Varieties of global dominance strategy: "the results somehow always turn out to be war""

John Mearsheimer's article Imperial by Design The National Interest 12/16/2010 (Jan-Feb 2011 issue) was written before the outbreak of the Arab democratic revolution and before the start of the Libya War. But the Libya War has given in a new and more immediate relevance in understanding the similarities and differences between the Cheney-Bush and Obama foreign policies. The basic strategy common to Democratic and Republican administrations since the collapse of the Soviet Union 20 years ago has been one that Mearsheimer calls "global dominance":

The root cause of America's troubles is that it adopted a flawed grand strategy after the Cold War. From the Clinton administration on, the United States rejected all these other avenues, instead pursuing global dominance, or what might alternatively be called global hegemony, which was not just doomed to fail, but likely to backfire in dangerous ways if it relied too heavily on military force to achieve its ambitious agenda.

Global dominance has two broad objectives: maintaining American primacy, which means making sure that the United States remains the most powerful state in the international system; and spreading democracy across the globe, in effect, making the world over in America's image. The underlying belief is that new liberal democracies will be peacefully inclined and pro-American, so the more the better. Of course, this means that Washington must care a lot about every country's politics. With global dominance, no serious attempt is made to prioritize U.S. interests, because they are virtually limitless. [my emphasis in bold]

Note that Mearsheimer's criticism falls outside what our punditocracy and the leaders of both parties currently consider mainstream opinion, because it argues that that our foreign policy suffers from fundamental flaws that both Democrats and Republicans perpetuate.

This does not mean there are no distinctions to be made between the parties on foreign policy or no ways to make judgments about events taking place within that strategic framework. On the contrary, Mearsheimer distinguish between partisan variations on the global dominance strategy, the Democrats preferring a liberal imperialist version and the Republicans a neoconservative version (though I would characterize the Republicans' approach more as neocon-militarist to account for the fact that Dick Cheney's particular variance is more unilateralist militarism without the democratic garnish the neocons prefer). Mearsheimer writes:

On one side are the neoconservatives, who believe that the United States can rely heavily on armed force to dominate and transform the globe, and that it can usually act unilaterally because American power is so great. Indeed, they tend to be openly contemptuous of Washington’s traditional allies as well as international institutions, which they view as forums where the Lilliputians tie down Gulliver. Neoconservatives see spreading democracy as a relatively easy task. For them, the key to success is removing the reigning tyrant; once that is done, there is little need to engage in protracted nation building.

On the other side are the liberal imperialists, who are certainly willing to use the American military to do social engineering. But they are less confident than the neoconservatives about what can be achieved with force alone. Therefore, liberal imperialists believe that running the world requires the United States to work closely with allies and international institutions. Although they think that democracy has widespread appeal, liberal imperialists are usually less sanguine than the neoconservatives about the ease of exporting it to other states. As we set off to remake the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall, these principles of global dominance set the agenda. [my emphasis]

David Rieff in Just Like Bush: What's the difference between Obama's Libyan war and neoconservatism? The New Republic 04/01/2011 describes the fundamental agreement between the neocon/Cheneyists and the liberal imperialist strategists this way: "Both sides think it is America's duty to reshape the world into a more democratic place. And no matter which side's narrative is in the ascendant, the results somehow always turn out to be war."

In a sense, what some are hailing as the Obama Doctrine on so-called humanitarian intervention seems like nothing so much as fusion of the liberal interventionism of the 1990s, during the period that stretched from Bosnia through Kosovo to Sierra Leone, and the neoconservative interventionism of the Bush era. Indeed, despite what liberal interventionist supporters of President Obama and of the Libyan war have claimed, there was little in the president's speech that, stripped of some of its religious cloaking, could not have come out of the mouth of George W. Bush, above all the Bush of the "democracy exporting/wars fought in the name of values" Second Inaugural in 2005. Liberal interventionists indignantly deny this of course, claiming that they believe in multilateralism whereas neoconservatives do not, and that they believe in soft power, or, in Secretary of State Clinton's formulation, smart power, whereas neoconservatives are fixated on hard power.

The problem with this is that the liberal interventionists' idea of multilateralism is one in which other nations join America's efforts. "The world works best when America leads" is the way the late Richard Holbrooke liked to put it, which neatly encapsulates the liberal hawks' view that they can have U.S. hegemony and multilateralism, which a more skeptical observer might be tempted to call hegemony without tears. But most of this is institutional sleight of hand. These interventions happen if the United States will provide the muscle and don't if it will not. That is how defenders of the Libyan war — up to an[d] including the president — can pretend that the fact that formally there is indeed a coalition, and that the United States has technically ceded the lead role in the operation to NATO (again, as if NATO was not a U.S.-dominated institution), makes such an intervention a horse of an entirely different color from those initiated by the horrid neocons, and never mind that, on this logic, in strictly institutional terms, the Soviets could have called the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 a Warsaw Pact operation. [my emphasis]

