Diversionary War
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Diversionary War

Domestic Unrest and International Conflict

Amy Oakes

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Diversionary War

Domestic Unrest and International Conflict

Amy Oakes

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About This Book

The very existence of diversionary wars is hotly contested in the press and among political scientists. Yet no book has so far tackled the key questions of whether leaders deliberately provoke conflicts abroad to distract the public from problems at home, or whether such gambles offer a more effective response to domestic discontent than appeasing opposition groups with political or economic concessions. Diversionary War addresses these questions by reinterpreting key historical examples of diversionary war—such as Argentina's 1982 Falklands Islands invasion and U.S. President James Buchanan's decision to send troops to Mormon Utah in 1857. It breaks new ground by demonstrating that the use of diversionary tactics is, at best, an ineffectual strategy for managing civil unrest, and draws important conclusions for policymakers—identifying several new, and sometimes counterintuitive, avenues by which embattled states can be pushed toward adopting alternative political, social, or economic strategies for managing domestic unrest.

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1
Introduction
Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels; that action, hence borne out,
May waste the memory of the former days.
—William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 21
In the late summer of 1998, at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, U.S. President Bill Clinton authorized air strikes against alleged terrorist targets in Sudan and Afghanistan. Several Clinton critics asserted that the bombings were intended to shift focus from the president’s admission that he had lied about having an improper relationship with White House intern Lewinsky. In a Salon editorial, for example, Christopher Hitchens wondered why the president hurried to attack: “There is really only one possible answer to that question. Clinton needed to look ‘presidential’ for a day.”2 And every major media outlet, from the New York Times and the Washington Post to ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, and NBC, ran stories on the speculations that the bombings were an attempt to divert attention from the scandal.3
Indeed, on several occasions the administration’s top national security aides were compelled to deny publicly that the attacks were linked to the president’s personal and legal troubles. For example, Secretary of Defense William Cohen was asked during a press conference whether he had seen the movie Wag the Dog, in which a Washington spin doctor fabricates a war to distract the public from the president’s liaison with a teenage girl. Cohen declined to answer directly, saying that “The only motivation driving this action today was our absolute obligation to protect the American people from terrorist activities.”4 Meanwhile, video rentals of Wag the Dog soared.5
Despite the administration’s emphatic denials, the event exhibited many hallmarks of a classic diversionary use of force, which is to say an international conflict provoked to whip up nationalist sentiment and rally the populace behind the regime or simply to distract the public from the government’s failings. First, the timing was felicitous. Clinton gave the mission a green light on the same day he was asked to provide federal investigators with a DNA sample, which signaled that the Starr Commission had potentially damning forensic evidence of intimate contact with Lewinsky. The White House also announced the strikes just three days after Clinton’s prime-time television appearance, in which he confessed to “a critical lapse in judgment, a personal failure” in having an affair with Lewinsky.6 And the attacks themselves coincided with Lewinsky’s second and final grand jury appearance, in which she was questioned about the veracity of Clinton’s testimony.
Second, the operation was generally popular. The target, Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network, was believed to be responsible for the deadly bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. As a result, even the Republican leadership praised Clinton’s decision to use force. House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s reaction was typical when he remarked that “if you saw the TV coverage of the two embassy bombings and the caskets come home to America, you know that this is real. . . . I think, based on what I know, that it was the right thing to do at the right time.”7 The public’s response was also favorable. In a poll conducted immediately after the raids, 68 percent of respondents approved of Clinton’s foreign policy—a high point in his presidency. Most people believed he had acted to protect U.S. national security, not to distract them from the scandal.8 The American public may have distrusted their president, but they also believed that he was a capable commander-in-chief. Whatever Clinton’s actual motivation, the attacks changed the national conversation from sordid assignations in the Oval Office to combating global terrorism.
