Every time I read that the strategy of the Trump team is “shock and awe” — a rapid, massive, multifront takeover of the U.S. government to shrink the bureaucracy and overturn established domestic and foreign policy priorities — I think back to the first time I heard that term.
It is not a good memory. It was the strategy that George W. Bush’s administration used in its 2003 invasion of Iraq, where Dick Cheney predicted we would be greeted as “liberators.”
About three weeks after that war started, I went into Iraq with some relief workers to see how “shock and awe” was playing. My first column was titled “Hold Your Applause,” because, as I explained, I was traveling with a Kuwait Red Cross unit to visit a hospital in Umm Qasr, “the first town liberated by coalition forces. But 20 days into the war, it is without running water, security or adequate food supplies.” The Kuwaiti relief workers I was with took “pity on the Iraqis,” I wrote, and tossed our extra lunchboxes out the bus window as we left. I watched hospital workers scramble after the leftover food.
This, I said, “was a scene of humiliation, not liberation. … I’m certain things will improve with time. But for now, America has broken the old order — Saddam’s regime — but it has yet to put in place a new order, and the vacuum is being filled in way too many places by looters, thugs, chaos, thirst, hunger and insecurity.”
Alas, my column came out the morning of April 9, 2003 — the day U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians tore down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad and everyone was celebrating this toppling as similar to the fall of the Berlin Wall. But there I was — someone who had supported the war to spread democracy in the region, not to find elusive W.M.D.s — telling people to hold their applause, while assuring them that things would get better.
I presume by now, dear reader, you have figured out why I am recalling one of the low points of my career. I was so naïve. I thought any U.S. administration that would launch a “shock and awe” campaign to take over a country half a world away would know what it was doing and would be staffed with experts who would know what they were doing. I could not have been more wrong.
When I returned to Baghdad a few weeks later and hung out with my friend Nabeel Khoury, a wise, Arabic-speaking U.S. diplomat, and we engaged with Bush team civilian administrators, I quickly realized that they had been chosen for their ideological purity — what I now call “right-wing woke” — about Hussein and W.M.D.s. They knew nothing about the incredibly complex system of Iraq that they had just shocked and awed.
In particular, Bush backed Shiite hard-liners, including later Nuri Kamal al-Maliki as prime minister and his team, and they formed a “de-Baathification commission” that purged and unemployed several hundred thousand Sunni Arabs — soldiers, teachers, bureaucrats — from the Iraqi system, often giving preference for jobs to Shiites. This eventually generated a Sunni insurgency, and ultimately led to ISIS, which then required the Obama administration to effectively re-invade. We are still fighting ISIS to this day.
Today, it is Donald Trump playing Bush and Elon Musk playing al-Maliki — only this time it is our own government that is being purged by right-wing woke ideologues who want to deBaathify it of D.E.I. ideology, environmental protections, clean energy programs and foreign aid. But I think that is only their cover story.
I think Musk and his Silicon Valley bros are radical libertarians who want to carry out the fevered dream of the Republican strategist Grover Norquist, whose goal, he liked to say, was to cut government “down to the size where one could drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
I am not against shrinking the government, but I am much more in favor of improving the government. The best way to do that is through a process that considers:
1. What are the biggest economic/technological/educational/health trends in the world in which we are living?
2. How do we maximize our ability to thrive in that world?
3. Therefore, where should we cut and where should we invest to maximize our tax dollars to succeed in this world?
No such process is going on with the Musketeers. All they ever talk about is how much they cut — never how their actions are part of an overall plan that will strengthen our society and better serve Americans. Their joy comes from cutting, not building, just as Trump’s joy in “The Apprentice” came from firing and not hiring.
Musk wants to be known for his chain saw and feeding the U.S. Agency for International Development into a “wood chipper.” He and his colleagues seem to delight in putting civil servants out of work and smashing some of our research crown jewels, like the National Institutes of Health, not to mention tossing aside climate scientists and weather predictors at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, among so many others.
If you think Iraq and the Middle East destabilized quickly because of the shock-and-awe effort without a wise plan to follow it, imagine doing the same to the U.S. government, which is connected everywhere in a flat world — where what is lost there is eventually felt here.
How so? Maybe the senior official at U.S.A.I.D. was exaggerating when he said Trump’s crushing of the agency, and withdrawing of foreign aid, would most likely lead to up to 18 million additional cases of malaria per year; 200,000 children a year becoming paralyzed with polio, and hundreds of millions of infections; and more than 28,000 new cases of infectious diseases such as Ebola and Marburg every year. But what if he wasn’t exaggerating? You think there will be no blowback here? Have you heard of Covid-19?
Show me one study where the Trump administration has stress-tested any of this. Or show me the stress tests of the devastating effect that Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada will have on Ford and General Motors. His repeated insistence that foreign exporters pay the cost of tariffs is nonsense. As Warren Buffett noted in a TV interview that aired over the weekend: “They are a tax on goods. I mean, the Tooth Fairy doesn’t pay ’em!”
And what do you think will be the long-term effect on the morale, recruiting and retention in the U.S. military to see the most senior American military officer and the chief of naval operations fired — not for any stated failures, but seemingly because the first was Black and had at one time expressed support for Black Lives Matter and the second was a woman? Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth certainly intimated that both were promoted for woke reasons, not real merit as serious war fighters.
Not on merit? Really? The fired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., graduated from the Air Force Weapons School — the branch’s equivalent of the Navy’s Top Gun program — had logged more than 3,100 flight hours primarily in F-16s, including 130 combat hours. He had a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and a master’s degree in aeronautical science.
In contrast, Hegseth, a former second-tier Fox News host once accused by his own mother of routinely mistreating women (she later disavowed her attack), is the epitome of a Trump-era D.E.I.-for-mediocre-white-men hire.
Musk, in his real businesses, surely would not hire Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be salespeople at a Tesla showroom. But Trump hired them precisely because they were second-rate ideologues who would agree to put their loyalty to Trump before the Constitution or the truth.
Trump is right on this: The war in Ukraine needs to end — now. But the way you get the most lasting peace in Ukraine — and for the rest of Europe — is by shocking and awing Vladimir Putin, who started that war, into accepting that he is going to have to live next to a Western-armed Ukraine anchored in the European Union — not by increasing Putin’s appetite by publicly bashing and extorting his victim. That is just shameful.
(By the way, where are all the social justice warriors who shut down campuses over Gaza last year, but seem to be giving Trump a pass when he stabs our democratic allies in the back and sides with Putin?)
It is shameful, and penny-wise and pound-foolish. Yes, America did pay more than any other country to construct the pillars of the liberal world order over the last 80 years. But in doing so we made the global pie so much larger and more stable for everyone. And since we were the biggest and strongest economy, our slices just kept getting bigger and bigger than anyone else’s.
If you shock and awe that system with no plan — other than right-wing woke revenge and Trump’s 19th-century view of geopolitics and trade — watch what happens to our slice and everyone else’s.
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