Historian Andrew Bacevich has a Niebuhrian view of public policy that gives his writing a sense of tragedy mixed with cautious hope.
In After Trump: The Donald in the Rearview MirrorTomDispatch 09/11/2018, he looks at the continuities of the Trump Era with its predecessors, seeing Trump in his way as being a normal product of the preceeding political and economic trajectory of the United States.
He does not mean it as a compliment.
Looking back to the immediate postwar area, which in retrospect we call the beginning of the Golden Age of Capitalism these days, Bacevich notes three "large facts" that defined the US reality: the gigantic industrial role of the country in the world economy; a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth and income (he actually calls it the distribution of "the benefits" of the economy); and, a broad pacifist sentiment.
The latter sounds especially surprising in 2018. But after the end of the Second World War, there really was a big hope and expectation from the American public that we needed peace and should try to avoid becoming involved in new wars. There was a big public demand to bring US troops home from abroad, to President Harry Truman's consternation. As Bacevich describes it, Americans "may not have been a peace-loving people, but they knew enough about war to see it as a great evil." Recogniying that war in itself is a great evil is the most appealing aspect of Niebuhrian realism.
But those three "large facts" of the postwar America are part of the past. The US is no longer the industrial powerhouse of the world in anything like the way it was in 1946. "Ours is increasingly a 'gig' economy," Bacevich writes, "which might be cool enough when you’re 25, but less so when you’re in your sixties and wondering if you’ll ever be able to retire."
Wealth and income distribution, of course, are radically more unequal today than in the postwar period. Republican Administrations promoted that outcome with deregulation and tax cuts slanted for the wealthy. So did the Democrats, if not quite so recklessly.
And, of course, today the government and the political parties and many ordinary citizens, too, accept constant war as normal rather than viewing war as a terrible though sometimes unavoidable evil:
By 2016, Americans had also come to accept war as normal. Here was “global leadership” made manifest. So U.S. troops were now always out there somewhere fighting, however obscure the purpose of their exertions and however dim their prospects of achieving anything approximating victory. The 99% of Americans who were not soldiers learned to tune out those wars, content merely to “support the troops,” an obligation fulfilled by offering periodic expressions of reverence on public occasions. Thank you for your service!
Bacevich developed that latter theme at length in his book, The New American Militarism (2005). And the trend wasn't interrupted by the Obama or Trump Administration.
Bacevich's Nieburhian perspective keeps in view the fallen state of humanity and the fragility of good intentions, particulary in foreign policy. This sometimes lends a fatalistic tone to his writing that makes me wish he would get a dose of Hegelian optimism. But he's not being cynical when he writes things like:
By the twenty-first century, the values that Trump embodies had become as thoroughly and authentically American as any of those specified in the oracular pronouncements of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, or Franklin Roosevelt. Trump’s critics may see him as an abomination. But he is also one of us.
Yet as his article also makes clear, he is highly critical of Trump and very aware of his particular obnoxious traits. What he says about Trump's supposed "isolationism" in foreign policy is on point.
At the same time, he is emphasizing that there are deeper problems whose solutions depend on an activated citizenry. I don't know if that's Hegelian so much as Jeffersonian, but he is making a call for ordinary voters to be more engaged and to take on their responsibilities in a democracy:
The nation’s too-little, too-late response to climate change for which a succession of presidents share responsibility illustrates the great and abiding defect of contemporary American politics. When all is said and done, presidents don’t shape the country; the country shapes the presidency -- or at least it defines the parameters within which presidents operate. Over the course of the last few decades, those parameters have become increasingly at odds with the collective wellbeing of the American people, not to mention of the planet as a whole. ...
Trump is not the problem. Think of him instead as a summons to address the real problem, which in a nation ostensibly of, by, and for the people is the collective responsibility of the people themselves. For Americans to shirk that responsibility further will almost surely pave the way for more Trumps -- or someone worse -- to come. [my emphasis]
Schlesinger is particularly known for his biographical works on Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, and of John and Bobby Kennedy. I was expecting him to focus on Schlesinger's advocacy for a hawkish Cold War foreign policy. He does note that in the 1960s, "With the Vietnam War now in full swing, he dashed off a blistering critique of Lyndon Johnson’s policy, titled The Bitter Heritage (1967), insisting that had [John] Kennedy lived he would have avoided war."
Instead, Bacevich focuses on the vision of domestic politics that Schlesinger advocated, promoted and celebrated, a view New Left critics in the 1960s called "Cold War liberalism," a term I still use myself, actually. Schlesinger was a relatively early opponent of the Vietnam War and supported Bobby Kennedy's antiwar efforts. He was not entirely hostile to more nuanced views of the early Cold War when he wrote in 1967 (Origins of the Cold WarForeign Affairs 46:1 [Oct]):
As the Cold War has begun to lose its purity of definition, as the moral absolutes of the fifties become the moralistic clichés of the sixties, some have be gun to ask whether the appalling risks which humanity ran during the Cold War were, after all, necessary and inevitable; whether more restrained and rational policies might not have guided the energies of man from the perils of conflict into the potentialities of collaboration. The fact that such questions are in their nature unanswerable does not mean that it is not right and useful to raise them. Nor does it mean that our sons and daughters are not entitled to an accounting from the generation of Russians and Americans who produced the Cold War.
This was more a barbed but polite expression of condescension to left historians' critiques of American Cold War policies prior to the mid-sixties. In the same spirit, in a footnote referring to D.F. Fleming, David Horowitz, William Appleman Williams and Gar Alperowitz, he says rather caustically, "The fact that in some aspects the revisionist thesis parallels the official Soviet argument must not, of course, prevent consideration of the case on its merits, nor raise questions about the motives of the writers, all of whom, so far as I know, are independent-minded scholars." Which was 1967 academic-speak for, "Yeah, they sound like Commies but we need to take what they're saying at least a little seriously."
And, yes, he was referring to that David Horowitz, who had a few years of a career as a leftie writer significant enough to be cited by Arthur Schlesinger but later pursued a career in the far-right ditch. His current online Frontpage Mag (which my gag reflex won't allow me to link) features one of his tweets saying, "Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out." I don't know whether he means that as a slur on Mean Libruls or as an autobiographical comment. Let me say that the fact that in some aspects of his current polemics thesis parallel Putinist Russian propaganda of the kind we've heard so much about lately, must not, of course, prevent consideration of the case on its merits, nor raise questions about the motives of the writer, who is, so far as I know, an independent-minded flaming rightwinger.
Yet even though Schlesinger wasn't much impressed by leading New left "revisionist" history, a term he uses as mostly pejorative, his 1967 sketch of the origins of the Cold War are notably different from the Cold War triumphalism with came with the "end of history" circa 1990.
He stresses that leaders on both Russia and the Western Allies were doing a lot of improvising. He talks about how the two major competing establishment views, "realists" and "universalists," evaluated the options in light of different assumption about why nations behave the way they do. And he states a chastened-sounding view that common among both Democratic and Republican advocates of nuclear arms control and efforts to dial back the two superpower tensions, as the US and the Soviet Union were called for decades: "The Cold War ... was the product not of a decision but of a dilemma. Each side felt compelled to adopt policies which the other could not but regard as a threat to the principles of the peace. Each then felt compelled to undertake defensive measures."
That approach does tend to minimize any cynical or malicious motive on the part of the US military-industrial complex. Which is still alive and well, by the way: William D. Hartung, The Scandal of Pentagon SpendingTomDispatch 10/10/2017.
Bacevich writes of Schlesinger's outlook and influence:
The cause to which he devoted his professional life was the promotion of U.S. liberalism, in his view “the vital center” of U.S. politics.
As a prodigiously gifted historian, Schlesinger celebrated the achievements of those he deemed liberalism’s greatest champions, notably Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the martyred Kennedy brothers. As a skillful polemicist, he inveighed against those he saw as enemies of liberalism, whether on the communist left or the Republican right. As a Democratic operative, he worked behind the scenes, counseling office seekers of a liberal persuasion and drafting speeches for candidates he deemed likely to advance the cause (and perhaps his own fortunes).
Bacevich also notes without being nasty about it that Schlesinger acted as the "court historian" of the Kennedy Administration. Which is true. Hey, every court needs its own historian, including the Court of Camelot.