Aaron David Miller also looks at policy continuities between the neocon/unilateralist Cheney-Bush Administration and Obama's liberal interventionist one in Is Obama Really George W. Bush? Huffington Post 04/04/2011. Here's how he frames his perspective:

There are fundamental differences to be sure: the president's tendencies to engage; to work multilaterally; to be contrite about American power; to see the world not as black or white, but in gray, the color of diplomacy. But on key issues--Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Arab-Israeli peacemaking--there's also great continuity. And in one of the greatest potential ironies of all, Obama could be heading for Bush 43 redux on getting rid of Gaddafi.

Miller looks at some of the problems confronting the US in the Libya War in Obama's 21st-Century War Foreign Policy 04/05/2011. In either variety of global strategy, there are limits to American power that make the global dominance strategy, in Mearsheimer's words, "doomed to fail" in the longer run (after often in the shorter-run). Miller writes:

Welcome to Libya, Mr. President. You've got your very own 21st-century war, where the goals are as diffuse as the means at your disposal to accomplish them. Having chosen to double down in Afghanistan, you now own two of them -- Afghanistan and Libya. To get out of the former, your military advisors [sic] argued, you first had to get in deeper. And you chose to do so.

In Libya, another war of choice, you are now confronted with many of the same contradictions, impossible choices, and hard decisions that these other conflicts pose. Yes, Libya isn't Iraq or Afghanistan; it may well be a good war fought for sound moral and humanitarian purposes -- but it's also a complicated war. To put it mildly, like the other two conflicts, getting in may be a lot easier than getting out, despite all rhetoric to the contrary. [my emphasis]

That's a basic rule of war that our political culture has, in practice, largely lost side of: it's a hell of a lot easier to get into a war than to get out of one.

Tags: aaron david miller, barack obama, david rieff, john mearsheimer, libya war

Keith Olbermann on the Libya War

Keith Olbermann has a good comment segment on the Libya War.



For a rosy view, check out Juan Cole's Top Ten Accomplishments of the UN No-Fly Zone 03/24/2011 Informed Comment 03/24/2011. Cole is consistently good at gathering and reporting information from Arab-language sources and at reporting them to his readers. Given his critical stance toward the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, and given the fact that his criticisms have all too often turned out to be well-placed, I'm surprised that he's initially so optimistic on the Libya intervention. I think he may be taken an optimistic evaluation of the Kosovo War as a major reference point for this one. He doesn't seem to be giving full weight to the limitations on air power that a closer look at the Kosovo War exposes. He also doesn't seem to be looking at the potential for insurgency in Libya, whether Muammar Qaddafi is ousted or not. (On that point, see Steven Metz, Libya’s Coming Insurgency The New Republic 03/20/2011.)

Neil Purcell pointed out this antiwar piece by David Rieff, The Road to Hell The New Republic 03/23/2011, who writes:

So much for the hope that Iraq and Afghanistan might actually have taught the West anything lasting about trying to impose democracy at the point of a gun. Instead, it is as if Iraq, which, in the United States, was initially welcomed by most liberal internationalists and neoconservatives alike as a war of liberation, had never happened, and, instead, we have traveled backward in time. Remember those halcyon days of the late 1990s when Tony Blair was promising the world that in the future the West would fight wars in the name of its values, not just of its interests, in effect promising that the wars of the twenty-first century would be noble wars of altruism? If you don’t, well, don’t worry: If the war in Libya is any indication, you’ll have the chance to live them all over again. Of course, the catastrophe in Iraq was supposed to have sobered us, and made even the most ardent liberal interventionists realize that Pascal’s great phrase, “He who would act the angel, acts the beast,” expresses the stark truth about what we self-flatteringly call humanitarian interventions. But instead, here we go again. [my emphasis]

Tags: david rieff, keith olbermann, libya war

Humanitarian intervention and the Iraq Syndrome

Fairness and Accuracy in Media's (FAIR) Extra! for Jan/Feb 2008 includes an article by Julie Hollar on The Humanitarian Temptation: Calling for war to bring peace to Darfur.

I hope that American political culture will experience a major "Iraq Syndrome" in which the public and Congress will scrutinize US involvement in wars more closely, skeptically and realistically than what occurred with the Iraq War.

Hollar's article is a reminder that even wars for legitimate purposes, such as an international intervention to halt genocide, can go badly wrong. We're seeing right now in Iraq and Afghanistan that American military power has definite limits, more constricting limits than most Americans would like to believe exist.

