Whacking Self-Sown Weeds

by Gaius Publius

In a nice piece at TomGram ("On Seeing America’s Wars Whole: Six Questions for A.G. Sulzberger," h/t Naked Capitalism) Andrew Bacevich takes the new editor of the New York Times to task for not adequately covering America's endless war in the Muslim (and increasingly, the African) world:

I ... want to suggest that obsessing about this administration’s stupefying tomfoolery finds the Times overlooking one particular issue that predates and transcends the Trump Moment. That issue is the normalization of armed conflict, with your writers, editors, and editorial board having tacitly accepted that, for the United States, war has become a permanent condition.

Bacevich doesn't fault the Times for not covering these events, but for failing to connect the dots, something it never fails to do when covering Russian adventures abroad.

The Shape of the Forever War

What struck me most about the piece, however, were the dots themselves. Displayed as he displays them, they seem to connect themselves:

* Over 6,000 days after it began, America’s war in Afghanistan continues, with Times correspondents providing regular and regularly repetitive updates;

* In the seven-year-long civil war that has engulfed Syria, the ever-shifting cast of belligerents now includes at least 2,000 (some sources say 4,000) U.S. special operators, the rationale for their presence changing from week to week, even as plans to keep U.S. troops in Syria indefinitely take shape;

* In Iraq, now liberated from ISIS, itself a byproduct of U.S. invasion and occupation, U.S. troops are now poised to stay on, more or less as they did in West Germany in 1945 and in South Korea after 1953;

* On the Arabian Peninsula, U.S. forces have partnered with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud in brutalizing Yemen, thereby creating a vast humanitarian disaster despite the absence of discernible U.S. interests at stake;

* In the military equivalent of whacking self-sown weeds, American drones routinely attack Libyan militant groups that owe their existence to the chaos created in 2011 when the United States impulsively participated in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi;

* More than a quarter-century after American troops entered Somalia to feed the starving, the U.S. military mission continues, presently in the form of recurring airstrikes;

* Elsewhere in Africa, the latest theater to offer opportunities for road-testing the most recent counterterrorism techniques, the U.S. military footprint is rapidly expanding, all but devoid of congressional (or possibly any other kind of) oversight;

* From the Levant to South Asia, a flood of American-manufactured weaponry continues to flow unabated, to the delight of the military-industrial complex, but with little evidence that the arms we sell or give away are contributing to regional peace and stability;

* Amid this endless spiral of undeclared American wars and conflicts, Congress stands by passively, only rousing itself as needed to appropriate money that ensures the unimpeded continuation of all of the above;

* Meanwhile, President Trump, though assessing all of this military hyperactivity as misbegotten -- “Seven trillion dollars. What a mistake.” -- is effectively perpetuating and even ramping up the policies pioneered by his predecessors.

Emphasizing Bacevich's main point, Tom Engelhardt asks us in his introduction to "imagine what kind of coverage [Russia] would be getting if, almost 17 years after it had launched a 'Global War on Terrorism,' Russian troops, special operations forces, airplanes, and drones were still in action in at least eight countries across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Niger, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen".

I can't get past that list, however. It's stunning in its scope. From it I draw a different set of conclusions.

Liking What Trump Is Doing; Wishing Someone Else Were Doing It

As Bacevich points out, we're "whacking self-sown weeds." The implications are frightening. My takeaways:

• The entire Establishment is waging this global war. With bipartisan consent we'll be at war forever unless a truly peace-minded, anti-Establishment candidate is elected president, and even then he risks being brought back down by the government that answers to him, elected or not. With respect to war policy, Sanders is such a candidate, perhaps, and there may be others. Yet no one else of his popular stature and appeal, with his authenticity and viability, has yet emerged.

• The Washington elites are crazy if we view them through the lens of their own words. To decry Trump as in the pocket of Russia one minute...

Pelosi: “What do the Russians have on Donald Trump … that he’s always catering to them?" #PelosiTownHall https://t.co/cxrMaXuJLm

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) May 16, 2017

and increase his domestic spying powers in the next...

55 Democrats voted against your constitutional rights and opposed the USA RIGHTS amendment. Had 26 voted the other way, we would have won. Among them is Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff. pic.twitter.com/7WHwPFGEIm

— Daniel Schuman (@danielschuman) January 11, 2018

is crazy by that measure.