Schlesinger passed away in 2007. He was very much an opponent of the Iraq War. In this polemical article in the very early days of the Iraq War, Good Foreign Policy a Casualty of WarLos Angeles Times 03/23/2003, he still couldn't resist taking a poke at those annoying lefties:
How have we gotten into this tragic fix without searching debate? No war has been more extensively previewed than this one. Despite pro forma disclaimers, President Bush's determination to go to war has been apparent from the start. Why then this absence of dialogue? Why the collapse of the Democratic Party? Why let the opposition movement fall into the hands of infantile leftists? [my emphasis]
He knew that the phrase "infantile leftists" had been made famous by Lenin. But given the intensity of his opposition to the Cheney-Bush war in Iraq, it's not unreasonable to imagine he was thinking those immature lefties wouldn't be nearly effective enough in articulating what a spectacularly bad idea it was:
The choice reflects a fatal turn in U.S. foreign policy, in which the strategic doctrine of containment and deterrence that led us to peaceful victory during the Cold War has been replaced by the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. The president has adopted a policy of "anticipatory self-defense" that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor on a date which, as an
earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy. The global wave of sympathy that engulfed the United States after 9/11 has given way to a global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism. Public opinion polls in friendly countries regard George W. Bush as a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein. Demonstrations around the planet, instead of denouncing the vicious rule of the Iraqi president, assail the United States on a daily basis.
Yo! I agreed with him on that in 2003 and if any thing even more so in 2017. He closed that polemic this way:
[Saddam] Hussein is unquestionably a monster. But does that mean we should forcibly remove him from power? "Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled," Adams said in the same July 4 speech, "there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy." We are now going abroad to destroy a monster. The aftermath -- how America conducts itself in Iraq and the world -- will provide the crucial test as to whether the war can be justified.
America as the world's self-appointed judge, jury and executioner? "We must face the fact," President John F. Kennedy once said, "that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient -- that we are only 6% of the world's population -- that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94% of mankind -- that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity -- and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem."
Yeah, that's a man and a historian worth remembering.
In our own day, the purpose of history is less to illuminate than to entertain or reassure. More or less like poetry, history serves at best an ornamental function. Today the only American historians enjoying a significant public profile are those like Michael Beschloss or Doris Kearns Goodwin who specialize in repackaging colorful stories. Innovative, critical, probing history does not lack for practitioners; yet beyond the confines of the professoriate, it commands minimal attention.
I recently read several essays be the Argentine philosopher Ricardo Forster in which he draws on the concepts of Guy Debord elaborated in his Society of the Spectacle (English translation 1970). And I'm tempted to say that Bacevich is referring to something like that phenomenon here.
But I've never been able to apply much more than the title phrase of Debord's book because I've never been able to grasp a consistent thread in his argument there. Because he says things like this:
Ideology is the basis of the thought of a class society within the conflictual course of history. Ideological facts have never been simple chimaeras, but deformed consciousness of realities, and as such they have been real factors in turn exerting real deforming action. All the more reason why the materialization of ideology brought about by the concrete success of autonomized economic production, in the form of the spectacle, is in practice confused with the social reality of an ideology which was able to reduce everything real to its own model.
This sounds like a particularly convulted way of describing Karl Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, which refers not to sexual practices but to the mystification of material realities caused by the production relations in society.
Apart from the formidable task of untangling the various threads of Debord's arguments, I'm not sure that what Bacevich is describing fits the Debord "society of the spectacle" model. He's talking about how the dominant corporate media provides history packaged as entertainment with "an ornamental function" and the viewers and listeners tend to receive it as such. This is a different way of processing history than the more critical, substantive way which academic history seeks to achieve.
Ricardo Forster uses the society-of-the-spectacle concept to talk about how the present media-drenched environment makes images into substantive objects in themselves which themselves become matters of political contention and thus gives enormous social and political power to media conglomerates. That line of thinking is something I can work with. But I'm not sure that's actually what Guy Debord had in mind.
For instance, he also writes, "The contemplative side of the old materialism which conceives the world as representation and not as activity - and which ultimately idealizes matter - is completed in the spectacle, where concrete things are automatically the masters of social life." In formulations like that, he seems to be emphasizing the insubstantiality of the hegemonic images rather than their potency. Debord calls the spectacle the space "where concrete things are automatically the masters of social life." But he also says things about the spectacle that seem to contradict that notion.
The focus of Bacevich's essay, though, is not on the philosophy of imagery but on the cautions against militarism and arrogance made by the historian William Appleman Williams (1921-1990). Bacevich ranks him among several other of his contemporaries who had an outlook that could be insightful across ideological divides:
Williams was an unapologetic radical. Yet he was by no means unsympathetic to conservatives. Nor did he lack for patriotism. Indeed, viewed in retrospect, he was one of those American intellectuals who bridge the divide between left and right, thereby representing some distinctive amalgam drawing from both camps. (Among Americans, Randolph Bourne, Charles Beard, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Christopher Lasch offer other twentieth-century examples).
Taking up his own challenge of drawing meaning analytical understanding from history. Referring to how the politics of the Vietnam War undermined Lyndon Johnson's Great Society project, he writes:
Meanwhile, to judge by Trump’s one-and-done missile attack on Syria and the fatuous deployment of the “Mother of All Bombs” in Afghanistan, our president’s approach to statecraft makes Lyndon Johnson look circumspect by comparison. Trump assured his supporters that he was going to break the hold of the foreign-policy establishment. In fact, he has embraced the establishment’s penchant for “using our power for whatever we happen at the moment to want, or against whatever at the moment we do not like.” [W.A. Williams] U.S. national-security policy has become monumentally incoherent, with the man in charge apparently doing whatever his gut or his latest visitor at Mar-a-Lago tells him to do.
Oliver Turner and Chengxin Pan write about the state of neoconservative foreign policy (How Neocons Are Still Winning in 2016The National Interest 08/15/2016):
... at its core, neoconservatism is a broad and powerful discourse which is closely underpinned by two widely held and enduring ideas about the United States and the world around it: American virtue and American power. What defines neoconservatism is a largely unchallenged belief that the United States is a virtuous nation with a moral entitlement to superior power for the global good. Thus defined, neoconservatism gave rise to the Bush Doctrine, but the doctrine, which for many epitomizes the very essence of neoconservatism, was not the definitive neoconservatism. Making this distinction helps explain the longer and more mundane lineage of the present neoconservatism. Emerging from the extreme events of 9/11, it was an extreme articulation of long-ingrained ideas about American virtue and power.
The also call attention to Hillary's words in a speech aimed at veterans, in which she called the US "the greatest country that has ever been created on the face of the earth for all of history." This sounds like boilerplate talk in American politics now. Bizarrely immodest as it is. And it's in formulations like this where neocon cynicism meets the liberal "humanitarian hawk" interventionist inclination. A heavy dose of Reinhold Niebuhr's brand of realism would do our foreign policy a lot of good, I'm thinking.
... to read Niebuhr today to avail oneself to a prophetic voice, speaking from the past about the past, but offering truths of enormous relevance to the present. As prophet, Niebuhr warned that what he called "our dreams of managing history" — dreams borne out of a peculiar combination of arrogance, hypocrisy, and self-delusion — posed a large and potentially mortal threat to the United States. Today we ignore that warning at our peril.
As a prophet, Niebuhr thought deeply about the dilemmas confronting the United States as a consequence of its emergence as a global superpower. The truths he spoke are uncomfortable ones. They do not easily translate into sound-bites suitable for the Sunday morning talk shows. Nor do they offer material from which to weave the sort of stump speech likely to boost the poll numbers of your favorite candidate in Iowa or New Hampshire.
Four of those truths merit particular attention at present. They are the persistent sin of American Exceptionalism; the indecipherability of history; and the false allure of simple solutions ...
Niebuhr tried to judge reality and to offer sound criteria for political action. In the confrontation with the Soviet Union, it was once again “Christian realism” to engage in biting and constructive criticism of U.S. international politics and to manifest “patriotic dissent.”7 The main purpose that the protestant theologian wanted to achieve was to interpret the American position in the world from the point of view of Christian faith. ...
Although acceptable by all, an ironic interpretation of history — which always accompanies Niebuhr’s analysis on the international role of his country12—becomes crucial and “normative” in Christianity.13 And this, he claims, occurs for two main reasons. First, Christian faith recognizes both the creative power of human freedom and its misuse and corruption. Second, this faith affirms a source of meaning that is outside of history and can give it rationality.14 On the other hand, from Niebuhr’s perspective, Christianity and irony are closely knit, because both dwell upon the contradictions and the duplicities of human life and history. ...
