Jeffrey Herf: The History Condi Rice Forgot to Mention to President Bush

Condoleezza Rice will almost certainly be confirmed as Secretary of State shortly after President Bush's second inaugural in January. Rice, a former Stanford provost and political scientist, has always benefited tremendously from the perception that she is more scholar than politician--she is, after all, never "Ms. Rice" but rather "Dr. Rice." And having a scholar around the White House might well have proved useful these last four years, as history--or rather the perceived lessons of history--played a central role in the formation of Bush's first-term foreign policy. The particular historical lessons most favored by this administration have been those derived from World War II: namely, that gathering threats are best dealt with preemptively, before they are able to seize the offensive; and that totalitarian states can be rebuilt into models of liberal democracy by a conquering coalition of armies. Rice herself explicitly invoked the lessons of World War II when in August 2003 she compared the Baathist insurgency to remnants of the Nazi regime that tried to sabotage Allied efforts in postwar Germany. "S.S. officers--called 'wehrwolves'--attacked coalition forces and engaged in sabotage, much like today's Baathist and Fedayeen remnants," she explained. Rice knew, or should have known, what she was talking about; she is, after all, co-author of a scholarly book on Germany. (Though the book was about post-cold-war German reunification, not World War II, one still assumes that Rice has a working knowledge of modern German history.)

Given all this, it seems fair to ask whether Rice has acquitted herself well as a scholar during the last four years. To be specific, it seems fair to ask whether the Bush administration misread the lessons of World War II; and if it did, to ask whether Condoleezza Rice--who both knew something about Germany and was the highest ranking academic in an administration in which analogies to World War II have played a central role in the formation of strategic doctrine--shouldn't be taking more of the blame for our failures in Iraq than she has thus far received.

To be fair, the administration did draw some reasonable historical lessons from World War II. First, as Bush's controversial national security statement of fall 2002 argued, weapons technology has spread around the globe exponentially faster than liberal democratic institutions--or, for that matter, systems of stable government that put some basic restraints on their leaders--or, for that matter, elementary common sense. We have witnessed novel forms of what I call "reactionary modernism," modern technology combined with rejections of both the Enlightenment and liberal democracy. This blend, which emerged in the Nazi regime, has had successors in "rogue" states in recent decades. It was only a matter of time before regimes or movements that might not be deterred by the prospect of even nuclear retaliation acquired weapons of mass destruction. In early 2003, Saddam's Iraq appeared close to fitting this description.

Hence, one could point to the 1930s to make a case for preemption. A war in 1938 launched by Britain, France, and the Soviet Union might very well have defeated Nazi Germany relatively quickly and prevented the Holocaust. Just as there was a great deal of resistance to imagining the worst about Hitler in the late '30s, so too was there reluctance in late 2002 and early 2003 to imagine the worst about Saddam. Outside the Blair government in England, the writings of Paul Berman, and the pages of The New Republic, there were too few liberals willing to see how the legacies of fascism and Nazism lived on in different forms in Al Qaeda and in Saddam's Baathist Iraq. For those of us who supported the war in Iraq, it was frustrating to see so many liberals so resistant to thinking about possible parallels between '30s Europe and the Middle East in 2003. Along these lines, the administration's argument that the United Nations must eschew the road of fecklessness taken by the League of Nations during the '30s--when it proved impotent in the face of the gathering forces of fascism--made further plausible use of the World War II analogy. Rice and others deserve credit for these insights.

However, an abuse of World War II history was soon to follow. First, and most obviously, Hitler really did have all the weapons that Churchill said he had in the famous debates in Britain's Parliament about appeasement and rearmament. Saddam did not. That is, the stated grounds for Churchill's position rested on an accurate assessment of both Hitler's intentions and capabilities. We now know that there was dissent in the American government about Saddam's weapons program--dissent that Rice either did not listen to or dismissed. As a scholar, she should have probed deeper to see if evidence actually supported the claims she was making.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, Rice forgot a key lesson of the victory over Nazism. British historian Michael Howard called it "the forgotten dimensions of strategy," namely the need to sustain domestic consensus in the face of war's extreme burdens. To confront the threat of Nazi Germany, Churchill formed a coalition government incorporating members of the Labor Party, while Franklin Roosevelt appointed Republicans to important positions in his cabinet. Victory, they understood, required national unity and a broad consensus. Roosevelt reduced this Clausewitzian insight into a famous pithy phrase: "Dr. New Deal" had to take second place to "Dr. Win the War." Rice, as National Security Advisor, stood by as President Bush destroyed the national consensus that briefly emerged after September 11. It collapsed in part because Bush married his foreign policy to deeply divisive economic, social, and cultural policies at home. Dr. Tax Cut for the Top Brackets never had to take second place to Dr. Remake the Middle East or Dr. Win the War on Terrorism. Given that Churchill and Roosevelt were spectacularly successful, it was depressing to observe that Rice did not insist that Bush govern from the center at home while seeking support for an aggressive U.S. foreign policy. An administration that really was devoted to the primacy of foreign policy would have recognized the need to moderate its domestic agenda.

Third, and most crucially, Rice was not wrong to call Saddam's regime "totalitarian"--a term she and others in the Bush administration did not hesitate to use--and to imagine what inaction might bring; yet having declared Saddam's regime a variant of totalitarianism, she did not point out that totalitarian regimes are extremely difficult to defeat. Here, the evidence from the end of World War II is stunning and clear. World War II lasted six years, four of which included the total mobilization of the major powers. Of the 60 million people who died in the six years of World War II about 40 million died in Europe and of them over four million were Germans. As historians and an educated general public have known for decades, World War II in Europe was over on May 8, 1945, because the German military had been totally devastated on the battlefield, German society had been pulverized from the air for three years, and the will to continue further fighting was completely gone. As a result, when the official surrender was declared, the war was over. One German historian has recently indicated that 1.5 million German soldiers died between January 1, 1945 and May 8, 1945--and 450,000 in January alone. This total, unambiguous, and definitive defeat, comparable in modern history only to the defeat of Napoleon's army in 1815, was the indispensable precondition for postwar success in the era of occupation.

The proper lesson from this staggering loss of life was that totalitarian regimes had the capacity to fight to the bitter end despite horrendous amounts of death and devastation. So it was astonishing that Rice did not tell President Bush that he should tell Karl Rove to keep his foreign policy opinions to himself, and that he should by no means land on an aircraft carrier in May 2003 to declare "mission accomplished" after two months--months!--of fighting in Iraq....