Washington’s Military Addiction
And The Ruins Still to Come
By Tom Engelhardt
May 13, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Tom
Dispatch" -
There are the news stories that
genuinely surprise you, and then there
are the ones that you could write in
your sleep before they happen. Let me
concoct an example for you:
“Top American and European military
leaders are weighing options to step
up the fight against the Islamic
State in the Mideast, including
possibly sending more U.S. forces
into Iraq, Syria, and Libya, just as
Washington confirmed the second
American combat casualty in Iraq in
as many months.”
Oh
wait, that was actually the lead
sentence in a May 3rd Washington
Times
piece by Carlo Muñoz. Honestly,
though, it could have been written
anytime in the last few months by just
about anyone paying any attention
whatsoever, and it surely will prove
reusable in the months to come (with
casualty figures altered, of course).
The sad truth is that across the Greater
Middle East and expanding parts of
Africa, a similar set of lines could be
written ahead of time about the use of
Special Operations forces, drones,
advisers, whatever, as could the sorry
results of making such moves in [add the
name of your country of choice here].
Put another way, in a Washington that
seems incapable of doing anything but
worshiping at the temple of the U.S.
military, global policymaking has become
a remarkably mindless military-first
process of
repetition. It’s as if, as problems
built up in your life, you looked in the
closet marked “solutions” and the only
thing you could ever see was one
hulking, over-armed soldier, whom you
obsessively let loose, causing yet more
damage.
How Much, How Many, How Often, and How
Destructively
In
Iraq and Syria, it’s been mission creep
all the way. The
B-52s barely made it to the battle
zone for the first time and were almost
instantaneously in the air, attacking
Islamic State militants. U.S. firebases
are built
ever closer to the front lines. The
number of special ops forces continues
to
edge up. American weapons flow in
(ending up in god knows whose
hands). American trainers and
advisers follow in ever increasing
numbers, and those numbers are
repeatedly
fiddled with to deemphasize how many
of them are actually there. The
private contractors begin to arrive
in numbers never to be counted. The
local forces being trained or
retrained have their
usual problems in
battle. American troops and
advisers who were
never, never going to be “in combat”
or “boots on the ground” themselves now
have their boots distinctly on the
ground in
combat situations. The first
American casualties are
dribbling in. Meanwhile, conditions
in tottering Iraq and the former nation
of Syria grow ever murkier, more
chaotic, and less amenable by the week
to any solution American officials might
care for.
And the response to all this in
present-day Washington?
You know perfectly well what the sole
imaginable response can be: sending in
yet more weapons, boots, air power,
special ops types, trainers,
advisers, private contractors, drones,
and funds to increasingly chaotic
conflict zones across significant swaths
of the planet. Above all, there can be
no serious thought, discussion, or
debate about how such a militarized
approach to our world might have
contributed to, and continues to
contribute to, the very problems it was
meant to solve. Not in our nation’s
capital, anyway.
The only questions to be argued about
are how much, how many, how often, and
how destructively. In other words, the
only “antiwar” position imaginable in
Washington, where accusations of
weakness or wimpishness are a dime a
dozen and considered lethal to a
political career, is how much less of
more we can afford, militarily speaking,
or how much more of somewhat less we can
settle for when it comes to militarized
death and destruction. Never, of
course, is a genuine version of less or
a none-at-all option really on that “table”
where, it’s said, all policy options are
kept.
Think of this as Washington’s military
addiction in action. We’ve been
watching it for
almost 15 years without drawing any
of the obvious conclusions. And lest
you imagine that “addiction” is just a
figure of speech, it isn’t.
Washington’s attachment -- financial,
tactical, and strategic -- to the U.S.
military and its supposed solutions to
more or less all problems in what used
to be called “foreign policy” should by
now be categorized as addictive.
Otherwise, how can you explain the last
decade and a half in which
no military action from Afghanistan
to Iraq, Yemen to Libya worked out
half-well in the long run (or even,
often enough, in the short run), and yet
the U.S. military
remains the option of first, not
last, resort in just about any
imaginable situation? All this in a
vast region in which
failed states are piling up, nations
are disintegrating, terror insurgencies
are spreading, humongous population
upheavals are becoming the norm, and
there are
refugee flows of a sort not seen
since significant parts of the planet
were destroyed during World War II.
Either we’re talking addictive behavior
or failure is the new success.
Keep in mind, for instance, that the
president who came into office swearing
he would end a disastrous war and
occupation in Iraq is now overseeing a
new war in an even wider region that
includes Iraq, a country that is
no longer quite a country, and
Syria, a country that is now officially
kaput. Meanwhile, in the other war he
inherited, Barack Obama almost
immediately launched a military-backed
“surge” of U.S. forces, the only real
argument being over whether
40,000 (or even as many as
80,000) new U.S. troops would be
sent into Afghanistan or, as the
“antiwar” president finally decided, a
mere 30,000 (which made him an absolute
wimp to his opponents). That was 2009.