As Niebuhr points out: “the more uncritically a civilization or culture, a nation or empire boasts of its disinterested virtue, the more certainly does it corrupt that virtue by self-delusion.” ...
The everlasting temptation to believe in a divine justification of a state’s behavior is considered by Niebuhr to be a kind of sin. ...
its original aspirations to global responsibilities and frustrations. It is particularly after World War II that the country is, in his view, even more dipped in irony, for the very reason that many of the dreams that America nurtured were cruelly deluded by history. If the ambition to practice a pure virtue fades into the responsibility that comes with the nuclear dilemma,26 then the feverish attempts to escape from a bitter reality through the constitution of an ideal world order cannot but prove to be useless in front of ever-increasing dangers and duties. ...
In Niebuhr’s political theory, irony has a clear and basic origin. It derives, as we have discussed, from human pretension, which corrupts the gift of freedom. The consequence of a misuse of freedom is the misrecognition of the limits of power, wisdom, and virtue. Hence, the meaning of irony lies in the necessary call
Andrew Bacevich has a long, thoughtful commentary on The Decay of American PoliticsMoyers & Co 08/05/2016. He gives particular emphasis to foreign policy:
Even by Washington standards, Secretary Clinton exudes a striking sense of entitlement combined with a nearly complete absence of accountability. She shrugs off her misguided vote in support of invading Iraq back in 2003, while serving as senator from New York. She neither explains nor apologizes for pressing to depose Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, her most notable “accomplishment” as secretary of state. “We came, we saw, he died,” she bragged back then, somewhat prematurely given that Libya has since fallen into anarchy and become a haven for ISIS. ...
Let me be clear: None of these offer the slightest reason to vote for Donald Trump. Yet together they make the point that Hillary Clinton is a deeply flawed candidate, notably so in matters related to national security. Clinton is surely correct that allowing Trump to make decisions related to war and peace would be the height of folly. Yet her record in that regard does not exactly inspire confidence.
When it comes to foreign policy, Trump’s preference for off-the-cuff utterances finds him committing astonishing gaffes with metronomic regularity. Spontaneity serves chiefly to expose his staggering ignorance.
By comparison, the carefully scripted Clinton commits few missteps, as she recites with practiced ease the pabulum that passes for right thinking in establishment circles. But fluency does not necessarily connote soundness. Clinton, after all, adheres resolutely to the highly militarized “Washington Playbook” that President Obama himself has disparaged — a faith-based belief in American global primacy to be pursued regardless of how the world may be changing and heedless of costs.
On the latter point, note that Clinton’s acceptance speech in Philadelphia included not a single mention of Afghanistan. By Election Day, the war there will have passed its 15th anniversary. One might think that a prospective commander-in-chief would have something to say about the longest conflict in American history, one that continues with no end in sight. Yet, with the Washington Playbook offering few answers, Mrs. Clinton chooses to remain silent on the subject. [my emphasis]
"In U.S. national security circles, the conviction that engagement promotes peace ad stability is not unlike the Christian belief in the Second Coming - it provides the ultimate rationale for the entire enterprise."
- Andrew Bacevich, America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (2016), p. 211
I try to be very cautious about work from people associated with the "libertarian" Cato Institute even when I find some of their arguments about the problematic nature of US military interventions. Because the Old Right isolationism that informs much of the libertarian and "paleo-conservative" foreign policy viewpoint generally if founded on a narrowly nationalistic view that is at best dismissive of international law and disarmament agreements.
But this part of Carpenter's post is on the mark and addresses one of my pet peeves about the militarization of foreign policy and the political in the United States:
Yet another sign [of the militarization of political language] is the growing tendency to misapply the term “commander-in-chief.” The Constitution makes it clear that the president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces. There were two reasons for that provision. One was to assure undisputed civilian control of the military. The other was to prevent congressional interference with the chain of command.
One thing, however, is abundantly clear. The Constitution did not make the president commander-in-chief of the country. Unfortunately, that is a distinction that is increasingly lost on politicians, pundits, and ordinary Americans[.] The notion that the president is a national commander who can direct the country and it is our obligation as subordinates to salute and follow his lead is an alien and profoundly un-American concept. It also implicitly ratifies the perverse doctrine of the imperial presidency — that the president alone (our commander-in-chief) gets to decide when the nation goes to war. Both are thoroughly unconstitutional, ahistorical, and unhealthy attitudes. Yet they have become common, if not dominant, attitudes in late twentieth century and early twenty-first century America. And that is frightening. Viewing the president as the commander-in-chief of the nation is the epitome of a mentally militarized society. [emphasis in original]
The specific language of the Constitution is, "The President shall be the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United Sates, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual service of the United States."
The Commander-in-Chief clause is the source of much of the expansion of the war powers of the Executive Branch since 1789, a development which is highly problematic but, for better or worse, generally accepted by both major parties in the US. Instances of Congress overriding the President on war policy during the Cold War or afterward have been few and far between.
The other side of the Commander-in-Chief power is that it establishes clearly the critical democratic principle of civilian control over the military. But that principle too has been undermined in practice in various ways. Andrew Bacevich wrote in Civilian Control? Surely, You Jest.The New Republic 08/18/2010:
Reality turns out to be considerably more complicated. In practice, civilian control—expectations that the brass, having rendered advice, will then loyally execute whatever decision the commander-in-chief makes—is at best a useful fiction.
In front of the curtain, the generals and admirals defer; behind the curtain, on all but the smallest of issues, the military’s collective leadership pursue their own agenda informed by their own convictions of what is good for the country and, by extension, for the institutions over which they preside. In this regard, the Pentagon’s behavior does not differ from that of automakers, labor unions, the movie business, environmental groups, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Israel lobby, or the NAACP.
In Washington, only one decision is considered really final—and that’s the one that goes your way. Senior military officers understand these rules and play by them. When the president or secretary of defense acts in ways not to their liking—killing some sought-after weapons program, for example—they treat that decision as subject to review and revision.
On the war powers issue, I'm very much in favor of Congress using its authority to put prudent limits on Executive power. More specifically, they should be trying to reduce the number of wars we get involved in.
Our real existing Congress, though, is happy to demand more wars and more aggressive foreign policy. That fact doesn't get to the Constitutional issues. But Congress' own frequently irresponsible attitude toward war and peace makes it convenient for them to avoid restrictions of Presidential warmaking.
Gary Wills also addressed the careless use of the Commander-in-Chief title in At Ease, Mr. PresidentNew York Times 01/27/2007:
I first cringed at the misuse in 1973, during the “Saturday Night Massacre” (as it was called). President Richard Nixon, angered at the Watergate inquiry being conducted by the special prosecutor Archibald Cox, dispatched his chief of staff, Al Haig, to arrange for Mr. Cox’s firing. Mr. Haig told the attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to dismiss Mr. Cox. Mr. Richardson refused, and resigned. Then Mr. Haig told the second in line at the Justice Department, William Ruckelshaus, to fire Cox. Mr. Ruckelshaus refused, and accepted his dismissal. The third in line, Robert Bork, finally did the deed.
What struck me was what Mr. Haig told Mr. Ruckelshaus, “You know what it means when an order comes down from the commander in chief and a member of his team cannot execute it.” This was as great a constitutional faux pas as Mr. Haig’s later claim, when President Reagan was wounded, that “Constitutionally ... I’m in control.”
President Nixon was not Mr. Ruckelshaus’s commander in chief. The president is not the commander in chief of civilians. He is not even commander in chief of National Guard troops unless and until they are federalized. The Constitution is clear on this: “The president shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States.”
Wills agrees with Ted Galen Carpenter on this semantic usage reflecting a militarization of US politics. "This reflects the increasing militarization of our politics," Wills wrote.
What do Old Right isolationists have in mind when they make similar points? Some of it is undoubtedly the stopped-clock-is-right-twice-a-day phenomenon. Or, ask Rick Perry famously put it last year, "A broken clock is right once a day."
