War, in short, is the
great simplifier -- and it may even work
when you’re fighting existential
military threats (as in World War II).
But it doesn’t work when you define
every problem as an existential one and
then make war on complex societal
problems (crime, poverty, drugs) or
ideas and religious beliefs (radical
Islam).
America’s
Omnipresent War Ethos
Consider the Afghan
War -- not the one in the 1980s when
Washington funneled money and arms to
the fundamentalist Mujahideen to inflict
on the Soviet Union a Vietnam-style
quagmire, but the more recent phase that
began soon after 9/11. Keep in mind
that what launched it were those attacks
by 19 hijackers (15 of whom were Saudi
nationals) representing a modest-sized
organization lacking the slightest
resemblance to a nation, state, or
government. There was as well, of
course, the fundamentalist Taliban
movement that then controlled much of
Afghanistan. It had emerged from the
rubble of our previous war there and had
provided support and sanctuary, though
somewhat grudgingly, to Osama bin
Laden.
With images of those
collapsing towers in New York burned
into America’s collective consciousness,
the idea that the U.S. might respond
with an international “policing” action
aimed at taking criminals off the global
streets was instantly banished from
discussion. What arose in the minds of
the Bush administration’s top officials
instead was vengeance via a full-scale,
global, and
generational “war on terror.” Its
thoroughly militarized goal was not just
to eliminate al-Qaeda but
any terror outfits anywhere on
Earth, even as the U.S. embarked on a
full-fledged experiment in violent
nation building in Afghanistan. More
than 13 dismal years later, that Afghan
War-cum-experiment is ongoing at
staggering expense and with the most
disappointing of results.
While the mindset of
global war was gaining traction, the
Bush administration launched its
invasion of Iraq. The most
technologically advanced military on
Earth, one that the president termed
“the greatest force for human liberation
the world has ever known,” was set loose
to bring “democracy” and a Pax
Americana to the Middle East.
Washington had, of course, been in
conflict with Iraq since Operation
Desert Storm in 1990-1991, but what
began as the equivalent of a military
coup (aka a “decapitation”
operation) by an outside power, an
attempt to overthrow Saddam Hussein and
eliminate his armed forces and party,
soon morphed into a prolonged occupation
and another political and social
experiment in violent nation-building.
As with Afghanistan, the Iraq experiment
with war is still ongoing at enormous
expense and with even more disastrous
results.
Radical Islam has
drawn strength from these American-led
“wars.” Indeed, radical Islamists cite
the intrusive and apparently
permanent presence of American
troops and bases in the Middle East and
Central Asia as confirmation of their
belief that U.S. forces are leading a
crusade against them -- and by extension
against Islam itself. (And in a
revealing
slip of the tongue, President Bush
did indeed once call his war on terror a
“crusade.”) Considered in these terms,
such a war is by definition a losing
effort because each “success” only
strengthens the narrative of
Washington’s enemies. There’s simply no
way to win such a war except by stopping
it. Yet that course of action is
never on the proverbial “table” of
options from which officials in
Washington are said to choose their
strategies. To do so, in the context of
war thinking, would mean to admit defeat
(even though true defeat arrived the
very instant the problem was first
defined as war).
Our leaders persist in
such violent folly at least in part
because they fear the admission of
defeat above all else. After all,
nothing is more pejorative in American
politics or culture than to be labeled a
loser in war, someone who “cuts and
runs.”
In the 1960s, despite
his own
serious misgivings about the ongoing
conflict in Vietnam, President Lyndon B.
Johnson set the gold standard in his
determination not to be the first
American president to lose a war,
especially in a “damn
little pissant country” like
Vietnam. So he persisted -- and the
conflict turned him into a loser anyway
and destroyed his presidency.
Even as he waged war,
as historian George Herring
has noted, LBJ did not want to be
known as a “war president.” Two
generations later, another Texan, George
W. Bush, grasped the “war president”
moniker with genuine
enthusiasm. He, too, vowed he would
win his war when things started to go
sour. Staring down a growing insurgency
in Iraq in the summer of 2003, Bush did
not shy from the challenge. “Bring
‘em on,” he said in what was
supposed to be a Clint Eastwood/Dirty
Harry-style
moment. Now, Washington is sending
troops
back into Iraq for the third time to
engage an even more intractable
insurgency, the Islamic State's radical
version of Islam, a movement originally
fed and bred partly in
Camp Bucca, an American military
prison in Iraq.
And just to set the
record straight, President Obama, too,
accepted the preeminence of war in
American policy in his 2009 Nobel Prize
acceptance speech in Oslo. There,
he offered a stirring defense of
America’s role and record as “the
world’s sole military superpower”:
“Whatever mistakes we
have made, the plain fact is this: the
United States of America has helped
underwrite global security for more than
six decades with the blood of our
citizens and the strength of our arms.
The service and sacrifice of our men and
women in uniform has promoted peace and
prosperity from Germany to Korea, and
enabled democracy to take hold in places
like the Balkans. We have borne this
burden not because we seek to impose our
will. We have done so out of enlightened
self-interest -- because we seek a
better future for our children and
grandchildren, and we believe that their
lives will be better if other peoples'
children and grandchildren can live in
freedom and prosperity.”