Resolving a bitter civil war is not easy for outsiders to accomplish. It may require a broad range of counterinsurgency operations, all of which risk turning a humanitarian intervention into a nationalist war against the intervening power(s). Language skills are also a critical factor. So is religion. In the case of Darfur and the Sudan, it may be difficult for many Sudanese and for Muslims in other countries to look at an intervention on the part of armies from Christian or Buddhist or Hindu nations against an Arab Muslim regime as motivated by entirely benign purposes.

It's also the case that the Dick Cheneys and Richard Perles of the world will always find "humanitarian" glosses for their cynical and militaristic foreign policies. After all, the often savage acts of nineteenth century imperial powers was crowned with the rhetoric of civilizing supposedly lesser peoples, e.g., the "white man's burden".

And military forcies large enough and well-trained enough to credible undertake a humanitarian intervention in a hostile, difficult, "non-permissive" environment is also a military that the Dick Cheneys and Richard Perles can use for their own truly dark purposes.

And war is war. It's about killing the enemy. Whatever the legitimacy of the war aims, the notion of "humanitarian war", as Helena Cobban has observed, is a hideous oxymoron. She writes in The myth of 'humanitarian' war 07/15/04 at her Just World News blog:

But trying to claim that any war can be 'humanitarian' is fundamentally dishonest. No war is 'humanitarian', ever. War sucks. War kills people; and by design it is a blatant attack on their most basic human rights--their rights to life, to physical security, to the pre-conditions of material and mental wellbeing. To pretend that any war serves 'humanitarian' aims is fundamentally to ignore those most evident facts about war--facts that too many Americans seem to have forgotten, if indeed they ever knew them.

Interlude for a seldom-pondered fact here. Almost no governments have ever launched military adventures far from their own borders without citing 'humanitarian' war aims... Nearly all the distant imperial conquests undertaken by European powers in past centuries were cloaked in great clouds of 'humanitarian' rhetoric... Perhaps this is connected to the fact that no government ever invites its people to mobilize for an 'unjust' or even 'unjustified' war? Every government, after all, likes to present itself as good, not greedy, overbearing, and grasping. (emphasis in original)

In Crimes of War 2.0 (2007), former humanitarian hawk turned skeptic David Rieff co-authors the article on "Humanitarian Intervention" with Anthony Dworkin. Referring to the often-cited Rwandan genocide as one of his examples, they write:

In practice, humanitarian intervention has often served as a justification for States to act in conflicts where there is no domestic support for more straightforward political interventions. The public in North America and western Europe has, for all the talk of compassion fatigue, proved remarkably sympathetic to the use of force to avert of bring to an end a humanitarian disaster. On the other hand, humanitarian intervention has also been a justification for other political motivations. In Rwanda, in 1994, it was commonly assumed that the French humanitarian intervention dubbed Operation Turquoise used the humanitarian imperative as a cover for France's decision to continue to try to influence events in the Great Lakes region of Africa with military force and, more specifically, to save the French-supported, but genocidal, government. And, historically, many of the imperial campaigns launched by the European colonial powers in the nineteenth century were justified on humanitarian grounds. (my emphasis)

They conclude by observing:

After the American invasion of Iraq, the morality and practical efficacy of armed intervention seem more problematical to many people than they did previously, and the rich world's appetite for humantiarian intervention appears at least temporarily to have wanted. However, the continuing victimization of civilians in internal conflicts such as Darfur means the use of military power for humanitarian purposes is likely to retain an enduring appeal, even in these chastened times.

Hollar's article on various media appeals for armed intervention in Darfur observes:

A “humanitarian intervention,” as benevolent as it may try to sound, at its core means non-consensual military action against a foreign country—war under the banner of humanitarianism. The remarkable thing about nearly all of these media calls for intervention is that, beyond the appeals to urgency and morality, virtually no effort is made to explain exactly why or how one should believe that aggressive military action is what will bring peace to Darfur; readers, apparently, are to take that as self-evident. “If the United Nations is not willing to intervene,” the St. Petersburg Times asked (7/27/04), “how can it be taken seriously as a force for peace and humanitarianism?”

The equation of intervention with peace and humanitarianism is particularly remarkable in the wake of Iraq. Despite the [Sacramento] Bee’s declaration that “nothing” is more globally urgent than rescuing the people of Darfur, Iraq is unquestionably a much larger humanitarian crisis. Best estimates put the death toll in Iraq at over a million. (See page 22.) According the UNCHR, 4.4 million Iraqis are currently refugees or internally displaced, despite widespread media attention on a relative handful of Iraqis returning home.

The "liberation" of the Kurds and Shiites from a genocidal dictator was from the beginning presented as a key justification for the Iraq War, increasingly so as the WMD argument lost all credibility with the public. Even now, calls for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq are based primarily on claims that a pullout will “result” in a humanitarian crisis - as if one were not already well underway. (my emphasis)

Hollar also has some important observations about the experience of the Kosovo War, something on which I hope to post more soon.