But Old Right isolationism is not only fundamentally nationalist and even xenophobic. It's also Old Right as in anti-New Deal and pro-segregation, meaning that it opposes federal "overreach" in matters like labor law, enforcing the 14th Amendment to the Constitution's guarantee of voting rights, requiring billionaires to pay taxes to support their country, etc. And expansive federal powers are indeed closely related historically and practically to a broad view of Executive warmaking powers. And to a foreign policy of global hegemony.
Donald Trump is injecting a little more old-fashioned isolationism into the Presidential race than we're accustomed to hearing. Andrew Bacevich has been emphasizing for years that "isolationism" is most often used as a bogeyman to discredit criticism of interventionist foreign policy. For example, 70 Years of “New Isolationism”The American Conservative 10/24/2013
The abiding defect of U.S. foreign policy? It’s isolationism, my friend. Purporting to steer clear of war, isolationism fosters it. Isolationism impedes the spread of democracy. It inhibits trade and therefore prosperity. It allows evildoers to get away with murder. Isolationists prevent the United States from accomplishing its providentially assigned global mission. Wean the American people from their persistent inclination to look inward and who knows what wonders our leaders will accomplish. ...
Most of this, of course, qualifies as overheated malarkey. As a characterization of U.S. policy at any time in memory, isolationism is a fiction. Never really a tendency, it qualifies at most as a moment, referring to that period in the 1930s when large numbers of Americans balked at the prospect of entering another European war, the previous one having fallen well short of its “War To End All Wars” advance billing.
In fact, from the day of its founding down to the present, the United States has never turned its back on the world. Isolationism owes its storied history to its value as a rhetorical device, deployed to discredit anyone opposing an action or commitment (usually involving military forces) that others happen to favor. If I, a grandson of Lithuanian immigrants, favor deploying U.S. forces to Lithuania to keep that NATO ally out of Vladimir Putin’s clutches and you oppose that proposition, then you, sir or madam, are an “isolationist.” ...
For this very reason, the term isolationism is not likely to disappear from American political discourse anytime soon. It’s too useful. Indeed, employ this verbal cudgel to castigate your opponents and your chances of gaining entrée to the nation’s most prestigious publications improve appreciably. Warn about the revival of isolationism and your prospects of making the grade as a pundit or candidate for high office suddenly brighten. This is the great thing about using isolationists as punching bags: it makes actual thought unnecessary. All that’s required to posture as a font of wisdom is the brainless recycling of clichés, half-truths, and bromides.
While I basically agree with Bacevich's description of the isolationist bogeyman, there is, as he puts it, a "tendency" on the far right that traces it's lineage back to the isolationist, more-or-less pro-Nazi Old Right of the 1930s and 1940s. Professional anti-leftist-speaking-as-a-repentent-leftist Ron Radosh wrote about some of the post-World War II examples of this in his disturbingly admiring Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism (1975). Investigative reporter Avedis Derounian, publishing under the pseudonym John Roy Carlson, published two books on the Old Right isolationist political hardcores, Under Cover (1943) and The Plotters (1946).
The presumed Presidential nominee, Donald Trump, has the dubious honor of having had Roy Cohn as one of his most important political mentors. (Michael Kruse, ‘He Brutalized For You’ Politico 04/08/2016; Olivia Nuzzi, Trump’s Mobbed Up, McCarthyite Mentor Roy CohnDaily Beast 07/23/2015) So he has had access to the political sewer fed in no small part by Old Right isolationism.
Hillary Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy record over the weekend, a glimpse into a potential general election strategy of casting Clinton as the more likely of the two to take the nation to war. ...
“On foreign policy, Hillary is trigger happy,” Trump told the crowd. “She is, she’s trigger happy. She’s got a bad temperament,” he said. “Her decisions in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya have cost trillions of dollars, thousands of lives and have totally unleashed ISIS.”
And he expressed a rarely heard appreciation for the “other side to this story,” noting: “Thousands of lives yes, for us, but probably millions of lives in all fairness, folks” for the people of the Middle East.
Trump implied that casualties inflicted by the U.S. military were far higher than reported. “They bomb a city” and “it’s obliterated, obliterated,” he said. “They’ll say nobody was killed. I’ll bet you thousands and thousands of people were killed every time you see that television set.”
“If we would’ve done nothing,” Trump argued, “we would’ve been in much better shape.”
And she explains that such pitches scarcely make Trump a dove:
Of course, Trump is hardly the candidate of peace. Nor is he a credible messenger.
He’s advocated for killing the families of terrorists, endorses torture and in his tirade against Clinton he applauded Saddam Hussein for executing people without trial, saying, “He used to kill [terrorists] instantaneously. … they didn’t go through 15 years of a court case.”
And she warns that Trump could make this kind of political pitch:“'Donald Trump will be running to the left as we understand it against Hillary Clinton on national security issues,' Republican strategist Steve Schmidt said on MSNBC last week. 'And the candidate in the race most like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from a foreign policy perspective is in fact Hillary Clinton, not the Republican nominee.'”
It would be more accurate, I think, to say that in conventional pundit-speak, Trump with this pitch will try to run both to the left and to the right of the Democrats. If the likely Democratic nominee sticks closely to the hawkish positions she supported as Senator and Secretary of State, Trump could play well with many swing voters with that pitch.
Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks looks at this left-right approach by the Trump campaign in Will Trump Be More Liberal Than Hillary? 04/21/2016; he talks about the foreign policy version following 9:00:
Bacevich gives Tricky Dicky some of the blame. I always enjoy seeing new support for the Grand Unified Theory of Nixon's Villainy:
There is a form of genius at work here. To an extent unmatched by any other figure in American public life, Trump understands that previous distinctions between the ostensibly serious and the self-evidently frivolous have collapsed. Back in 1968, then running for president, Richard Nixon, of all people, got things rolling when he appeared on Laugh-In and uttered the immortal words, “Sock it to me?” But no one has come close to Trump in grasping the implications of all this: in contemporary America, celebrity confers authority. Mere credentials or qualifications have become an afterthought. How else to explain the host of a "reality" TV show instantly qualifying as a serious contender for high office?
Of course, the Republicans are projecting a more currently theory of Villainy. AS Bacevich notes, "with absolute unanimity, Trump, Cruz, and Rubio ascribe to Barack Obama any and all problems besetting the nation. To take their critique at face value, the country was doing swimmingly well back in 2009 when Obama took office. Today, it’s FUBAR, due entirely to Obama’s malign actions."
He also takes a dig at Presidential megalomananic tendencies:
Fantasies of a great president saving the day still persist, something that Trump, Cruz, and Rubio have all made the centerpiece of their campaigns. Elect me, each asserts. I alone can save the Republic.
Here, however, Trump may enjoy an edge over his competitors, including Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. With Americans assigning to their presidents the attributes of demigods -- each and every one memorialized before death with a library-shrine -- who better to fill the role than an egomaniacal tycoon who already acts the part? The times call for strong leadership. Who better to provide it than a wheeler-dealer unbothered by the rules that constrain mere mortals?
Bacevich sees Trump as an authoritarian:
Should Trump or a Trump mini-me ultimately succeed in capturing the presidency, a possibility that can no longer be dismissed out of hand, the effects will be even more profound. In all but name, the United States will cease to be a constitutional republic. Once President Trump inevitably declares that he alone expresses the popular will, Americans will find that they have traded the rule of law for a version of caudillismo. Trump’s Washington could come to resemble Buenos Aires in the days of Juan Perón, with Melania a suitably glamorous stand-in for Evita, and plebiscites suitably glamorous stand-ins for elections.
Bacevich is on of my very favorite writers and historians. But I'm afraid he has a surprisingly conventional image of Juan and Eva Perón. Though Peronism is complicated, to put it mildly. I'm not sure how he associates "plebiscites [that are] suitably glamorous stand-ins for elections" with them. The elections of 1946 and 1951 were free and competitive elections, the latter being the first in which Argentine women had the right to vote.
Now, if he wants to compare a Trump Administration to Perón's second Presidency follow by *Isabel* Perón's, that's a much better comparison. Isabel basically let a weird mystic named José López Rega run the show, complete with death squads. That sounds more like Trump's speed to me, given his overt enthusiasm for torture and war crimes. (Pamela Engel, Donald Trump suddenly softened his stance on torture after getting blasted by military and legal expertsBusiness Insider 03/04/2016)
Bacevich makes an intriguing argument about Trump's impact on the two-party system:
If Trump secures the Republican nomination, now an increasingly imaginable prospect, the party is likely to implode. Whatever rump organization survives will have forfeited any remaining claim to represent principled conservatism.
