Andrew Bacevich on the continuities in Trumpism

Historian Andrew Bacevich has a Niebuhrian view of public policy that gives his writing a sense of tragedy mixed with cautious hope.

In After Trump: The Donald in the Rearview Mirror TomDispatch 09/11/2018, he looks at the continuities of the Trump Era with its predecessors, seeing Trump in his way as being a normal product of the preceeding political and economic trajectory of the United States.

He does not mean it as a compliment.

Looking back to the immediate postwar area, which in retrospect we call the beginning of the Golden Age of Capitalism these days, Bacevich notes three "large facts" that defined the US reality: the gigantic industrial role of the country in the world economy; a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth and income (he actually calls it the distribution of "the benefits" of the economy); and, a broad pacifist sentiment.

The latter sounds especially surprising in 2018. But after the end of the Second World War, there really was a big hope and expectation from the American public that we needed peace and should try to avoid becoming involved in new wars. There was a big public demand to bring US troops home from abroad, to President Harry Truman's consternation. As Bacevich describes it, Americans "may not have been a peace-loving people, but they knew enough about war to see it as a great evil." Recogniying that war in itself is a great evil is the most appealing aspect of Niebuhrian realism.

But those three "large facts" of the postwar America are part of the past. The US is no longer the industrial powerhouse of the world in anything like the way it was in 1946. "Ours is increasingly a 'gig' economy," Bacevich writes, "which might be cool enough when you’re 25, but less so when you’re in your sixties and wondering if you’ll ever be able to retire."

Wealth and income distribution, of course, are radically more unequal today than in the postwar period. Republican Administrations promoted that outcome with deregulation and tax cuts slanted for the wealthy. So did the Democrats, if not quite so recklessly.

And, of course, today the government and the political parties and many ordinary citizens, too, accept constant war as normal rather than viewing war as a terrible though sometimes unavoidable evil:

By 2016, Americans had also come to accept war as normal. Here was “global leadership” made manifest. So U.S. troops were now always out there somewhere fighting, however obscure the purpose of their exertions and however dim their prospects of achieving anything approximating victory. The 99% of Americans who were not soldiers learned to tune out those wars, content merely to “support the troops,” an obligation fulfilled by offering periodic expressions of reverence on public occasions. Thank you for your service!

Bacevich developed that latter theme at length in his book, The New American Militarism (2005). And the trend wasn't interrupted by the Obama or Trump Administration.

Bacevich's Nieburhian perspective keeps in view the fallen state of humanity and the fragility of good intentions, particulary in foreign policy. This sometimes lends a fatalistic tone to his writing that makes me wish he would get a dose of Hegelian optimism. But he's not being cynical when he writes things like:

By the twenty-first century, the values that Trump embodies had become as thoroughly and authentically American as any of those specified in the oracular pronouncements of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, or Franklin Roosevelt. Trump’s critics may see him as an abomination. But he is also one of us.

Yet as his article also makes clear, he is highly critical of Trump and very aware of his particular obnoxious traits. What he says about Trump's supposed "isolationism" in foreign policy is on point.

At the same time, he is emphasizing that there are deeper problems whose solutions depend on an activated citizenry. I don't know if that's Hegelian so much as Jeffersonian, but he is making a call for ordinary voters to be more engaged and to take on their responsibilities in a democracy:

The nation’s too-little, too-late response to climate change for which a succession of presidents share responsibility illustrates the great and abiding defect of contemporary American politics. When all is said and done, presidents don’t shape the country; the country shapes the presidency -- or at least it defines the parameters within which presidents operate. Over the course of the last few decades, those parameters have become increasingly at odds with the collective wellbeing of the American people, not to mention of the planet as a whole. ...

Trump is not the problem. Think of him instead as a summons to address the real problem, which in a nation ostensibly of, by, and for the people is the collective responsibility of the people themselves. For Americans to shirk that responsibility further will almost surely pave the way for more Trumps -- or someone worse -- to come. [my emphasis]

The state of American mourning and militarism, Trump-Kelly version

Our alt-right President gives us literally daily reasons for outrage. Everyone wonders whether we're being played by a flood of distractions. On the other hand, when the President is talking crazy and inciting war and civil violence, people can't just ignore that, either.

Masha Gessen wrote an important piece on one of the outrages of this past week, John Kelly and the Language of the Military Coup New Yorker 10/20/2017. She was responding to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly's defense of Trump's heartless phone call to the family of Sgt. David. Johnson, one of four soldiers recently killed during a mystery mission in Niger. (Barbara Starr and Zachary Cohen, Missing soldier found nearly a mile from Niger ambush, officials say CNN 10/21/2017)

Johnson's mother described Trump's callous comments in an interview with the Washington Post (Anne Gearan and Kristine Phillips, Fallen soldier’s mother: ‘Trump did disrespect my son’ 10/18/2017)

Sgt. La David T. Johnson’s mother, Cowanda Jones-Johnson, told The Washington Post that she was present during the call from the White House on Tuesday to Johnson’s widow, Myeshia Johnson. She also stood by an account of the call from Rep. Frederica S. Wilson (D-Fla.) that Trump told Myeshia Johnson that her husband “must have known what he signed up for.”

“President Trump did disrespect my son and my daughter and also me and my husband,” Jones-Johnson said. ...

Wilson went on to say Trump “was almost like joking. He said, ‘Well, I guess you knew’ — something to the effect that ‘he knew what he was getting into when he signed up, but I guess it hurts anyway.’ You know, just matter-of-factly, that this is what happens, anyone who is signing up for military duty is signing up to die. That’s the way we interpreted it. It was horrible. It was insensitive. It was absolutely crazy, unnecessary. I was livid.”

“She was in tears. She was in tears. And she said, ‘He didn’t even remember his name.’ ”

Here is a video of Kelly's press conference, following by adoring words from the Morning Zoo crew, who want to consider Kelly one of the proverbial grownups-in-the-room who will supposedly restrain Trump's excesses. Though public evidence for such a function of their part is rather scarce. General John Kelly's Powerful Speech Hit At Wilson And President Donald Trump Morning Joe MSNBC 10/20/2017:

As I mentioned on a Facebook thread of one of my friends, since the President and his Chief of Staff think everyone enlisting in the military "knows what they're signing up for," maybe the Pentagon should use a cigarettes-style warning on all their recruitment ads, along the lines of: "In signing up for military service, you should know you are signing up to die, possibly in a useless war started for the most venal purposes by politicians who don't give a s*** whether you live or die anyway. Also, you made die as a direct consequence of some stupid-ass move by military contractors who feel no obligation to defend your life as long as they're making a buck."

I only recall encountering in real life two meanings of "he knew what he was signing up for." One is to remind someone of their obligations if they seem reluctant to fulfill them. The other is to say, "I don't care whether somebody is suffering, to hell with them." I can't see how either would be an appropriate message from the President to the spouse of a soldier killed in the line of duty.

Nuance and situational awareness matter in this things. I'm no grief-counseling expert. And everyone handles grief in their own way. Something like, "we all know that was a risk but it's horrible to lose him" is a whole different thing from "well, we all know it can happen, too bad for him." And of course soldiers in the middle of a combat assignment have less immediate latitude to process grief than when people die under more ordinary circumstances. So "we all know it can happen to us" would have a different meaning in that context, with a kind of solidarity or empathy totally missing from what Trump and Kelly said this week.

I personally wouldn't recommend saying that to friends or family members in any case. I've never seen anyone get offended by someone saying of the loss of one of their loved ones, "at least he's not suffering anymore." But I avoid saying it myself, because even in cases of someone suffering a very painful condition, the person passing away may or may not have seen it that way.

On the practical administrative side, official procedures and grief-management rituals are an extremely important function for the military. In blunt terms, those practices try to say "our grief is genuine and your wife/husband/son/daughter died for a great cause," without coming off as saying "it may have been a pointless death but we're going to pretend it isn't." And that's pretty deeply rooted in anthropology. If you want your tribe to rally around when the war drums sound in the jungle, you have to communicate to the warriors that if they die it's not entirely in vain. And also just common humanity.

It seems to me that what Trump and Kelly did was actually to step on that elaborate official mourning structure pretty hard by having senior officials send a message that to most people will come off more like, "it's no big deal, some people live, some people die, suck it up, I've got a golf game to get to."

Masha Gessen highlights the concern that John Kelley's statement included a perspective that was not only morbidly maudlin, but anti-democratic. Here is the mordibly maudlin:

Fallen soldiers, Kelly said, join “the best one per cent this country produces.” Here, the chief of staff again reminded his audience of its ignorance: “Most of you, as Americans, don’t know them. Many of you don’t know anyone who knows any of them. But they are the very best this country produces.”

