The making of a hawk

Though Albright's view was to be proved the correct one, Powell's concern for the lives of American soldiers is not easily dismissed. All too often, the officials and commentators calling for blood and fire have no personal experience of the frontline misery they are clamoring for -- and frequently have surprisingly little empathy for those who will be put in harm's way, including soldiers and civilians. Powell, who endured two rounds of duty in Vietnam, is painfully aware of what battle is like. Ultimately, the truest test of a hawk's sincerity is whether he himself would volunteer to fight -- or be willing to sacrifice the lives of his own children. Powell is right: G.I.s aren't toy soldiers. And unless a hawk can say he is prepared to make this ultimate sacrifice, he's on shaky moral ground.

Powell and the military elite weren't the only ones scarred by Vietnam, of course -- an entire generation of Americans was. When President Johnson began escalating the war in 1964, I was a 12-year-old student at a military academy in Los Angeles, the Harvard School. We drilled, took rifle practice and fought battle exercises with the expectation that, after graduation, we would serve our country as junior officers in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia. We attended solemn chapel services in memory of fallen alumni; their heroic names lived forever on school plaques. But as the war dragged on, and it became clear even to ROTC-trained teenagers like me that something was terribly wrong over there, that the majority of Vietnamese -- for whom we were ostensibly fighting -- did not seem to want us to win, some deep sense of patriotic mission that stretched back generations in my family and countless others was broken. Now, among the young men and women I knew, the honorable path was not to fight in this American war, as our fathers had when they were called to duty decades before, but to fight against it.

In recent years, it has once again become fashionable among the pundit class to denigrate those who protested the war and to venerate those who chose to serve. But the antiwar activists I knew and worked with did not make their choices lightly or selfishly. The decision to break with our country's policy was a wrenching one for us, and we paid for it in various ways. Many of us, including myself, were sentenced to jail for our protests; some, like a close college friend, served two years in a federal prison for burning his draft card. I was prepared to join him if my number had been called in Nixon's macabre lottery system. My early youth was a never-ending campaign of pamphleteering, marching and, as the war spread its poison, increasingly bitter run-ins with violent police assault squads. But the deeper cost was the disorienting sense of estrangement we came to feel from the country we had been raised to love. Ironically, we saw the same alienation in the young veterans we came to know as they returned from the war and turned against it. The stories have achieved mythological status and I'm sure some of them are true -- but no one I knew ever spit on a returning soldier. These men were even more haunted by the war than we were; we felt they were brothers in the same nightmare. Some -- like my friend who decided to go under pressure from his father, a conservative Florida mayor, but insisted on serving as a medic on a helicopter gunship -- experienced things he could never put behind him and died a few years after the war ended, in a way that seemed suicidal. He had a Southern sense of valor, clearly intact under his wry veneer, that two decades after his death still brings tears to my eyes whenever he swims into memory. The point I'm trying to make is that antiwar activists were attempting to prevent casualties like this, senseless carnage that outlasted the war itself. And I came to regard these efforts as heroic. I still do.

The only members of my generation I have contempt for are those who loudly supported the war but found convenient ways to escape serving in it. I saw this syndrome develop while still a military student -- as the war staggered on, suddenly the names of fallen graduates came to a halt. The conservative tycoons and politicians who sent their sons to the academy were finding face-saving ways for their offspring to dodge the war -- the preferred escape hatch was enrollment in the National Guard. This allowed these "fortunate sons" (in the words of the acidic antiwar song by Creedence Clearwater Revival) to appear patriotic and not disturb their career trajectories, while saving their asses. It was an easy out made famous by two of the nation's most prominent fortunate sons, Vice President Dan Quayle and the current occupant of the White House.

This contempt is shared by Powell, who, Halberstam notes, "despised the class distinctions that had determined who had gone to Vietnam and who had not, which he called 'an antidemocratic disgrace.'" Powell wrote in his autobiography, "I can never forgive a leadership that said in effect: 'These young men -- poorer, less educated, less privileged -- are expendable (someone once described them as 'economic cannon-fodder') but the rest are too good to risk.' I am angry that so many of the sons of the powerful and well-placed ... managed to wangle slots in the Reserve and National Guard units." This raises the question: What does Powell think of the war record of the president he currently serves as secretary of state?