It was a moment that
defined the Obama presidency as being
remarkably in tune with America’s
already omnipresent war ethos. It was
the very negation of “hope” and “change”
and the beginning of Obama’s transition,
via the CIA’s drone assassination
program, into the role of
assassin-in-chief.
Everything Is
Jihad
Recent American
leaders have something in common with
their extremist Islamic counterparts:
all of them define everything,
implicitly or explicitly, as a jihad, a
crusade, a holy war. But the violent
methods used in pursuit of various
jihads, whether Islamic or secular,
simply serve to perpetuate and often
aggravate the struggle.
Think of America’s
numerous so-called wars and consider if
there’s been any measurable progress
made in any of them. Lyndon Johnson
declared a “war on poverty” in 1964.
Fifty-one years later, there are still
startling numbers of desperately poor
people and, in this century, the gap
between the poorest many and richest few
has widened to a chasm. (Since the days
of President Ronald Reagan, in fact, one
might speak of a war on the poor, not
poverty.)
Drugs? Forty-four years after
President Richard Nixon proclaimed the
war on drugs, there are still millions
in jail, billions being spent, and drugs
galore on the streets of American
cities.
Terror? Thirteen years and counting
after that “war” was launched, terror
groups, minor in numbers and reach in
2001, have proliferated wildly and there
is now something like a “caliphate” --
once an Osama bin Laden fantasy -- in
the Middle East: ISIS in power in parts
of Iraq and Syria, al-Qaeda
on the rise in Yemen, Libya
destabilized and divvied up among ever
more extreme outfits, innocents still
dying in U.S.
drone strikes.
Afghanistan? The opium trade has
rebounded big time, the Taliban is
resurgent, and the region is being
destabilized.
Iraq? A cauldron of ethnic and
religious rivalries and hatreds, with
more U.S. weaponry on the way to
fuel the killing, in a country that
functionally no longer exists. The only
certainty in most of these American
“wars” is their violent continuation,
even when their original missions lie in
tatters.
The very methods the
U.S. employs and the mentality its
leaders adopt ensure their
perpetuation. Why? Because drug
addiction and abuse can’t be conquered
by waging a war. Neither can poverty.
Neither can terror. Neither can radical
Islam be defeated through armed nation
building. Indeed, radical Islam thrives
on the very war conditions that
Washington helps to create. By fighting
in the now familiar fashion, you merely
fan its flames and ensure its
propagation.
It’s the mindset that
matters. In places like Iraq and
Afghanistan, places that for most
Americans exist only within a "war"
matrix, the U.S. invades or attacks,
gets stuck, throws resources at the
problem indiscriminately, and "makes a
desert and calls it 'peace'" (to quote
the Roman historian Tacitus). After
which our leaders act surprised as hell
when the problem only grows.
Sadly, the song
remains monotonously the same in
America: more wars, made worse by
impatience for results driven by each
new election cycle. It’s a formula in
which the country is eternally fated to
lose.
Two Curious
Features of America’s New Wars
Historically, when a
nation declares war, it does so to
mobilize national will, as the U.S.
clearly did in World War II.
Accompanying our wars of recent decades,
however, has been an urge not to
mobilize the people, but
demobilize them -- even as
the "experts" are empowered to fight and
taxpayer funds pour into the national
security state and the
military-industrial complex to keep the
conflicts going.
Recent wars, whether
on drugs or in the Greater Middle East,
are never presented as a challenge we
the people can address and solve
together, but as something only those
who allegedly possess the expertise and
credentials -- and the weapons -- can
figure out or fight. George W. Bush
summed up this mindset in classic
fashion after 9/11 when he urged
Americans
to go shopping and visit Disney
World and leave the fighting to the
pros. War, in short, has become yet
another form of social control. Have a
gun or a badge of some sort and you can
speak forcefully and be listened to;
otherwise, you have no say.
In addition, what
makes America’s new wars unique to our
moment is that they never have a
discernible endpoint. For what
constitutes “victory” over drugs or
terror? Once started, these wars by
definition are hard to stop.
Cynics may claim
there’s nothing new here. Hasn’t
America always been at war? Haven’t we
always been a violent people? There’s
truth in this. But at least Americans
of my grandfather’s and father’s
generation didn’t define themselves by
war.
What America needs
right now is a 12-step program to break
the urge to feed further our national
addiction to war. The starting point
for Washington -- and Americans more
generally -- would obviously have to be
taking that first step and confessing
that we have a problem we alone can’t
solve. "Hi, I’m Uncle Sam and I’m a
war-oholic. Yes, I’m addicted to war.
I know it’s destructive to myself and
others. But I can’t stop -- not without
your help."
True change often
begins with confession. With humility.
With an admission that not everything is
within one’s control, no matter how
violently one rages; indeed, that
violent rage only aggravates the
problem. America needs to make such a
confession. Only then can we begin to
wean ourselves off war.
William J. Astore,
a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), is
a TomDispatch
regular. He edits the
blog The
Contrary Perspective.
Follow TomDispatch
on Twitter and join us on
Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Tomorrow’s
Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret
Ops in Africa, and Tom
Engelhardt's latest book,
Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret
Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 William
J. Astore
