In Daydream Believers, Fred Kaplan combines high-level reporting with his razor sharp analysis to explain, once and for all, how Bush got so far off track--and why much of the nation followed him.  The grand illusions he believed in flatter the politican who declares them and the citizen who buys into them.  But they're absolutely wrong, and they've been around since Nixon, and they were wrong then, too. 

For example, as Fred Kaplan discovered, in the spring and fall of 2002, months before the invasion of Iraq, the Army and the Air Force each held its seasonal war games. The games ended the way everyone knew they would: Blue (the U.S.) won, Red (“Nair”) lost. But the games disturbed Army strategist Wass de Czege because they skirted the main issue. They ended the minute victory seemed inevitable to the U.S. However, he wrote in a memo to Rumsfeld--again, before the invasion--that winning a war doesn’t mean simply defeating the enemy on the battlefield. It means achieving the strategic goals for which the war is being fought in the first place.  They'd declared the mission accomplished when true victory was still far off.  His objections were taken as a political objection, not a technical one.  As far as they were concerned, de Czege didn't understand we'd entered a new era, and the old rules no longer applied.

According to Kaplan, the biggest mistake the Daydreamers make lies behind the notion that September 11th changed everything.  The world operates now exactly as it always has, and the tragedydoesn't excuse them from history class.  But these daydreamers love to think that they stand on the threshold of a revolution, and they say so at every turn.  Ignoring history allows them to think, as well, that moral clarity alone is what won WWII and the Cold War.  If we are clear in our purpose, noble in our goals, and loud in our denunciations, what more do we need for victory?  After all, this world view also imagines that beneath every foreign face lurks an American mind waiting to be set free.  Democracy isn't that hard to build, they argue. Just blow the lid off a dictatorship and a just society will come bubbling out.  All we need is the political will to do it, and those who offer objections are just playing politics.

But Kaplan warns that we could end up somewhere even worse than we are now. The decline of the Daydreamers could herald a new era of isolationism or a return to immoral Kissinger-esque Realism, which could end up being worse for America--and the world. 

"America's leaders have gone from hubris to waking fantasy, according to this caustic critique of the Bush administration's foreign policy. Kaplan (The Wizards of Armageddon) argues that the Cold War's end and 9/11 persuaded President Bush and his advisers to unilaterally impose America's political will on the world, while remaining blind to the military and diplomatic fiascoes that followed. Rumsfeld's 'Revolution in Military Affairs,' a doctrine touting supposedly omnipotent mobile forces and high-tech smart weapons, convinced Pentagon officials that Iraq could be pacified without a large force or a reconstruction plan. Bush abandoned Clinton's diplomatic rapprochement with North Korea, then stood by as Kim Jong-Il built nuclear weapons. And imbued with a 'mix of neo-conservatism and evangelism' that was peddled most flamboyantly by Israeli ideologue Natan Sharansky, Bush backed clumsy pro democracy initiatives that backfired by bringing anti-American and sectarian groups to power in the Middle East. Eschewing Kaplan's favored approach of fostering international security through alliances and consensus building, Bush assumed that 'by virtue of American power, saying something was tantamount to making it so.' The particulars of Kaplan's indictment aren't new, but his detailed, illuminating (if occasionally disjointed) accounts of the evolution of the Bush administration's strategic doctrines add up to a cogent brief for soft realism over truculent idealism." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Excavating the failures of the Bush administration's foreign policy has almost become a genre in itself. Bob Woodward's trilogy documents virtually every decision since 9/11 by every key player. 'Fiasco' (by Thomas Ricks), 'Cobra II' (by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor) and 'The Assassins' Gate' (by George Packer) recount the missteps in Iraq step by painful step. And books like Zbigniew..." Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) Brzezinski's 'Second Chance' chronicle just how far we have fallen in the world's esteem. 'Daydream Believers,' by Fred Kaplan, who writes the 'War Notes' column for Slate, is a valuable addition to this category. A lively and entertaining — if occasionally horrifying — read, it offers a cautionary tale for any administration and for the men and women who hope to serve in one.

Like a master archaeologist who can see through the shards and stones of a dig to reconstruct the culture of the city below, Kaplan lays out all the failures, omissions and delusions of Bush administration officials as a set of four dreams. The 'fog of moral clarity' describes the comfort that many Bushites took in seeing a world of black and white. 'Breaking the world anew' charts how the president and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice came to believe that advocating universal democracy would dissolve the age-old tension between ideals and interests. The 'mirage of instant victory' recounts Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's obsession with the transformation of the military. Finally, 'chasing silver bullets' recounts the less often told story of the determination of Rumsfeld and President Bush to build anti-missile defense systems regardless of how many scientists, defense experts and even generals said they wouldn't work.