None of this will matter to Trump, however. He is no conservative and Trumpism requires no party. Even if some new institutional alternative to conventional liberalism eventually emerges, the two-party system that has long defined the landscape of American politics will be gone for good.
He doesn't expand on the point in his article. Others have argued that the Citizens United decision resulted in the fracture of the Republican Party as a national organization, massively encouraging the tendency toward a factionalized party of a variety of compenting factions of the billionaires and Christian fundamentalists. The United States is famous for having a "weak" party system anyway. And the Republican Party can still function as an ideologically coherent national party even with competing internal factions. Because on major policy perspectives, even the currently squabbling Presidential candidates share a strong common orientation, as Paul Krugman describes in Clash of Republican Con ArtistsNew York Times 03/04/2016:
In fact, you have to wonder why, exactly, the Republican establishment is really so horrified by Mr. Trump. Yes, he’s a con man, but they all are. So why is this con job different from any other?
The answer, I’d suggest, is that the establishment’s problem with Mr. Trump isn’t the con he brings; it’s the cons he disrupts.
First, there’s the con Republicans usually manage to pull off in national elections — the one where they pose as a serious, grown-up party honestly trying to grapple with America’s problems. The truth is that that party died a long time ago, that these days it’s voodoo economics and neocon fantasies all the way down. ...
What Donald Trump has done is tell the base that it doesn’t have to accept the whole package. He promises to make America white again — surely everyone knows that’s the real slogan, right? — while simultaneously promising to protect Social Security and Medicare, and hinting at (though not actually proposing) higher taxes on the rich. Outraged establishment Republicans splutter that he’s not a real conservative, but neither, it turns out, are many of their own voters.
Just to be clear, I find the prospect of a Trump administration terrifying, and so should you. But you should also be terrified by the prospect of a President Rubio, sitting in the White House with his circle of warmongers, or a President Cruz, whom one suspects would love to bring back the Spanish Inquisition.
Bob Reich gives his version of the end-of-the-Party on his Facebook page today:
If you caught any of last night’s Republican debate you understand my point that there is no longer a Republican Party. In its place we have a Star Wars barroom of yelling, yiping, vulgar, empty-headed, bigoted buffoons. The level of discourse last night reached a new low (Trump bragged about being well-endowed “I guarantee you there’s no problem down there”), and the degree of animus a new level of school-yard vapidity. This is not a governing party’s candidates. It is a collection of wining [sic] teenagers.
But does the level of internal chaos among Republican Party factions mean that the two party system is set to disintegrate? I would rule it out, but I'm dubious. The US system of winner-take-all elections is a powerful incentive to a two-party system.
Andrew Bacevich writes about the American Jonathan Pollard, convicted and long imprisoned for espionage on behalf of Israel (American traitor, Israeli heroPolitico 07/30/2015):
On all matters touching on security, Israel plays hardball. It does not view itself as beholden to the United States or bound by American concerns, a reality that Israeli governments regularly affirm in word and deed. That seriousness ought to command respect. It should also elicit an equally serious American response. That response should take the form of a candid acknowledgment that where U.S. and Israeli security interests diverge, the United States need not be bound by Israeli concerns.
In negotiating a nuclear accord with Iran, of course, the Obama administration has done just that, which is what makes the deal such a startling departure from standard American practice. Obama has refused to defer to the demands of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and he just might get away with it.
Opponents of that deal have responded with a torrent of criticism. What’s so striking about their objections is that they consist largely of talking points that Netanyahu himself might have drafted. Obama’s American critics fail even to make any effort to distinguish between the U.S. interests and Israeli interests involved, preferring to sustain the fiction that those interests align.
Indeed, the critics seem less interested in evaluating the pros and cons of the agreement than in affirming their own “passionate attachment” to Israel. That phrase, coined by George Washington, warns of the dangers that result from indulging in misplaced affection for another country. [my emphasis]
Timothy Phelps reports on the release, which is a parole for which he eligible after serving 30 years on a life sentence on passing secret technical information on to Israel about US espionage systems (Jonathan Pollard, American who spied for Israel, to get paroleLos Angeles Times 07/28/2015):
The release, set for Nov. 21, comes at a time of renewed tension between the Israeli government and Obama administration over an international agreement to restrict Iran’s nuclear program. But U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry and other American officials emphasized that foreign policy considerations were not a factor in Pollard’s release. Israeli officials have likewise said the release will not soften their opposition to the Iran agreement, which they say is not strong enough.
A parole board unanimously decided to release Pollard after a hearing July 7, according to a statement by Pollard’s attorneys, Eliot Lauer and Jacques Semmelman. “We are grateful and delighted that our client will soon be released,” the statement read.
The Justice Department said it did not oppose Pollard’s release, describing it as a “mandatory parole.” Under the law in place at the time of his sentence, Pollard would become eligible for parole after serving 30 years. Parole would be granted as long as Pollard had not violated prison rules and was not considered likely to commit another crime.
Andrew Bacevich in Don't let the US try and solve Arab world problemsAljazeera 03/31/2015 talks about the evolution from the Cheney-Bush Freedom Agenda in the Middle East to Obama's policies for the region:
The great conceit of the Freedom Agenda was that the United States possessed the capacity - primarily measured in armed might - to discard one US-devised order and replace it with another more to its own liking. In Iraq that enterprise failed irredeemably. In Washington, however, the implications of that failure, stemming primarily from a reckless misuse of military power, have yet to sink in.
Today the limited stability that [Condoleeza] Rice treated with such disdain is well and truly gone, as events everywhere from Libya to Yemen to Syria to Iraq make abundantly clear.
Yet in responding to the chaos that Rice and her colleagues did so much to foster, US President Barack Obama clings to the expectation that US military power, wielded directly or through proxies, can somehow or other restore a semblance of calm, however partial or imperfect.
Credit Obama with having learned one important lesson from his predecessor: Sending US troops to invade and occupy countries in the Greater Middle East is a dumb idea.
Fault him for not appreciating the larger lesson that US military intervention in this part of the world is inherently counterproductive. Air strikes, drone strikes, cyber strikes, special operations forces dispatched to advise or train or kill: None of these will suffice to check the anarchic forces that the United States itself helped let loose.
Obama took office as President after the neoliberal economic policies ascendant since 1980 in the US had produced the Great Recession and when the Cheney-Bush radical foreign policy had produced a visible disaster in the Iraq War and failure in the Afghanistan War.
Both situations were an ideal opportunity for a Democratic President seeking to be transformational. But Obama's intent and orientation was transactional rather than transformative.
But transactional in the right direction is far preferable to continuing with a disastrous direction. As Bacevich notes in this piece, "To think of history as tragedy comes closer to the truth" than thinking of it "as a series of problems that the United States is called upon to solve."
James Mann recounts in Rise of the Vulcans (2004):
In the days immediately after September 11, the Vulcans [the Cheney-Bush foreign policy team] were determined to do things differently from in the past. Now they were no longer to listen to old excuses, old rationalizations, old ways of thinking of the sort that they had had to tolerate when they had dealt with the world in previous administrations. This blend of resolve and righteous indignation cut across the Bush administration, from hawks to moderates and from central issues of terrorism to peripheral ones. Richard Armitage [Deputy Secretary of State 2001– February 22, 2005] was a perfect example of the new mood.
Mann recounts a meeting of Armitage just after the 9/11 attacks in his office with the head of Pakistan's intelligence agency ISI, Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad, and Pakistan's Ambassador to the US Maleeha Lodhi:
Now, Armitage said, Pakistan faced a choice. Pakistan was either on America's side or not. You can report that back to General Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president, Armitage said. When Ahmad tried to explain the background to Pakistan's relationship with the Taliban, Armitage cut him short. "History starts today," he said. [my emphasis]
That kind of transformative attitude proved to be disastrous in reality.
Leon Panetta, the long-time Democratic Party operative who served as Obama’s Defense Secretary and CIA Director, said this week of Obama’s new bombing campaign: “I think we’re looking at kind of a 30-year war.” Only in America are new 30-year wars spoken of so casually, the way other countries speak of weather changes. He added that the war “will have to extend beyond Islamic State to include emerging threats in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere.” And elsewhere: not just a new decades-long war with no temporal limits, but no geographic ones either. He criticized Obama – who has bombed 7 predominantly Muslim countries plus the Muslim minority in the Phillipines (almost double the number of countries Bush bombed) – for being insufficiently militaristic, despite the fact that Obama officials themselves have already instructed the public to think of The New War “in terms of years.”
