War without cost?

Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, has an article in the American Conservative on Paul Wolfowitz. Bacevich sees Wolfowitz’s worldview as a response to the classic problem of “dirty hands.” Thinkers like Reinhold Niebuhr famously held that it was sometimes necessary to incur guilt while wielding power in service to the the good. America’s alliances with repulsive dictators like Stalin, or the use of weapons of mass destruction during World War II would be examples. This inevatibly implied limitations on the use of force, since it always involved moral costs.

However, Wolfowitz, at least according to Bacevich, believes that advances in technology have made possible a kind of precision warfare that can, in principle, resolve the Niebuhrian dilemma. Thus also Wolfowitz’s thinking reconciled the urge to do good and the quest for American military supremacy. The US could be both the new Rome and the new Jerusalem. But if the use of force is now to be regarded as essentially morally costless, then it becomes pointless to regard war as a last resort.

Wolfowitz was opposed in the run-up to the war by Army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki. Shinseki represented the old-school approach to war, directly opposed to Wolfowitz’s vision of war as a routine tool of policy. Shinseki was publicly rebuked and ended up going into early retirement, and, of course, we got our war. Despite his political victory, though, Bacevich sees Wolfowitz’s legacy as a mixed one at best:

In its trial run, the doctrine of preventive war—Wolfowitz’s handiwork as much as the president’s—has produced liberation and occupation, a crisp demonstration of “shock and awe” and a protracted, debilitating insurgency, the dramatic toppling of a dictator and horrifying evidence implicating American soldiers in torture and other abuses.

[…]

The forces that Paul Wolfowitz helped unleash—a dangerous combination of hubris and naïveté—are exacting an ever mounting cost. His considerable exertions notwithstanding, truth in matters of statecraft remains implacably gray. Even assuming honorable intentions on the part of those who conceived this war, wielding power in Iraq has left the United States up to its ankles, if not up to its knees, in guilt.

Not to mention that the much-ballyhooed “precision” weapons we’ve been hearing about since at least the first Gulf War still go off target and still give us ample “collateral damage,” as we’ve seen in Iraq, Kosovo, and elsewhere. Plus, the deliberate targeting of infrastructure, however well-justified militarily, can’t help but affect civilian populations.