The one-per-cent figure is puzzling. The number of people currently serving in the military, both on active duty and in the reserves, is not even one per cent of all Americans. The number of veterans in the population is far higher: more than seven per cent. But, later in the speech, when Kelly described his own distress after hearing the criticism of Trump’s phone call, the general said that he had gone to “walk among the finest men and women on this earth. And you can always find them because they’re in Arlington National Cemetery.” So, by “the best” Americans, Kelly had meant dead Americans — specifically, fallen soldiers. ...

The number of Americans killed in all the wars this nation has ever fought is indeed equal to roughly one per cent of all Americans alive today. This makes for questionable math and disturbing logic.

This kind of talk belongs more in a Jim Jones-style death cult than in public statements by senior political and military officials in a democratic country.

It goes beyond grateful hyperbole for those who serve in the armed forces. And beyond respect and gratitude for those who wound up giving their lives in military service. But the course of events that made them casualties of war did not convey sainthood on them. Nor did it make their shades, which in Kelly's version seemingly wander among the graves of Arlington, into superior beings to the living. Among various problem with that occultist outlook, it perpetuates the dangers fantasy that American soldiers aren't normal human beings, and that it's a good thing that they die in war, something to be envied by the living rather than mourned.

Gessen makes the helpful point that such a perspective is radically different than "the kind of statement that’s attributed to General George S. Patton: 'The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.'” [my emphasis]

But I have reservations about the specific context in which she puts that reference. Recalling his own growing up in the Soviet Union, she writes, "It is in totalitarian societies, which demand complete mobilization, that dying for one’s country becomes the ultimate badge of honor." But calling dying in war "the ultimate badge of honor" is something that people in Western democratic societies would have little problem doing. Viewing their ghosts wandering the military cemetery as "very best this country produces" is whole different level of maudlin.

Gessen concludes with an example of what I would call an expression of outright militarism in Kelly's statement:

Kelly’s last argument was his most striking. At the end of the briefing, he said that he would take questions only from those members of the press who had a personal connection to a fallen soldier, followed by those who knew a Gold Star family. Considering that, a few minutes earlier, Kelly had said most Americans didn’t even know anyone who knew anyone who belonged to the “one per cent,” he was now explicitly denying a majority of Americans — or the journalists representing them - the right to ask questions. This was a new twist on the Trump Administration’s technique of shunning and shaming unfriendly members of the news media, except this time, it was framed explicitly in terms of national loyalty. As if on cue, the first reporter allowed to speak inserted the phrase “Semper Fi” — a literal loyalty oath—into his question.

Before walking off the stage, Kelly told Americans who haven’t served in the military that he pities them. “We don’t look down upon those of you who haven’t served,” he said. “In fact, in a way we are a little bit sorry because you’ll have never have experienced the wonderful joy you get in your heart when you do the kinds of things our servicemen and women do—not for any other reason than that they love this country.”

NATO's Warsaw summit

Unlimited private money in politics is a definite threat to democracy. So are war and militarism. And it's a shame that the ongoing assumptions of American foreign policy aren't more of a normal focus in our politics these days.

Patrick Lawrence writes about the posture that NATO leaders struck in their recent meeting in Warsaw, Poland: The West escalates with Russia: Make no mistake, a second Cold War is now official NATO policy Salon 07/12/2016:

One, the U.S., Britain, Germany and Canada will each station a rotating battalion in a front-line state. These are respectively Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. Two, after many years of heated debate, nuclear weapons are to remain part of the NATO arsenal in Europe. Three, the alliance officially assumed command of an anti-missile defense system that, as of now, has components in Spain, Turkey and Romania.

There is no mistaking the magnitude of these decisions when taken together. I liken Warsaw last week to Washington in the spring of 1947, when Truman’s advisers and Senate allies determined it was time to sell the public a permanent wartime economy and a national security state. What followed was his “scare hell out of the American people” speech, so named by Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican senator from Michigan and one of Truman’s intimates. What followed that was $400 million in aid to the fascist Greek monarchy, and what followed that was the first Cold War.

Reality No. 1: The West is now to have troops closer to Russia than ever before in history. Reality No. 2: Russia has signaled no intention whatsoever of doing anything more than defending its borders, rock-candy mountains of unsupported nonsense in the press notwithstanding. Reality No. 3: The only reason these soldiers will rotate is because NATO agreed with Russia in 1997 not to station troops permanently east of Germany. These deployments are a disgraceful fiddle, thus. Reality No. 4: NATO officers continue to insist that missile defenses are intended to counter Iranian missiles. It now takes very big brass to trot this one out: Given last year’s nuclear accord, the standing explanation no longer passes even as a fig leaf.

A White House Fact Sheet of July 8 reported what the summit would do:

Specifically, allied leaders will take decisions to enhance collective defense by enhancing NATO’s forward presence on the eastern flank through the deployment of one rotational battalion each in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, as well as developing a tailored forward presence in Romania and Bulgaria. In addition, NATO will further develop the Alliance’s ballistic missile defense capabilities, and ensure its nuclear deterrent remains credible, safe, secure, and effective. Allies will also take steps to build resilience against non-traditional challenges such as hybrid tactics, cyber vulnerabilities, and terrorist threats as essential components of credible deterrence and defense. Each of these efforts supports the explicit commitments allies have to one another in Articles 3 and 5 of the Washington Treaty regarding our individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack, the indivisibility of our security, and our mutual responsibility to contribute to collective defense.

Together, these measures represent the largest reinforcement of NATO’s collective defence and deterrence since the end of the Cold War. NATO does not seek confrontation, but will defend all allies against any threat. Everything NATO does is defensive, proportionate, and in line with each ally’s international commitments. Our deterrence and defense aims not to provoke a conflict, but to prevent one.

Allies will also decide at the summit to expand the Alliance’s efforts to project stability beyond NATO’s borders. All NATO allies are members of the U.S.-led Global Coalition to Counter ISIL (C-ISIL), and the Alliance will take additional steps at the summit to bolster C-ISIL efforts, including through direct NATO support to the C-ISIL coalition as well as through enhanced training of the Iraqi Security Forces. In the Aegean Sea, NATO is already providing capabilities to support EU and national efforts to address the refugee and migrant crisis in Europe, and will seek to decide to further enhance our maritime security cooperation with the European Union to help address the security challenges in the Central Mediterranean Sea. NATO is also focusing and intensifying its defense capacity building and other areas of security cooperation with regional partners, such as Iraq, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, and Mauritania to address the root causes of instability. [my emphasis]

That's quite a euphemism; Instead of projeting force, NATO will "project stability."

Albrecht Müller offers his own antiwar perspective in Ein Rückblick auf die perfekte Propaganda im Umfeld des NATO-Gipfels. Daran kann man die Methoden der Manipulation bestens studieren. Nachdenkseiten 12.07.2016.

Paul Jay of The Real News has an interview here with leftist Russian professor Alexandr Buzgalin on relations between Russia and the West, Why is the Capitalist West Fighting with Capitalist Russia? 07/13/2016:

Robert Parry's Consortiumm News has also been raising concerns about NATO current posture, such as:

Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, Merkel Urged to Temper NATO’s Belligerence 07/06/2016

John Walsh, NATO Marches Toward Destruction 07/08/2016

Medea Benjamin and Alice Slater, Challenging the New Cold War 07/09/2016

Natylie Baldwin, Russia Pushes Back on NATO Expansion 07/09/2016

Graham Fuller, Europe’s NATO Ambivalence 07/10/2016

Ivan Eland, NATO as an ‘Entangling Alliance’ 07/11/2016

Rick Sterling, Western Propaganda for a New Cold War 07/14/2016

Graham Fuller makes a key point:

The peaceful collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1991 also posed a difficult question: what would be the rationale for NATO’s continued existence? All organizations seek to perpetuate their own existence and NATO became almost desperate for a new mission — a new enemy. Washington was loath to yield up its key instrument of control in European politics.

But how much do European geopolitical goals mesh with American ones? This too depends on one’s geopolitical vision of the world. For Europe, war among its members is virtually unthinkable. But Washington and NATO have a vested interest in maintaining a Russian threat as the centerpiece of E.U. geopolitics.

Today the U.S., including virtually all of its mainstream media, adopt reflexive anti-Russian positions. In U.S.-sponsored parlance, Russian President Vladimir Putin now represents a “resurgent threat.” Indeed, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs incredibly informs Congress that Russia represents America’s number one existential threat. Aggressive NATO maneuvers at the very doorstep of Russia help make this a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The political trend that self-identifies as "paleo-conservative" is also critical of NATO policy. Their criticism comes from an isolationist/nationalist viewpoint, although they can make some valid points on occasion. As Rick Perry said in his most memorable pronouncement, even a stopped clock is right once a day.