For another, simpler explanation, consider this: It isn't crazy logic that drives them, but calculated hypocrisy. Why hypocrisy? Because...

• Leaders of the ruling bipartisan consensus like most of what Trump is doing; they just want someone else doing it. Perhaps Pence, to choose just one.

Enough Democrats were ambivalent about the Trump tax cuts, for example, that they campaigned softly (and ineffectively) against it, unlike their vigorous (and effective) campaign to protect their president's signature achievement, Obamacare.

Enough Democrats voted for former Eli Lilly president Alex Azar to run HHS to get him confirmed.

And enough Democrats will vote for torturer Gina Haspel as CIA director to make the confirmation bipartisan. After all, 14 Senate Democrats (plus Angus King) voted to confirm pro-torture Mike Pompeo as CIA chief, and Pompeo almost immediately appointed Haspel as his deputy. No one in DC wants to piss off the CIA. As Chuck Schumer noted, it would take a fool to do it. (Trump, at one time, was such a fool. Now, not so much.)

Will the next round of power-holding Democrats keep us out of war and take the CIA out of the torture business? It's fair to be extremely doubtful.

It's therefore fair to conclude this war will last forever, will be waged at our will, where and as long as we choose. It's also fair to ask: Is forever war, fought forever abroad, a stable new world order? Or failing to be reduced, will it expand and come home?

The Weeds Whack Back

A prediction: This war will come back to bite us. It will come back home to the shopping malls, airports, schools and hospitals of America. Not just the large, big-city ones, but the regional ones as well, those in the "heartland" where live the solid citizens who blissfully rubber-stamp everything the bipartisan war-making leaders want to do.

After all, with a volunteer (undrafted) army deployed abroad and just "lone gunmen" at home to be troubled about, why should heartlanders care about foreign deaths, so long as their fossil fuel–iPhone lifestyle is provided for? When the combatants stop looking like lone gunmen, however, and start looking more like the organized terrorizing warriors we've become overseas, perhaps they'll care then.

But caring, if it comes, will come too late. A non-military government, in substance already lost, will be lost in form as well. The next new American state will be born, a naked military one, but c'est la guerre as they say: It can't be helped.

The implications of that next change, including the implications for climate change mitigation, have a world-historical shape. Life in the "homeland" will be very much different from this one, if or when the U.S. military starts to fight the forever war here like it's fighting it abroad. Teasing out the shape of that new American state is beyond the scope of this piece, but your imagination may suffice to paint the picture.

GP
 

Cheney, Wolfowitz, Kagan And Other Of America's Enemies Are Emboldened And On The March

I don't know anyone who was a Saddam Hussein fan… but I've never been to Iraq. In fact, I always avoided the place. Even in the '60s and '70s when I traveled a lot in that part of the world, I did all I could to avoid Iraq, spending my time lolling around Trabzon, Ezurum and Van in Turkey (much of it, without any real paved roads, having just been opened to foreigners for the first time since 1925) and Tabriz and Zanjan in Iran, to avoid the dubious allure of Baghdad (where the Ba'athists had just taken over). When I was traveling in the area, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr was in charge of Iraq and the Shah was still firmly on the Peacock Throne in Iran. Saddam didn't really take power until 1979, the same year Iran finally booted out the Shah and the parasites around him (who moved, en masse, to Beverly Hills).

Still, in 2006, when Rauf Rashid Abd al-Rahman, the chief judge for the kangaroo court the U.S. set up to execute Saddam, sentenced the Iraqi president to death, I felt a little queasy. There was just something about the U.S. invading a sovereign state under false pretexts and murdering the president (on the eve of the main Muslim religious festival Eid) and his sons that seemed a little on the barbaric and primitive side to me.

Last week, in northern Iraq, ISIS rebels and Ba'athists captured al-Rahman, who had recently served as Minister of Justice for Kurdistan. They executed him two days later. When I get a barbaric and primitive urge myself, I wonder what they would do to Dick Cheney-- and I wonder if I would be as reticent about it as I was about the murder of Saddam.

