“We used to do 25- and 50-year problems. We don’t do that any more. We want everything done in six months. We want everything done in a month. We want everything done in a year at most.” Lawrence Wilkerson

In January 2003, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell walked into his chief of staff’s office with a 48-page document. It was the script of a speech to the United Nations to make the American case for going to war in Iraq, and his chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, had to prepare him to deliver it.

“It was the lowest moment in my personal and professional career,” Wilkerson said this week during a visit to the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

Wilkerson, a retired U.S. army colonel and Vietnam War veteran, has been critical about that script and the crisis that followed — and continues in the region. Now a professor of government and public policy at The College of William and Mary in Virginia, he draws on thinkers from Thomas Piketty to Thucydides to explain the challenges facing American foreign policy.

On the day the Canadian Parliament voted to send fighter jets to Iraq, Wilkerson spoke to the Star. (The interview has been edited and condensed for space and clarity.)

You’ve been outspoken about the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003. Why?

My concern is twofold. One, As a strategist in the military, I see the balance of power having been majorly disturbed and I don’t see any balance being restored. There are two ways to do that. One would be for the U.S. to go back and maintain the balancing force itself, either as we sort of did earlier offshore — that is, in carrier battle groups, marine amphibious groups and so forth — or in actual installations like the major air force installation in Qatar, on the ground, in the region . . . That’s untenable, I think, because every soldier, sailor, marine, air force personnel in the region would have a big bull’s-eye on his back for any group that had an angst and wanted to kill Americans.

So how do you do it? Well, there is a way, I think. And that’s to re-establish Iran. She is the natural hegemon in the Gulf. So why not forge some sort of rapprochement with Tehran that recognizes the Gulf Cooperation Council, led by Saudi Arabia, as a partner; recognizes Israel and her desire to be secure and democratic, hopefully; recognizes all the traditional power points and inflection points in that region but essentially says, ‘Hey, look — the United States will remain offshore and be a balancer when it needs to be but we’re not going to sit down in the region. And we expect you people, led by Iran, to actually handle the situation on a day-to-day basis.’

That might sound a little bit cold and a little bit too realpolitik, but I think it also brings into the debate Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and, ultimately the entire region. And it says, this is the only way to forge a stability that breeds prosperity, more openness, more transparency and hopefully more democracy, or at least democratic tendencies, over the next 25 to 30 years. And you’ve all got to work at it. And we’ll help you. But we’ll help you principally with economic and finance, trade, so forth, and we’ll keep military forces offshore where they’re not visible, so to speak, and yet they’re ready to do things to support you when you can’t handle ’em, when they get out of your capability to handle. But basically we’re expecting you to handle most of it. You gotta bring Turkey into that, too, of course. It’s a regional solution with a U.S. backdrop, and I think that’s the only way you’re ever going to get this situation resolved.

Canada has taken a hard line against Iran, though. Do you see them coming around to a plan like that?

I think if they were led there. (laughs) It’s going to be difficult to get the United States to go there. I think the president has a predilection for going there, but there’s a lot of opposition, incredible opposition, and most of it forms most formidably around Israel. And Israel knows that and plays it to the maximum extent possible, especially this current Israeli leadership.

What are the factors that make this current situation with the Islamic State group different than 2003?

I think it’s more dangerous, I really do. In 2003 we disturbed the balance, and we stayed there to keep the balance, and we stayed there for 10 years. We then didn’t have the determination, if you will, to stay there as we did in Korea, to stay there as we did in Europe. Indeed, we’re still in Korea, we’re still in Europe. To a certain extent we’re still in Japan. And the moment we left (Iraq), the balance fractured. It fell apart, as anyone looking at it from a geo-strategic perspective knew it would. And now we’ve got the chaos that ensued.

How likely do you think it is to be able to reach a diplomatic solution there?

I don’t think it’s that difficult if you approach it from the perspective that you’re going to deal with everybody. That means you’ve probably got to deal with Bashar Assad, you’ve probably got to deal forthrightly with Tehran and they’ve got to deal forthrightly with you. So there are two sides to this. The hardliners, the (Iranian) Revolutionary Guard types, veterans of the war between Iraq and Iran, who really think we sided with Iraq — which we did — they’re going to be hard to convince and they’re going to fight, just like people in the United States are fighting, to keep any rapprochement from happening. But if you can overcome that — and an astute politician and a good leader, I think, could — and marshal the American people to support you in that, I think you could bring it off. I don’t see the kind of skill, though, that would be necessary to bring that off being available right now. Partly because it is not innately there, and partly because my party (the Republicans) will not let it manifest itself. Anything to keep the president from success is my party’s mantra.

