t think Dick Cheney would have marched on to Syria, marched on to Iran, and so forth. Now, would he if it had been singularly easy to do so, you know, if Iraq had really been a piece of cake and we’d been met with flowers in the street and so forth like he predicted? I don’t know. Maybe he would have. He’s a pragmatist. He might have gone on if he thought he could do the same thing in other places.