This is a book about diversionary war. Do leaders use foreign adventure to improve their domestic political fortunes? If so, under what conditions are unpopular governments most likely to deploy this strategy? Are diversionary uses of force successful in reducing domestic discontent? Is diversionary war a more-effective response to internal unrest than, say, making political concessions to opposition groups or suppressing dissent?
Conventional wisdom among the political class maintains that leaders in trouble routinely initiate diversionary conflicts. Since World War II, for example, most U.S. presidents have been suspected, at one point or another, of provoking or escalating a foreign conflict to rally support for the government or divert attention from the administration’s blunders.
In 1948 Harry Truman’s political opponents accused him of aggravating the conflict with the Soviet Union, particularly during the Berlin blockade, in order to win votes in a tough election.9 If Truman had excited tensions with Moscow to increase his popularity with voters, he would have been following the advice of his campaign strategists. Truman’s advisors crafted a memo predicting that he would benefit politically if the “battle with the Kremlin” intensified because the “worse matters get, up to a fairly certain point—real danger of imminent war—the more is there a sense of crisis. In times of crisis the American citizen tends to back up his President.”10
John F. Kennedy also was thought to have engaged in “aggressive posturing in international affairs . . . to improve his domestic image,” in particular in his handling of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.11 Republicans argued that the president manufactured the conflict, which became public less than one month before midterm elections, to help Democrats keep their majority in both houses of Congress. For example, Representative Thomas Curtis of Missouri told his constituents that the crisis was “phony and contrived for election purposes.”12 Even the president’s allies questioned his motives. Robert Hilsman, a Kennedy appointee to the Department of State, commented that “behind the policy choices loomed domestic politics. . . . The United States might not [have been] in mortal danger but the administration certainly was.”13
In May 1975, Gerald Ford sent a Marine task force to rescue the 39-person crew of the U.S. freighter Mayaguez, which had been seized by Cambodian Khmer Rouge forces in international waters—a mission described by the Wall Street Journal as having “all the elements of an Errol Flynn swash-buckler.”14 When the prisoners were freed, the president’s approval ratings surged by 11 points—even though more U.S. troops died in the operation than there were hostages to be rescued.15 Five years later, while under fire for not using force in the Iranian hostage crisis, Jimmy Carter implied in an interview that Ford had acted in a self-serving manner: “I have a very real political awareness that at least on a transient basis the more drastic the action taken by the President, the more popular he is. When President Ford expended 40 American lives on the Mayaguez . . . it was looked upon as a heroic action, and his status as a bold and wise leader rose greatly. This is always a temptation.”16
Following the U.S. invasion of Grenada on October 25, 1983, Ronald Reagan faced scrutiny from members of Congress and the media, who hinted that the president might have sought to distract the public from the deadly suicide bombing of American and French barracks in Beirut two days earlier.17 For example, Democratic Representative Peter Kostmayer of Pennsylvania declared that “I haven’t seen a single shred of evidence that American lives were in danger in Grenada.”18 Francis Clines of the New York Times went further, baldly asserting that Reagan had used a “rallying ’round the flag” strategy.19
In 1989 George H. W. Bush dispatched more than 24,000 troops to depose the government of Manuel Noriega and restore democracy to Panama. Observers wondered whether the administration was simply “trying to cure its political image problems at home,” as the president had “long been accused of being a ‘wimp’” in matters of foreign policy.20 But when the administration’s press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, was asked whether the invasion of Panama “was the test of fire that will cause [the president] to be more respected at home and abroad,” Fitzwater responded simply: “We see him . . . as the same bold, visionary, outstanding, strong, macho, strong, whatever, leader he’s always been.”21
Critics of George W. Bush maintained that the president escalated the crisis over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in the summer and fall of 2002 in order to guarantee Republican control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections. For example, columnist Frank Rich wrote that Bush’s political strategists knew that “an untelevised and largely underground war [on terror] . . . might not nail election victories without a jolt of shock and awe. It was a propitious moment to wag the dog” in Iraq.22 Vice President Dick Cheney, in an interview on Meet the Press, described such allegations as “reprehensible.”23
