Postpartisanship, classic Daniel Bell version (2): All the big problems are solved ("in the West")

Part 1 of this post looked at the political environment in which Daniel Bell was writing the essays collected as The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (1960; I'm using the 1965 revised edition here). He was very much a part of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and others associated with their outlook. As discussed in Part 1, the CCF was covertly funded by the CIA to provide a highbrow counter to anti-Cold War advocacy by prominent intellectuals.

Daniel Bell (1919-2011)

Simply dismissing Communism and Marxism as we see today in the popular press was not an option for such a grouping of intellectuals in the 1950s. With the Communist world  - or the "socialist camp" as they themselves preferred to call it - then including the USSR, China and the Warsaw Pact nations, an effective Cold War approach for such a group would have to address their doctrines more directly. The End of Ideology represents Bell's attempt to perform just that task.

On one level, it seems odd to think of the 1950s as an "end of ideology" period. There were intense political controversies in the US at the time over issues like civil rights, the Korean War, and alleged Communist infiltration of the federal government (McCarthyism). Under their high risk nuclear doctrine known as Tripwire/Massive Retaliation, the Eisenhower Administration kept a lid on military expenditures, while the Democrats heartily criticized them for doing so. When the Russians put Sputnik into orbit in 1958, there was no shortage of bitter recriminations against each other among American politicians.

But the kind of Cold War end-of-ideology consensus represented by a group like the CCF didn't deny those differences. It included conservatives and left-liberals. And the focus of the CCF on combating Communism and promoting the Cold War in western Europe and the US meant that it couldn't be restricted to narrow conservatism. Ex-Trotskyists like Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol who later became famous as neoconservatives fit well into that niche, because they could address Marxist ideology on its own terms and also make arguments that liberals couldn't simply dismiss as die-hard anti-New Deal grumping. The more conservative among the CCF-type intellectuals might be more attentive to arguments from business for lighter regulation, the more left-leaning to efforts at establishing American-style democracy in the segregated Deep South states. But they were united in a triumphal narrative that considered any fundamental challenge to the American brand of democratic government and capitalist economy to be fully settled.

In the US, there was also the particulars of the two-party arrangement. Defenders of Southern segregation and champions of Keynesian economic policy were united in the Democratic Party, while the Republicans also had their conservative hardliners like Robert Taft but a President generally considered a moderate, and there were actual liberals within the Party. Ideological differences didn't break down obviously along party lines in many instances, and the need to fudge them within both parties was an incentive to fuzzy, non-ideological rhetoric around them.

Bell's The End of Ideology is not an argument that such controversies as civil rights or labor disputes were unimportant. It is an argument against any kind of fundamental criticism of the Cold War or the American political and economic system. Criticisms that fell outside that consensus were not respectable, not ones that would be recognized as valid by what Paul Krugman today calls the Very Serious People.

The End of Ideology is reminiscent of a Tom Friedman column. But without the taxi drivers. There are strains in society, he argues, but the comfortable assumptions of the society have moved beyond serious question. "The intellectual rehabilitation of American capitalism is being completed while the reality itself is rapidly changing," he writes. (p. 94)

The first essay in the book is called "America as a Mass Society: A Critique," based on a 1955 paper for the CCF. The 1950s saw a great deal of what became known as "mass society" analysis focused on the homogenizing tendencies of modern societies, a matter that was given new urgency by the rise of powerful mass communication instruments like radio and television and the mass mobilizations seen in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union. One might think an argument that modern society had such homogenizing effects would be attractive to someone wanted to demonstrate an "end of ideology." But Bell rejects the notion:

The moralist may have his reservations or give approval - as some see in the breakup of the family the loss of a source of essential values, while others see in the new, freer marriages a healthier form of companionship - but the singular fact is that these changes emerge in a society that is now providing one answer to the great challenge posed to Western - and now world - society over the last two hundred years: how, within the framework of freedom, to increase the living standards of the majority of people and at the same time maintain or raise cultural levels. For these reasons, the theory of the mass society no longer serves as a description or Western society but as an ideology of romantic protest against contemporary life. [my emphasis] (p. 38)

Postwar US society, we might say, was the best of all possible worlds. It was certainly solving the problems of capitalism that had given rise to the classic Marxist challenge to that system. To admit that some fundamental problem exist in capitalist civilization, or in "modernity", would open the way to fundamental criticism that could not be allowed within the Cold War dichotomy.

But this wasn't a killer-capitalism or Gilded Age perspective in which the losers were losers because of their moral failures and the rich wealthy because of God's favor or their superior personal qualities. What looked to other like a threat to the integrity of individual people or even a menace to self-government was for Bell a virtuous solving of the problems of the last 200 years: "The mass society is the product of change - and is itself change. It is the bringing of the 'masses' into a society, from which they were once excluded." (p. 38)

And the problems of that society are reassuringly manageable:

The key question remains one of political economy. On a technical level, economic answers to the organization of production, control of inflation, maintenance of full employment, etc. are available. Political answers, in an interest-group society like ours, are not so easy. But in the long run the problems of the distribution of burdens and the nature of controls cannot be deflected. The "statist" needs of a semi-war economy with its technical imperatives must clash with the restless anti-statist attitudes of the corporate managers. The first Republican administration in twenty years, even though it represents these anti-statist corporate managers, is not able to change drastically the course of government spending. The international situation imposes the same imperatives on Republicans as on Democrats, and the semi-war that is made necessary by it inevitably casts government in the role of controller and dominator of the economy. The real political question in domestic affairs will then become which of the groups will bear the costs of the added burdens. [my emphasis in bold] pp. 93-4)

The Cold War is beyond respectable challenge in that view. Democrats and Republicans are agreed on the basic size and function of government. And the Cold War - forced entirely by the "international situation" and certainly not by some class interest, military-industrial complex or cynical political calculation - has the happy effect of keeping Republicans and Democrats in line with respectable opinion, the "conventional wisdom," as John Kenneth Galbraith dubbed it in The Affluent Society (1958).

He devotes a chapter to attacking C. Wright Mills' widely-known book The Power Elite (1956), pronouncing Wright to be "a 'vulgar' Marixst" (p. 62) for suggesting that there might be a dominant economic class in the US that also seeks to exercise political power. Mills, Bell argues, "is motivated by his enormous anger" because, after all, "Many people do feel helpless and ignorant and react in anger." He specifically objects to Mills' suggestion that there might be any internal business or other interest that might have some less-than-completely-patriotic interest in the Cold War. He writes (emphasis his), "United States foreign policy since 1946 ... was not a reflex of any internal social divisions or class issues in the United States but was based on an estimate of Russia's intentions." (p. 72) The Vietnam War would eventually make such criticisms much more prominent, however much Daniel Bell and the Very Serious People of 1960 might have wished to ban them from respectable discussion, as uncouth "anger" on the part of the "helpless and ignorant."