I continued to wear my antiwar record as a badge of honor years after Vietnam, eliciting predictable sneers from conservatives and mandatory respect in liberal circles. The lessons of Vietnam guided me during my opposition to President Reagan's murky war in Central America, even through the Persian Gulf War, which I again marched against, as a bloody crusade on behalf of Big Oil. Years later, I came to see the Gulf War as more than this, as I educated myself about the ghastly regime in Baghdad and the horrors it had inflicted on its own people as well as enemies. By the time Milosevic and his henchmen began bombarding defenseless cities and filling concentration camps and mass graves with undesirables, while his European neighbors and U.N. "peacekeepers" endlessly dithered, I had come fully round to a conviction I had not embraced since I was a boy: America is not only capable of using its unrivaled power for good -- it must. When waves of American bombers began striking at Serbian military installations and power plants in spring 1999, I felt a kind of unmitigated pride I hadn't remembered since those long-ago days when I watched old World War II movies without a sense of irony. As Halberstam documents, President Clinton had to be pushed and prodded into taking decisive action -- by aides like Albright and Holbrooke, by Gen. Clark on the military side, by trusted allies like Tony Blair -- and finally by the unrelentingly belligerent Milosevic himself. But when Clinton finally did, it was his finest moment as commander in chief.

The transition from dove to hawk is a political, intellectual and personal journey that many others in my generation have been making in recent years, some since Sept. 11. The length of this collective trek came home for me this morning on the way to work, as I listened closely for the first time to the lyrics of Neil Young's new song, "Let's Roll," inspired by the words of United Airlines Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer as he and his brave comrades rushed the cockpit. Thirty years ago, I was equally stirred by Young's bitter "Ohio," his antiwar anthem about the Kent State student protesters who were cut down by "tin soldiers in Nixon's army." (It was the one time the fortunate sons in the National Guard saw action during Vietnam, to kill their fellow citizens.) But it's the simplicity of Young's current song that sums up the world today: "No one has the answers/but one thing is true/You've got to turn on evil/ when it's coming after you ... Time is running out, let's roll."

For years after Vietnam, I wanted America to step back from the world, and what I regarded as its arrogant -- if not imperial -- need to impose its own sense of order on history. But I have come to share the view of Robert Kagan, that "if you are the president of the United States, you do not find trouble, trouble finds you." Or as Richard Holbrooke told Halberstam, speaking of Clinton's early desire to focus almost exclusively on domestic issues (believing this was the electorate's message in choosing him over the internationalist Bush): "What Clinton did not yet understand was that foreign policy never lets an American president go." There are inevitably times when the darkest powers of the human heart find the means and opportunity to threaten not just the world's peace but its sense of decency. And while international coalitions or U.N. peacekeeping forces would, in a better world, be the best way to respond to these explosions of evil, the sober truth is that -- from Kuwait to Kosovo to Kabul -- only the United States has demonstrated the force and the will to do so effectively.

I am no foreign policy expert, as is surely plain by now. But I believe it's incumbent on all America's citizens to learn as much as our busy lives allow about the world -- and not just leave it to our best and brightest -- because the United States' unique leadership role assures that all of us will feel the impact of the globe's crises, no matter how remote they might initially seem. I have developed my own criteria for when I think American intervention is justified; that is, when it's worth the cost in blood and treasure, not only for the U.S., but for the people we are trying to rescue. In my mind, there are three cases when resorting to military force is necessary: 1) When the United States is directly attacked -- which it was not only on Sept. 11 but in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, as well as the explosions aimed at the U.S. embassies in Africa and naval ship in Yemen; 2) When an aggressor threatens regional stability and world peace -- such as Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and Milosevic's assaults on Bosnia and Kosovo; 3) When a nation launches a campaign of genocidal extermination against its own people or those of its neighbors -- as Milosevic did against the Muslims of the former Yugoslavia and the Hutu tribe did against the Tutsis in Rwanda.

Bloodbaths like Rwanda strike many Americans as not worth the cost of intervention, since they do not directly threaten our national security. But we do indeed have a dog in these fights. These orgies of violence are crimes against humanity -- and unless they're stopped and their perpetrators brought to justice, they degrade the world we live in and embolden future Pol Pots and Interhamwes, the machete-wielding vigilantes who hacked to death nearly a million of their Rwandan neighbors in a 100-day spasm of gore, while the U.S. did nothing and U.N. soldiers fled the country. The tragedy of Rwanda, as a 1999 "Frontline" report on PBS documented, was that this low-tech genocide could have been stopped with a minimal show of force. Instead it was a "triumph of evil," as "Frontline" titled its report, "which the philosopher Edmund Burke observed happens when good men do nothing." When demonic visionaries are allowed to put their Grand Guignol theories into practice, the moral universe that all of us inhabit shrivels.

Next page: The Jeffersonians fear foreign disasters -- but they're often wrong