The American Conservative is generally in the paleo-conservative category, but not all their contributors are. Andrew Bacevich sometimes appears there, for instance. Philip Giraldi of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (and a signer of the article from them cited above) writes on the Russia issue in Russian Harassment and Other Fables The American Conservative 07/13/2016. And he makes this sensible observation:

One thinks of Russia less frequently when U.S. policy failures are examined. In 1991, Russia was a superpower. Today it is a convenience, a straw man fortuitously produced whenever someone in power wants to justify weapons expenditures or the initiation of new military interventions in faraway places. Much of the negative interaction between Washington and Moscow is driven by the consensus among policymakers, the Western media, and the inside-the-beltway crowd that Russia is again—or perhaps is still and always will be—the enemy du jour. But frequently forgotten or ignored is the fact that Moscow, even in its much-reduced state, continues to control the only military resource on the planet that can destroy the United States, suggesting caution should be in order when one goes about goading the bear.

Bonnie Kristian, who identifies as a libertarian, also writes for that same publication, Is the Pentagon Hyping the Russia Threat? 06/20/2016. She picks up on this earlier article by Mark Perry, which focuses on inter-service rivalry in the military as an important factor in how the supposed Russian threat is perceived: The U.S. Army’s War Over Russia Politico 05/12/2016.

The warnings about escalation in the Middle East keep on coming ...,

... and for the moment it appears President Obama is acting on some of that kind of advice.

Paul Pillar writes in The Military Impulse and Hysteria Over ISIS The National Interest 12/06/2015, also at LobeLog Foreign Policy:

ISIS and its enclave certainly constitute a significant security problem in the Middle East and specifically for Syria and Iraq. But that is a problem distinct from, and should not be conflated with, the countering of terrorist threats in the United States. It would be a big mistake to let a surge of fear about such threats, let alone opportunistic political exploitation of such fear, drive the making of policy on Syria and Iraq.

Any use of military force in that theater ought to be guided instead by lessons from recent experience that are almost too obvious to need restating. One of those lessons is that the toppling or ouster of an undesirable regime or quasi-regime does not necessarily end a security problem but merely marks the start of a new phase of a war. Another is that as long as there is not the will and the consensus among local populations to form a new and stable alternative political order, the resulting disorder only works to the advantage of extremist groups. ISIS was born under a different name in the disorder in Iraq that followed the U.S. toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime. One of the few places where ISIS appears to have established a satellite presence where it has more of an organizational and not just inspirational connection is in the chaos of Libya since Muammar Gadhafi's regime was toppled with the aid of Western military force.

Stephen Walt writes about the short-sightedness of the US and other NATO nations in Don’t Give ISIS What It Wants Foreign Policy 11/16/2015, after the Paris attacks by ISIS sympathizers:

... jihadi terrorism is a political movement based on a minority’s narrow and fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. To some extent, the emergence of groups such as the Islamic State or the original al Qaeda is symptomatic of the broader legitimacy and governance crisis in the Arab and Islamic world. It is also, however, an unfortunate but understandable response to decades (or even centuries) of Western interference in the Middle East, and especially to the policies that have taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the region.

To acknowledge this fact in no way justifies what happened in Paris, and I am most certainly not defending, excusing, or rationalizing what the attackers did last Friday or what other terrorists have done before. At the same time, to pretend that American and European actions have nothing whatsoever to do with this problem is to bury one’s head in the sand and ignore the obvious. To note just one example of the West’s own role in creating this problem: Had the United States refrained from invading Iraq back in 2003, there almost certainly would be no Islamic State today.

We have to face facts squarely: Decades of misguided U.S. and European policies have left many people in the Arab and Islamic world deeply angry at and resentful toward the West. Those policies include the West’s cozy coddling of various Arab dictators, its blind support for Israel’s brutal policies toward the Palestinians, and its own willingness to wage air campaigns, employ sanctions, or invade Middle Eastern countries whenever it thinks doing so suits its short-term interest. Consider how we would react if some foreign power had been doing similar things to us — and not just once but over many years. Unsurprisingly, among those many angry people are a few — fortunately, only a few — who decide to try to pay back the West for what they regard as illegitimate and murderous interference. Their response is morally despicable and will solve nothing, but it should not be all that difficult to fathom.

There is also something new about what is going on. Great powers have long taken advantage of weaker societies, but today, the weak are sometimes able to hit back at the great power’s homeland. Britain, France, Belgium, and other countries used to treat their colonial subjects in brutal and sometimes murderous ways, but the colonized peoples had no way to attack their colonial masters back in the imperial heartland. Today, groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State can do just that, no matter how many precautions we take. That is the new reality we are now struggling to absorb.

And he notes:

If the Islamic State can get France and other countries to crack down on their Muslim citizens and also get the West to reoccupy large swaths of the Middle East, then its false narrative about the West’s deep and intrinsic antipathy to Islam will gain more credence, as will its carefully cultivated image as the staunchest defender of Islam today.

Not learning reasonable lessons from recent foreign policy experience

Andrew Bacevich continues his Cassandra role of giving good advice the policymakers and the Very Serious People will cheerfully ignore. But we can always hope that more people will start listening.

In The Folly of World War IV: Wars Are Never Quick, Cheap or Easy Moyers & Company 12/04/2015, he gives some realistic cautions on the decisions of the NATO countries including the US and Germany to escalate militarily in Iraq and Syria without any coherent political strategy and without enough forces to pacify the area. And, yes, I use "pacify" to recall the Vietnam War. And Bacevich speculates on the tremendous effort and costs a serious attempt to do that would involve.

He writes:

In 1991, when the first President Bush ejected Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait, Americans rejoiced, believing that they had won a decisive victory. A decade later, the younger Bush seemingly outdid his father by toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan and then making short work of Saddam himself — a liberation twofer achieved in less time than it takes Americans to choose a president. After the passage of another decade, Barack Obama got into the liberation act, overthrowing the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in what appeared to be a tidy air intervention with a clean outcome. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton memorably put it, “We came, we saw, he died.” End of story.

In fact, subsequent events in each case mocked early claims of success or outright victory. Unanticipated consequences and complications abounded. “Liberation” turned out to be a prelude to chronic violence and upheaval.

Indeed, the very existence of the Islamic State (ISIS) today renders a definitive verdict on the Iraq wars over which the Presidents Bush presided, each abetted by a Democratic successor. A de facto collaboration of four successive administrations succeeded in reducing Iraq to what it is today: a dysfunctional quasi-state unable to control its borders or territory while serving as a magnet and inspiration for terrorists.

Stephen Biddle and Jacob Shapiro make a similar point in Here’s why we can only contain the Islamic State, not bomb it back to the Stone Age Washington Post 12/01/2015:

More than a decade of continuous warfare against militants in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere have taught us a great deal about what works, what doesn’t, and why. And that experience suggests that to defeat the Islamic State — defined as eliminating its ability to carry out Paris-style terrorism — would require a vastly greater effort than almost anyone now proposes, and a vastly greater effort than the American public is likely to support.

In practical terms, what’s possible against the Islamic State is some form of containment or suppression. And that’s essentially what the administration’s current policy amounts to. You can quibble with elements of that policy, but we’re stuck with its basic outline. The Western interests at stake are limited; the underlying problem is deeper and tougher than critics imply, and the cost to solve the real problem is much higher.

I wish our policymakers would take these realistic lessons from recent experience seriously:

If the 2003 Iraq campaign, the 2001-2 Afghan campaign, or the 2011 Libya campaign tell us anything, it is that taking the enemy’s capital does not reliably end the war. Replacing a hostile regime with a weak successor in a splintered society or, worse, catalyzing anarchy, simply launches the war’s next phase: insurgency and civil conflict.

The resulting chaos is often little better for U.S. interests than what came before.

The Islamic State itself has now established local affiliates in unstable post-Moammar Gaddafi Libya and in ill-governed parts of eastern Afghanistan. Its predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), got its start in the security vacuum of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. Many other militant groups hostile to Western interests have exploited the same disorder in these and other war zones.

"Keeping the American people safe" - to the exclusion of the Constitution

The White House website presents President Obama's address later today this way: "On Sunday, December 6, at 8:00 pm ET, President Obama will address the nation from the Oval Office about the steps our government is taking to fulfill his highest priority: Keeping the American people safe." (my emphasis)

The experience since 2001 of the so-called "war on terror" has convinced me that such seemingly innocuous formulations are actually dangerous.

From Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution: "Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:—'I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.'"

Defending the Constitution of course includes defending the people of the country against foreign enemies and domestic ones that threaten the Constitutional order: "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic Violence." (Article 4.4)

But preserving the Constitution and a "Republican Form of Government" also means protecting due process of law and basic freedoms. Including the freedoms of speech, press, religion and assembly. Not just the Ku Klux Klan version of the Second Amendment.