The chapter on "The Failure of American Socialism" makes an argument that is a staple of what American Republicans today proudly call American Exceptionalism, a phrase apparently invented by Joseph Stalin. The core of Bell's version of the argument is that socialists and anyone of similar inspiration are essentially religious fanatics, like the leader in the German Peasant War of 1524–25, Thomas Münzer, or the "radical Anabaptists," known for their theocratic city-state in Munster of 1533-5. Bell argues that "not only the anarchist, but every socialist, every convert to political messianism, is in the beginning something of a chiliast," which in Bell's understanding is someone engaged in "the ecstatic effort to realize the Millennium at once." (pp. 280-1)

Anabaptists, Commies: Daniel Bell thought they were all the same
Here Jan van Leiden (1509-1536) prepares for the beheading of one of his 16 wives, Elisabeth Wantscherer for criticizing him

His argument comes down to the fact that Communists and socialists are inherently fanatics and can't operate in democratic politics because they are determined to be Anabaptists hacking off heads. The "twentieth-century Communist" is completely stuck with Anabaptist fanaticism. "He is the perpetual alien living in the hostile enemy land. ... His is the ethic of 'ultimate end'; only the goal counts, the means are inconsequential. Bolshevism thus is neither int he world nor of it it, but stands outside." A socialist may step out of that rigid fanaticism, but then he cease to be serious about his inherently Utopian goal. He praises US Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas for being what he seems to regard as an amiable loser. "If [Eugene] Debs was, at bottom, the sentimentalist of American socialism, Norman Thomas has been its moral figure." Thomas, he says, was "a man whose instincts are primarily ethical" and that has made him "the genuine moral man in the immoral society." But as such, he found himself "caught inextricably in the dilemmas of expediency, the relevant alternatives, and the lesser evil." (pp. 289, 290)

Somehow in Bell's presentation, Thomas both retained his moral purity, making him like unto a religious prophet, but nevertheless avoided doctrinaire purity and engaged in ethical behavior by entering into the practical compromises of real-world democratic politics, and apparently both things made him an ineffectual figure. Because this whole socialism business is just un-American. Or something. He concludes, "For the socialist movement, living in but not of the world, [compromise] was a wisdom which it could not accept. Doctrine remained; but the movement failed." This being a highbrow presentation, it wouldn't have been prudent for him to add the implied, "And thank God for that! Dang Commies!!" But the tone fits.

A chapter taken from a paper presented to a 1958 CCF conference, "Two Roads From Marx: The Themes of Alienation and Exploitation and Workers' Control in Socialist Thought," indicates how central Cold War concerns were to Bell's end-of-ideology position. The paper has some nice things to say about social-democratic attempts to improve workers' control of the workplace, and even gives a nod to the unorthodox experiment in that regard then taking place in Yugoslavia, which had broken away the Soviet Union in 1948 in its foreign policy. He also praises in a limited way Georg (György) Lukács and his work on Hegelian influences on Marx' thought. Lukács had fallen out of official favor in the Soviet bloc, serving as he did as Hungarian Minister of Culture during the revolt of 1956. The postwar Soviet philosophical line strongly de-emphasized Hegel's influence on Marxist thought, which caused some amount of upheaval in East Germany philosophy and, in a perhaps surprising twist, retarded the study of physics in the Soviet bloc. Lukács and Ernst Bloch were particular targets of criticism for their Hegelian emphasis in Marxist philosophy.

But Bell wasn't going very far down the road of praising dissident East European thinkers:

What is remarkable, in fact, is that in the last few years in Europe, a whole school of neo-Marxists, taking inspiration from Lukacs, have gone back to the early doctrines of alienation in order to find the basis for anew, humanistic interpretation of Marx. To the extent that this is an effort to find a new, radical critique of society, the effort is an encouraging one. But to the extent-and this seems as much to be the case-that it is a form of new myth-making, in order to cling to the symbol of Marx, it is wrong. For while it is the early Marx, it is not the historical Marx. The historical Marx had, in effect, repudiated the idea of alienation. [my emphasis in bold] (p. 365)

That last idea is highly questionable, as his insertion of "in effect" indicates. It's notable that in this essay he undertook to show some grasp of the German philosophical background of Marxism, though he makes sure to tell us that even on his philosophical insight on alienation, "Marx's followers drew the 'vulgar' implications from these conclusions." And Marx "in effect" repudiated them anyway, in Bell's view. He concludes the essay by arguing that enlightened management techniques can address whatever problems might be bound up with the nature of work. "The fullness of life must be found in the nature of work itself," he argues, and "the work place itself ... must be the center of determination of pace and tempo of work." (p. 392) Whatever psychological-social problems of "alienation" might exist, they could be addressed as a technical management issue. Neither the class structure of society nor the organization of economic enterprises were especially relevant.

His epilogue is called "The End of Ideology in the West," and is several pages of polemics against Anabaptist Marxism. Here he's explicit about what he means by the famous phrase of the book's title: "The end of ideology closes the book, intellectually speaking, on an era, the one of easy 'left' formulae for social change." (my emphasis) American Exceptionalism has obviously triumphed, the great economic problems of depressions have been solved, American and European capitalism justified as the Hegelian end of history, and we can finally be done with those abominable "'left' formulae for social change."  Also all the troubling griping about modernity and class conflict and alienation and the truncating of democracy by the power of wealth and so on. From now own, we can follow the Very Serious People in contemplating "individual issues on their individual merits." (pp. 405-6)

Bell's concept of the end of ideology indeed envisioned an end of ideology "in the West," a West united in an open-ended Cold War and nuclear arms race, a West in which questions about serious dysfunctions in society, even calamitous ones, are just not raised. A West in which the bases of even screaming economic disparities, overt militarism and blatant social injustice are not seriously questioned in respectable thought.

Bell's "end of ideology" is framed in Cold War terms primarily as a criticism of the Other Side and its official Marxist ideology. But it's also very much a quietism perspective that rejects the possibility that there may be any kind of deep-rooted or fundamental problems in the societies of the United States and Europe. This at a time when African-Americans were largely denied the vote and other basic civil rights in the Deep South, when Spain and Portugal were ruled by dictatorships, and even France and gone through a six-month period in 1958 when the National Assembly handed full power to Charles De Gaulle to avert a civil war over Algeria, which at the time The End of Ideology was published was still colonized by France. Bell framed his perspective as anti-Communism. But it was "anti" more than that.

The hope for such a convenient state of affairs for the One Percent is alive and well today. The advocates of neoliberalism internationally seek to achieve that end but taking the most decisive economic questions off the table of public discussion, leaving only technocratic questions as to how much public money to spend on education. Or the exact terms of international trade treaties, so long as the their basic antilabor provisions and their protections for the uninhibited movement of capital are beyond question.

Andrew Bacevich has suggested that the Cold War is usefully seen as a phase of a Long War that is still continuing. Daniel Bell insisted that US actions in the Cold War in the 1950s were driven by the actions of the nuclear-armed Soviet Union. Now that the Soviet Union no longer exists, the Long War clicks right along with wide bipartisan support and an amorphous enemy known as The Terrorists. And our Very Serious People today also consider it beyond the pale of respectable opinion to suggest that the Long War might be driven even in part by anything so worldly as war profiteering.

Like Bell's End of Ideology theory, neoliberalism and the Long War are also end-of-ideology ideologies. Just before the 2012 election, President Obama laid out his own end-of-ideology ideology of postpartisanship and the Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Sabrina Siddiqui reported in Obama, In Morning Joe Interview, Predicts War Inside Republican Party If He Is Reelected Huffington Post 10/29/2012:

"There are a whole range of issues I think where we can actually bring the country together with a non-ideological agenda," Obama said in a pre-taped interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." ...

"I truly believe that if we can get the deficit and debt issues solved, which I believe we can get done in the lame-duck or in the immediate aftermath of the lame-duck, then that clears away a lot of the ideological underbrush," he said. "And then now we can start looking at a whole bunch of other issues that, as I said, historically have not been that ideological." [my emphasis]

And yet those "vulgar" ideological problems keeping coming up, no matter how badly the Very Serious People want them to go away.

