American Carnage: Fighting the Forever War
By
Rebecca Gordon
March
07, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Tom
Dispatch"
-
In his inaugural
address, President Trump
described a
dark and dismal United States, a country overrun
by criminal gangs and drugs, a nation stained
with the blood seeping from bullet-ridden
corpses left at scenes of “American carnage.” It
was more than a little jarring.
Certainly, drug gangs and universally accessible
semi-automatic weapons do not contribute to a
better life for most people in this country.
When I hear the words “American carnage,”
however, the first thing I think of is not an
endless string of murders taking place in those
mysterious “inner
cities” that
exist only in the fevered mind of Donald Trump.
The phrase instead evokes the
non-imaginary deaths
of hundreds of thousands of people in real
cities and rural areas outside the United
States. It evokes the conversion of
millions of
ordinary people into homeless refugees. It
reminds me of the places where American wars
seem never to end, where new conflicts seem to
take up just as the old ones are in danger of
petering out. These sites of carnage are the
cities and towns, mountains and deserts of Iraq,
Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, and
other places
that we don’t even find out about unless we go
looking. They are the places where the United
States fights its endless wars.
During the 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump
often sounded like a pre-World War II-style
America First isolationist, someone who thought
the United States should avoid foreign military
entanglements. Today, he seems more like a man
with a uniform fetish. He’s referred to
his latest efforts
to round up undocumented immigrants in this
country as “a military operation.” He’s
similarly
stocked his cabinet
with one
general still
on active duty, various
retired generals,
and other military veterans. His pick for
secretary of the interior, Montana Congressman
Ryan Zinke,
served 23 years
as a Navy SEAL.
Clearly, these days Trump enjoys the company of
military men. He’s more ambivalent about what
the military actually does. On the campaign
trail, he railed against the folly that was --
and is -- the (second) Iraq War, maintaining
with questionable accuracy
that he was “totally against” it from the
beginning. It’s not clear, however, just where
Trump thinks the folly lies -- in invading Iraq
in the first place or in failing to “keep”
Iraq’s oil afterward. It was a criticism he
reprised when
he introduced Mike Pompeo as his choice to run
the CIA. “Mike,” he explained, “if we kept the
oil, you probably wouldn’t have ISIS because
that’s where they made their money in the first
place.” Not to worry, however, since as he also
suggested to Pompeo, “Maybe we’ll have another
chance.” Maybe the wrong people had just fought
the wrong Iraq war, and Donald Trump’s version
will be bigger, better, and even more full of
win!
Perhaps Trump’s objection is simply to wars we
don’t win. As February ended, he
invited the
National Governors Association to share his
nostalgia for the good old days when “everybody
used to say ‘we haven’t lost a war’ -- we never
lost a war -- you remember.” Now, according to
the president, “We never win a war. We never
win. And we don’t fight to win. We don’t fight
to win. So we either got to win, or don’t fight
it at all.”
The question is, which would Trump prefer:
Winning or not fighting at all? There’s probably
more than a hint of an answer in his
oft-repeated
campaign promise
that we’re “going to win so much” we’ll “get
tired of winning.” If his fetish for winning --
whether it’s trade wars or shooting wars --
makes you feel a little too exposed to his
sexual imagination, you’re probably right. In
one of his riffs on the subject, he told his
audience that they would soon be pleading they
had “a headache” to get him to stop winning so
much -- as if they were 1950s housewives trying
to avoid their bedroom duty. But daddy Trump
knows best:
“And I'm
going to say, ‘No, we have to make America great
again.’ You're gonna say, ‘Please.’ I said,
‘Nope, nope. We're gonna keep winning.’”
There’s more than a hint of where we’re headed
in Trump’s recent
announcement
that he’ll be asking Congress for a nearly 10%
increase in military spending, an additional
annual $54 billion for the Pentagon as part of
what he calls his “public safety and national
security budget.” You don’t spend that kind of
money on toys unless you intend to play with
them.
Trump
explained his
reasoning, in his trademark idiolect, his unique
mangling of syntax and diction:
“This is a
landmark event, a message to the world, in these
dangerous times of American strength, security,
and resolve. We must ensure that our courageous
servicemen and women have the tools they need to
deter war and when called upon to fight in our
name only do one thing, win. We have to win.”
So it
does look like the new president intends to keep
on making war into the eternal future. But it’s
worth remembering that our forever wars didn’t
begin with Donald J. Trump, not by a long shot.
