Hillary Clinton and “The Lessons of History”
As Hillary Clinton becomes the near certain choice as Democratic candidate for President, new attention has been focused on her hard-edged rhetoric about foreign and military policy. Bernie Sanders has warned that her preference for military action in the Middle East indicates a failure to “learn the lessons of history.”
This charge is based on a common misunderstanding about how our leaders have interpreted past military encounters. Since World War II, American officials have not ignored the lessons of history, they actually have tended to over-learn them, often at great cost to our national interest.
Emerging from the victories of 1945, leaders in the Pentagon had “learned” that the “American way of war” — overwhelming firepower made possible by the industrial might of the world’s most powerful nation — would assure its forces success in any conflict. But Vietnam then taught that in civil wars, particularly those involving insurgent fighters, firepower could be disastrously counter-productive. The “Rolling Thunder” air campaign, the napalming of the land, the search and destroy forays had killed and alienated friends and motivated foes even as it took a terrible toll of American troops. It would take years for the American armed forces to recover from this ugly struggle and its inevitable failure. Military leaders, with General Colin Powell in the lead, vowed “never again” to that kind of war.
But learning the lesson of Vietnam, avoiding involvement in bitter civil conflicts, had its own consequences in the early 1990s. Hillary Clinton was Bill Clinton’s most trusted adviser, and she was there in 1993 when President Clinton, only weeks after inauguration, was confronted with the brutal ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serbs. This was a civil war, and James Baker, Secretary of State for Clinton’s predecessor, had taken history’s lesson to conclude that “we have no dog in that fight” and should therefore stay out.
The new President did not agree; Bill Clinton wanted to use American power to stop the slaughter. But Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had insisted that air strikes would be futile and warned of the dangers of sending American ground troops. Each time he was asked if something could not be done about the Serbian artillery bombarding civilian populations, he would insist that any American action would inevitably lead to at least 100,000 American “boots on the ground.” There were repeated references to the “Pottery Barn metaphor”: if you break it, you own it. America could be facing another quagmire without end.
Powell was not alone. The Secretaries of Defense and State, the Republican Congressional opposition, and our NATO allies all opposed forceful action in Bosnia in 1993. And so the President, early in a first term in which he was pressing to pass his domestic agenda, accepted Powell’s advice.
A similar lesson was over-learned in Somalia, when the “Black Hawk Down” tragedy taught of the dangers to our troops posed by African civil war quagmires. President Clinton, preoccupied with that memory from just six months before, allowed rampaging Hutus to slaughter half a million Tutsis in Rwanda without American intervention.
For Bill Clinton, the failure to use military muscle in Rwanda and Bosnia early in his administration led to a re-evaluation of uses of American power. By 1995, with the Bosnian war becoming more intense and Serbian forces engaging in mass murder in Srebrenica, he ordered a massive U.S.-led NATO air campaign that crushed the Bosnian Serbs and led to the Dayton Accords and the end of this conflict. And in 1998, when the leader of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, sent his army into Kosovo, Bill Clinton orchestrated an even more powerful attack which destroyed the Milosevic regime. It was a triumph. Noble Laureate and Czech President Vaclav Havel said that if any war could be called ethical, Kosovo could, because “this war placed human rights above the rights of the state.”
This pattern of over-learning lessons continued for the next two decades. George W. Bush believed that the “shock and awe” bombardment of Iraq (like Clinton’s in the Balkans) and a ground invasion (like his father’s in the Gulf War) would yield an outcome similar to what his two predecessors had achieved. He was enormously, tragically wrong.
Then, President Obama, having learned the lesson of Iraq, refused to allow substantial American intervention in the horrific Syrian civil war, pulling back even after he had set his own “red line” warning that Syria not to use chemical weapons. He knew that Bush had taken a sledge hammer to a bee’s nest in Iraq, eliminating Saddam Hussein only to create a calamitous series of consequences still transforming the region and damaging American interests almost everywhere. Obama had therefore resolved not to allow America to be caught in the abyss of another ethnic-religious conflict.
But had Barack Obama “over-learned” the lesson of history in Iraq? Hillary Clinton evidently thinks so, and she might be right. Clinton, not only as a candidate in both 2008 and 2016 but even during her time as Obama’s Secretary of State, has had her differences with the President. While working closely with him, she clearly has favored a more muscular foreign policy.
Notable here: her advocacy of arming Syrian insurgents early in that civil war, before massive Russian intervention or the rise of ISIS, when Assad might have been forced to the bargaining table (or forced to flee). And, somewhat later, there was her support for a no-fly zone over northern Syria, which would have ended Assad’s murderous aerial bombing campaign, providing a possible safe haven for many who might not have had to become part of the flood of refugees headed for Europe and making it almost impossible for Vladimir Putin to send the Russian air force to the rescue of the dictator in Damascus.
Hillary Clinton’s willingness to use military force in some foreign conflicts, her allegedly “hawkish” approach, might be rooted in her “cold realism about human nature,” as a recent New York Times Magazine piece suggested. But it may also be a product of what she has learned advising and watching two presidents as they dealt with the “lessons of history.” Sometimes, leaders must draw their own conclusions and ignore the warnings or enticements of the recent past.