In the must-see video up top, Bill Moyers interviews respected military historian Andrew Bacevich about the war hysteria being drummed up again by sleazy neocon, Robert Kagan, a former advisor to 3 hawkish politicians who were all wrong about Iraq and have all earned the distrust of the American people: John McCain, Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton. Moyers wanted to discuss a recent article he wrote for Commonweal, The Duplicity of the Ideologues which was, in effect, a response to the deceitful warmongering Kagan was spouting last week at the neocon publication the New Republic, Superpowers Don't Get To Retire. Bacevich reminded his readers what Kagan does for a living: propaganda. He also told Moyers that "the most important thing the President has learned from his predecessor is that invading and occupying countries in the Islamic world is a pretty dumb idea. It leads to complications and enormous costs." Nice that Obama and Chuck Hagel have learned that lesson. Cheney and Kagan certainly haven't. Have Hillary and Kerry?

[B]ack in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the intellectual forebears of Robert Kagan decried this decision to cut American losses. Leaving implied the acceptance of failure. Such a failure, they insisted, would hand the Communists a great victory. U.S. credibility would suffer permanent damage. The Soviets would seize the initiative. Dominoes would topple. The United States would find itself isolated and alone.

None of those gloomy predictions-- similar in tone to Kagan’s own forecast of “increasing conflict, increasing wars over territory, greater ethnic and sectarian violence, and a shrinking world of democracies” as the inevitable price for any lapse in American globalism-- turned out to be accurate, of course.

Instead, the nation that Kagan describes as committed to doing “what no nation had ever been able to do” actually did what every great power does when it loses a war.  It licked its wounds and left it to others to lick their own. That the United States made next to no effort to aid the Vietnamese and others adversely affected by the war speaks volumes about the definition of “global responsibility” that actually prevailed in Washington. But however cynical, leaving-- more accurately abandoning-- South Vietnam turned out to be a smart move. Doing so facilitated this nation’s military, economic, and political recovery.

With the end of the Cold War, according to Kagan, Washington’s commitment to promoting a liberal world order reached new heights. The signature of U.S. foreign policy during the 1990s was renewed activism. A series of armed interventions ensued. “All aimed at defending and extending the liberal world order,” Kagan writes, “by toppling dictators, reversing coups, and attempting to restore democracies.”

As Hemingway’s Jake Barnes might put it, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” In fact, during the post-Cold War decade, with the Persian Gulf now the epicenter of U.S. military activity, “extending the liberal world order” lagged well behind other, more pressing considerations. Priority number one was to ensure the safety and well-being of the distinctly illiberal Saudi monarchy. Priority number two was to contain Shiite-majority Iran. Fear of delivering Sunni-controlled Iraq into the hands of its own Shiite majority muted U.S. enthusiasm for democratizing that country. If the choice was between stability and democracy, Washington preferred the former.

Still, if as Kagan regretfully notes (and recent polls affirm), Americans today show signs of being “world weary,” it’s not the events of the 1990s that have induced this weariness. No, if Americans appear disinclined to have a go at overthrowing Syria’s Assad or at restoring the Crimea to Ukrainian control, it’s due to their common-sense assessment of what U.S. policy in very recent years has produced.

…Back in 1996, in a famous Foreign Affairs article co-authored with William Kristol, Kagan identified “benign global hegemony” as the proper basis for U. S. policy. It was incumbent upon the United States to exploit its Cold War victory. Armed with a combination of “military supremacy and moral confidence,” Washington needed to put existing and potential adversaries in their place. The idea was “to make clear that it is futile to compete with American power.” Permanent dominion was the goal. To settle for anything less, Kagan and Kristol wrote, was to embrace “a policy of cowardice and dishonor.”

Even before September 11, 2001, Kagan was among those fixing their sights on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as the place to validate this approach. The events of 9/11 reinforced his determination along with his sense of self-assurance. Writing with Kristol in April 2002, he declared flatly that “the road that leads to real security and peace” is “the road that runs through Baghdad.”

George W. Bush took that road. Yet much to his considerable chagrin, Bush discovered that it led to rather considerable unpleasantness. As it dragged on, the Iraq War exposed as hollow any American aspirations to global hegemony. Left behind when U.S. troops finally withdrew was their reputation for military supremacy. Meanwhile as reports of prisoner abuse, torture, and the killing of noncombatants mounted, American moral confidence lost its luster. As for the Iraqis themselves, although few Americans are inclined to take notice, today they enjoy neither security nor peace.