I've written before about the distinctions that Steven Metz of the US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute makes among various types of situations that may involved the US in counterinsurgency and the kind of careful realism that is required in evaluating those cases. He presents some of those arguments in the Winter 2007-08 issue of the Army War College journal Parameters, New Challenges and Old Concepts: Understanding 21st Century Insurgency. His distinctions are also relevant to humanitarian interventions, which are likely to involve some sort of counterinsurgency/anti-guerrilla operations, especially if "regime change" is one of the goals of the intervention. He sees three major categories of such cases:

Rather than a “one size fits all” American strategy for counterinsurgencies, the United States should recognize three distinct insurgency environments, each demanding a different response:

• A functioning and responsible government with some degree of legitimacy in a nation with significant US national interests or traditional ties can be rescued by foreign internal defense (El Salvador model).

• There is no functioning or legitimate government but there is a broad international and regional consensus favoring the creation of a neo-trusteeship until systemic reengineering is complete. In such instances, the United States should provide military, economic, and political support as part of a multinational force operating under the auspices of the United Nations.

• There is no functioning and legitimate government and no international or regional consensus for the formation of a neo-trusteeship. In such cases, the United States should pursue containment of the conflict through the support of regional states and, in cooperation with friendly states and allies, creating humanitarian “safe zones” within the region of the conflict.

And his concluding observation on counterinsurgencies are also relevant to humanitarian interventions:

Perhaps we need to transcend the idea that insurgency is simply a variant of conventional war and amenable to the same strategic concepts. Such a conceptual and strategic readjustment will not come easily. It will be hard to simply contain an insurgency and possibly witness the ensuing humanitarian costs when no salvageable government or multinational consensus exists that is capable of reengineering the failed social, political, or economic system. It will be particularly difficult to conform to the notion of serving as mediators or honest-brokers rather than as active allies or supporters of a regime. But to not do so — to confront new security problems with old ideas and strategies — is a recipe for disaster. (my emphasis)

Elaborating the same idea in the body of the article, Metz makes the important observation reminding us that the risk of protracted conflict a problem in itself:

Such actions suggest that the US military and broader defense community need a very different way of thinking about and undertaking counterinsurgency strategies and operations. At the strategic level, the risk to the United States is not that insurgents will “win” in the traditional sense, gain control of their country, or change it from an American ally to an enemy. The greater likelihood is that complex internal conflicts, especially ones involving an insurgency, will generate other adverse effects: the destabilization of regions; reduced access to resources and markets; the blossoming of transnational crime; humanitarian disasters; and transnational terrorism. Given these possibilities, the US goal should not automatically be the direct defeat of the insurgents by the established regime (which often is impossible, particularly when a partner regime is only half-heartedly committed), but, rather, the rapid resolution of the conflict. A quick and sustainable outcome which integrates most of the insurgents into the national power structure is less damaging to US national interests than a protracted conflict that may lead to the total destruction of the insurgent base. Protracted conflict, not insurgent victory, is the threat. (my emphasis)

That threat can be just as real in a humanitarian intervention as it is in a Cheneyist intervention.

Tags: anthony dworkin, darfur, david rieff, helena cobban, humanitarian intervention, humanitarian war

Iraq War: Has it become a fine old conflict?

Jessica Mitford was quite a character. Probably beset known for her book on the funeral business, The American Way of Death (1963), she was a British aristocrat who spent many years in the American Communist Party. Her sister Unity Mitford was a good buddy of Adolf Hitler. Jessica's brother-in-law through her sister Diana was Sir Oswald Mosley, head of the British Union of Fascists. Ha! And you thought holiday dinners with your family get contentious! Jessica also wrote a memoir about her years in the Communist Party, called A Fine Old Conflict (1977). It's done with a light touch, which the title reflects. She said she sang the English version of the Internationale, which has a line, "'Tis the final conflict", and for years she thought that line was, "It's a fine old conflict."

I thought of that when I saw the TPM video linked below, showing the latest round of Iraq War triumphalism. We're more than half way done with the fifth year of this thing, with no end in sight. So it's acquired rhythms of its own that have become almost familiar. This is the end of the calendar year, so we hear various projections that the number of troops may be drawn down substantially next year. This has become almost as much an annual ritual as turkey for Thanksgiving.

The good news this time is that The Surge is succeeding. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina claims it's "the most successful counterinsurgency operation in military history." (Graham sees stunning progress in Iraq by Bruce Smith AP/The State 11/26/07.

Of course, in CheneyWorld, these things have meanings that are not easily apparent to the rest of us. Success means violence is down, you see. So we have to keep lots of troops there to keep the success going. But when violence goes up, that's also good news and a sign of success, because that shows that The Terrorists are desperate, and we have to keep lots of troops there to keep the success going.