Tags: daniel bell, cold war, end of ideology, grand bargain, long war, neoliberalism

War on terror, or a Long War war running on fear?

The Washington Post's David Ignatius, one of the Very Serious People in good standing, recently wrote about How Osama bin Laden is winning, even in death 04/27/2012:

In the year since Osama bin Laden’s death, it has been a comforting thought for Westerners to say that he failed. And that’s certainly true in terms of al-Qaeda, whose scorched-earth jihad tactics alienated Muslims along with everyone else. But in terms of bin Laden’s broader goal of moving the Islamic world away from Western influence, he has done better than we might like to think.

Egypt is a case in point: This has been a year of mostly nonviolent democratic revolution. But it has brought to power some Salafist and Muslim Brotherhood groups that share common theological roots with bin Laden. And the al-Qaeda goal of driving the “apostate,” pro-American President Hosni Mubarak from power has been achieved. ...

And the battle is still raging in Yemen, the place that bin Laden believed offered his best chance of victory. The United States just decided to step up its drone war there, which is a sure sign that al-Qaeda poses a significant, continuing threat. [my emphasis]

Marcy Wheeler in We Drone Strike, Ergo We Are at War Emptywheel 04/28/2012 sums up Ignatius' analytical logic: "David Ignatius, DC insider, says we’re ramping up drone strikes, ergo al Qaeda must pose a significant, continuing threat." Courtier journalism at its "best", in other words.

Inatius and Brian Fishman of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point and the Obama-friendly New America Foundation joined Judy Woodruff of the PBS Newshour on Monday to talk about the same topic, A Year After Bin Laden's Death, How Strong Is al-Qaida? 04/30/2012:



This idea that Bin Laden is dead and Al Qaida is devastated but Al Qaida still represents a terrible and growing global threat to the United States is so bizarre and delusional that it's advocates have a hard time even pretending to believe it. In a column devoted to the notion that anything that happens in Muslim-majorities countries that even slightly irritates the US is a terrorist threat from Bin Laden's Ghost, Ignatius the Very Serious Person also writes:

As I reported last month, bin Laden was so worried that killing Muslims had tainted al-Qaeda’s image that he proposed rebranding the group with a different name. What bothered bin Laden, he wrote, was that "al-Qaeda describes a military base with fighters without a broader mission to unify the nation."

Al-Qaeda couldn’t make the transition from violent jihad to nonviolent Islamist politics. That wasn’t its DNA. Bin Laden continued to plan suicide operations against America and its political leaders, and he beseeched Atiyah to find “a brother distinguished by his good manners, integrity, courage and secretiveness, who can operate in the U.S.” Basically, he wanted to keep killing Americans but stop killing Muslims.

This theme of internal reform, which would halt the Muslim bloodshed, is clear in a December 2010 admonition from Atiyah and another deputy, Abu Yahya al-Libi, to the Pakistani Taliban movement known as the TTP: "We stress on the fact that real reform is the duty of all, and to succeed we should look for and correct our actions and avoid these grave mistakes."

According to that, Bin Laden himself, leader of the Al Qaida group that carried out the 9/11 attacks, was so disgusted with the groups that now call themselves "Al Qaida" that before his death a year ago he wanted to distance himself from the name "Al Qaida" because he thought they were ruining his brand. But those same groups and every other Muslim political groups that somehow bothers Washington is a continuation of the Bin Laden/Al Qaida threat.
And it doesn't make jack for sense.

That doesn't prevent him from expanding on that spin in the Newshour interview:

So, from our standpoint, the best thing that happened is that this violent terrorist means of jihad, means of striking against foreign influence in the Muslim world has been discredited.

What you see is still strong is the idea that bin Laden and so many other Muslims have that Western influence is too pervasive. They want it out. And so we have seen in these Arab uprisings over the last year a continuing force for that idea, which was an idea that bin Laden had too.

Making this argument also means ignoring real history, a practice in which our Very Serious People are experienced. Bin Laden may have been all kinds of evil. But the reason he and his fanatical followers originally focused on the US as the "far enemy" that had to be their priority target was that after the Gulf War, American troops remained stationed in Saudi Arabia. And the US carried imposed a major sanctions regime on Iraq for over a decade, with more or less continual bombing, including the very intensive bombing of Operation Desert Fox - surely one of the strangest operational names the Pentagon ever came up with because of its association with Ernst Rommel - in late 1998. All that in addition to the fact that they saw the US as a prime supporter of unpopular and dictatorial regimes like Mubarak's in Egypt. Even if one defends every single one of those actions as necessary and desirable, it makes no sense to ignore that they also included undesirable repercussions. Like Bin Laden's and Al Qaida's view of their jihadist mission.

So maybe it's time for a serious, practical reassessment of the amount of intervention the US is carrying out, especially the drone strikes which may look "surgical" and clean to Americans, but look like war to the people in the village where the bombs explode.

I'll have to give Judy Woodruff credit, here, though. She does press the point in a polite way that Ignatius' argument really doesn't make sense. After getting him to agree that a party like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt that is using a parliamentary path to power doesn't represent the same kind of threat Bin Laden's Al Qaida did, we get this exchange:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Is that how you would see it, Brian Fishman, that it's there, but it's not the direct threat to the U.S. that al-Qaida has been?

BRIAN FISHMAN: Yes.

I think, in many ways, the Arab spring revolutions, especially their -- in Egypt, where it was a relatively peaceful revolution, was a clear repudiation of al-Qaida's ideology and strategy for changing the political dynamics in the Middle East.

But I think it's also important to note that while there is sort of a shared intellectual lineage between the Muslim Brotherhood and groups like al-Qaida, today, al-Qaida looks at groups like the Muslim Brotherhood as its foremost enemy, even more so than the United States, because it sees groups like that as competing for the same constituencies that it wants to lead.

And al-Qaida knows that it's not going to lose a lot of supporters to the United States directly, but it will lose supporters to the Muslim Brotherhood if groups like that are able to demonstrate that they can seize political power, and really influence the way that governance is structured in that part of the world.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And does -- and, David, in a final few seconds, what posture then does the United States have in that struggle between al-Qaida and the Muslim Brotherhood?

DAVID IGNATIUS: Well, we're going to keep going after -- the U.S. will keep going after al-Qaida wherever it finds people who are dedicated to the -- violent change and killing of Americans.

Which brings us back to Marcy's characterization of Ignatius' argument: "David Ignatius, DC insider, says we’re ramping up drone strikes, ergo al Qaeda must pose a significant, continuing threat."

For the Very Serious People, the existence of the Long War Against Terrorism creates its own justification.

Tags: global war on terror, long war, osama bin laden, war on terror

September 11 retrospective: Tom Hayden on the new militarism

Tom Hayden has a long op-ed with some thoughtful observations and reading suggestions, 9/11 blind Sacramento News and Review 09/08/2011, in which he discusses the very real problem presented by the Pentagon's Long War, the state of permanent war we entered soon after the 9/11 attacks in 2001:

The military occupation of our minds will continue until many more Americans become familiar with the strategies and doctrines in play during the Long War. Not enough Americans in the peace movement are literate about counterinsurgency, counterterrorism and the debates about "the clash of civilizations" — i.e., the West vs. the Muslim world.