Part of that surge involved an
announcement that the withdrawal of
American combat forces would begin in
2011. Seven years later, that
withdrawal has once again been
halted in favor of what the military
has taken to privately calling a “generational
approach” -- that is, U.S. forces
remaining in Afghanistan into at least
the 2020s.
The military term “withdrawal” may,
however, still be appropriate even if
the troops are staying in place. After
all, as with addicts of any sort, the
military ones in Washington can’t go
cold turkey without experiencing painful
symptoms of withdrawal. In American
political culture, these manifest
themselves in charges of “weakness” when
it comes to “national security” that
could prove devastating in the next
election. That’s why those running for
office compete with one another in
over-the-top descriptions of what they
will do to enemies and terrorists (from
acts of
torture to
carpet-bombing) and in even more
over-the-top
promises of “rebuilding”
or “strengthening” what’s already the
largest, most expensive military on the
planet, a force better funded at present
than those of at least the next
seven nations combined.
Such promises, the bigger the better,
are now a necessity if you happen to be
a Republican candidate for president.
The Democrats have a lesser but similar
set of options available, which is why
even Bernie Sanders
only calls for holding the Pentagon
budget at its present staggering level
or for the
most modest of cuts, not for
reducing it significantly. And even
when, for instance, the urge to rein in
military expenses did sweep Washington
as part of an overall urge to cut back
government expenses, it only resulted in
a half-secret
slush fund or “war budget” that kept
the goodies flowing in.
These should all be taken as symptoms of
Washington’s military addiction and of
what happens when the slightest signs of
withdrawal set in. The U.S. military is
visibly the drug of choice in the
American political arena and, as is only
appropriate for the force that has,
since 2002,
funded, armed, and propped up the
planet’s
largest supplier of opium, once
you’re hooked, there’s no shaking it.
Hawkish Washington
Recently, in the New York Times
Magazine, journalist Mark Landler
offered a political portrait
entitled “How Hillary Clinton Became
a Hawk.” He laid out just how the
senator and later secretary of state
remade herself as, essentially, a
military groupie, fawning over
commanders or former commanders ranging
from then-General David Petraeus to Fox
analyst and retired general Jack Keane;
how, that is, she became a figure, even
on the present political landscape,
notable for her “appetite for military
engagement abroad” (and as a
consequence, well-defended against
Republican charges of “weakness”).
There’s no reason, however, to pin the
war-lover or “last true hawk” label on
her alone, not in present-day
Washington. After all, just about
everyone there wants a piece of the
action. During their primary season
debates, for instance, a number of the
Republican candidates
spoke repeatedly about building up
the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the
Mediterranean, while making that already
growing force sound like a set of
decrepit barges.
To
offer another example, no presidential
candidate these days could afford to
reject the White House-run drone
assassination program. To be
assassin-in-chief is now considered
as much a part of the presidential job
description as commander-in-chief, even
though the drone program, like so many
other militarized foreign policy
operations these days,
shows little sign of
reining in terrorism despite the
number of “bad guys” and terror “leaders”
it kills (along with
significant numbers of
civilian bystanders). To take
Bernie Sanders as an example -- because
he’s as close to an antiwar candidate as
you’ll find in the present election
season -- he recently
put something like his
stamp of approval on the White House
drone assassination project and the “kill
list” that goes with it.
Mind you, there is simply no compelling
evidence that the usual military
solutions have worked or are likely to
work in any imaginable sense in the
present conflicts across the Greater
Middle East and Africa. They have
clearly, in fact, played a major role in
the creation of the present disaster,
and yet there is no place at all in our
political system for genuinely antiwar
figures (as there was in the Vietnam
era, when a massive
antiwar movement created space for
such politics). Antiwar opinions and
activities have now been driven to the
peripheries of the political system
along with a word like, say, “peace,”
which you will be hard-pressed to find,
even rhetorically, in the language of
“wartime” Washington.
The Look of “Victory”
If
a history were to be written of how the
U.S. military became Washington’s drug
of choice, it would undoubtedly have to
begin in the Cold War era. It was,
however, in the prolonged moment of
triumphalism that followed the Soviet
Union’s implosion in 1991 that the
military gained its present position of
unquestioned dominance.