The
Forever Wars
Joe Haldeman’s 1974 novel,
The Forever War,
which won the three major science fiction
prizes, a Hugo, a Nebula, and a Locus, was about
a soldier involved in a war between human beings
and the Taurans, an alien race. Because of the
stretching of time when traveling at near
light-speed (as Einstein predicted), while
soldiers like Haldeman’s hero passed a few years
at a time at a front many light-years from home,
the Earth they’d left behind experienced the
conflict as lasting centuries. Published just
after the end of the Vietnam War -- fought for
what seemed to many Americans like centuries in
a land light-years away -- The Forever War
was clearly a reflection of Haldeman’s own
experience in Vietnam and his return to an
unrecognizable United States, all transposed to
space.
|
Break
Free From The Matrix
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In 1965, Haldeman had been drafted into that
brutal conflict, probably one
of those that Donald Trump thinks we didn’t
“fight to win.” It certainly seemed like a
forever war while it lasted, especially if you
included the French colonial war that preceded
it. But it did finally end, decisively, with an
American loss (although, in a sense, it’s still
being fought out by the thousands of
Vietnam veterans
who live on the streets of our country).
After the attacks of 9/11 and George W. Bush’s
declaration of a Global War on Terror, some
people found the title of Haldeman’s novel a
useful shorthand for what seemed to be an era of
permanent war. It gave us a way of describing
then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s
vision of a new kind of war against an enemy
located, as he
told NBC’s
Meet the Press on September 30, 2001, “not
just in Afghanistan. It is in 50 or 60 countries
and it simply has to be liquidated. It has to
end. It has to go out of business.”
More than 15 years later, after a decade and a
half of forever war in the Greater Middle East
and parts of Africa, al-Qaeda and the
Taliban are
still in business, along with a set of new
enemies, including Boko Haram in Nigeria, Chad,
Niger, and Cameroon; al-Shabaab in Somalia; and
ISIS, which, if we are to believe the president
and his cronies, is pretty much everywhere,
including Mexico.
In a war against a tactic (terrorism) or an
emotion (terror), it’s hardly surprising that
our enemies have just kept proliferating, and
with them, the wars. It’s as if Washington were
constantly bringing jets,
drones, artillery, and firepower of every sort
to bear on a new set of Taurans in another
galaxy.
Decades before Haldeman’s Forever War,
George Orwell gave us an unforgettable portrait
of a society controlled by stoking permanent
hatred for a rotating cast of enemies. In
1984,
the countries of the world have coalesced into
three super-nations -- Oceania, Eurasia, and
Eastasia. Winston Smith, the novel’s
protagonist, recalls that, since his childhood,
“war had been literally continuous, though
strictly speaking it had not always been the
same war.” Smith joins thousands of other
citizens of Oceania in their celebration of Hate
Week and observes the slick substitution of one
enemy for another on the sixth day of that week:
“...when
the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and
the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into
such delirium that if the crowd could have got
their hands on the two thousand Eurasian
war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged on
the last day of the proceedings, they would
unquestionably have torn them to pieces -- at
just this moment it had been announced that
Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia.
Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an
ally.”
Except
that there is no actual announcement. Rather,
the Party spokesman makes the substitution in
mid-oration:
“The
speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty
minutes when a messenger hurried onto the
platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into
the speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read it
without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered
in his voice or manner, or in the content of
what he was saying, but suddenly the names were
different. Without words said, a wave of
understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania
was at war with Eastasia!
And it
had always been thus. “Oceania was at war with
Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with
Eastasia.”
1984
is,
of course, a novel. In our perfectly real
country, human memories work better than they do
in Orwell’s Oceania. Or do they? The United
States is at war with Iraq. The United States
has always been at war with Iraq. Except,
of course, when the United States sided with
Iraq in its vicious, generation-destroying
conflict with Iran in the 1980s. Who today
remembers Ronald Reagan’s “tilt
toward Iraq”
and against Iran? They’re so confusing, those
two four-letter countries that start with “I.”
Who can keep them straight, even now that we’ve
tilted back toward what’s left of Iraq -- Trump
has even
removed it from
his latest version of his Muslim ban list -- and
threateningly
against Iran?
Many Americans do seem to adapt to a revolving
enemies list as easily as the citizens of
Oceania. Every few years, I ask my college
students where the terrorists who flew the
planes on 9/11 came from. At the height of the
(second and still unfinished) Iraq War, when
many of them had brothers, sisters, lovers, even
fathers fighting there, my students were certain
the attackers had all been Iraqis. A few years
later, when the “real men” were
trying to gin
up a new opportunity to “go
to Tehran,” my
students were just as sure the terrorists had
been from Iran. I haven’t asked in a couple of
years now. I wonder whether today I’d hear that
they were from Syria, or maybe that new country,
the Islamic State?