On all of these matters, Kagan chooses to stay mum. That is his privilege, of course. Yet in exercising that privilege he forfeits any claim to be taken seriously. As with members of the Catholic hierarchy who hoped that the clergy sex abuse scandal would just blow over or investment bankers who shrug off the economic collapse of 2008 as just one of those things, without accountability there can be no credibility.

William Buckley once remarked that the country would be better off governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. Here’s a corollary: When it comes to foreign policy, the president of the United States would be better served to consult a few reasonably informed citizens from Muncie, Indiana, than to take seriously advice offered by seers such as Robert Kagan.

If experience has brought President Obama to share in this view-- as his recent ruminations on foreign policy appear to suggest-- then more power to him.

I have serious doubts that Hillary Clinton has learned anything at all, and I hope Democrats will demand she prove she has before handing her their party's presidential nomination. Her natural inclinations have always been more in line with Kagan's than Bacevich's. "My reading [of history] is of course there is evil in the world that needs to be taken into account and some time must be confronted," Bacevich told Moyers. "But let’s not kid ourselves: In somehow imagining that the United States represents all that is good and virtuous, we, ourselves, have committed many sins. And we ought to be cognizant of those sins before we go pronouncing about how the world ought to be run."

9/11 and the case for reality (Part 3): Are we a "peace-loving nation" or a nation committed to permanent war?

With the launch of "Operation Iraqi Freedom," former career military officer (now professor of international relations at Boston University) Andrew Bacevich has written: "Claims that once seemed elementary -- above all, claims relating to the essentially benign purposes of American power -- now appeared preposterous."


"I thought I knew a lot about war; even if Sherman was right that 'war is hell,' it was frequently necessary, we did it well, and -- whatever those misinformed peaceniks said -- we made the world a better place.

"But then I went to a war zone. . . ."

-- Jeremiah Goulka, in "Confessions of a Former Republican"

"All of my adult life I had been a company man, only dimly aware of the extent to which institutional loyalties induce myopia. Asserting independence required first recognizing the extent to which I had been socialized to accept certain things as unimpeachable. . . .

"George W. Bush's decision to launch Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 pushed me fully into opposition. Claims that once seemed elementary -- above all, claims relating to the essentially benign purposes of American power -- now appeared preposterous. The contradictions that found an ostensibly peace-loving nation committing itself to a doctrine of preventive war became too great to ignore. The folly and hubris of the policy makers who heedlessly thrust the nation into an ill-defined and open-ended 'global war on terror' without the foggiest notion of what victory would look like, how it would be won, and what it might cost approached standards hitherto achieved only by slightly mad German warlords."

-- Andrew Bacevich, in "The Unmaking of a Company Man"
(the introduction to his book Washington Rules:
America’s Path to Permanent War)

by Ken

Before the detour yesterday ("What makes Willard's thuggish imbecility on Libya different from his usual thuggish imbecility?") necessitated by the "Mutt" man's Mutt-ish outburst, I had intended to continue my "9/11 and the case for reality" series, in particular proceeding from Tuesday's Part 2, "The right-wing worldview has long coupled delusions with lies, not least in matters of 'national security.'"

In a sense, though, we were continuing the theme, because it wasn't just the "Mutt" man's terrifyingly outsize ignorance and cynicism on display ("I'll say any damn thing I have to to get what I friggin' want, which is to park my carcass in the Oval Office"). There was an actual strain of ideology embedded in the Muttster's thuggish reiteration of the view "America don't apologize, America kicks butt -- bring it on, suckuh!" Remember that many of the right-wing pols who were horrified by the "Mutt" man's orgy of self-indulgence objected not to the substance but to the manner of it -- to the politics rather than the "principle." (Sorry, I have to put quotes around "principle.")