Presidents have often been accused of using force to distract attention from domestic ills. But do governments actually provoke diversionary wars? And do they work?
Investigating the existence of a diversionary motivation for war is a critically important task for several reasons. First, there is little consensus regarding the accuracy of the diversionary theory of war. Some media and political elites see diversionary war as pervasive, but many scholars deny the existence of a diversionary motivation for interstate conflict, describing it as a “myth.”24 By clarifying when leaders use diversionary tactics, this book contributes to an important research program in the field of international relations.
Second, interstate wars have enormous consequences in international politics. War can bankrupt treasuries, trigger revolutions, and reshape cultures. And conflict is one of the chief mechanisms by which wealth and power are redistributed in the international system. If there is a relationship between domestic unrest and foreign adventurism, exploring that link may help policy makers anticipate and head off these wars. For example, following the death of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Il, analysts have conjectured that his son and successor, Kim Jong-un, might be tempted to provoke a diversionary war with South Korea to consolidate his rule and promote domestic cohesion.25 Insight into the plausibility of this scenario, as well as strategies to dissuade Pyongyang from using diversionary tactics, would be valuable given the potential for such a conflict to destabilize the region.
Third, if governments put their troops in harm’s way for domestic political gain rather than to promote the national interest, this is a major issue for legitimate rule. Diversionary war is widely considered immoral, if not criminal. In a democracy the public demands a voice in policy making, but for leaders to use force to win their favor may amount to an impeachable offense.
To some degree, a relationship between domestic politics and the use of force abroad is uncontroversial. The effect of public opinion on foreign policy decision making can be thought of as concentric rings, like those on a shooting target. In the outermost ring are cases in which the willingness of the public to tolerate a leader’s decision, say, to commit ground troops is a necessary condition for the use of force. Here, the public has a veto on the government’s behavior: if the leader perceives a significant domestic political downside from a bellicose foreign policy, a different course of action will be taken. In 1994 the Clinton administration declined to intervene militarily in the Rwandan genocide, in part because it concluded that the conflict was not a sufficient threat to U.S. interests to expend the political capital required to overcome widespread domestic opposition to action.26 Almost all uses of force in a democracy such as the United States fall at least within this circle, where domestic opinion provides an acceptability constraint.
In the middle band of the target, we find instances in which domestic political gains are seen as a side benefit of the use of force. Here, generating a rally effect does not contribute to the final policy choice, but the government takes advantage of any domestic dividends from using force. Several of the examples discussed above may fall into this category. For example, Reagan would have invaded Grenada regardless of events in Beirut—the plan to send troops was set before the bombing. And when he was warned that his opponents might accuse him of using diversionary tactics by intervening in Grenada, Reagan reportedly said that “if this [invasion] was right yesterday, it’s right today and we shouldn’t let the act of a couple terrorists dissuade us from going ahead.”27 Nevertheless, his administration skillfully used the successful mission in Grenada to shelter the president from criticism over his policy in Lebanon.28
In the center of the target are international conflicts that are provoked primarily to reduce the public’s opposition to the government, that is, where domestic discontent is a necessary condition for a leader’s decision to use force abroad. It is these cases—true diversionary wars—that are most contested by scholars.
In Diversionary War I argue that the key to understanding the relationship between domestic and international conflict can be found through a new model of government decision making based on the concept of policy substitutability drawn from the literature on foreign policy analysis.29 The central insight is that governments choose their responses to a given problem from a menu of alternatives that can be substituted for one another. Thinking in terms of policy substitutability puts us in a decision maker’s shoes so that we view diversionary war as one option among many for managing civil unrest. The challenge for the scholar is then to explain why embattled governments initiate diversionary wars instead of attempting a rival solution to their domestic problems, such as buying off opponents—in...

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