It reminds me a lot of a boss I had that was known for his fascinating but quirky stories. This is a slightly sanitized version of a story he told me to illustrate how you have to go about dealing with staff attorneys:

Always remember, if you ask an attorney, "Can I steal money?", he'll say, "Yes, go ahead and do it, and we'll find a way to get you off".

But if you ask an attorney, "Can I steal money from this particular account?", he'll say, "Yes, go ahead and do it, and we'll find a way to get you off".

So, you see? It's all in how you ask the question!

Come to think of it, working with him probably was good training to understand some of today's bizarro Republican talk. He had lots of other good sayings like, "I'm caught between a hard rock." And, "Don't burn your bridges before you build them."

It was four years ago in December that we had the stunning success of capturing Saddam Hussein-Hitler. Bush's poll ratings spiked, loyal war fans talked about what a great victory it was, and every day in every way things were getting better and better in Iraq. Remember when Holy Joe Lieberman solemnly scolded Howard Dean for suggesting that Saddam's capture wouldn't make any difference in the insurgency? What kind of mangy hippie was Dean to even think such a thing?

Trent "ah'm for the white man!" Lott just announced his retirement from the Senate on Monday. So it's only appropriate to recall the sober advice that historic statesman was giving on the Iraq War in October 2003 to The Hill:

Honestly, it's a little tougher than I thought it was going to be," Lott said. In a sign of frustration, he offered an unorthodox military solution: "If we have to, we just mow the whole place down, see what happens. You're dealing with insane suicide bombers who are killing our people, and we need to be very aggressive in taking them out."

That's the way real white men fight a war, you see. When "we just mow the whole place down", that shows them A-rab Muslim how much superior our white civilization and Christian religion is to their backward, violent habits and beliefs.

But outside the fog of white supremacy where Trent Lott's mind seems to dwell, even then there was an active antiwar movement, including soldiers and there families. Suzanne Goldenberg reported on the latter in Dissent on the home front: families of US soldiers in Iraq lead anti-war protests Guardian 10/25/03. Of course, Republicans war lovers like Ole Trent were insisting even then that they were the only ones "supporting the troops". but Rush Limbaugh hadn't yet announced that antiwar members of the service were "phony soldiers".

Those were the good old days, when the war was still young. Paul Krugman commented in a column of 10/28/03 A Willful Ignorance New York Times):

According to The New York Times, President Bush was genuinely surprised to learn from moderate Islamic leaders that they had become deeply distrustful of American intentions. The report on the "perception gap" suggests that the leader of the war on terror has no idea how badly that war — which must, ultimately, be a war for hearts and minds — is going.

Mr. Bush's ignorance may reflect his lack of curiosity: "The best way to get the news," he says, "is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff." Two words: emperor, clothes.

Other things in Krugman's column bring back memories of the early days:

Yet that moral punctiliousness is curiously selective. Last year the Bush administration, in return for a military base in Uzbekistan, gave $500 million to a government that, according to the State Department, uses torture "as a routine investigation technique," and whose president has killed opponents with boiling water. The moral clarity police were notably quiet.

Why is aiding a brutal dictator O.K., while trying to understand why others don't trust us — and doing something to create that trust — isn't? Why won't the administration mollify Muslims by firing Lt. Gen. William Boykin, whose anti-Islamic remarks have created vast ill will, from his counterterrorism position? Why won't it give moderate Muslims a better argument against the radicals by opposing Ariel Sharon's settlement policy, when a majority of Israelis think that some settlements should be abandoned, and even Israeli military officers have become bitterly critical of Mr. Sharon?

Oh, those innocent times, when American involvement with torture was thought to mean giving money to dictators who do it.

And the Christian General Boykin? Who could forget him and his helpful reminder that we were gonna beat them there Muslims because our God is bigger than theirs.

Actually, on the torture things, people who had actually been paying attention knew that something was rotten in CheneyLand on that score even at this time in 2003, even though the Abu Ghuraib scandal didn't blow until 2004. Americans working closely with the Northern Alliance warlords in Afghanistan in 2001 had not necessarily shown a lot of concern for our allies massacring prisoners of war. The treatment of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh was also not exactly by the book, as those who paid attention to the case realized. But the whole Guantanamo Gulag was already set up. And the "enemy combatant" category had been created to evade the laws of war. The Cheney-Bush administration had made it clear they didn't intend to follow the Geneva Convention in their grand War Against Terrorism.

There was also a torture case in which Lt. Col. Allen B. West faced court-martial and eventually pleaded out to a fine and early retirement in late 2003 for torturing an Iraqi prisoner. The reaction among the Freeper crowd was a grim reminder that there was a definite core of authoritarian support among the public for torture. A letter-writer to Stars and Stripes hit on some basic principles that apply in such cases, that would have saved the US a lot of trouble if characters like Dick Cheney and Rummy had applied them (West went too far by Walter Irwin Stars and Stripes European/Mideast editions 12/04/03):

When Lt. Col. West interrogated a person allegedly involved in planning an attack, took that person outside the detention facility, placed a gun next to his head and pulled the trigger twice, he crossed the line. Lt. Col. West himself became a terrorist. Lt. Col. West may have had inside information about a possible attack, but he should have left it to the experts to obtain that information and put his troops on higher alert.