And we've seen way too much of government officials and Members of Congress, both Republican and Democratic, showing indifference and even hostility toward basic Constitutional freedoms in the name of "keeping the American people safe."

But the right to war profiteering, its main beneficiaries tend to think that "safety" will protect their most sacred right just fine.

Lee Fang and Zaid Jilani report in Defense Contractors Cite “Benefits” of Escalating Conflicts in the Middle East The Intercept 12/04/2015:

Major defense contractors Raytheon, Oshkosh, and Lockheed Martin assured investors at a Credit Suisse conference in West Palm Beach this week that they stand to gain from the escalating conflicts in the Middle East.

Lockheed Martin Executive Vice President Bruce Tanner told the conference his company will see “indirect benefits” from the war in Syria, citing the Turkish military’s recent decision to shoot down a Russian warplane.

The incident, Tanner said, heightens the risk for U.S. military operations in the region, providing “an intangible lift because of the dynamics of that environment and our products in theater.” He also stressed that the Russian intervention would highlight the need for Lockheed Martin-made F-22s and the new F-35 jets.

The Greatest ISIS Generation?

Generalissimo Tom Brokaw was on Meet the Press this morning describing how the US is at war (aren't we always?) with The Terrorists, ISIS specifically, and explaining how We have to conduct it.

Tom Brokaw on ISIS: "We're at War" 11/22/2015:

And according to him, we won't be able to count on our European allies. I guess because our European allies are never targeted by The Terrorists.

Fortunately, respectable news organizations don't allow journalists to express political opinions: Hadas Gold, CNN reporter suspended after tweet on refugees Politico 11/19/15

Otherwise, We might think Generalissimo Tom was shamelessly warmongering instead of objectively commenting on the situation.

Kathleen Parker sounds like the sensible one in this clip, God help us. And of course, we need to go all Greatest Generation on The Evil Ones, too. I feel like I'm watching a bad remake of a bad clown movie.

There's nothing quite like watching the Sunday morning shoes to diminish your faith in the future of the human race.

The ideological ancestry of Cheney-Bush nationalism

Jacob Heilbrunn, Unleashed: The GOP vs. The World The National Interest 04/22/2015 has quite an interesting account of the development ofd the current warmongering worldview of the Republican Party:

... the GOP has, over the years, become wedded to a liberation doctrine that essentially allows its champions to present bombing and invading other countries at will as acts of supreme moral virtue. The crucible for that doctrine was the 1950s, when a small insurgency on the right — what Dean Acheson called “the attack of the primitives” — targeted both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations as soft on Communism. After China went red and Stalin’s Soviet Union exploded an atomic bomb, a radical conservative faction, spearheaded by William F. Buckley Jr., declared that the Truman administration had it all wrong. Containment was inadequate, a cowardly recipe for defeat. Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, who fired Kennan from the Foreign Service in July 1953, promised nothing less than the rollback of Communism.

As Russian tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956, however, the Eisenhower administration stood pat. Rollback was exposed as so much bluff and bombast. But as Sam Tanenhaus noted in the previous issue of The National Interest, for Senator Barry Goldwater and his admirers the dream remained alive. They went to war —against the liberal Republican establishment that allegedly was intent on appeasing America’s foreign enemies. [my emphasis in bold]

This is something to keep in mind when left-leaning war critics hold President Eisenhower up as some kind of model peace President.

The Sam Tanenhaus article to which Heilbrunn refers is The Bush Restoration 02/23/2015. Referring to the Cheney-Bush Administration's hawks, he writes:

The martial dogma they embraced struck many as new. In fact, it was an offshoot of the rollback or “liberationist” doctrine espoused by militant anti-Communists in the 1950s and 1960s. At the time, this approach was rejected as irresponsible by Democratic and Republican presidents alike. But it flourished on the right. Its first major political spokesman was Barry Goldwater. “In addition to keeping the free world free, we must try to make the Communist world free,” he declared in The Conscience of a Conservative. “To these ends, we must always try to engage the enemy at times and places, and with weapons, of our own choosing.” This crusading foreign policy was later taken up by neoconservatives in Bush 43’s administration and at outposts like the Defense Policy Board and the Weekly Standard. Together, they created the Bush Doctrine, which was Goldwaterism revived. “Deterrence, the promise of massive retaliation against nations, means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend,” George W. Bush said at West Point in June 2002. “Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies. . . . We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge.” [my emphasis in bold]

Glenn Greenwald on permanent war and Andrew Bacevich on the IS chapter

Glenzilla talks about the state of the War on Terror in Key Democrats, Led by Hillary Clinton, Leave No Doubt That Endless War Is Official U.S. Doctrine The Intercept 10/07/2014:

Leon Panetta, the long-time Democratic Party operative who served as Obama’s Defense Secretary and CIA Director, said this week of Obama’s new bombing campaign: “I think we’re looking at kind of a 30-year war.” Only in America are new 30-year wars spoken of so casually, the way other countries speak of weather changes. He added that the war “will have to extend beyond Islamic State to include emerging threats in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere.” And elsewhere: not just a new decades-long war with no temporal limits, but no geographic ones either. He criticized Obama – who has bombed 7 predominantly Muslim countries plus the Muslim minority in the Phillipines (almost double the number of countries Bush bombed) – for being insufficiently militaristic, despite the fact that Obama officials themselves have already instructed the public to think of The New War “in terms of years.”

Then we have Hillary Clinton (whom Panetta gushed would make a “great” president). At an event in Ottawa yesterday, she proclaimed that the fight against these “militants” will “be a long-term struggle” that should entail an “information war” as “well as an air war.” The new war, she said, is “essential” and the U.S. shies away from fighting it “at our peril.” Like Panetta (and most establishment Republicans), Clinton made clear in her book that virtually all of her disagreements with Obama’s foreign policy were the by-product of her view of Obama as insufficiently hawkish, militaristic and confrontational.

At this point, it is literally inconceivable to imagine the U.S. not at war. It would be shocking if that happened in our lifetime. U.S. officials are now all but openly saying this. “Endless War” is not dramatic rhetorical license but a precise description of America’s foreign policy. []my emphasis in bold]

If you look hard and know what to look for, you can detect "libertarian" elements in Glenn's article. But the analysis is basically spot on. We do have a state of permanent war.

Andrew Bacevich, author of Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (2010), writes about the Obama Non-War War chapter of the permanent war in Even if we defeat the Islamic State, we’ll still lose the bigger war Washington Post 10/03/2014. Bacevich, an historian and Catholic thinker heavily influenced by Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's outlook on foreign policy, applies his skeptical-minded view to the prospects of the war against IS:

... even as the United States persists in its determination to pacify the Greater Middle East, the final verdict is already in. U.S. military power has never offered an appropriate response to whatever ails the Islamic world. We’ve committed our troops to a fool’s errand.

And worse, the errand is also proving unnecessary. With abundant North American energy reserves now accessible — all that shale oil and fracked gas — we don’t need the Persian Gulf oil that ostensibly made our post-1980 military exertions imperative. For whatever reasons, Washington’s national security elites seem oblivious to the implications these resources have for policy in the Middle East.

No matter how long it lasts, America’s war for the Greater Middle East will end in failure. And when it does, Americans will discover that it was also superfluous.

Bacevich does not have the history-begins-today limitation that seems to infect our star pundits:

As America’s efforts to “degrade and ultimately destroy” Islamic State militants extend into Syria, Iraq War III has seamlessly morphed into Greater Middle East Battlefield XIV. That is, Syria has become at least the 14th country in the Islamic world that U.S. forces have invaded or occupied or bombed, and in which American soldiers have killed or been killed. And that’s just since 1980.

Let’s tick them off: Iran (1980, 1987-1988), Libya (1981, 1986, 1989, 2011), Lebanon (1983), Kuwait (1991), Iraq (1991-2011, 2014-), Somalia (1992-1993, 2007-), Bosnia (1995), Saudi Arabia (1991, 1996), Afghanistan (1998, 2001-), Sudan (1998), Kosovo (1999), Yemen (2000, 2002-), Pakistan (2004-) and now Syria. Whew. ...

We must hope for victory over the Islamic State. But even if achieved, that victory will not redeem but merely prolong a decades-long military undertaking that was flawed from the outset. When the 14th campaign runs its course, the 15th will no doubt be waiting, perhaps in Jordan or in a return visit to some unfinished battleground such as Libya or Somalia or Yemen.