Then we have Hillary Clinton (whom Panetta gushed would make a “great” president). At an event in Ottawa yesterday, she proclaimed that the fight against these “militants” will “be a long-term struggle” that should entail an “information war” as “well as an air war.” The new war, she said, is “essential” and the U.S. shies away from fighting it “at our peril.” Like Panetta (and most establishment Republicans), Clinton made clear in her book that virtually all of her disagreements with Obama’s foreign policy were the by-product of her view of Obama as insufficiently hawkish, militaristic and confrontational.
At this point, it is literally inconceivable to imagine the U.S. not at war. It would be shocking if that happened in our lifetime. U.S. officials are now all but openly saying this. “Endless War” is not dramatic rhetorical license but a precise description of America’s foreign policy. []my emphasis in bold]
If you look hard and know what to look for, you can detect "libertarian" elements in Glenn's article. But the analysis is basically spot on. We do have a state of permanent war.
Andrew Bacevich, author of Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (2010), writes about the Obama Non-War War chapter of the permanent war in Even if we defeat the Islamic State, we’ll still lose the bigger warWashington Post 10/03/2014. Bacevich, an historian and Catholic thinker heavily influenced by Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's outlook on foreign policy, applies his skeptical-minded view to the prospects of the war against IS:
... even as the United States persists in its determination to pacify the Greater Middle East, the final verdict is already in. U.S. military power has never offered an appropriate response to whatever ails the Islamic world. We’ve committed our troops to a fool’s errand.
And worse, the errand is also proving unnecessary. With abundant North American energy reserves now accessible — all that shale oil and fracked gas — we don’t need the Persian Gulf oil that ostensibly made our post-1980 military exertions imperative. For whatever reasons, Washington’s national security elites seem oblivious to the implications these resources have for policy in the Middle East.
No matter how long it lasts, America’s war for the Greater Middle East will end in failure. And when it does, Americans will discover that it was also superfluous.
Bacevich does not have the history-begins-today limitation that seems to infect our star pundits:
As America’s efforts to “degrade and ultimately destroy” Islamic State militants extend into Syria, Iraq War III has seamlessly morphed into Greater Middle East Battlefield XIV. That is, Syria has become at least the 14th country in the Islamic world that U.S. forces have invaded or occupied or bombed, and in which American soldiers have killed or been killed. And that’s just since 1980.
Let’s tick them off: Iran (1980, 1987-1988), Libya (1981, 1986, 1989, 2011), Lebanon (1983), Kuwait (1991), Iraq (1991-2011, 2014-), Somalia (1992-1993, 2007-), Bosnia (1995), Saudi Arabia (1991, 1996), Afghanistan (1998, 2001-), Sudan (1998), Kosovo (1999), Yemen (2000, 2002-), Pakistan (2004-) and now Syria. Whew. ...
We must hope for victory over the Islamic State. But even if achieved, that victory will not redeem but merely prolong a decades-long military undertaking that was flawed from the outset. When the 14th campaign runs its course, the 15th will no doubt be waiting, perhaps in Jordan or in a return visit to some unfinished battleground such as Libya or Somalia or Yemen.
Juan Cole has a kinda-sorta hopeful take on the speech. He's hoping that Obama was basically faking it when he talked about the goal of destroying ISIS/ISIL/whatever-we-call-it-today. He hopes instead that Obama really intends to do limited containment. (Obama’s ISIL Actions are Defensive, Despite Rhetoric of going on OffenseInformed Comment 09/11/2014)
Cole's arguments actually have more the sound of hoping for the best. But the thread of hope is stretched pretty thin when its based on hoping the President doesn't really mean that his war aims are what he says they are.
Then there was this before the speech:
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry raised the possibility Wednesday that U.S. troops might be committed to ground operations in Iraq in extreme circumstances, the first hedging by an administration official on President Barack Obama’s pledge that there will be no U.S. boots on the ground to battle the Islamic State. ...
Kerry reiterated that Obama has said no U.S. combat troops would be deployed to fight the Islamic State in Iraq, before adding, “Unless, obviously, something very, very dramatic changes.”
That formulation hasn’t been used previously by administration officials in discussing the growing U.S. confrontation with the Islamic State, and it’s sure to feed concerns that the United States may be making a greater commitment to a new conflict in the Middle East than it first intended. (Roy Gutman, Kerry: US troops might deploy to Iraq if there are ‘very dramatic changes’ McClatchy/Stars and Stripes 09/10/2014)
Uh,yes, it will feed such concerns. Although I'm sure that's what the merry trio of the bold Maverick McCain, Huckleberry "the-sky-is-falling-aaaiiii!!!" Graham, and Tailgunner Ted Cruz would love to see:
The speech was immediately criticized by some of Obama’s fiercest foreign policy opponents. Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz dubbed the speech “fundamentally unserious” on Fox News. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), using another acronym for ISIL, said on CNN that “the president really doesn’t have a grasp for how serious the threat from ISIS is.”
“The president’s plan will likely be insufficient to destroy ISIS, which is the world’s largest, richest terrorist army,” McCain said in a subsequent statement with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). (Lauren French, Hill mixed on Obama speechPolitico 09/11/2014)
And, yes, I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked!! that the Republicans are criticizing the President In A Time Of War.
This whole think is discouraging to me because of what Howard LaFranchi says, "In presenting to the American people his strategy for 'degrading and ultimately destroying' the Islamic State (IS), President Obama essentially launched what he came into office pledging to get the United States out of: an open-ended military campaign in the Middle East." (With Islamic State speech, Obama deepens US involvement in Middle East (+video)Christian Science Monitor 09/11/2014)
LaFranchi quotes Andrew Bacevich, who takes a conscious Niebuhrian view of foreign affairs:
For others, though, Obama’s strategy in its essence is no different from what has guided the war on terrorism since the aftermath of 9/11.
“This is absolutely a continuation of the long war,” says Andrew Bacevich, a professor emeritus at Boston University and national security expert prominent for his criticism of America’s Middle East wars. “Whether or not the effort to defeat ISIS succeeds, this new intervention is not going to bring the long war to an end.”
Obama is following a familiar pattern of “use force or don’t act,” Professor Bacevich says, but he adds that force did not work in Afghanistan or Iraq and that it won’t address the roots of a challenge like IS.
“Relying on force to do what – bring stability to, democratize, pacify, and make friends with the Islamic world – does not seem with experience to offer anything in the way of a remedy,” he says. “Military action is not going to solve the larger problem of the conflict between traditional forms of Islam and a world tending increasingly towards secular modernity.”
Bacevich, who says he is not advocating inaction, insists there is a moral argument to be made for intervention against IS – but that is not what he sees Obama doing. “His argument is that ISIS poses a clear threat to the United States,” he says, “and that's wrong.”
Bacevich is his genuinely innovative writing considers the Long War to begin with the Cold War, and doesn't restrict the term to the so-called War on Terrorism. Gareth Porter analyzes the same phenomenon from the perspective of US military dominance in the world since the Second World War.
There are lots of nasty flies in this ointment.
There's Iran, with whom we entered into a de facto alliance when the Cheney-Bush Administration invaded Iraq, although that wasn't their intention in their imperial daydream about knocking of one Middle East government after the other with minimal forces, their own version of the Light Brigade celebrated by Alfred Lord Tennyson in the poem quoted in the title to this post.
Using the [US] military tool in any major way simply is not a viable option for the United States, except as a last resort. Prepositioning assets to signal intent and capability is probably the only significant role for the U.S. military at the moment, because the United States would be better served by Iran’s military bolstering both the Iraqi and Syrian governments. (Larry Goodson, Syria and the Great Middle Eastern WarArmy Strategic Studies Institute 07/08/2014)
There's Turkey. "It should be remembered as well that Erdogan's Turkey provided shelter, supply lines, transit rights and training space for IS among other Sunni jihadi groups fighting in Syria. The Turks are still doing this." (Pat Lang, Too many moving parts, too manySic Semper Tyrannis 09/11/2014)
And, of course, there's Syria:
For President Barack Obama, the decision to go after Islamic State militants in Syria also creates a dilemma, as doing so could help Assad, who Obama has said needs to relinquish power.