I
don’t blame my students for not knowing that the
9/11 attackers included 15 Saudis, two men from
the United Arab Emirates (UAE), one Egyptian,
and one Lebanese. It’s not a fact that’s much
trumpeted anymore. You certainly wouldn’t guess
it from where
our military aid
and American-made weaponry goes. After
Afghanistan ($3.67 billion) and Israel ($3.1
billion), Egypt is the next largest recipient of
that aid at $1.31 billion in 2015.
Of course, military aid to other countries is a
windfall for U.S. arms manufacturers. Like food
money and other forms of foreign aid from
Washington, the countries receiving it are often
obligated to spend it on American products. In
other words, much military “aid” is actually a
back-door subsidy to companies like Boeing and
Lockheed Martin. Being wealthy oil states, the
Saudis and the UAE, of course, don’t need
subsidies. They buy their U.S. arms with their
own money -- $3.3 billion and $1.3 billion worth
of purchases respectively in 2015. And they’re
putting that weaponry to use, with U.S.
connivance and -- yes, it should make your head
spin in an Orwellian fashion -- occasional
support from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,
by
taking sides in
a civil war in Yemen. U.S.-made fighter planes
and cluster bombs have put more than seven
million Yemenis in
imminent danger
of starvation.
War
Without End, When Did You Begin?
When
did our forever war begin? When did we start to
think of the president as commander-in-chief
first, and executor of the laws passed by
Congress only a distant second?
Was it after 9/11? Was it during that first Iraq
war that spanned a few months of 1990 and 1991?
Or was it even earlier, during the glorious
invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada
in 1983, codenamed Operation Urgent Fury? That
was the first time the military intentionally --
and successfully -- kept the press sequestered
from the action for the first 48 hours of that
short-lived war. They did the same thing in
1989, with the under-reported invasion of
Panama, when somewhere between 500 and 3,500
Panamanians died so that the United States could
kidnap and try an erstwhile
ally and CIA asset,
the unsavory dictator of that country, Manuel
Noriega.
Or was
it even earlier? The Cold War was certainly a
kind of forever war, one that began before World
War II ended, as the United States used its
atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to, as
we now say, “send a message” to the Soviet
Union. And it didn’t end until that empire
imploded in 1991.
Maybe it began when Congress first abdicated its
constitutional right and authority to declare
war and allowed the executive branch to usurp
that power. The Korean War (1950-1953) was never
declared. Nor were the Vietnam War, the Grenada
invasion, the Panama invasion, the Afghan War,
the first and second Iraq wars, the Libyan war,
or any of the wars we’re presently involved in.
Instead of outright declarations, we’ve had
weasely, after-the-fact congressional approvals,
or
Authorizations for the Use of Military Force,
that fall short of actual declarations of war.
The
framers of the Constitution understood how
important it was to place the awesome
responsibility for declaring war in the hands of
the legislative branch -- of, that is, a
deliberative body elected by the people --
leaving the decision on war neither to the
president nor the military. Indeed, one of the
charges listed against King George III in the
Declaration of Independence was: “He has
affected to render the Military independent of
and superior to the Civil power.”
Thomas
Jefferson, John Adams, and the others who met in
the stifling heat of that 1776 Philadelphia
summer, close enough to battle to hear the boom
of British cannons, decided they could no longer
abide a king who allowed the military to
dominate a duly constituted civil government.
For all their many faults, they were brave men
who, even with war upon them, recognized the
danger of a government controlled by those whose
sole business is war.
Since 9/11, this country has experienced at
least 15 years of permanent war in distant
lands. Washington is now a war capital. The
president is, first and foremost, the
commander-in-chief. The power of the expanding
military (as well as paramilitary intelligence
services and drone assassination forces, not to
mention for-profit military contractors of all
sorts) is emphatically in presidential hands.
Those
hands, much
discussed in the 2016 election campaign, are now
Donald Trump’s and, as he indicated in his
recent address to Congress, he seems hell-bent
on restoring the military to the superiority it
enjoyed under King George. That is a danger of
the first order.
Rebecca Gordon, a
TomDispatch regular,
teaches in the philosophy department at the
University of San Francisco. She is the author
of
American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who
Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes.
Her previous books include Mainstreaming
Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11
United States and Letters from
Nicaragua.
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Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2017 Rebecca Gordon