Taken as a whole, the actions of Lt. Col. West were along the same lines as the war criminals of Japan, Germany and Italy in World War II. Some were arrested, tried, convicted and even executed for their actions. They were guilty of murder, torture, inhumane treatment of prisoners, and stepping outside the rules of war. Lt. Col. West stepped across the line. He admits it and seems proud of it.

If an interrogator put a gun next to a suspect’s head and asked questions, the suspect would say something, regardless of whether it was true or not, just to save his life. Lt. Col. West obtained some information. But how was he to know if it was truthful or not? (my emphasis)

The torture issue was out there. There were no lack of warning signs. But the Republican controlled Congress, which meant they were loyal lackeys of the White House. So they did nothing.

The CIA had referred the outing of Valerie Plame to the Justice Department. The Establishment press steadfastly tried to ignore the story, because a big part of the story was the shameful complicity of the mainstream press in that Karl Rove political hit job, which could have (and may actually have) cost lives. But it would turn out to be one of our most important windows into the cynical scam by which Cheney and Bush got up their war with Iraq.

Other problems were also there for those who made some effort to dig out the news. Mercenary firms were placing a lot of people in Iraq, with uncertain prospects for their effects. Bumbling on the part of Jerry Bremer's CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) was already visible, though we had no idea of the level of political hackery, incompetence and corruption that was really going on. But tips of the iceberg were appearing. Serious deficiencies in the initial planning were no secret by then, having been documented by, among others, the Army itself in the Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) After Action: Operation IRAQI FREEDOM.

David Rieff described some of the problems already encountered in Blueprint for a Mess New York Times 11/02/03:

Historically, it is rare that a warm welcome is extended to an occupying military force for very long, unless, that is, the postwar goes very smoothly. And in Iraq, the postwar occupation has not gone smoothly.

I have made two trips to Iraq since the end of the war and interviewed dozens of sources in Iraq and in the United States who were involved in the planning and execution of the war and its aftermath. It is becoming painfully clear that the American plan (if it can even be dignified with the name) for dealing with postwar Iraq was flawed in its conception and ineptly carried out. At the very least, the bulk of the evidence suggests that what was probably bound to be a difficult aftermath to the war was made far more difficult by blinkered vision and overoptimistic assumptions on the part of the war's greatest partisans within the Bush administration. The lack of security and order on the ground in Iraq today is in large measure a result of decisions made and not made in Washington before the war started, and of the specific approaches toward coping with postwar Iraq undertaken by American civilian officials and military commanders in the immediate aftermath of the war.

Despite administration claims, it is simply not true that no one could have predicted the chaos that ensued after the fall of Saddam Hussein. In fact, many officials in the United States, both military and civilian, as well as many Iraqi exiles, predicted quite accurately the perilous state of things that exists in Iraq today. There was ample warning, both on the basis of the specifics of Iraq and the precedent of other postwar deployments -- in Panama, Kosovo and elsewhere -- that the situation in postwar Iraq was going to be difficult and might become unmanageable. What went wrong was not that no one could know or that no one spoke out. What went wrong is that the voices of Iraq experts, of the State Department almost in its entirety and, indeed, of important segments of the uniformed military were ignored. As much as the invasion of Iraq and the rout of Saddam Hussein and his army was a triumph of planning and implementation, the mess that is postwar Iraq is a failure of planning and implementation.

Things were seriously screwed up then, despite all the happy talk. And the notion of establishing a permanent American presence in Iraq or achieving some Second World War-style "unconditional surrender" in Iraq today is fantasy.

But the war goes. Are we going to be listening to Lindsey Graham making similar fool declarations in 2011? We will if the Republican Party has its way. Because they're clueless about how to bring this thing to a decent end, which has long since come to mean, "minimizing the disaster".

Here's the TPM video:



Tags: antiwar movement, antiwar protest, david rieff, iraq war, jessica mitford, paul krugman, lindsey graham, trent lott

Changing perspectives

Sometimes when I look back at something written or said prior to the Cheney-Bush administration, I'm surprised at how much my own way of looking at things has changed. But it's not 9/11 that "changed everything" for me. For that matter, I don't think I've had any drastic turns or breaks in my way of looking at things. But the Iraq War and the administration's torture policy have made me look at some things, particularly in relation to foreign policy, in a different way than I did before.