He's not being hyperbolic. I've written here numerous times about theories of war that have become so popular in the officer corps, according to which the "center of gravity" (the most important point of potential weakness) in war is public opinion in the United States. This view of war, based largely on a deeply flawed reading of the experience of the Vietnam War - and for the Pentagon a self-serving one - inevitably encourages maximum emphasis on attempting to manage American public opinion. It's illegal for the government in general, including the military, to propagandize the US public. But the law is not vigorously enforced in the case of the Pentagon, to put it mildly. Hayden writes:

The Long War casts a shadow not only over our economy and future budgets, but our unborn children's future as well. This is no accident, but the result of deliberate lies, obfuscations and scandalous accounting techniques. We are victims of an information warfare strategy waged deliberately by the Pentagon.

As Gen. Stanley McChrystal said much too candidly in February 2010, "This is not a physical war of how many people you kill or how much ground you capture, how many bridges you blow up. This is all in the minds of the participants." David Kilcullen, once the top counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, defines "international information operations as part of counterinsurgency."

In his 2010 book, Counterinsurgency, Kilcullen wrote that Gen. Petraeus’ goal is to achieve a "unity of perception management measures targeting the increasingly influential spectators’ gallery of the international community."

This new "war of perceptions," relying on naked media manipulation, such as the treatment of media commentators as "message amplifiers" but also high-technology information warfare, only highlights the vast importance of the ongoing WikiLeaks whistle-blowing campaign against the global secrecy establishment.

And he reminds us that despite the commitment of both parties to the present course of permanent war, the public rejects its assumptions:

The more we know about the Long War doctrine, the more we understand the need for a long peace movement. The pillars of the peace movement, in my experience and reading, are the networks of local progressives in hundreds of communities across the United States. Most of them are citizen volunteers, always immersed in the crises of the moment, nowadays the economic recession and unemployment. Look at them from the bottom up, and not the top down, and you will see:

• the people who marched in the hundreds of thousands during the Iraq War;

• those who became the enthusiastic consumer base for Michael Moore’s documentaries and the Dixie Chicks'anti-Bush statements;

• the first to support Howard Dean when he opposed the Iraq war, and the stalwarts who formed the anti-war base for then-candidate Barack Obama;

• the online legions of MoveOn who raised millions of dollars and turned out thousands of focused bloggers;

• the voters who dumped a Republican Congress in 2006 on the Iraq issue, when the party experts said it was impossible;

• the millions who elected Obama president by an historic flood of voluntary enthusiasm and get-out-the-vote drives;

• the majorities who still oppose the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and want military spending reversed.

As Juan Cole discusses in Sadrists to Demonstrate in Baghdad against US Troops Remaining Informed Comment 09/08/2011, we may be actually about to get nearly all of the American troops out of Iraq, effectively ending the war we started in 2003. And by "we," I mean the Cheney-Bush Administration. It was a wholly unnecessary war.

He recommends two books I've reviewed here, Andrew Bacevich's The New American Militarism (2005) and the collection of essays edited by Bacevich, The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War II (2007).

Tags: 9/11, long war, tom hayden

SecDef Robert Gates on war: what's old is new

Andrew Bacevich is his various books has joined others in documenting how the Pentagon just kept on fighting the Cold War, long after the "Iron Curtain" had fallen and the Soviet Union had dissolved. The Iraq War and the Afghanistan War brought a new fashionability to counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN). But on closer inspection it largely comes down to using conventional forces to shoot up villages, with hit squads and mercenaries thrown into the mix.

The Cold War ended, but the Long War continues. And the military prefers to keep right on preparing to fight the Soviet Union. Republican Secretary Robert Gates, who Obama kept on as his on Secretary of Defense, expressed the Pentagon's Long War preferences in a speech at West Point today: Thom Shanker reports on it for the New York Times in Gates Warns Against Any More Wars Like Iraq or Afghanistan 02/25/2011; I say "reports", if you can call stenography reporting. The Department of Defense (DOD) Web site has its own article on it: Jim Garamone (American Forces Press Service), Gates Challenges Cadets to Change Army Culture 02/25/2011. The full text is available at Speech, United States Military Academy (West Point, NY) 02/25/2011. From the DOD text:

Which leads to the first major challenge I see facing the Army: How will it structure itself – how will it train and equip – for the extraordinarily diverse range of missions it will face in the future? ...

The need for heavy armor and firepower to survive, close with, and destroy the enemy will always be there, as veterans of Sadr City and Fallujah can no doubt attest. And one of the benefits of the drawdown in Iraq is the opportunity to conduct the kind of full-spectrum training – including mechanized combined arms exercises – that was neglected to meet the demands of the current wars. Looking ahead, though, in the competition for tight defense dollars within and between the services, the Army also must confront the reality that the most plausible, high-end scenarios for the U.S. military are primarily naval and air engagements – whether in Asia, the Persian Gulf, or elsewhere. The strategic rationale for swift-moving expeditionary forces, be they Army or Marines, airborne infantry or special operations, is self-evident given the likelihood of counterterrorism, rapid reaction, disaster response, or stability or security force assistance missions. But in my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should "have his head examined," as General MacArthur so delicately put it.

By no means am I suggesting that the U.S. Army will – or should – turn into a Victorian nation-building constabulary – designed to chase guerrillas, build schools, or sip tea. But as the prospects for another head-on clash of large mechanized land armies seem less likely, the Army will be increasingly challenged to justify the number, size, and cost of its heavy formations to those in the leadership of the Pentagon, and on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, who ultimately make policy and set budgets.

The "swift-moving expeditionary forces" sounds an awful lot like the now-officially-defunct "revolution in military affairs" (RMA) and the related "transformation" to which Rummy, Gates' predecessor as SecDef, embraced as his way of relying on a massive army set to fight the long-since-defunct Soviet Union but handling interventions on the side with small, technologically-sophisticated forces relying on the "networked battlefield". It was this notion that led him to insist on minimizing the number of forces assembled for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, with consequences that are all-too-well known.

Here is how Gates put it, apparently reincarnating Rummy's perspective while claiming to have learned from the recent past:

What we can expect in the future is that potential adversaries – be they terrorists, insurgents, militia groups, rogue states, or emerging powers – will seek to frustrate America’s traditional advantages, in particular our ability to shoot, move and communicate with speed and precision. From the look of things, the Army will not repeat the mistakes of the past, where irregular warfare was shunted to the side after Vietnam. The odds of repeating another Afghanistan or Iraq – invading, pacifying, and administering a large third world country – may be low. But in what General Casey has called "an era of persistent conflict," those unconventional capabilities will still be needed at various levels and in various locations. Most critically to prevent festering problems from growing into full-blown crises which require costly – and controversial – large-scale American military intervention. [my emphasis]

In other words, our we-don't-call-them-RMAed-any-more forces will handle these little constabulary actions like Iraq and Afghanistan but do so in a quick and efficient way so we won't have these big ole wars that make anyone actually watching wonder whether our mega-expensive armed forces can actually win a war larger than, say, invading the island Grenada back in the glory days of St. Reagan.

This is great:

A second challenge that I believe faces today’s and tomorrow’s Army – your Army – is whether and how the Army can adapt its practices and culture to these strategic realities. From the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers and junior- and mid-level leaders down range have been adjusting and improvising to the complex and evolving challenges on the ground – in many cases using the Internet, especially tools of social media, to share tactical lessons learned in real time with their colleagues at the front or preparing to deploy back here in the United States.

Notice that he doesn't include in adapting the Army's "practices and culture" any frivolous stuff like learning Arabic. Or Pashto or Dari or Persian or Urdu or other languages spoken in places that are or might be the scene of US wars.