Even when the facts are familiar, Kaplan weaves these stories together in a way that highlights the often hidden connections between them. The result is an account of the pathologies not only of individuals and departments in the Bush administration, but also of Washington itself. Successful op-ed writers typically prepare their pieces well in advance and then wait for a news peg that will motivate editors to run just such a piece. Kaplan describes the development of new policy in much the same way: Ideas put forth in countless books, articles and think tanks lie fallow for years, even decades, until one of their proponents finally achieves high office. For example, when Paul Wolfowitz first advocated American global primacy in 1992, in a document called the Defense Policy Guidance, his ideas went nowhere. In 2000, he and several co-authors tried again, building on the same concepts in the Project for the New American Century's report 'Rebuilding America's Defenses.' When Wolfowitz rejoined the Pentagon on March 2, 2001, those ideas became the template for the Bush administration's National Security Strategy in 2002.

Nothing is necessarily wrong with this model of seeding and harvesting new policies. In an effective and functioning policy process, however, all policy proposals would have to pass through a filter of feasibility. Their champions would have to explain concretely what their proposals would cost, how they would overcome anticipated obstacles and how to define success. Better yet, proponents would have to justify themselves to officials with adverse bureaucratic interests, or even, perish the thought, Congress.

The absence of that process in the Bush administration resulted not only from arrogance and ignorance, but also from a failure of management at the very highest levels. Kaplan claims that the disastrous twin orders given by Coalition Provisional Authority head L. Paul Bremer to remove Baathist party members from virtually every level of the Iraqi government and to disband the Iraqi army were in fact dictated by Douglas Feith, then undersecretary of defense for policy. Yet two months earlier the National Security Council had decided to remove only the top level of Baathists from the government and to decommission only the Republican Guard, not the entire army. Feith and his boss Rumsfeld simply disregarded these decisions. But when then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told Bush that Rumsfeld was disobeying NSC decisions approved by Bush himself, Bush responded by telling Rice to meet with chief of staff Andrew Card — he'll take care of it, he said. Card, however, was no more willing to face down Rumsfeld than Bush was. As a result, flagrant insubordination, with criminally negligent consequences, went unremarked, not to mention unpunished.

'Daydream Believers' is an odd title, suggestive more of a pop song than a foreign policy book. Its source is T.E. Lawrence, describing those who dream by night as harmless, because they wake up to reality: 'But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.' For Kaplan, the daydreamers of the Bush administration started out with some good ideas. But 'the ideas morphed into a vision, the vision into a dream. After September 11, they took their dream into the real world — acted it with open eyes — and saw it dissolve into a nightmare.'

Along the way, Kaplan notes, we have learned just how hard it is to try to transform the internal politics of another country. The tide of transformation all too often crashes on the hard rocks of factional interests. Kaplan makes this point repeatedly as a caution about the limits of purely military power and the dangers of seeing the world as a morality play. But in a political season in which both Republicans and Democrats are talking about sweeping change and transformation, it is also a lesson worth remembering at home.

Anne-Marie Slaughter is dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and author of 'The Idea That Is America.'"

Reviewed by Anne-Marie Slaughter, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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America's power is in decline, its allies alienated, its soldiers trapped in a war that even generals regard as unwinnable. What has happened these past few years is well known. Why it happened continues to puzzle. Celebrated Slate columnist Fred Kaplan explains the grave misconceptions that enabled George W. Bush and his aides to get so far off track, and traces the genesis and evolution of these ideas from the era of Nixon through Reagan to the present day.

America's power is in decline, its foreign policy adrift, its allies alienated, its soldiers trapped in a war that even generals regard as unwinnable. What has happened these past eight years is well-known. Why it happened continues to puzzle. In Daydream Believers, celebrated Slate columnist Fred Kaplan combines in-depth reporting and razor-sharp analysis to explain just how George W. Bush and his aides got so far off track — and why much of the nation followed.

For eight years, Kaplan reminds us, the White House — and many of the nation's podiums and opinion pages — rang out with appealing but deluded claims: that we live in a time like no other and that, therefore, the lessons of history no longer apply; that new technology has transformed warfare; that the world's peoples will be set free, if only America topples their dictators; and that those who dispute such promises do so for partisan reasons. They thought they were visionaries, but they only had visions. And they believed in their daydreams.

In his Slate chronicles through the Iraq War years, Fred Kaplan consistently outshone other analysts with his explanations of what was going wrong and why. In this engrossing and completely new work, he tells the story of the little-known theorists who have shaped much of the world's recent history. For me this book was full of revelations.--James Fallows, National Correspondent, The Atlantic Monthly

This is the inside history of our time, told with precision and confidence by an author who knows where the secrets are kept — and also that the most powerful and dangerous weapon in Washington, D.C., is a new idea. --Thomas E. Ricks, author of Fiasco: TheAmerican Military Adventure in Iraq and Making the Corps