Humanitarian hawks as "trigger hippies"

That's probably a term that deserves to catch on. From Chase Madar, Hawks for humanity Aljazeera America 01/21/2014 on the disturbing trend of human rights activists being shills for wars:

Liberal hawks respond to skepticism over their bellicosity with an invented pedigree of successful humanitarian wars, wheeling out India’s armed intervention in East Pakistan in 1971, which halted a genocide and created Bangladesh, or Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in 1978, which ended the Khmer Rouge, or Tanzania’s invasion of Uganda in 1979, which brought down Idi Amin. What they fail to mention is that these wars weren’t simple humanitarian interventions but attacks motivated almost entirely by national self-interest, conducted to stem massive, destabilizing influxes of foreign refugees from a bordering nation.

But the past is past. Supporters of humanitarian warfare tend not to dwell on their ventures’ failures for very long. Remember the carnage when the U.N. ventured into Somalia, with war crimes committed by both sides? The 200,000 Serbs and Roma ethnically cleansed from Kosovo during the NATO bombardment of Belgrade? The dictatorship of the militias in Libya and the excruciating pacification campaign in Afghanistan, which some have confused with a feminist Peace Corps project?

Realistically, militarism and warmongering is much more a pastime - and sometime profession - for rightwingers than it is for serious human rights groups.

Still, Madar is making an important point: "The itchy trigger finger of the human rights industry is symptomatic of the atrophy of diplomacy and dealmaking in favor of the militarization of statecraft. Do human rights professionals really want to be party to this?"

Tags: militarism

Martin Luther King, Jr. on economic inequality

This clip from The Young Turks, Why Conservatives Hate This Fact About MLK 01/20/2014, talks about the present-day implications of what Martin Luther King, Jr. had to say on economic inequality:

Tags: inequality, martin luther king jr., militarism, white racism

MLK Day 2014

For MLK Day, this is the famous Martin Luther King, Jr. speech, Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam of 04/30/2014

The text is available from Pacifica Radio and UC Berkeley.

The fight against militarism contains. As does the fight for voting rights. Ben Mankiewicz reports for The Young Turks in The Fight For Voting Rights Continues 01/20/2014:

Joan Walsh writes about how important it is to get beyond the goody-two-shoes image of King that has become standard for the mainstream media in The radical MLK we need today Salon 01/20/2014:

King and [Nelson] Mandela had much in common, but one thing stands out this week: As they were lionized globally, both were deradicalized, pasteurized and homogenized, made safe for mass consumption. Each was in favor of a radical redistribution of global wealth. Each crusaded against poverty and inequality and war. Both did it with an equanimity and ebullience and capacity to forgive and love their enemies that made it easy to canonize them in a secular way. White people love being given the benefit of the doubt and/or being forgiven. I speak from experience. ...

King was always a radical, but at the end of his life, he was something of an outcast, criticized by liberals, the left and the right.

Forget about the right, for now: King crossed some Democrats and labor leaders when he turned against the Vietnam War in 1967, after his unparalleled Riverside Church speech. He knew the war was not only wrong, but was making Johnson’s alleged “War on Poverty” fiscally impossible. Meanwhile a growing black power movement mocked King’s commitment to nonviolence and integration. Even some close allies in the civil rights movement blanched when he joined Marion Wright Edelman and other organizers to start a Poor People's Campaign later that year – a movement of black, white, Latino, American Indian and Asian people mired in poverty, to fight the war and get the help they deserved. They were to march on Washington and set up a camp there in April 1968, the month King was assassinated.

Of course, to anyone reasonably in touch with reality, President Obama is anything but a radical. But Joan uses his recent rhetorical stress on income inequality to frame her point:

We are ready for the radical King now. President Obama, perhaps belatedly, has declared income inequality "the defining issue of our time." Even poverty seems back on the agenda. The man who may be doing the most to advance these issues right now isn’t a politician or a rabble rouser; it’s Pope Francis, who’s been hailed by everyone from Obama to Paul Ryan (Ryan gets him wrong) as helping us make the issue of poverty central to our politics. “If Dr. King were alive today, he would be in Rome visiting Pope Francis holding a joint press conference to summoning the world to aid the poor eradicate poverty,” Clarence Jones says. The president promises he’s going to the Vatican to meet the new pope, and that's a start.

Tags: inequality, martin luther king jr., militarism, white racism

Andrew Bacevich takes a skeptical look at our glorious generals and their organizational culture

Andrew Bacevich has been doing great work for years on the US military. But since his analyses generally fall outside the lazy assumptions of the Very Serious People, you don't see him on the TV gab-fests where such VSPs as David Brooks and Tom Friedman hold forth.

In 'Good Guys' Make Bad Generals The American Conservative 05/13/2013 (May/June 2013 issue), he uses a review of Thomas Ricks' new book to look at the real outcomes of the current organizational culture in the senior military ranks:

To become a general officer is to join an exclusive club. As with many clubs, ranking members decide whom to admit, restricting entry to those who satisfy the criteria for being the right sort. In American military vernacular, Ricks writes, the key is to be deemed a “good guy.” The good guy projects the right attitude, strikes the right pose, and recites all the right clichés. Good guys are team players. They don’t rock the boat. They get ahead by going along. In practical terms, demonstrated adherence to orthodoxy becomes the premier qualification for admission. Heretics need not apply.

And according to Ricks, once you’re in, you’re golden: with membership come privileges and protection. So when events expose the limitations of a William Westmoreland in Vietnam or a Tommy Franks in Iraq, other senior officers cognizant of those shortcomings keep mum. Sergeants or captains falling short in the performance of duty might feel the axe; not so with the generals said to be responsible for what the sergeants and captains do or don’t do. General officer responsibility turns out to be more nominal than real. Reflecting on the Iraq War, one disenchanted American officer put it this way: “As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.” Needless to say, that officer’s invitation to join the club never arrived. [my emphasis]

Bacevich discusses the dubious accomplishments of Gen. William DePuy, who he credits with developing the infamou "search-and-destroy" strategy in the Vietnam War. He also credit DePuy with successfully convincing the senior officer corps to not learn the most meaningful lessons of that war:

Yet the abject failure of that concept in Vietnam—a failure above all of creative intelligence—prompted little soul-searching on DePuy’s part. Nothing that had occurred there altered his pre-existing conception of warfare. Stripped to its essentials, that conception reduced combat to a series of discrete, measurable tasks. In DePuy’s eyes, to master tasks was to master war itself. Paying lip service to war’s human dimension, disdaining its political aspect altogether, DePuy’s approach—which became the Army's approach—pretended to a sort of pseudo-empiricism, as if war were akin to a large-scale industrial enterprise.

Demanding compliance with prescribed formulas, checklists, and decision matrices, DePuy’s Army had little use for critical thinking or independent judgment. This was the Army that in 1991 fought Saddam Hussein and then in 2003 came back for a second go—an Army led by “good guys” who had mastered minor tactics but were intellectually complacent, strategically illiterate, and wore their antipathy for politics like a badge of honor.

Bacevich quotes an important observation by Ricks on the developing generals' culture in the Vietnam War era: "The Army, writes Ricks, 'was fast becoming a collection of 'organization men' ... who were far less inclined to judge the performance of their peers.' Generals 'were acting less like stewards of their profession, answerable to the public, and more like keepers of a closed guild.'"

And for all the secular and religious idolatry that US political culture currently practices toward the military and its allegedly glorious leaders, the results are not especially impressive:

In terms of providing its army with bountiful resources, no nation comes even close to the United States. In terms of willingness to commit that army into action, no nation (except perhaps Israel and the United Kingdom) compares. Yet the roster of victories achieved by the United States Army since 1945 is an abbreviated one: the Dominican Republic (1965), Grenada (1983), and Panama (1989). Twenty years ago, observers might have added the Persian Gulf War (1991) to that list. Unfortunately, the brief and seemingly glorious encounter that was Operation Desert Storm turned out to be a mere preliminary bout.

Forays ending in something other than victory—i.e., conclusive operational success yielding desired political outcomes—have been both more numerous and of greater moment. The Cold War provided the occasion for one costly draw (Korea) and one humiliating defeat (Vietnam). The post-Cold War era has included one outright failure, the embarrassing if quickly mythologized Somalia intervention, along with two wars of middling size, long duration, and ambiguous outcome. Whatever verdict historians ultimately render regarding Iraq and Afghanistan, they are unlikely to classify them as roaring successes.

But in a climate of cultural militarism with a foreign policy of global hegemony, such questions are too infrequently considered. The Very Serious People are too focused on the next war to cheer for.

Tags: andrew bacevich, militarism

US and war in Africa

Will Bunch notices a Wall Street Journal headline announcing, "U.S. Boosts War Role in Africa." And he asks, "Hey, remember that time we declared war on Africa?" Attytood 03/04/2013. To which he answers, "Me neither."