Tags: long war, robert gates, us military

More on Tom Hayden and Obama's disappointing the base

I posted earlier about the criticism that Joan Walsh directed at Tom Hayden for what she saw as an overly-credulous attitude toward Obama on progressive priorities. I was focusing there on her criticism of his 2008 position. On Thursday, Digby seconded Joan's criticism in Fergawdsake Hullabaloo 12/03/09.

There were a lot of comments to her post, including some good ones gizmo, rilkefan (great screen name!) and Mitchell Freedman. I'm incorporating into this post most of what I said in a comment there. Digby always seems to get a number of commenters lecture shaking their heads at her thinking that anything positive can be accomplished because Big Money has everything locked up and why bother to complain about them. I guessing most of those people fit into the category I call "Republicans and future Republicans".

Here I want to talk more about the substance of Tom Hayden's position on Obama. Because it's actually carefully considered and is not really much different from the analyses that Joan and Digby also make of Obama and the state of the Democratic Party.

It's true that those who were adult New Left activists in the 1960s do sometimes have a tendency to fall back on wooden rhetoric, even someone like Tom with a lot of experience in retail electoral politics. But the "manifesto" quality of that group statement to which Joan and Digby are referring isn't his normal style, either. What he has to say about politics and about both the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars is usually worth hearing. In the case of Iraq, he was personally active early on in trying to bring together Iraqis and Americans to promote peace talks. And his book Ending the War in Iraq (2007) is going to be worth reading for a long time. I learned during these last eight years that there was particular value in reading some of the better analyses of the Vietnam War from the time that the war was still going on. And the same will no doubt be true about those from the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.

Joan singles out Tom in her criticism, but the 2008 statement she quotes actually was a four-person manifesto-type endorsement. Tom himself wrote separately at the Huffington Post in 2008 about his endorsement of Obama, titled An Endorsement of the Movement Barack Obama Leads. He wrote there:

As for issues, the differences between Obama and Clinton on Iraq are difficult to pin down. Obama was against the Iraq war five years ago, and favors a more rapid pullout of combat troops than Clinton. But both would replace combat troops with an American counterinsurgency force of tens of thousands, potentially turning Iraq into Central America in the 1970s. Obama seems more supportive of diplomacy than Clinton, but he supports military intervention in Pakistan's tribal areas. Edwards favors a more rapid pullout from Iraq, but is unlikely to prevail. ...

I do not like the Hillary haters in our midst. As president, her court appointees alone would represent a relief from the present rigging of the courts and marginal improvements for working people. On Iraq, I believe she could be pushed to withdraw. She is a centrist, and it will be up to social movements to alter the center. ...

Is Barack the one we have been waiting for? Or is it the other way around? Are we the people we have been waiting for? Barack Obama is giving voice and space to an awakening beyond his wildest expectations, a social force that may lead him far beyond his modest policy agend [sic]. Such movements in the past led the Kennedys and Franklin Roosevelt to achievements they never contemplated. [As Gandhi once said of India's liberation movement, "There go my people. I must follow them, for I am their leader."]

That last sentence appears in the original in brackets,for some reason; my emphasis is in bold.

And I think his perspective as he expressed it then, "sixties" rhetoric or not, is basically correct. And it's essentially the same position that Joan Walsh is arguing: Obama is governing as a "centrist", i.e., a corporate Democrat who is far too open to the advice of warmongers on foreign policy and to advocates of what most of the world calls "neoliberalism" on domestic policy. If he becomes the leader of a successful progressive movement, it will be because the base forces him to do so. Politics is still politics, in the 2000s as well in in the 1960s. And it is still "up to social movements to alter the center."

The article which set Joan Walsh and Alex Koppelman and Digby off is Obama Announces Afghanistan Escalation The Nation 12/01/09, which he opens by saying, "It's time to strip the Obama sticker off my car."

His immediate comment on the Afghanistan escalation was:

The expediency of his decision was transparent. Satisfy the generals by sending 30,000 more troops. Satisfy the public and peace movement with a timeline for beginning withdrawals of those same troops, with no timeline for completing a withdrawal.

Obama's timeline for the proposed Afghan military surge mirrors exactly the eighteen-month Petraeus timeline for the surge in Iraq.

He makes it very clear that he would expect to support Obama in 2012 against Sarah Palin or any other Republican candidacy "of the pitchfork carriers for the pre-Obama era." But he also stresses the need to actively oppose the Afghanistan War:

Beyond public persuasion and pressuring Congress, activists are sure to be hitting the streets and precincts in the year ahead. The antiwar movement has a certain leverage based on the current doubt in the minds of voters and policy experts, and the potential dissent from within the Obama base. Democratic turnout increased 2.6 percent in 2008 over 2004, while Republican votes dropped by 1.3 percent. Twenty-two million more young people voted in 2008 than in 2004. The unprecedented energies of those young people who volunteered their time, money and hope could drain away by 2012, if not sooner.

In addition, the peace movement will be globalizing its reach as Obama seeks to extract more troop concessions from wary NATO countries. Opposition is particularly strong in the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and France. When Obama accepts the Nobel Prize in Oslo on December 10, he may address as many as ten thousand protestors. ...

The albatross of the Karzai government will threaten any plans to rapidly expand the Afghan army and police, themselves divided along sectarian lines. In 2005, the Kabul regime ranked 117th on the list compiled by Transparency International; by this year it was 176th. [my emphasis]

His piece is mostly about the Afghanistan War and it's worth reading in full.

The last eight years have reinforced very strongly for me the need for the United States to drastically reduce our military budget and adopt a far more cautious role about military intervention. The Long War is corrupting our democracy and seriously undermining the rule of law. What the constant state of war and manufactured fear is doing to the US is grimly illustrated in this Pew poll commissioned by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), reported with the title U.S. Seen as Less Important, China as More Powerful 12/03/09, as shown by their summary table on description of their findings on American opinions about torture:

The proportion of the public saying torture is at least sometimes justified against suspected terrorists has increased modestly over the past year. Currently, 54% say torture is at least sometimes justified to gain important information from suspected terrorists, compared with 49% in April and 44% in February.

As long as the US is spending half of the world's military budget, the ugly reality is we will have a military establishment closely tied with major economic interests from weapons manufacturers to mercenary companies and war-loving think-tanks who will always be finding new enemies to fear and fight. And the findings of that poll on torture show the kind of baggage it brings with it.

Tags: long war, obama administration, tom hayden, torture

Here they go again, the blame-America-first crowd!

I get so tired of hearing from the blame-America-first crowd! Here's a guy writing about what he calls the "Dark Age thesis", basically the idea that terrorism is an extential threat to the United States:

As such, the Dark Age thesis is really not about the decline of the sovereign state and the descent of the world into anarchy. It is instead an irrational response to the decline of American hegemony with a naïve emphasis on the power of nonstate actors to compete with nation-states. The analysis concludes that because the current paradigm paralysis places a higher value on overstated threats than opportunities, our greatest hazard is not the changing global environment we live in, but our reaction to it.

Where do these hippies get off blaming America for the world's problems like this?

This one, by the way, is by Lt. Col. P. Michael Phillips, a US military liaison to the Pakistani military, writing in the Summer 2009 issue of the Army War College quarterly journal Parameters. His article has the postmodern title, Deconstructing Our Dark Age Future.