This is the very mindset we were talking about Tuesday, drawing on testimony from two reformed right-wingers who have told their conversion stories in Tomgrams from Tom Engelhardt's TomDispatch.com: Andrew Bacevich ("How Washington Rules," from 2010 -- in the form of the introduction to his book, as noted above) and Jeremiah Goulka ("Confessions of a Former Republican," from a couple of weeks ago). "What both men are talking about," I wrote Tuesday, the 11th of September, "are the lies and delusions that lay at the heart of foreign policy -- in the name of 'national security' -- in the Bush regime. And today is the anniversary of what should be its eternal shame."

The eternal shame shines on! Since Tuesday night we have learned that the "Mutt" man, despite his previous disinclination to twist his silver-plated tongue around matters of foreign policy, is proud to light the light and carry the torch for that eternal shame.

It's hardly a secret that right-wing pols as far back as memory goes have honed their skills at using phony-baloney mindless jingoism to monopolize the votes of voters bred to respond to this very bogosity. One of the fascinations of both Jeremiah Goulka's and Andrew Bacevich's stories is their frankness about their unquestioning acceptance of this worldview. It's a sterling reminder of how gullible even very smart people can be.

On Tuesday I quoted this telling paragraph from Jeremiah Goulka:

Lots of Republicans grow up hawks. I certainly did. My sense of what it meant to be an American was linked to my belief that from 1776 to WWII, and even from the 1991 Gulf War to Kosovo and Afghanistan, the American military had been dedicated to birthing freedom and democracy in the world, while dispensing a tough and precise global justice.

Tonight I think we need to read on a bit:

To me, military service represented the perfect combination of public service, honor, heroism, glory, promotion, meaning, and coolness. As a child, I couldn’t get enough of the military: toys and models, movies and cartoons, fat books with technical pictures of manly fighter planes and ships and submarines. We went to air shows whenever we could, and with the advent of cable, I begged my parents to sign up so that the Discovery Channel could bring those shows right into our den. Just after we got it, the first Gulf War kicked off, and CNN provided my afterschool entertainment for weeks.

As I got older, I studied Civil War military history and memory. (I would eventually edit a book of letters by Union Gen. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.) I thought I knew a lot about war; even if Sherman was right that "war is hell," it was frequently necessary, we did it well, and -- whatever those misinformed peaceniks said -- we made the world a better place.

But then I went to a war zone.

I was deployed to Baghdad as part of a team of RAND Corporation researchers to help the detainee operations command figure out several thorny policy issues. My task was to figure out why we were sort-of-protecting and sort-of-detaining an Iranian dissident group on Washington’s terrorist list.

It got ugly fast. . . .

(One thing that seems ungracious to point out but I think still needs to be pointed out is that despite Jeremiah's from-the-cradle passion for military service -- "the perfect combination of public service, honor, heroism, glory, promotion, meaning, and coolness" -- he made that fateful first visit to a war zone not in military service but as a RAND Corporation researcher.)

As I noted Tuesday, for Andrew Bacevich the awakening didn't begin till he was 41, when in he got firsthand views of the 1989-90 former East Germany, which in his hawk's-eye view was the forward edge of the terrifying Soviet juggernaut poised to engulf the West, which he discovered instead to be a dilapidated wreck.

[I might add here that one of the fascinations of the final volume of the diaries of the language and literature professor Victor Klemperer (published decades later as The Lesser Evil: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1945-59), who miraculously survived the Nazi period in his home city of Dresden only to be confronted with the Soviet occupation, is his observation of the stripping of East Germany by the Soviets extracted, who shipped back to the Soviet Union everything they found which was remotely transportable, and left behind a client state that was close to a slave state.]

Bacevich wrote that, following his transformative observations in Jena and East Berlin, "Bit by bit, my worldview started to crumble." I quoted the paragraph that follows on Tuesday:

That worldview had derived from this conviction: that American power manifested a commitment to global leadership, and that both together expressed and affirmed the nation’s enduring devotion to its founding ideals. That American power, policies, and purpose were bound together in a neat, internally consistent package, each element drawing strength from and reinforcing the others, was something I took as a given. That, during my adult life, a penchant for interventionism had become a signature of U.S. policy did not -- to me, at least -- in any way contradict America’s aspirations for peace. Instead, a willingness to expend lives and treasure in distant places testified to the seriousness of those aspirations. That, during this same period, the United States had amassed an arsenal of over 31,000 nuclear weapons, some small number of them assigned to units in which I had served, was not at odds with our belief in the inalienable right to life and liberty; rather, threats to life and liberty had compelled the United States to acquire such an arsenal and maintain it in readiness for instant use.