His conclusion is a good one:

The entire "war on terror" has been the worse case of "mission creep" in the history of civilization. We drift from Iraq to Yemen to Mali and elsewhere in Africa -- on what basis? It's time for Congress to repeal the vague and never-ending Authorization for Use of Military Force, which was enacted under Pearl-Harbor-day-of-infamy conditions on Sept. 14, 2001, but is way past its expiration date. When it comes to this stuff, I giess [sic] I'm just a small government guy.

Tags: militarism

Thomas Frank: Obama's bipartisan fixation didn't let him "seal the deal" after 2008 election

Thomas Frank has a new essay in the print edition of Harper's, called "Compromising Positions," about President Obama's fixation on bipartisanship.

David Daley interviewed him for Salon on the topic (Thomas Frank: Obama’s squandered hope 08/22/2012). Daley poses the question/comment, "Obama thinks he is reaching across the aisle, the Republicans move farther to the right, and as he stretches and stretches for compromise, he’s being dragged to an entirely new part of the political spectrum." And Frank replies as follows.

Yes, which they have done. And that’s the thing that nobody understands, which is when you declare — which Obama did and Clinton partially did before him — that the two parties are the only thing that matter, and bridging the differences between them and the distance between them is what matters, it makes the issues themselves kind of secondary. It’s the centrism that comes first, and the bipartisanship that comes first. Everything comes down to this sort of geometrical relationship between the two parties. If that’s the case, then everything is freed from its moorings and the Republicans are allowed to move whichever way they want. Obviously that’s going to be to the right in order to drag the debate with them.

It's not just game theory, of course. The Republicans were presented with the same challenge as Obama, which is how do you deal with the financial crisis and this incredible economic setback. And they actually came up with a compelling answer to this question. Obama came up with an answer to the question of what should we do about partisanship, because like many people here in Washington, he thinks partisanship is the real challenge. He thought the real problem with America is that we have these parties and they fight with each other over every little thing. And he’s right to some degree. It is a problem, and it’s annoying if you turn on the TV and here’s Fox News, and you turn on another channel and here’s MSNBC. They’re both insulting and stupid in their own way. Yes, it’s a problem, but it’s not the main problem. It’s not even in the top 10 problems, as far as I’m concerned, but for Obama it’s the No. 1 problem.

Now the other side looks out at what is actually the real problem, which is economic catastrophe. What the public really wants is not someone who is going to reach out across the aisle and shake hands with the other side and say that “we aren’t red states and we aren’t the blue states, we’re the United States.” No. They wanted an answer to the problem at hand, and here’s the crazy thing: the Republicans came up with one. It’s a fanciful answer, the answer that we deregulate more, that we have to reach out and achieve that perfect capitalism that’s eluding us. [my emphasis]

He also makes the important point about how damaging Obama's Look Forward Not Backward approach has been in establishing a strong Democratic profile against the Republicans. Daley asks, "Obama cleaned the Republicans’ clock in 2008. And then, as you write, handed 'a vanquished but utterly intransigent foe a veto' over his agenda. How does that happen?" Frank responds:

That part of it, it’s the insult added to the injury. The worst part of it is that he didn’t seal the deal after he won in 2008. He did not want to talk about the economy and what went wrong; he did not want to talk about what went wrong with the Bush administration, and you think of all of the sort of regulatory disasters ... You want to talk about what went wrong, about the people regulating Wall Street, and you couldn’t have an easier way of making that case about regulatory capture. You look at these agencies, who was in them, who was in charge of them, who they answer to, and they’re filled with lobbyists from the financial industry. It was open and shut. He doesn’t want to go back and talk about it.

Then you have the oil spill disaster, where the regulators were, again, asleep — completely missed it. Another perfect example, perfect object lesson for him to go back and talk about what’s wrong with the regulatory state. He never does. And this is something where protesters on both the left and right are talking about regulatory capture now, and about the insiders ruling the country. Everybody is talking about this—except for him. He let that victory just slip through his fingers because he doesn’t want to go and speak about the dark side of people’s suspicions. He wants to remain cheery and upbeat. [my emphasis in bold]

At one point, Frank uses the phrase "original sin" to refer to how key Obama's failure to aggressively address the economic crisis with a strong enough stimulus program was for his Administration.

I don't disagree with Frank's analysis, though I might nitpick a couple of points. In fact, I think he states the hollowness of Obama's dogmatic commitment to bipartisanship well.

But there's also an aspect of this that's intellectual and ideological, the neoliberal ideology of deregulation and privatization, an outlook that is backed up with boatloads of corporate lobbying and campaign money. It's not just a matter of Obama's personality, though that undoubtedly plays a large part. But Obama chooses his drive for compromise between the corporate Democrats and the Republicans, not between labor and progressive Democrats, on the one hand, and corporate Democrats on the other. He doesn't have a problem soundly rejecting compromise with his own party's base, as Tom Tomorrow captured so well in his Middle Man cartoon image:

The horizon for compulsory compromise in which Obama works is one bounded by the ideology of neoliberalism. There are differences between the two major parties. If anything, Frank in that interview understates the difference between Obama's recovery program and what we could have expected from Cheney and Bush. Most notably, the rescue of the auto industry would not likely have occurred under a Republican President. That's not a small thing.

A lot of this has to do with our national security state and the militarism of our foreign policy. There's no necessary connection between the specific kind of neoliberal ideology that dominates the major right and left parties of the US and Europe today. But there is a huge one in fact, especially in the case of the United States.

A number of good writers and analysts like Andrew Bacevich have been chronicling the problems with our current foreign policy of global dominance and the far-reaching militarization of our foreign policy. In his last full column for Salon, Glenn Greenwald talked about the perpetual fear-mongering and threat inflation involved in the ongoing War on Terrorism, which doesn't seem to have receded in priority in the least with the death of supposed terrorist super-mastermind Osama bin Laden: The sham "terrorism expert" industry 08/15/2012.

This Administration's "original sin" in my view was the Look Forward Not Backward policy toward torture perpetrators in the Cheney-Bush Administration. Prosecuting those crimes and not only reversing the torture policy - which I'm not convinced the Obama Administration has done completely - but also prosecuting the perpetrators at all levels was essential to re-establishing the rule of law that was so badly undermined by the previous Administration. And Obama refused to do it.

The politicization and dubious political prosecutions of the Ashcroft-Gonzales Justice Department is something that also should have been thoroughly vetted by the current Administration.

Obama's reluctance to prosecute the torture perpetrators was clearly related to his desire to continue the basic lines of the Cheney-Bush foreign policy. Such a prosecution would have exposed not only the misdeeds of policymakers in the previous Administration but also the collusion of military officials with them. It would also have meant the Republicans would have opposed him intensely on military and foreign-policy issues. As it is, they rhetorically condemn him for being insufficiently militant and too "weak" in foreign policy. But in practice, they have been largely in agreement with Obama's foreign policies.

Obama so far has been more restrained on Iran policy than a Republican President would likely have been. But he continues to escalate the confrontation with the Islamic Republic there. We can't be confident that Obama would not initiate a military attack on Iran in a second term.

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, militarism, neoliberalism

The Pentagon's publicity clout

Stephen Walt has a post commenting on two meetings of the safely establishment Council on Foreign Relation (CFR) in which senior military officials are offered a prominent presence (Military-Intellectual complex? Foreign Policy 04/27/2012) :

None of this is all that surprising, but am I the only one who sees it as more evidence of the creeping militarization of U.S. foreign policy? The Pentagon already spends several billion taxpayer dollars each year on public relations; does CFR need to give it another platform from which to purvey its views? More importantly, will any well-known advocates of a more restrained and less militarized global posture be given a chance to lay out their views at the annual meeting? What about experts who think U.S. military leaders were at least partly responsible for the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan?

America's founding fathers were wary of excessive military influence, and by the end of his long career, so was President (and five-star general) Dwight D. Eisenhower. They understood that in a free society, powerful institutions should be confronted and held accountable. Since 9/11, however, we've seen a predictable but growing deference to military expertise and advice. Politicians bend over backwards to tell us how much they support "the troops" and hardly anyone in office is willing to challenge military leaders openly. Just read Bob Woodward's book Obama's Wars, and you get a good sense of how civilian authorities can get rolled by those in uniform.

Tags: militarism, stephen walt

President Obama on his relationship to the uniformed military

Rolling Stone's By Jann Wenner did a mostly softball interview with President Obama, Ready for the Fight: Rolling Stone Interview with Barack Obama 04/25/2012. I was struck by this part:

I came in without having served in the military, but feeling a great reverence for our military, and in awe of the sacri­fices that our men and women in uniform make every single day. In the first year, the Pentagon had grown accustomed to basically setting the terms – not just tactics, but also strategy. There was some sense that we had a lot of hammers, so everything was a nail. In part because of really good work by Bob Gates, who I kept on as secretary of defense, and in part because of me really trying to engage and listen to the Joint Chiefs and have a frank and open and honest discussion, even when we had strong disagreements, they developed a sense that I care about our military – but that I very much believe in civilian control of our military, and that military decisions are in service of strategies and broader conceptions of diplomacy that are made here in this White House. And so I can say, with a lot of confidence, that at this point the relationship between me and the Pentagon is very good. I think they know I care about them and I respect them, and I think they respect me and listen to what I say. They understand that I'm the commander in chief. [my emphasis]

That whole section makes me really uncomfortable for these reasons.