I'm hesitant to even make this kind of sarcastic presentation, even though it's pretty common in Left Blogostan. But with Newsweek imitating The Onion this week with a banner cover headline, "The Case for Killing Granny", it's getting to the point that only a professional comedian can handle sarcasm and irony appropriately.

But this piece struck me because Republican accusations that Democrats want to "blame America first" for any foreign policy troubles is based on pulling quotes like that out of context and reframing them as anti-American. That's to the extent they are based on anything at all other than pure assertion.

The fact is that US foreign policy since the end of the Second World War has suffered seriously from threat inflation. And it's something that very much needs to be part of the foreign policy discussions and debates in the US going forward.

Tags: long war, us foreign policy

Long War, dead-or-alive

From George Stephanopoulos' interview with National Security Advisor James Jones, This Week 05/10/09:

STEPHANOPOULOS: President Karzai also said while he was here that he believes Osama bin Laden is alive. Yet President Zardari of Pakistan says he thinks bin Laden is dead.

What is the best U.S. intelligence right now?

JONES: I think the best intelligence is that we gauge our reaction based on what intelligence we have. And it is inconclusive. Secondly, we wait and see how long it has been before we've seen him actually make a statement, release a video, and make our judgments on that.

The truth is, I don't think anybody knows for sure. [my emphasis]

So, I see a couple of possibilities here. One is that Osama bin Laden is the latest Hitler, heading a powerful and potent worldwide network of terrorists called Al Qa'ida with whom we are fighting a Long War, and who present a military threat comparable to - or probably greater than - either Nazi Germany in alliance with militarist Japan, or the nuclear-armed Soviet Union.

Another possibility is that he could be dead.

And Obama's National Security Advisor isn't really sure which one is the case.

Yet neither case seems to make any difference in the massive military budget that continues as though the Cold War never ended.

More accurate would be Andrew Bacevich's formulation, that the Cold War was part of what we now call the Long War. And a great deal of the perceived threat and constant threat inflation is less a reason than a justification for a military establishment that is largely self-justifying and driven by domestic political ideologies and economic interests.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, let me ask you about that, because we saw some audio tapes from Osama bin Laden in both January and March of this year, and it's my understanding that U.S. intelligence thought that those were authentic.

JONES: Mm-hmm.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So what has changed since then to make the intelligence inconclusive?

JONES: Well, as of March, they thought it was authentic, but we don't have any firm information that says that that has changed one way or the other. So I think we'll just continue to press on and we'll see what happens there.

STEPHANOPOULOS: What does your gut tell you?

JONES: I -- my gut -- I would like to know conclusively if that's not the case. And I think we have that evidence.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Does it matter any more if he's dead or alive?

JONES: I think it matters symbolically to the movement, for sure. But it's clear that that movement has been resilient in replacing their leaders as quickly as we are able to capture or eliminate them.

But I think symbolically it would be a very big thing if he weren't.

In that last comment, it's not clear whether he means "it would be a very big thing" if Bin Laden weren't dead or if he weren't alive. And in terms of ideology and military policy, I'm not at all sure it matters. Because, as he said, "that movement has been resilient in replacing their leaders as quickly as we are able to capture or eliminate them". So the Long War must go on.

It's probably worth clarifying here that in saying this, I'm not going all Noam Chomsky or anything. I'm only interested in left purism when the left purists are producing useful ideas. The idea that there is no essential difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties today, or that the larger problems of the Long War make any differences between the parties on foreign policy minor or irrelevant, is not part of my way of looking at the world.

Essentially, that pitch is associated with third parties that hope to win adherents by trying to transcend the politics by which actual decisions are made in the United States on public policy issues. But even promoting a third-party alternative doesn't have to dogmatic and unable to make a distinction between the two dominant parties.

Obama's foreign policy is an enormous improvement over the crudely militarized version practiced by the Cheney-Bush administration. Not only did that administration seem to view foreign policy primarily as a matter of wars and military threats. They also went a long way toward organizationally transferring important elements of foreign policy from the State Department to the Pentagon. The elaborate pretense by President Bush that in his decisions on war policies in Iraq that he was simply executing the recommendations of his generals was a prominent reflection of that. In a healthy democracy with a vigorous independent press - as opposed to our ailing democracy with a broken press - that would have been considered outrageous. Having our Savior-General Petreaus go up the Hill as the primary spokesperson for that administration's Iraq policies is a related and equally outrageous example.

The very fact that Obama himself states clearly that he as the elected President makes the decisions about military strategy in our ongoing wars is an enormous improvement. The fact that is stands out as significant in any way is a measure of how disastrous the previous eight years really were. Since the most important element of US foreign policy is nuclear disarmament, the fact that Obama intends to actively pursue it is the most welcome kind of change from the Cheney-Bush policy of an open-ended nuclear arms race and unconstrained proliferation. Except, of course, when we needed some excuse to attack an oil-rich nation whose government was being insufficiently cooperative.

Tags: global war on terror, james jones, long war, osama bin laden, war on terror

America's limits and the long war to deny them (4)

Andrew Bacevich is particularly concerned with the ways in which the national security state has increasingly removed important foreign policy and military decisions from any healthy functioning of the democratic process. His essay in The Long War looks in particular at how the development of civil-military relations since the Second World War has contributed to that result.

Those relations have been far more complex than simply Don Rumsfeld being a nasty guy. (Though he certainly is that!) At the conclusion of his analysis, Bacevich writes that national security has been, both in the Cold War and now, "the one arena of American life from which democratic processes were persistently excluded". That's not to say they were immune to democratic processes. The essay by Charles Chatfield in The Long War examines the popular social movements that raised challenges to aspects of the Long War, both in its Cold War phase and since. But Bacevich's generalization remains valid:

Thus did the civil-military reality that had pertained through the Cold War persist during the new global war on terror: as factions of the national security elite, both civilian and military, vied with each other behind closed doors to control this or that aspect of policy, all remained united in their collective determination to keep the people - assumed to be ill-informed, vacillating, and untrustworthy - out.

Bacevich's The Limits of Power (2008) is written in a more popular style, and is done in a somewhat more polemical tone. For those not so acquainted with the historical background surveyed in The Long War, some of Bacevich's analysis may sound jarring. Which is no doubt one of the purposes of the book, to encourage readers to look more carefully at these problems.

Limits has a prophetic aspect to it in the sense of railing against unacceptable evils. Bacevich draws heavily on the political theory of Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, once on of the leading influences among American Cold War liberals.

He focuses on three areas of crisis: profligacy; the political crisis; and, the military crisis. His insights are valuable through, though his devotion to such beloved but obsolete articles of faith as the balanced budget detracts somewhat from his arguments on excessive profligacy. But his larger framework of questioning crass materialism and anarchic economic "progress" is appealing in a world facing environmental disasters and global climate change.

Limits offers some qualities that are far too rare in writing on public affairs in America today. He takes a genuinely critical-minded look at some major flawed bipartisan assumptions of our foreign policy without falling into careless generalization or artificially blurring real differences between the two major parties. And he takes an unsentimental approach that comes from extensive knowledge of military affairs when he discusses military figures. He concludes on an explicitly prophetic note:

Adamantly insisting that it is unique among history's great powers, the United States seems likely to follow the well-worn path taken by others, blind to the perils that it courts through its own feckless behavior. ...

Thus does the tragedy of our age move inexorably toward its conclusion. "To the end of history," our prophet [Niebuhr] wrote, "social orders will probably destroy themselves in the effort to prove that they are indestructible". Clinging doggedly to the conviction that the rules to which other nations must submit don't apply, Americans appear determined to affirm Niebuhr's axiom of willful self-destruction.