If it’s even in the disinterest of the United States, my party will do it if it’s in the interest of the party. And that’s a horrible formulation. That is really a dangerous thing to say about a political party. And yet it was forecast by George Washington and by others who talked about factions, about allegiance to party, and about allegiance to party gradually overcoming allegiance to country. And we have some of that now. We have people who are actually more politically interested in their future and their party than they are about the ultimate, long-term security of the country.

You still identify as a Republican, though.

Yes, because I’d like my party back. I’d like to regain my party for saner and sober minds. It’s the party of Lincoln.

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There is more talk about sending coalition airstrikes to fight the Islamic State. You mention that you don’t see airstrikes as being feasible ...

They’re feasible. I don’t think they’re going to solve much.

What would solve it?

I think in Iraq, you need a viable, interested, patriotic even, courageous Iraqi national force. And you need to take the battle on the ground, in Iraq, to the Islamic State forces. But more importantly than that, at the same time, you need a government in Baghdad that promises to the Sunnis who are supporting the Islamic State, and lives up to those promises, to create a politically inclusive government that allows the Sunnis to share real power. You need that to accompany it. That will both incentivize the military, because they will see, the Sunni members in particular, that the government is now protective of them instead of trying to jail them or kill them, and it will also put together a political structure that can sustain itself over the long haul.

What’s the urgency of going now to take on the Islamic State?

I think the current administration would tell you, and the intelligence would back them up, that you have to get them before they grow to the proportions where you would almost be forced into doing this massive (long-term military presence) I’m talking about. You have some people who are actually thinking in terms of, if (the Islamic State) gets 30,000 fighters under arms in six months to a year, you could get 60,000, 100,000, 200,000; you could use this oil wealth to buy a lot of tanks, a lot of armaments and so forth; you could really field a formidable military force. And if it gets to that point, we really will have to contemplate, without much alternative, putting a really substantial military force on the ground. I don’t happen to subscribe to that theory about potential growth of this force, but I know there are enough people talking about it that they’re frightening others — not just in Washington but elsewhere, too — about the potential for this force to grow.

But I do think there is a possibility that if you don’t do something at the present moment — and I would do something regionally, I wouldn’t do something with U.S. forces — then you may have a problem that later on is a much bigger crisis than you have now. So it is important to do something effectively and swiftly.

Is there anything in particular that you think is being overlooked in this whole debate right now?

I think one of the things that’s being overlooked that haunts the administration still is it thinks that every country in the region is roughly the same, and that if a tyrant is in charge, if he goes, it’s better, but we should wait until he’s imminently going before we say that and support his going. And that you can apply that, as we sort of did in Egypt, to all the rest of the countries. Including — and this is what scares the Saudis — the Saudis. The prognosis is they’ll eventually go, their people will be so unsatisfied that they’ll rise up and they’ll overthrow the royals and the Shia will maybe lead that effort in Saudi Arabia, which is the great fear of the Saudi elites, and that eventually you’ll have that all across the area. All the tyrants will be gone.

And that what you need to do is be there quickly so that you can ensure that what replaces them is not Al Nusra, Al Qaeda or the Islamic State, but something reasonably like what the West would be comfortable with. Not a Jeffersonian democracy. Not a tyranny either, but maybe something in between for a time. And I don’t think that works. I think every country is different. You have to understand Syria. You have to understand Bahrain, you have to understand Saudi Arabia, you have to understand Iran, you have to understand all these countries, and you have to take a different approach to each one of them, and you have to do this all simultaneously, or near-simultaneously. And that’s hard. It’s especially hard when you don’t do diplomacy very well. We’ve let that skill atrophy since World War II, turning more to the hard power than the soft power. And I think we need to regrow that skill and burnish it and use it more often. And I think this is a perfect situation where it needs to be used and needs to be used over a long period of time, and used well.

We used to do 25- and 50-year problems. We don’t do that any more. We want everything done in six months. We want everything done in a month. We want everything done in a year at most. This is not something that gets done that fast. This is going to take time and a lot of hard work.

Stephanie MacLellan is a master’s candidate at the Munk School of Global Affairs.

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