Civilian control of the military is not a matter of a President's personal belief, it's part of our basic Constitutional system. I don't like to see a President talking about this as though its a matter of his personal management style.

"I think they know I care about them and I respect them": this sounds like management-consultant or motivational-speaker jargon. He's the President. The duty of the military from generals to private is to follow his legal orders. If they don't "respect" him enough to do so, or they aren't motivated to do so because they think Obama does sufficiently care about their feelings or whatever, then they should resign. Or the President should fire them. Yes, the President has to build a working relationship with his generals. But it makes me really uncomfortable to hear him talking about it this way.

"I came in without having served in the military, but feeling a great reverence for our military." Has Obama ever said in public that he has "reverence" for any other agency of the federal government? Like the National Institutes of Health, for instance, whose job it is to find ways to save lives? Aside from the fact that it sounds cloying, and that it echoes the chronic defensiveness of Democrats on military-related issues, it just seems wrong for the President to describe the military this way. His job is to command the military and set policy for it. Not to bow down to them in "reverence".

And as a matter of historical fact, I also wonder about this comment: "In the first year, the Pentagon had grown accustomed to basically setting the terms – not just tactics, but also strategy."

This sounds like something he would say that he might see as pleasing the Democratic base. But one of the things about the Cheney-Bush Administration is that for all their warmongering and warmaking and verbal idolatry of the military in public, they were clear that they were giving the orders. Rummy is a war criminal and an overall jerk. But he practiced civilian control of the military, if often in a bullying and inappropriate way. Ask Gen. Eric Shinseki.

Obama two sentences later talks about the "really good work by Bob Gates, who I kept on as secretary of defense." Yes, the Bush Defense Secretary he kept on. Which in retrospect was a terrible sign of how little he planned to strike out on a new course in national security policy. But if "the Pentagon had grown accustomed to basically setting the terms – not just tactics, but also strategy" - the would have been doing that under Secretary Gates, wouldn't they? Gates was Secretary of Defense for the last two years of Bush's Presidency.

Gates just announced he was forming a consulting firm with Bush National Security Adviser, Secretary of State, and war criminal Condoleezza Rice.

Republican politicians, including Bush and Rummy, like to talk about how they are just going to do what the uniformed military tells them to do, because their base likes to hear that. It's dangerous talk coming from a President or national security officials, and contemptuous of the American system of government. But in the Cheney-Bush Administration, the civilians did cram their preferences in matters like the Iraq War down the generals' throats.

Not that we saw any generals resigning in protest.

I am glad to see that Obama is still talking diplomacy with Iran: "So we have another round of talks taking place between Iran and the P5-plus-1 ... There is a window of opportunity to resolve this issue diplomatically, and that is my fervent preference."

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, militarism

The US in the world: discussion on "The decline of the American empire"

This Aljazeera English segment of the regular program Empire, The decline of the American empire first aired on 12/29/2011, has a good panel discussion with four American participants of the general question of the US military role in today's world. There is an accompanying article, The decline of the American empire 01/01/2012 and a Transcript: Decline of the American empire 12/30/2011.



At just after 41:00 in the video, panel participant Susan Glasser, editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, refers to the current situation as "a global crisis of capitalism". It's an accurate phrase, and one that I'm happy to see edging its way into "respectable" discussion.

The problem with many of these decline-of-American-empire analysis is that they often put emphasis on a conservative argument, that the current level of US national debt is unsustainable and threatens the health of the economy. This is just not the case.

We do hear that argument in this Empire special. But it also discusses the economic strength of the US and the role of the dollar as the world's reserve currency.

One person in the special also mentions that the US military budget, large as it is, represents about 3% of the GDP.

Neither debt nor "entitlements" nor crowding out of civilian investment is going to force the reduction of US commitments. But the level of military commitments the US has now does face resistance from other countries. Military spending is public spending, and it does compete in priority with other spending. We may not have a militarized economy in terms of percentage of GDP. But we do have a militarized political culture which risks unnecessary wars and corrupts our democratic institutions.

It's astonishing and disturbing that the Democratic President of the United States, with the now-explicit support of Congress, claims the right to assassinate anyone, including American citizens, anywhere in the world that the Executive Branch designates as a "terrorist" without the requirement for any legal charges or due process of law. And the courts, with some exceptions (that are minor in light of the seriousness of the problem), have refused to stand up against the Constitutional violations that have become an integral part of the War On Terror. And even though the suffering of American soldiers makes limit intrusion into public consciousness, it is substantial and consequential. The possibility and reality of "blowback" is also inherent in our current highly interventionist foreign policy.

We live in a national security state predicated on the existence of an imaginary worldwide state of war. It's an amazing state of affairs. And it will continue to corrupt and diminish democracy in the United States until that fantasy is dispelled and the level of military commitment significantly reduced.

Militarism isn't the only problem for democracy and freedom in the US. (See Bush v. Gore, Citizen's United.) But it is a major problem that the American public can't afford to ignore if we're serious about keeping a democratic government.

Tags: militarism

Andrew Bacevich on "An End to Empire"

Andrew Bacevich writes on An End to Empire in The American Conservative 09/07/2011. He refers to the post-1989 triumphalism that came to dominate the thinking of both Democratic and Republican Parties, though with different understandings in each of them:

In Washington, such expectations qualified as advanced thinking, finding expression in the expansive claims that became a hallmark of the 1990s. "We stand tall. We see further into the future." Thus did Madeleine Albright elaborate on the attributes accruing to the world's "indispensable nation." Meanwhile, her boss Bill Clinton was wagging his finger at China. Beijing needed to align itself with the "right side of history," the president counseled, which meant that the Chinese should take their cues from America.

Expanding on or embroidering these themes got your books on bestseller lists, your columns in all the best newspapers, and your smiling face on the Sunday talk shows. My favorite artifact of this era remains the New York Times Magazine dated March 28, 1999. The cover story excerpted The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Tom Friedman’s just-released paean to globalization-as-Americanization. The cover itself purported to illustrate "What the World Needs Now." Alongside a photograph of a clenched fist adorned with the Stars and Stripes in brilliant red, white, and blue appeared this text: "For globalism to work, America can't be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is."

I've been reading some of the German literary critic Walter Benjamin's work lately. And Bacevich's invocation of that particular image reminds me of the way Benjamin used physical images that were identified with a particular moment in history to not just illustrate the point but to symbolize it in a meaningful way.

And that was undoubtedly a moment of arrogance and delusion on the part of American leaders. Both problematic features of thinking on the part of our political elites would get considerably worse:

Remarkably, the events of September 11, 2001 served not to overturn such thinking, but to affirm it. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld did not disagree with the claims of American prescience and prerogatives expressed by Clinton and Albright. Sharing in the view that the United States was indeed an almighty superpower, they merely wanted to assert that power more aggressively. After 9/11, they had little difficulty converting George W. Bush — hitherto proponent of a humble foreign policy — to their view. If the results achieved from winning the Cold War had turned out to be less conclusive than first thought, then surely one more big push would deliver history to its intended destination. So the ideologues in power, now Republicans rather than Democrats, and those cheering from the sidelines, neoconservative voices now ascendant, determined to pull out all the stops. As Richard Perle and David Frum, co-authors of the agitprop classic An End to Evil, put it, "There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust." ...

The years 1991 and 2001 are commonly treated as breakpoints, markers that inaugurate distinctive chapters of history, the first labeled "Post-Cold War," the second "Post-9/11." Yet there is a strong case to be made for amalgamating the two decades into a single period: call it the "era of ideological fantasy," when U.S. self-regard and Washington's confidence in its ability to remake the world in America's image reached unprecedented heights.

Bacevich lists eight different assumptions about American power that have been shown to be deeply flawed in the last 20 years. He seems to be optimistic that American policymakers and the public will draw appropriate conclusions from those lessons.

Bacevich takes Reinhold Niebuhr's cautious evaluation of human judgment seriously. So I'm sure he expects more folly in foreign policy for some time to come.

But one way in which he's overly optimistic is in his conventional assumption that the current budget deficit are a serious problem for the US. "Together the deficit and the Afghanistan war exemplify the chronic imbalances that unless corrected will accelerate American decline," he writes.