In
those days, people were still
speculating about whether the country
would reap a “peace dividend” from the
end of the Cold War. If there was ever a
moment when the diversion of money from
the U.S. military and the national
security state to domestic concerns
might have seemed like a no-brainer,
that was it. After all, except for a
couple of rickety “rogue states” like
North Korea or Saddam Hussein's Iraq,
where exactly were this country’s
enemies to be found? And why should
such a muscle-bound military continue to
gobble up tax dollars at such a
staggering rate in a reasonably
peaceable world?
In
the decade or so that followed, however,
Washington’s dreams turned out to run in
a very different direction -- toward a
“war dividend” at a moment when the U.S.
had, by more or less universal
agreement, become the planet’s “sole
superpower.” The crew who entered the
White House with George W. Bush in a
deeply contested election in 2000 had
already been
mainlining the military drug for
years. To them, this seemed a planet
ripe for the taking. When 9/11 hit, it
loosed their dreams of conquest and
control, and their
faith in a military that they
believed to be unstoppable. Of course,
given the previous century of successful
anti-imperial and national independence
movements, anyone should have known
that, no matter the armaments at hand,
resistance was an inescapable reality on
Planet Earth.
Thanks to such predictable resistance,
the drug-induced imperial dreamscape of
the Busheviks would prove a fantasy of
the first order, even if, in that
post-9/11 moment, it passed for bedrock
(neo)realism. If you remember, the U.S.
was to “take
the gloves off” and release a
military machine so beyond compare that
nothing would be capable of standing in
its path. So the dream went, so the
drug spoke. Don’t forget that the
greatest military blunder (and crime) of
this century, the invasion of Iraq,
wasn’t supposed to be the end of
something, but merely its beginning.
With Iraq in hand and garrisoned,
Washington was to take down Iran and
sweep up what Russian property from the
Cold War era still remained in the
Middle East. (Think: Syria.)
A
decade and a half later, those dreams
have been shattered, and yet the drug
still courses through the bloodstream,
the military bands play on, and the
march to... well, who knows where...
continues. In a way, of course, we do
know where (to the extent that we
humans, with our limited sense of the
future, can know anything). In a way,
we’ve already been shown a spectacle of
what “victory” might look like once the
Greater Middle East is finally
“liberated” from the Islamic State.
The descriptions of one widely hailed
victory over that brutal crew in
Iraq -- the liberation of the city of
Ramadi by a U.S.-trained elite Iraqi
counterterrorismforce backed by
artillery and American air power -- are
devastating. Aided and abetted by
Islamic State militants igniting or
demolishing whole neighborhoods of that
city, the look of Ramadi retaken should
give us a grim sense of where the region
is heading. Here’s how the Associated
Press
recently described the scene, four
months after the city fell:
“This is what victory looks like...:
in the once thriving Haji Ziad
Square, not a single structure still
stands. Turning in every direction
yields a picture of devastation. A
building that housed a pool hall and
ice cream shops -- reduced to
rubble. A row of money changers and
motorcycle repair garages --
obliterated, a giant bomb crater in
its place. The square’s Haji Ziad
Restaurant, beloved for years by
Ramadi residents for its grilled
meats -- flattened. The restaurant
was so popular its owner built a
larger, fancier branch across the
street three years ago. That, too,
is now a pile of concrete and
twisted iron rods.
“The destruction extends to nearly
every part of Ramadi, once home to 1
million people and now virtually
empty.”
Keep in mind that, with oil prices still
deeply depressed, Iraq essentially has
no money to rebuild Ramadi or anyplace
else. Now imagine, as such “victories”
multiply, versions of similar
devastation spreading across the
region.
In
other words, one likely end result of
the thoroughly militarized process that
began with the invasion of Iraq (if not
of Afghanistan) is already visible: a
region shattered and in ruins,
filled with uprooted and impoverished
people. In such circumstances, it may
not even matter if the Islamic State is
defeated. Just imagine what Mosul,
Iraq’s second largest city and still in
the Islamic State's hands, will be like
if, someday, the long-promised offensive
to liberate it is ever truly launched.
Now, try to imagine that movement itself
destroyed, with its “capital,” Raqqa,
turned into another set of ruins, and
remind me: What exactly is likely to
emerge from such a future nightmare?
Nothing, I suspect, that is likely to
cheer up anyone in Washington.
And what should be done about all this?
You already know Washington’s solution
-- more of the same -- and breaking such
a cycle of addiction is difficult even
under the best of circumstances.
Unfortunately, at the moment there is no
force, no movement on the American scene
that could open up space for such a
possibility. No matter who is elected
president, you already know more or less
what American “policy” is going to be.
But don’t bother to blame the
politicians and national security nabobs
in Washington for this. They’re
addicts. They can’t help themselves.
What they need is rehab. Instead, they
continue to run our world. Be suitably
scared for the ruins still to come.