“Whilst it’s true that attacks will serve Syrian ends, it will also serve the ends of Syrian opposition groups, whom Obama has committed to supporting,” Joshi said. The Islamic State may be weakened, “but the opposition will also be getting stronger and that's bad news for Assad.” (John Vandver et al, What can we expect from the anti-Islamic State coalition?Stars and Stripes 09/11/2014)
Then there's the bizarre predicament of targeting ISIS, which is the Syrian goverment's most powerful opposition in the civil war raging there, making us the de facto allies of President Bashar Assad's regime. But we're also backing another one of Assad's opponents in the civil war, our fabled "moderate" Sunni allies:
One major difficulty is that some Sunni nations see a need for an armed group that will protect Sunni interests against the Shiite-led government in Iraq and the Alawite-dominated government of President Bashar Assad in Syria.
“All things being equal, in a perfect universe, the Saudis would like to harness a group like IS. The problem is, IS doesn’t say, ‘Oh, sir, how high do I jump?” said Kamran Bokhari, an adviser on Middle East and South Asian affairs with the global intelligence company Stratfor.
Support for a broad offensive against the Islamic State from some key allies is likely to come only in return for greater political power for Sunnis in Iraq and stepped-up U.S. support for anti-Assad forces in Syria. That will complicate the efforts of Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, whom Obama has dispatched to the region to drum up support for the initiative from Sunni allies such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Jordan.
Still, analysts say, the old Sunni bulwarks have little choice but to support, at least cosmetically, a U.S. coalition, since the Islamic State is at their borders and unwilling to act as a proxy for them against Shiite foes such as Iran and Hezbollah. They’ll push for the creation of a Syrian rebel force strong enough to fight both the Islamic State and the Iranian-backed Assad regime. (Hannah Allam and Jonathan Landay, Obama strategy to beat Islamic State likely to draw U.S. into years of conflictMcClatchy Newspapers 09/05/2014)
That would be the Iran by which, according to Larry Goodson, "the United States would be better served by Iran’s military bolstering both the Iraqi and Syrian governments" than by direct military action against ISIS.
Jeffrey White, a former senior Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, said it appears that Obama has been forced by the Islamic State’s military successes and its growing threat to undertake a serious effort to build and arm a Syrian opposition force capable of defeating the Islamist extremists with the help of U.S. air power.
“It certainly sounds like we’re more serious,” said White, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, though he cautioned: “We’ve heard this so many times before, but little has come of it.”
Obama’s language Friday on Syria reinforced the idea that crushing the Islamic State has replaced Assad’s ouster as the main U.S. priority in Syria, White said. ...
There are indications that the hard work to build such a force is already underway, overseen by the CIA, despite remarks by Obama last month disparaging the moderate U.S.-backed Syrian opposition as “doctors, farmers, pharmacists, and so forth.”
The top general of the Free Syrian Army told McClatchy last week that since December secret U.S. military and non-lethal support has bypassed the group’s Turkey-based leadership and gone directly to up to 14 commanders inside northern Syria and some 60 smaller groups in the south. All of them report to the U.S. spy agency, he said.
“The leadership of the FSA is American,” said Gen. Abdul-llah al Bashir, who defected from Assad’s army two year ago.
Free Syrian Army field commanders confirmed that the United States is providing their men with training outside Syria and with weapons, including TOW anti-tank missiles. (Allam and Landay)
John Vandver et al also talk about the perspectives of various and sundry allies in spirit or in fact: Australia (who knows why?), Bahrain, Canada, France (whose Socialist President apparently loves him some war as much as he loves Herbert Hoover economics), Germany (where Angela Merkel doesn't limit her goals to impoverishing the eurozone population but also wants to make Germany a bigger military player), Great Britain (our faithful poodle in such matters), Italy (that is trying to survive Angie-nomics), Jordon (possibly maybe), Kuwait, Poland (who doesn't have any immediate eastern European concerns to worry about, except for, you know, the Ukraine crisis), Qatar (whose monarchy has been supporting Sunni opposition to our Iraqi allies and Iranian friends), Saudi Arabia (whose government and citizens continue to be major funders of violent Islamic extremism), and the United Arab Emirates.
Whatever strategy President Barack Obama lays out Wednesday to combat the Islamic State is sure to rely heavily on buy-in from rival Muslim powerhouses Saudi Arabia and Iran – one a Sunni Muslim kingdom with its own grim penchant for beheadings and the other a Shiite pariah state that’s executed thousands of dissidents. ...
Virtually any action against the Islamic State inside of Syria will help the forces of President Bashar Assad, whose ouster the United States has demanded for years.
Iran, meanwhile, is what Shaikh called the “silent partner” in the coalition, too radioactive to be explicitly included but whose presence and influence are too great to be ignored.
The expectation, analysts said, is that Iran would contribute discreetly by leaning on the new government in Baghdad to make more concessions to Sunni leaders and by nudging the Assad regime in Damascus toward reviving the idea of a negotiated resolution to the crisis.
“What Iran does now will determine to what extent the other Gulf and Arab states will more visibly accept its role,” Shaikh said. “It’s a key moment.”
U.S.-Iranian talks on the Islamic State are kept very quiet, but evidence crops up in occasional leaks or news items. One recent example is the emergence of a photo that purported to show Iranian spymaster Qassem Suleimani with Iraqi Shiite militiamen near Amerli, where U.S. warplanes had just helped to break a months-long siege. Put more simply: Americans provided the air cover and Iranian-backed militias provided the ground forces to retake territory from the Islamic State. [my emphasis]
Andrew Bacevich has been doing great work for years on the US military. But since his analyses generally fall outside the lazy assumptions of the Very Serious People, you don't see him on the TV gab-fests where such VSPs as David Brooks and Tom Friedman hold forth.
In 'Good Guys' Make Bad GeneralsThe American Conservative 05/13/2013 (May/June 2013 issue), he uses a review of Thomas Ricks' new book to look at the real outcomes of the current organizational culture in the senior military ranks:
To become a general officer is to join an exclusive club. As with many clubs, ranking members decide whom to admit, restricting entry to those who satisfy the criteria for being the right sort. In American military vernacular, Ricks writes, the key is to be deemed a “good guy.” The good guy projects the right attitude, strikes the right pose, and recites all the right clichés. Good guys are team players. They don’t rock the boat. They get ahead by going along. In practical terms, demonstrated adherence to orthodoxy becomes the premier qualification for admission. Heretics need not apply.
And according to Ricks, once you’re in, you’re golden: with membership come privileges and protection. So when events expose the limitations of a William Westmoreland in Vietnam or a Tommy Franks in Iraq, other senior officers cognizant of those shortcomings keep mum. Sergeants or captains falling short in the performance of duty might feel the axe; not so with the generals said to be responsible for what the sergeants and captains do or don’t do. General officer responsibility turns out to be more nominal than real. Reflecting on the Iraq War, one disenchanted American officer put it this way: “As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.” Needless to say, that officer’s invitation to join the club never arrived. [my emphasis]
Bacevich discusses the dubious accomplishments of Gen. William DePuy, who he credits with developing the infamou "search-and-destroy" strategy in the Vietnam War. He also credit DePuy with successfully convincing the senior officer corps to not learn the most meaningful lessons of that war:
Yet the abject failure of that concept in Vietnam—a failure above all of creative intelligence—prompted little soul-searching on DePuy’s part. Nothing that had occurred there altered his pre-existing conception of warfare. Stripped to its essentials, that conception reduced combat to a series of discrete, measurable tasks. In DePuy’s eyes, to master tasks was to master war itself. Paying lip service to war’s human dimension, disdaining its political aspect altogether, DePuy’s approach—which became the Army's approach—pretended to a sort of pseudo-empiricism, as if war were akin to a large-scale industrial enterprise.
Demanding compliance with prescribed formulas, checklists, and decision matrices, DePuy’s Army had little use for critical thinking or independent judgment. This was the Army that in 1991 fought Saddam Hussein and then in 2003 came back for a second go—an Army led by “good guys” who had mastered minor tactics but were intellectually complacent, strategically illiterate, and wore their antipathy for politics like a badge of honor.
