The Pentagon's internal war

The career military and their civilian bosses at the Pentagon are at odds over weaponry, Saudi Arabia -- and Iraq.

By Joshua Micah Marshall

Aug 9, 2002 | In the spring of 2001, shortly after the Bush administration had taken office, a delegation of Saudi diplomats attended a meeting at the Pentagon with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz. As the meeting was breaking up, one of the attendees, Harold Rhode -- a Pentagon employee and Wolfowitz protégé then serving as Wolfowitz's "Islamic affairs advisor" -- approached Adel Al-Jubeir, a soft-spoken Saudi diplomat who once served as an assistant to the Saudi ambassador and today is foreign policy advisor to Crown Prince Abdullah.

Rhode told Al-Jubeir that once the new administration got its affairs in order there'd be no more pussyfooting around as there was in the Clinton days, according to a source familiar with the meeting. The United States would take care of Saddam, start calling the shots in the region, and the Saudis would have to fall in line. Al-Jubeir demurred. These were issues the two allies would certainly discuss, Al-Jubeir told the American.

Rhode then shoved his finger in the diminutive Saudi's chest and told him, "You're not going to have any choice!"

Rhode's antics caused a brief frenzy on the phone lines connecting the Pentagon, the State Department and the Saudi Embassy. And the embarrassing incident may have cost Rhode a high-level appointment in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asian Affairs office. But the incident -- among others -- set the tone for the Bush administration's relations with the Saudis, which were deeply troubled well before Sept. 11, when more than a dozen Saudi nationals drove planes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. After the Washington Post reported earlier this week that a Pentagon advisory board listened to a speaker (and a peculiar one one at that) describe Saudi Arabia as America's enemy, suggesting military action against the desert kingdom, Pentagon officials were quick to insist that such views were by no means those of the Pentagon or the Bush administration.

But the touchiness of the response and the delicacy of the issue underscores a reality that the Saudis and high-level administration officials well understand: Many, perhaps most, of the Bush administration appointees at the Pentagon today are only slightly less hostile to the Saudis -- and many of America's other traditional Arab allies -- than the speaker at the briefing.

And it spotlights an unsettling problem among the men deciding whether we should wage war: The relationship between career military officers and their civilian bosses at the Pentagon are the worst they've been, some insiders say, in more than 20 years, even more divisive than they were during the Clinton years. There is no clear resolution to it, and particularly in the near future, the rift could have dangerous consequences.

The Bush administration's most right-leaning political appointees are concentrated at the Pentagon. And nowhere is that tilt more evident than in its Middle East policies. The Bush appointees have not just ignored recommendations from military advisors and civil servants but have often ousted or sidelined those who have had the temerity to offer any policy advice. Over the last 18 months, there has been an exodus of career civil servants leaving the Pentagon policy shop for stints on Capitol Hill or with other Defense Department-affiliated institutions, according to a half-dozen such departees who spoke to Salon -- far more than is normally the case when administrations change from one party to the other. Many of those slots have been filled by ideologues and think-tank denizens who can be relied on to serve up the right kind of advice to their superiors.

When most people think of neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, they think of men like Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary, and Richard Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board -- the panel that heard the anti-Saudi briefing. But the second tier of civilian appointees at the Pentagon is stacked with Wolfowitz and Perle protégés who are in many ways even more conservative in their views than their mentors and -- as the Rhode incident shows -- a good deal more hotheaded. And even Wolfowitz strikes many in the military as more than a touch conservative. "Wolfowitz is a right-wing sucker," says retired Army colonel William Taylor, a defense policy analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "He's a good guy, a smart guy. But he's to the right of Genghis Khan."

In the minds of these second-tier appointees, taking out Saddam Hussein is only part of a larger puzzle. Their grand vision of the Middle East goes something like this: Stage 1: Iraq becomes democratic. Stage 2: Reformers take over in Iran. That would leave the three powerhouses of the Middle East -- Turkey, Iraq and Iran -- democratic and pro-Western. Suddenly the Saudis wouldn't be just one more corrupt, authoritarian Arab regime slouching toward bin Ladenism. They'd be surrounded by democratic states that would undermine Saudi rule both militarily and ideologically.

As a plan to pursue in the real world, most of the career military and the civilian employees at the Pentagon -- indeed most establishment foreign policy experts -- see this vision as little short of insane. But to Bush's hawkish Pentagon appointees the real prize isn't Baghdad, it's Riyadh. And the Saudis know it.

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