But the US budget deficit now and in the immediate future is not a problem for the United States. And given that the austerity policies on which there is a shameful bipartisan consensus right now, depression is likely to be the main economic problem for years to come. And given the prospective end of the euro, which sadly looks more likely all the time, the dollar will remain the world's reserve currency for some time to come. And that means we will continue to run large trade deficits, which in turn means that federal budget deficits will continue as long as private savings exceed private spending.

The budget deficit will not force an end to triumphalist foreign policies and the excesses of militarism any time soon.

Tags: andrew bacevich, militarism, us foreign policy

Juan Cole's defense of the Libya War to "the Left"

Juan Cole has posted a personal manifesto of sorts, An Open Letter to the Left on Libya Informed Comment 03/27/2011 defending the so-called humanitarian war in Libya. Cole's value in commentary on the Middle East and the Muslim world has been in his depth of knowledge of Islam and of the area and his attention to facts and their meaning in context. And that continues to be so in the Libya War.

But in justifying the Libya War on essentially the same grounds as the Obama Administration, he allows himself to float off into careless abstractions. One is a classic example of a sophomoric argument:

The United Nations Security Council authorization for UN member states to intervene to forestall this massacre thus pitched the question. If the Left opposed intervention, it de facto acquiesced in Qaddafi's destruction of a movement embodying the aspirations of most of Libya's workers and poor, along with large numbers of white collar middle class people.

The historian Henry Steele Commager used to be fond of quoting James Madison saying that "theory" can lead us astray, so experience should be our guide. As a general position, it's a little to Lockean for my taste. But it applies well to Cole's particular argument. We could just as easily say that because Juan Cole isn't in Los Angeles shooting it out with the Crips and Bloods, he de facto supports violent urban street gangs.

It's true that the UN Security Council action makes the intervention legal in international law. It does not in itself make it a good idea. It does not mean that the United States has to take part in implementing this good idea; France and Britain were both eager to do humanitarian service by shooting down planes and bombing and rocketing military sites. No doubt their bombs and rockets, like our own, carefully distinguish between Bad People and those deserving to live.

In the real world of week before last, what happened was that the United States pushed hard for UN authorization for the war against Libya. It did not push for war against Yemen or Bahrain, where protesters are also being killed by their governments. It did not push for UN Security Council authorization to overthrown the government of Saudi Arabia to end its abuses of human rights. Are we to conclude that this means the Obama Administration therefore approves of the Wahhabi version of Islamic law in Saudi Arabia? Or that it approves of repression and human rights abuses in Yemen and Bahrain? Obviously not. It's a silly, sophomoric argument and I'm surprised to see him using it.

Very relevant in terms of politics in the Middle East and the Muslim world especially - but not only there - is the painfully obvious fact that for decades, the United States has acquiesced in and in many ways actively supported Israel's overt violations of occupation law and their targeting of civilians in their wars, even though US policy officially condemns at least the settlement policy. In this case, the support is not passive in the sophomoric sense of "you don't support international intervention to overthrow the Israeli government so therefore you support everything it does." It is active support and could scarcely be more obvious. Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid, with Egypt the second largely because of its peace policy toward Israel. Right or wrong, practical or not, this is a real contradiction in US foreign policy with real consequences. It ought to be enough to discourage adults from making the sophomoric argument. But obviously it isn't.

Cole implicitly recognizes that such generalizations as he makes in the sophomore argument are irrelevant. Because he goes on to explain how particular conditions in Libya make its situation different than those in other countries currently involved in the Middle East/North African wave of hopefully-democratic revolution and also different from Darfur. I heard a commentator on Aljazeera English yesterday referring to the rebels fighting in Libya as the "democratic" forces; I hope they are.

He also falls into some careless historical analogies. The Kosovo War is the most relevant recent historical example, though thinking by analogy is tricky, in fact one of the worst problems in American foreign-policy making. The only good news on that score - and one that really amazes me - is that I've yet to hear of anyone invoking "Munich" or warning about the dangers of "appeasement." Nor any comparison of Qaddafi to Hitler. Amazing! Although Cole makes some not-very-useful general comments about the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9 and the Second World War

I'm guessing based on his various comments that Cole is working from a very optimistic set of lessons from the Kosovo War. The more relevant lessons from it would be: air power inhibited the use of ground troops against civilians but didn't prevent it; initial expectations of a quick capitulation by Serbia turned out to be dead wrong; "strategic bombing" of Serbian cities was soon added to the campaign (Chinese Embassy! Oops!); Milošević didn't accede to NATO demands on Kosovo until he thought he would soon face a ground campaign; and, regime change in Belgrade was never part of the war aim.

Helena Cobban also reminds us about the eventual outcome here 12 years later:

Now, it is extremely unclear what the political upshot of all this will be in Libya. In Kosovo, Washington ended up midwifing a tiny, landlocked little statelet that is a hub of organized crime at the heart of the Balkans, and whose people have a very stunted quality of life.

Cole makes this reference early in his piece:

I am unabashedly cheering the liberation movement on, and glad that the UNSC-authorized intervention has saved them from being crushed. I can still remember when I was a teenager how disappointed I was that Soviet tanks were allowed to put down the Prague Spring and extirpate socialism with a human face. Our multilateral world has more spaces in it for successful change and defiance of totalitarianism than did the old bipolar world of the Cold War, where the US and the USSR often deferred to each other’s sphere of influence.

There was no way in the world that the United States in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, was going to blast its way into Eastern Europe and go to war with the Soviet Union over the Warsaw Pact intervention in what was then Czechoslovakia. Nor did it have the power to do so. Even aside from the huge commitment of resources to the Vietnam War, US Cold War military strategy in Europe was defensive, based on repelling a Soviet invasion, and was based on the use of tactical nuclear weapons. It was never part of the military assumption there that US conventional forces would be able without nukes to defeat a Soviet invasion of western Europe. That's a huge part of the reason that the US refused to adopt a no-first-use policy on nukes. It would have been an enormous investment in arms, personnel and defensive military installations to have made a conventional defense (i.e., not using nukes) of western Europe possible against the Red Army.

Cole may have been a kid in 1968. But he's all grown up now. Is he seriously suggesting that the world would be better off today if the US had initiated a war with the Warsaw Pact in 1968 that would have involved nuking East Germany? What the hell kind of humanitarian notion is that? Whatever the motivations, it made no practical sense then, and it's pure fantasy now to suggest that it did.

Cole's comparison of the international legitimacy of the Libya War in comparison to the Iraq War is good. And it has practical relevance, because the international legitimation affects the course of the war and its repercussions for the United States. But again, that fact that it's legal doesn't mean its a good idea. To use a homey example, it's legal to invest your retirement savings in blackjack games in Las Vegas, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea. Nor does it mean that it's a good idea for the United States at this particular time.

I haven't seen Cole grappling with the very real risks of the Libya War yet. I fully expect him to as they arise. And let's stipulate that something very close to miracles do happen, even in war. Muammar Qaddafi could decide to stop down tomorrow and Libya could establish a democracy modeled on the United States Constitution. I would recommend they be careful of the Supreme Court, though. And that might want to tighten up the Article 1 war powers clauses. Failing that, though, here are some of the problems:

• Smart as our humanitarian bombs are, they kill people and inevitably kill civilians. The longer the war continues, the more they are likely to kill. (Note to Christian Rightists: our freedom bombs kill unborn babies, too.)

• According to Steven Metz, whether Qaddafi stays or goes in the short term, "there is no place on earth more likely to experience an insurgency in the next few years than Libya." That's more than a trivial consideration.

• Republican warmongers, bless their cold little hearts, actually have a point that an intervention like this doesn't make sense if regime change isn't part of the war aim.

• Who in the name of the Prophet are we supporting in Libya? Call it whatever you like, we're backing one side in a civil war. Who.Are.They? Cole addresses that question this way, "The question is what kind of leadership was emerging in places like Benghazi. The answer is that it was simply the notables of the city." Wouldn't those same notables have been supporting the Qaddafi regime for decades? It's possible they have sterling democratic credentials. But do we the American public have any good reason to think so?

• Nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation should be the highest strategic priority for United States foreign policy; it's hard to imagine that the Libya intervention - after years of rewarding Qaddafi's regime for going along with US policy on nonproliferation - doesn't significantly set back nuclear nonproliferation. A nuclear weapon is the best insurance against being invaded by the United States, UN authorization or not.

• I'm convinced that for the "responsibility to protect" (R2P) to ever become a meaningful standard for military intervention, it would have to be done by an independent military force, responsible directly to the UN and not to individual countries. Otherwise, it becomes an excuse to cover for cold power politics.

• There are also real limits to United States power. That applies to "humanitarian" wars as well as to Cheney wars.

Tags: israel, juan cole, kosovo war, libya war, militarism