Bacevich quotes an important observation by Ricks on the developing generals' culture in the Vietnam War era: "The Army, writes Ricks, 'was fast becoming a collection of 'organization men' ... who were far less inclined to judge the performance of their peers.' Generals 'were acting less like stewards of their profession, answerable to the public, and more like keepers of a closed guild.'"
And for all the secular and religious idolatry that US political culture currently practices toward the military and its allegedly glorious leaders, the results are not especially impressive:
In terms of providing its army with bountiful resources, no nation comes even close to the United States. In terms of willingness to commit that army into action, no nation (except perhaps Israel and the United Kingdom) compares. Yet the roster of victories achieved by the United States Army since 1945 is an abbreviated one: the Dominican Republic (1965), Grenada (1983), and Panama (1989). Twenty years ago, observers might have added the Persian Gulf War (1991) to that list. Unfortunately, the brief and seemingly glorious encounter that was Operation Desert Storm turned out to be a mere preliminary bout.
Forays ending in something other than victory—i.e., conclusive operational success yielding desired political outcomes—have been both more numerous and of greater moment. The Cold War provided the occasion for one costly draw (Korea) and one humiliating defeat (Vietnam). The post-Cold War era has included one outright failure, the embarrassing if quickly mythologized Somalia intervention, along with two wars of middling size, long duration, and ambiguous outcome. Whatever verdict historians ultimately render regarding Iraq and Afghanistan, they are unlikely to classify them as roaring successes.
But in a climate of cultural militarism with a foreign policy of global hegemony, such questions are too infrequently considered. The Very Serious People are too focused on the next war to cheer for.
Andrew Bacevich in January of this year gave an address to the American Historical Association on "The Revisionist Imperative". It was published in The Journal of Military History 76/2 (Apr 2012) under the title, "The Revisionist Imperative: Rethinking Twentieth Century Wars." It's also available online at the Marshall Foundation website.
Bacevich in this lecture argues that we need to focus on two extended conflicts that reach across the last century and one of them into the current one. The first encompasses the two world wars and the Cold War:
Enshrined today as a story of freedom besieged, but ultimately triumphant, the familiar story began back in 1914 and continued until its (apparently) definitive conclusion in 1989. Call this the Short Twentieth Century. ...
The Short Twentieth Century, geographically centered on Eurasia, pitted great powers against one another. Although alignments shifted depending on circumstance, the roster of major players remained fairly constant.
That roster consisted of Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan, with the United States biding its time before eventually picking up most of the marbles.
The second involves the oil heartlands:
The less familiar alternative recounts a story in which freedom as such has figured only intermittently. It has centered on the question of who will dominate the region that we today call the Greater Middle East. Also kicking into high gear in 1914, this story continues to unfold in the present-day, with no end in sight. Call this the story of the Long Twentieth Century. ...
From time to time, the Long Twentieth Century has also pitted great powers against one another. Yet that struggle has always had a second element. It has been a contest between outsiders and insiders.
Western intruders with large ambitions, preeminently Great Britain until succeeded by the United States, pursued their dreams of empire or hegemony, typically cloaked in professions of uplift or "benevolent assimilation." The beneficiaries of imperial ministrations – from Arabs in North Africa to Moros in the southern Philippines – seldom proved grateful and frequently resisted.
Andrew Bacevich takes a look at the problems presented by President Obama's current approach to secret war by Special Forces in Unleashed: Globalizing the Global War on TerrorTomDispatch 05/29/2012.
Bacevich doesn't try to tiptoe around the right wing's hissy fits over Patriotic Correctness. For instance, he writes:
The displacement of conventional forces by special operations forces as the preferred U.S. military instrument -- the "force of choice" according to the head of USSOCOM, Admiral William McRaven -- marks the completion of a decades-long cultural repositioning of the American soldier. The G.I., once represented by the likes of cartoonist Bill Mauldin’s iconic Willie and Joe, is no more, his place taken by today’s elite warrior professional. Mauldin’s creations were heroes, but not superheroes. The nameless, lionized SEALs who killed Osama bin Laden are flesh-and blood Avengers. Willie and Joe were "us." SEALs are anything but "us." They occupy a pedestal well above mere mortals. Couch potato America stands in awe of their skill and bravery.
This cultural transformation has important political implications. It represents the ultimate manifestation of the abyss now separating the military and society. Nominally bemoaned by some, including former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and former Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, this civilian-military gap has only grown over the course of decades and is now widely accepted as the norm. As one consequence, the American people have forfeited owner’s rights over their army, having less control over the employment of U.S. forces than New Yorkers have over the management of the Knicks or Yankees.
As admiring spectators, we may take at face value the testimony of experts (even if such testimony is seldom disinterested) who assure us that the SEALs, Rangers, Green Berets, etc. are the best of the best, and that they stand ready to deploy at a moment's notice so that Americans can sleep soundly in their beds. If the United States is indeed engaged, as Admiral McRaven has said, in "a generational struggle," we will surely want these guys in our corner. [my emphasis]
He also reminds us that the fact that secrecy hides much of what they do doesn't at all mean that we should assume everything is going alright. If anyway, we should assume the opposite. Bacevich writes, "From a president’s point of view, one of the appealing things about special forces is that he can send them wherever he wants to do whatever he directs. There’s no need to ask permission or to explain. Employing USSOCOM as your own private military means never having to say you’re sorry." Or, more to the point, with no need for "notification or consultation" with Congress, much less accountability to the public.
As U.S. special ops forces roam the world slaying evildoers, the famous question posed by David Petraeus as the invasion of Iraq began -- "Tell me how this ends" -- rises to the level of Talmudic conundrum. There are certainly plenty of evildoers who wish us ill (primarily but not necessarily in the Greater Middle East). How many will USSOCOM have to liquidate before the job is done? Answering that question becomes all the more difficult given that some of the killing has the effect of adding new recruits to the ranks of the non-well-wishers.
In short, handing war to the special operators severs an already too tenuous link between war and politics; it becomes war for its own sake.
It was recently reported that U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) commander Adm. Bill McRaven and Deputy Director of Operations Brig. Gen. Sean Mulholland want to establish a worldwide network linking special operations forces (SOF) of allied and partner nations to combat terrorism. ...
This plan may seem ultra-ambitious but given the demand on and pace of U.S. SOF activities in recent years it hardly comes as a surprise. The forces will be conducting missions in 120 countries by year's end, up from about 75 currently. And while they account for only three percent of the military as a whole, they make up more than seven percent of the forces assigned to Iraq and Afghanistan. [my emphasis]
The always-insightful Andrew Bacevich writes on The New American Way of War LRB Blog 02/13/2012, describing the Obama Administration strategy of waging war with passive acceptance from the public rather than actual democratic endorsement:
Drones and special forces are the essential elements of a new American way of war, conducted largely in secret with minimal oversight or accountability and disregarding established concepts of sovereignty and international law. Bush’s critics charge him with being a warmonger. But Obama has surpassed his predecessor in shedding any remaining restraints on waging war.
How exactly the new American way of war will promote the longterm well-being of the United States is unclear. Indeed, the question goes almost unasked. All we know is that there are a lot of people out there who qualify as bad guys. And we aim to kill them all.
Bacevich is one writer who maintains a high degree of consistency outside of conventional partisanship.
Andrew Bacevich comments on the religious aspect of American nationalism in America: With God on our sideLos Angeles Times 10/16/2011:
"God did not create this country to be a nation of followers," Romney announced [in a recent speech at the Citadel]. "America must lead the world." Absent the "clarity of American purpose and resolve, the world becomes a far more dangerous place," with freedom itself in jeopardy. To avert this catastrophe, Romney declared, "this century must be an American century," with the United States economically preeminent and wielding "the strongest military in the world."
Whence do these insights derive? "Why should America be any different than scores of other countries around the globe?" Romney asked rhetorically. His answer captures the essence of our present-day civic religion: "I believe we are an exceptional country with a unique destiny and role in the world."
The Hebrew Bible provides no evidence to support this proposition. Nor do the teachings of Jesus Christ and his disciples. Yet the American Bible incorporates a de facto Third Testament, which validates this assertion of American uniqueness. That testament, fashioned from a carefully tailored rendering of the 20th century, recounts the story of a new chosen people serving as God's instrument of salvation, leading humankind onward to the promised land. [my emphasis]
Bacevich is the editor a new book coming out in 2012, The Short American Century: A Postmortem.
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