I was reminded of that coming across these three articles:

Andrew Bacevich, The World According to Clinton First Things June/July 1999

The Idea that Is America by Anne-Marie Slaughter TPMCafe 06/19/07

American Exceptionalism by any other name... by David Rieff TPMCafe 06/19/07

Prior to 2002 or so, Bacevich seems to have published his articles on military and foreign policy issues mainly in conservative journals, of which First Things is one. In the 1999 linked above, he is making a thoughtful if somewhat caustic criticism of the Clinton's administration's use of history in terms that apply even more strongly to the neoconservative ideologues who defined not only the surface ideology but also the policies of the Cheney-Bush administration.

David Rieff is replying to the Anne-Marie Slaughter post that elaborates a 2007 version of the kind of Clintonian historical moralism that Bacevich discusses. Slaughter's piece is pretty general. But here is how Slaughter describes her Wilsonian framework for US foreign policy:

We need not only to embrace a vigorous national debate on what we stand for, but also to launch a global debate about the meanings and trade-offs of universal values. Liberty, democracy, equality, justice, tolerance, humility, and faith bind Americans together, but these values do not stop at the shores of the Atlantic and Pacific, or the banks of the Rio Grande and Saint Lawrence. We have always insisted that our values are universal values. Indeed, part of what we think makes us distinctively American is that we hold to a set of values that apply around the world. (my emphasis)

I'm always dubious when people start talking about "launching a debate". That's one of those things where I want to say, okay, if you think we need to launch a debate, then launch it, don't talk about the need to launch it.

Her article's main point is pretty tame. She's saying that Americans need to learn a lot more about how other democracies in the world work. I'm down with that.

Where Rieff challenges her is on her moralistic vision of American history as the story of the progress of democracy, which he calls "Whig" history:

But leave what we have wrought in Latin America from James Monroe through Woodrow Wilson (self-determination, indeed!) to Henry Kissinger and Ronald Reagan to one side. There is, more generally, something strangely over-intellectualized as well as over-sentimentalized about Anne-Marie’s account of our own history. Take, for example, her argument that our debates about what our values mean constitute what she calls “the essence of our politics, the secret of our success, and the source of our strength as a vibrant, open society.” Frankly, while I might wish this were so, I don’t think there is really much historical basis for the claim.

Rieff takes a shot at the assumption that democracy produces capitalism and vice versa:

Would an economic historian agree that political and moral debate was the secret of our economic success? Perhaps one who subscribes to the neo-liberal and neo-conservative view that democracy engenders successful, liberal capitalist societies would do so? But that, frankly, is utopianism disguised as economics and is, in any case, foundering as China and Russia demonstrate the economic viability of capitalism in an authoritarian political context.

I would add that Wilhelminian Germany and France under Napolean III also provide examples of thriving capitalism under an authoritarian-type government.

Rieff also calls attention to the fact that much of the world is unlikely to share a Wilsonian vision of American moral virtue:

I try to imagine a historically-minded Latin American reading Anne-Marie Slaughter’s claim that the essence of American patriotism is its commitment to “liberty, democracy, equality, justice, tolerance, humility, and faith,” without exploding in bitter laughter and I find that I cannot. ...

But is history really a progress, as Anne-Marie claims? Perhaps we are not going ‘forward’ at all, but backwards, or sideways. Frankly that seems far more likely to me and I can’t help wondering, were Anne-Marie herself not trying to ‘rehumanize and revitalize’ what I believe she would think of as the American project, whether she would really disagree? Again, when Anne-Marie speaks of the need to “get our foreign policy back on track,” or, in her justifiable consternation over the Bush administration’s suicidal foreign policy, refers to nations friendly to the United States that think that we Americans “no longer (italics mine [Rieff's]) listen and learn,” I come back to my fantasy of a Latin American reading these words, and I invite Anne-Marie’s readers to ask themselves what any non-American would make of such a claim? I also cannot help wondering if the nations and peoples who did once believe this were any other than the Europeans grateful at America’s role in their liberation from the Nazis. But Europe is not the world, and I do not believe that Latin Americans or East Asians ever believed anything of the sort. (my emphasis in italics)

Rieff writes about the notion of American exceptionalism which he finds in Slaughter's work, "What a florid romance Americans make of America!"

Bacevich in 1999 was also arguing for a more restrained, more realistic, less messianic vision of America's role in the world. But it was the Clinton administration, then dealing with the Kosovo crisis, to which his main criticism was directed:

The view of history espoused by President Clinton - and the vast aspirations that he and his lieutenants have concocted - appear by comparison naive and pretentious. For this Administration, the true object of the exercise [of promoting its particular interpretation of history] is not understanding or wisdom. Rather, it is to package the past into nice inoffensive bundles, neatly lined up on the near side of the President’s bridge to the new millennium. As we step off into the twenty-first century, Mr. Clinton would have us leave that history behind. But we had best step lively. For the contents of those bundles remain toxic and Mr. Clinton’s packaging is imperfect. Indeed, the bundle marked Kosovo just sprang a leak.

