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Going To War Without The Powell Doctrine

By Scott Shuger
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2001, at 9:14 PM ET

Jake has done a real service in clearly stating the Powell Doctrine and straightforwardly showing that it fails as a measure for whether or not the U.S. should now respond to the Sept. 11 attacks militarily. I also think he is correct in arguing that the central problem with the PD is that it is outsized by the scope and enormity of the present predicament. (The telltale sign that this was no doctrine in the sense that it had anything like a repeatable application was that its one shining moment was the Gulf War, a situation that was profoundly sui generis--a war against a country without significant military or economic allies or indigenous civilian support on a battlefield with nothing to hide under or behind populated by an army that refused to fight.) All I want to do here is pull at one seeming consequence of Jake's argument--a seeming consequence he might not even endorse--to make sure that in overthrowing one false policy god we are not erecting an altar to another.

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When Jake argues against the current satisfiability of PD condition No. 3--that military force can achieve the objective--he says that "the answer can't be known in advance." And against No. 4--the costs of the intended military operations must be specifiable--he writes, "...there's no way of estimating the human or economic cost of the war." Against No. 5--the gains and risks of intended military operations must be analyzed--he writes, "There's no way to know in advance whether military force will justify any losses in terms of protection from terrorism, or even whether fighting back will make us safer from terrorism at all." And against No. 6--the ways in which the situation we seek to alter may develop further, once it is altered by force, must be specifiable--he writes, "Military intervention by the United States might undermine moderate Arab governments. It could cause massive damage to our economy. It could leave us as an occupying power in one or more Muslim countries. Or it might not do any of these things. We fail Powell's test, because we can't see around any of these corners." Jake's argument is a good ad hominem against Powell, but is not the application of an acceptable principle. Jake's right in each case, but not because any valid doctrine of war justification must make war supremely calculable, but because Powell made precisely this false assumption. The course of war--even the course of a single battle--is not a priori knowable.

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The doctrine behind Powell's is Clausewitz's: To wage a war successfully, a nation's people, its army and its government must agree on a clearly defined objective. Without that, neither the physical, fiscal nor psychological costs of war can be shouldered for as long as victory usually takes. This still seems true to me. Where Powell went wrong was to construe "clearly defined objective" in such a way that it entailed all sorts of detailed prior knowledge no political leader nor the generals he depends on for his information can ever have. Even though we have a certain objective X and the best route to that objective turns out to be Y, in willing X we are not automatically at that moment willing Y or required to do so. The fundamental problem of human life, Kierkegaard sagely observed, is that although it can only be understood backwards, it must be lived forwards.

And so it is with war aims. When on Dec. 8, 1941, FDR asked the Congress for a declaration of war, he didn't yet know how he would fight that war. He didn't even know yet where he would fight it. He didn't have any idea how many lives or how many dollars it would cost. He hadn't even yet formulated his bedrock war goal--the demand that the Japanese and the Nazis surrender unconditionally. But that didn't matter and it would have been absurd for anyone to insist that he have all this worked out first. What Roosevelt did have was a new and convincing case that the fascist powers were a threat to all democracies, even those that hadn't fielded armies against them and were insulated by geography. After Sept. 11, President Bush is in a similar position. He can't, pace the Powell Doctrine, right now answer many big questions--like "Will we win?"--or thousands of smaller nagging questions--like, "How long will it take?"--about the prosecution of the war against terrorism--questions that he, like FDR before him, in due time must answer. But he can right now make the case that there is no bloodless alternative to using military force against terrorism with global reach. And I think he has made this case. Or perhaps the hijackers made it for him. And they didn't do it by providing a cost-benefit analysis.

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