Tags: andrew bacevich, limits of power, long war

America's limits and the long war to deny them (3)

A major gap in Andrew Bachevich's theory of American militarism is that his conservative assumptions about economics lead him to an excessive focus on the relatively small role of US military spending as a percentage of GDP. The Alex Roland and Benjamin Fordham essays in The Long War don't close the gap. But they do give some indications of how that can be done.

The degree of "militarism" or military power cannot be measured by military spending as a percentage of GDP. It was a favorite propaganda point during the Cold War to point to that percentage in the USSR, which was higher than in the US, as evidence of the Soviets' hostile intent and of the militarized nature of their economy. But if one country with a smaller economy is trying to match the military preparedness of a country with a much larger GDP, of course it will have a higher military percentage of GDP. In itself, that really tells us only that one country's GDP is bigger than the other's.

Two features of US military spending make it problematic: the fact that we spend about half the military budgets of the entire world, and the fact that there really are economic interests and military bureaucracies that have institutional stakes in maintaining such disproportionate levels of military spending and in maximizing the perception of the external threats that justify them.

Fordham provides a chart in 2004 dollars (p. 274) that shows a trendline for US defense outlays from 1947 through 2004. It shows the trendline almost flat at around $310B. But the peaks tell a striking story. They are 1953 (Korean War, early Cold War anti-Soviet buildup), 1968 (Vietnam War), 1989 (peak of the Reagan buildup, final year of Cold War) and 2004.

The so-called global war on terror (GWOT), in which our main enemies are terrorists hiding in caves in Pakistan, is costing us as much as those earlier events, in which the US faced a nuclear-armed adversary for the first time and was fighting a hot war against the Chinese and North Korean Armies (1953), the peak of the 1960s arms race and the height of the Vietnam War (1968) and the final year of the Cold War in the period where Reagan's conscious policy was to force the USSR into levels of military spending they could not afford (1989). In 1977, outlays dropped to around $250B. Their lowest point in the post-Cold War period was around $285B in constant dollars. As Fordham puts it:

Although budgets do not translate directly into military power..., it is clear that when compared to the military outlays of great powers up to World War II, the scale of resources the United States has dedicated to its military since 1945 is historically unprecedented. [my emphasis]

When we look at the military budget as a percentage of GDP, 1953 and 1968 provide notable peaks at around 14% and 10%, respectively. The percentage of GDP has generally declined with minor ups and downs to around 4% in 2004. A more strongly pronounced pattern in the same direction appears in the trend for military spending as a percentage of the federal budget. Fordham writes:

The declining Pentagon shares indicate not an erosion of military power but rather massive growth in both the federal budget and the overall U.S. economy. However, the declining proportion of the economy or the budget spent on the military does point to some important limits on what the American political system was willing to bear absent the impetus provided by an extreme national emergency. These limits required choices that successive postwar administrations made in different ways.

This means that economically, the US could afford much higher military expenditures without in itself damaging the economy. It's also a reminder that the right size for the military budget cannot be determined from its percentage of GDP. Whether the military budget is big enough depends on the real external threats and the strategy developed for meeting them.

And one of the worst habits developed during the Cold War was threat inflation, sometimes massive threat inflation. A vast overestimate of the threat posed by a unified government ruled by Ho Chi Minh's Communists lead to the unnecessary US involvement in the Vietnam War, which did real harm to the US, not least in the number killed and wounded. The threat inflation stemmed from many sources, not all of them by any means cynical or venal.

Alex Roland, however, reminds us that there were big profits to be made by providing weaponry to the armed forces. And institutional competition between the services was real and led to escalating demands for weaponry and troops as well as providing a context powerfully conducive to that threat inflation. That phenomenon did not begin with Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), and the neoconservatives they played for suckers over the Iraq War.

Tags: alex roland, andrew bacevich, benjamin fordham, long war

America's limits and the long war to deny them (2)

The conflicts with Iraq from 1990 until today illustrate the dynamic that Andrew Bacevich and his collaborators describe in The Long War.

There is nothing original or scandalous about recognizing that oil is a major policy concern for the United States in the Middle East. But American policy there, both in protecting Israel and in maintaining Western access to Saudi oil, had previously been framed in terms of conflict with the Soviet Union. The Carter Doctrine made it explicit that the US considered it a vital national interest to prevent any other outside power, i.e., the USSR, from achieving military-political dominance in the Middle East.

But the policy fixation on maintaining American predominance there continued unabated after the USSR ceased to exist. Even if we accept that the Gulf War was necessary, very different policy conclusions were possible and discussed at the time. Once it was obvious that American dependence on oil required us to go to war in defense of dubious causes like preserving the Wahhabist Saud dynasty from threats external or internal, a more responsible leadership than that provided by the Bush family would have devoted policy and resources to developing sustainable energy sources to replace oil. Instead, the Bush administration embraced Hummers and SUVs, rejecting the need for higher fuel efficiency or sustainable alternatives to oil.

It was a major lost opportunity. The Soviet menace had disappeared. The Gulf War had produced an outburst of patriotic sentiment which, as shown in the Congressional debate over the Gulf War, was far more serious and thoughtful than anything we've seen since. The national leadership could have used the moment to go in a very different, more constructive, more peaceful direction. But our national leadership at the time included Old Man Bush as President and Dick Cheney as Secretary of Defense.

The Gulf War also led to an enduring commitment to fighting Iraq that was to a large extent carried for years by inertia. As we now know clearly, UN sanctions and weapons inspections had effectively ended the Iraqi WMD programs by 1995. But the US continued periodic bomb and missile attacks on Iraq through the Clinton administration, not least in the bizarrely named Operation Desert Fox of 1998. And, of course, we will consider ourselves lucky if the 20th anniversary in 2010 of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 finds American troops extracted from Iraq. Which has been devastated as few countries ever have been devastated by nearly two decades of conflict with the USA.

The illusions about air power that Tami Davis Biddle describes so well in The Long War played a huge part in the post-Cold War inertia. American general persuaded themselves that the technical wonders of US airpower could achieve such miracles as the removal of a regime by "shock-and-awe", cleanly decapitating a government and allowing it to be quickly and easily replaced.

It was this belief in the air war miracles of their dreams that led aggressive nationalists like Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, as well as their allied neoconservative daydreamers, to imagine they could blast their way into Baghdad in early 2003, set up a pliable client state, and reduce the American presence to around 30,000 troops by the end of 2003. The idea was that those troops would garrison Iraq while permanent bases there could be used for additional miracle blitzkrieg wars against Iran, Syria and any other "rogue states" without nuclear weapons whose regime Washington found it convenient to change.

Biddle summarizes the basic flaw in that hope when she writes:

But if ongoing improvement in precision, intelligence, target acquisition, and strike capability continue to refine and empower the strategic air mission, they cannot - of themselves - force warfare to become a less complex and confusing business, immune to human emotion and calculations that fall entirely outside the realm of rationality.

The extremely excessive faith of American generals and politicians in the magical powers of air war is one of the deepest flaws in American foreign and military policy.

Tags: andrew bacevich, cold war, iraq war, long war

VDH Watch 1: VDH explains why Americans should love war

Since this is the first VDH Watch post, I'll do this one as kind of a stream-of-consciousness approach. In this one, we'll be looking at his column: Our Strange War National Review Online 06/03/05.