Bacevich in that article discusses at some length the ways in which the Clinton administration tried to promote an interpretation of American history that was optimistic and humane, but also directed toward justifying it's own policy orientation. He argues that the reason such an undertaking was such a priority for Clinton had to do with "the 1960s". Bacevich's description of what that means reflects his own background adhering to more the conservative side of what we now commonly call the "culture war" (although as late as 1992, it sounded shocking and extreme to hear Pat Buchanan talking that way at the Republican National Convention.)

Bacevich describes the relevant elements of the "1960s" view he saw as follows:

Foremost among those myths was the assertion that in the twentieth century survival itself had become problematic. ...

A second and related element of this mythology was a deep-seated skepticism about the nation’s founding ideals. ...

The third element was a corresponding skepticism about America’s role in world affairs.

But, Bacevich says, the Clintonians discovered that "as a blueprint for governance, the mythology of the 1960s is next to useless." He then cites several examples of Clinton administration rhetoric that I find far more problematic today after seeing Bush, Cheney, Rummy and the neocons bring democracy and liberty to Iraq through bombs, bullets and torture. He writes:

In the new age of globalization that beckons, according to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in a speech at Tennessee State University, the United States provides the "organizing principal" [sic]. America’s place is at "the center of this emerging international system." Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott has gone a step further, declaring that the United States is "hegemon and proud of it." ...

The American claim to being the "organizing principal" of the new age rests on the certainty that the United States embodies that right side, and that Americans, especially senior government officials, are uniquely equipped to discern the direction of world affairs. After all, as Secretary Albright has explained, "We stand tall, and therefore we can see further into the future." The mission of the United States on the eve of the new millennium is to coax others into acknowledging the direction in which historical forces tend, to commend those nations that are moving in concert with history, and to chide the reluctant to get with the program. (my emphasis)

And this one particularly caught my eye after seeing Bush and Cheney's faith-based foreign policy in action:

Thus, during President Jiang Zemin’s 1997 visit to the United States, Mr. Clinton publicly rebuked the Chinese government for being on "the wrong side of history." A year later, explaining the rationale for his own trip to China, the President told reporters that "one of the things I have to do is ... to create for them a new and different historical reality." (my emphasis)

Now, the Clinton administration never had the absurd level of hubris Cheney and Rummy and the neocons have displayed in recent years. In general, the tried to keep themselves "reality-based".

But still, I think we have to be careful about letting our leaders, Republican or Democratic, hide behind pretty abstract ideals. We have to look at the realities their actions are producing. And when it comes to wars, we should (1) avoid them whenever reasonably possible and (2) insist that policy-makers take full account of the specific realities of that country instead of invading the country that imagine is there instead of the country that we're actually invading.

Today, the following comment of Bacevich's resonates with me much more strongly than it would have in 1999:

There are those, on both the left and the right, who will find much to applaud in the prospect of the United States exerting itself to "shape history." There are others, again across the political spectrum, who will judge such an endeavor to be suffused with arrogance and doomed to fail.

Tags: andrew bacevich, anne-marie slaughter, david rieff

A cautious word for the Democrats on foreign policy

David Rieff just wrote a piece asking, But Who’s Against the Next War? New York Times 03/25/07. Some of the disputes and "press corps" gossip about the Democratic positions on the war - did Hillary Clinton say her vote on the 2002 war resolution was a "mistake" or did she only make it clear that it was completely unjustified? - sound like the proverbial arguments about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Medieval theologians didn't really argue about that, by the way; that claim was a Protestant polemic. But I'll write about angel theology some other time.

Rieff is being provocative in his article, and I don't actually think he characterizes the various Democratic candidates positions on Iran fairly. Clinton, for instance, took a position in a speech to the Iran-hawkish AIPAC lobby that sounded notably more pragmatic and less warlike than the administration's, and the AIPAC audience was presumably not happy to hear that from her.

But Rieff is worth listening to. Because in the 1990s he was sympathetic toward "humantiarian" military interventions, which is not quite as blatant an oxymoron as "humanitarian war". But he now looks back on such interventions during the Clinton administration (Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo) with a critical sense informed by the preventive war the Cheney-Bush administration launched against Iran. That's a perspective that's necessary in the foreign policy discussion. The United States needs to be far more restrained about "projecting" our military power and re-commit to avoiding war whenever reasonably possible - not to finding prettier slogans to justify them.

And however sound the intentions of one government may be, a US military that's optimized for "humanitarian" interventions all over the world can also be used by a Cheney-Bush or McCain-Giulani administration to launch new Iraq-type wars and turn other countries into the hell that this one has created in Iraq.

Tags: david rieff, democratic party, democrats