Hanson opens this column by offering us the grand vision of what he calls our "three-year-plus war" against "Islamic fascism."

He's apparently getting impatient with the pace of things, even though I suspect "three-year-plus" means for him an unending excuse for spending more on the military than all other countries of the world combined. There has been more time passed between the 9/11 attacks and now than the time between the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 and V-J Day in 1945. So "three-years-plus" is a modest description.

Then he draws on one of those grand historical analogies of which Bush fans are so fond:

Imagine that a weak Hitler in the mid-1930s never planned conventional war with the democracies. Instead, he stealthily would fund and train thousands of SS fanatics on neutral ground to permeate European society, convinced of its decadence and the need to return to a mythical time when a purer Aryan Volk reigned supreme. Such terrorists would bomb, assassinate, promulgate fascistic hatred in the media, and whine about Versailles, hoping insidiously to gain concessions from wearied liberal societies that would make ever more excuses as they looked inward and blamed themselves for the presence of such inexplicable evil. All the while, Nazi Germany would deny any connections to these "indigenous movements" and "deplore" such "terrorism," even as the German people got a certain buzz from seeing the victors of World War I squirm in their discomfort. A triangulating Mussolini or Franco would use their good graces to "bridge the gap," and seek a "peaceful resolution," while we sought to "liberate" rather than defeat the German nation.

At this point, I find myself thinking, okay, let's walk thought it real slow and easy, Victor. (As I picture him saying that stuff aloud and making the little quotation mark gestures with his hands at the indicated points.) If Hitler had relied only on terrorists and saboteurs to annoy his neighbors, he wouldn't have built up a huge army instead. Which means he wouldn't have been in a position to snatch Czechoslovakia by threatening war. Or to march into Vienna. Or to attack Poland. Or invade the Soviet Union.

Then, the dizzy sensation in my head warns me that I'm on the wrong track. So I continue reading:

So to recap: The real enemy is an Islamic fascist ideology that is promulgated by a few thousand. They wear no uniforms and are deeply embedded within and protected by Muslim society.

Muslims bad. Muslims are kinda like Hitler. Real Amurcans don't like Muslims. I get the drift, I think.

Now, VDH, with his Hoover Institute scholarship, tells us that these America-hating Muslims are also sneaky. Because lots of them admire the jihadists but don't want to say so out loud. Or maybe they insist on saying so only in Arabic, and, heck, who can understand that? And with a "leap of faith" (I can make the quote-mark gesture, too, just like Condi-Condi always does) that only true believers can manage - or columnists pandering to true believers - VDH explains that these same character flaws are what make Muslims want to emigrate:

This passive-aggressive sense of inferiority explains why millions of Muslims flock to Europe to enjoy its freedom and prosperity, even as they recreate there an Islamist identity to reconcile their longing and desire for what they profess to hate.

Follow that? That peculiar feeling around your temples as you ponder it could be mistaken for the feeling of one's mind expanding. And if you just let it go at that, you can probably avoid the impending headache that it really is warning you about. If you want to turn it into a migrane, start pondering it next to the thought, "But I thought they hated us for our freedoms."

Fortunately, we wise Americans can step back and understand the failings of inferior peoples:

Consequently, the United States has not been able to bring its full arsenal of military assets to the fray. It is nearly impossible to extract the killers from the midst of civilian society. Too much force causes collateral damage and incites religious and nationalist anti-American fervor. Too little power emboldens the fascists and suggests America (e.g., Nixon's "pitiful, helpless giant") cannot or will not win the war.

Like a parent with a naughty child, a maddening forbearance is the order of the day: They burn American flags, behead, murder, and promise death and ruin to Americans; we ignore it and instead find new ways of displaying our sensitivity to Islam.

You tell 'em, Vic! Spare the rod and spoil the fascist child, I always say.

Okay, by now I feel the need to get to the end of this thing, to avoid headache and nausea. So, as we continue, we find that all the Muslim governments are to blame when some Muslim attacks Americans, that Muslims have a lot of oil but are still really backward - those Muslim natives just don't know how to handle their blessings, because they're like children, you know. And then "the West" has gone soft, with all this worrying about minorities and such, and fretting about the possible negative effects of bombing the beejeesus out of any country we feel like attacking. Too little power emboldens the fascists, VDH says.

Oh, and calling the network of torture chambers that the Bush administration has established at Guantanamo, Abu Ghruaib, Bagram and elsewhere a "Gulag" (actually, I prefer Al Gore's term "the Bush Gulag," myself) is evidence that "there is a deep, deep sickness in the West." What's the solution?

Well, VDH tells us, we have to stop thinking small. We have to kill the "Islamic fascists" and stop being so timid in the Middle East. Stabilize Iraq? Only wimps would be content with that! No, we have wage wars of liberation against Iran and Syria, too, to bring them the march of freedom that the Iraqi people are currently enjoying.

All right, I can't stand it any more! Let's break this mess down into its not-very-obscure ideological subtext. And it is ideological hackery from beginning to end. You could "fisk" every line, it's full of so many propaganda buzzwords. First, the Second World War and Hitler references are entirely frivolous in terms of analysis. They serve two main purposes: (1) to lend the positive image that the Second World War has in the minds of most Americans to Bush's wars; and, (2) to cast the battle against jihadists as a matter of conventional warfare between states. Also, terms like "Islamic fascist" or "Islamofascist" (with or without the Condi-Condi quote-sign gestures) are pretty much totally devoid of content. They're also conservative propaganda terms to identify their Dear Leader Bush' foreign policy with the Second World War.

If I were to pretend for a second that his "what-if" game about Nazi Germany had any substance, I would say that its so counter-factual as to be totally absurd. To imagine a Hitler and a Nazi Party that wasn't fundamentally committed to conventional wars of conquest is to imagine a Hitler and a Nazi Party fundamentally different from the ones that actually existed.

Now that Bush himself has publicly embraced the John Birch Society notion that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were scheming to hand over all of eastern Europe to Stalin and the Commies, you might think the rightwingers would ease up on the Second World War references.

VDH's piece that I've quoted here seems to be nothing but ideological fluff to be "fixed around" the following notions:

1. Americans shouldn't worry about civilian casualities in Iraq or any other country the US invades. Why worry about Muslim mommas and their Muslim babies being killed if they are only going to raise those Muslim babies to be anti-American jihad-lovers? (If you don't think there are "respectable" white folks who make such arguments, you need to get out more.)

2. Invading pretty much any Muslim country we choose is okay, because they're all to blame for the 9/11 attacks.

3. Why fret about overt American attempts to control other countries' oil resources? The Muslims are too primitive and backward to manage them responsibly anyway.

4. The "war against terrorism" is a matter of invading and conquering Muslim countries of our choice.

5. When everyone is more-or-less forced to face the fact that the US has lost the Iraq War, don't blame staunch Republican rightwingers like VDH: look, he was saying we need to be tougher! It's those wimpy Democrats and whoever that undercut our grand crusade there.

Just for a glimpse at the heart of the ideology that VDH is really pushing let's go back to this sentence: "So there is a deep, deep sickness in the West." This sense of the Western democracies being decadent, weak and contemptible is far more widespread among today's Halliburton Republicans than most of them would like to admit. And not just among the religious ones, either.

If there were a Pulitzer Prize for hackery, Victor Davis Hanson would be an annual contender.

(See also the Index to the VDH Watch.)

Tags: global war on terror, long war, potsdam conference, second world war, vdh watch, victor davis hanson, war on terror