Again, tonight I think we need to read a little farther.

I was not so naïve as to believe that the American record had been without flaws. Yet I assured myself that any errors or misjudgments had been committed in good faith. Furthermore, circumstances permitted little real choice. In Southeast Asia as in Western Europe, in the Persian Gulf as in the Western Hemisphere, the United States had simply done what needed doing. Viable alternatives did not exist. To consent to any dilution of American power would be to forfeit global leadership, thereby putting at risk safety, prosperity, and freedom, not only our own but also that of our friends and allies.

To Bacevich "the choices seemed clear enough": between "the commitments, customs, and habits that defined American globalism, implemented by the national security apparatus within which I functioned as a small cog" and "appeasement, isolationism, and catastrophe." And circumstances provided him with the perfect backdrop for this view: "Seeing the Cold War as a struggle between good and evil answered many questions, consigned others to the periphery, and rendered still others irrelevant."

Before his belated awakening he says, he had "occasional suspicions," including a bunch from his personal Vietnam experience, "which I had done my best to suppress."

I was, after all, a serving soldier. Except in the narrowest of terms, the military profession, in those days at least, did not look kindly on nonconformity. Climbing the ladder of career success required curbing maverick tendencies. To get ahead, you needed to be a team player. Later, when studying the history of U.S. foreign relations in graduate school, I was pelted with challenges to orthodoxy, which I vigorously deflected. When it came to education, graduate school proved a complete waste of time -- a period of intense study devoted to the further accumulation of facts, while I exerted myself to ensuring that they remained inert.

This is, I think, a valuable insight: the way the system uses ambition to cultivate and reinforce obliviousness in its would-be players. With his 23 years in the Army behind him, and his ambition gone with them:

Wealth, power, and celebrity became not aspirations but subjects for critical analysis. History -- especially the familiar narrative of the Cold War -- no longer offered answers; instead, it posed perplexing riddles.

Bacevich underlines that he was coming to grips with this wildly different reality in the '90s, a period "bookended by two wars with Iraq when American vainglory reached impressive new heights." More important than his "realization that I had grossly misinterpreted the threat posed by America's adversaries"--

was the fact that I had misperceived "us." What I thought I knew best I actually understood least. Here, the need for education appeared especially acute.

George W. Bush's decision to launch Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 pushed me fully into opposition. Claims that once seemed elementary -- above all, claims relating to the essentially benign purposes of American power -- now appeared preposterous. The contradictions that found an ostensibly peace-loving nation committing itself to a doctrine of preventive war became too great to ignore. The folly and hubris of the policy makers who heedlessly thrust the nation into an ill-defined and open-ended "global war on terror" without the foggiest notion of what victory would look like, how it would be won, and what it might cost approached standards hitherto achieved only by slightly mad German warlords. During the era of containment, the United States had at least maintained the pretense of a principled strategy; now, the last vestiges of principle gave way to fantasy and opportunism. With that, the worldview to which I had adhered as a young adult and carried into middle age dissolved completely.

I don't think the "Mutt" man really believes any of that nonsense he's been spewing about Egypt and Libya. Like everything else he says in the campaign, it's just stuff he says. What makes him dangerous isn't the substance of the stuff he says, such as it is, but his willingness to say any damned thing that comes into his head if it may help put him into a position to do the stuff he really wants to do, about which we know just enough to make me, at least, pretty terrified. (We also know that he's probably prepared to do, as president, all sorts of stuff he doesn't really give a damn about if it means gaining support for the stuff he does.)

But there are a lot of people out there who do believe in this brand of kick-butt jingoism, and that's very dangerous, especially as long as there are cynical politicians prepared to pander to them. I wish there was some way to help them to understand the things that Andrew Bacevich and Jeremiah Goulka came to understand.

We still have some additional important lessons to learn from Jeremiah, which go beyond the national-security sphere, and also underlie it. I wish they gave me some hope, but I'm afraid that the fact that they don't doesn't allow us to ignore them. Watch this space.

#

"Long wars are antithetical to democracy" (Andrew J. Bacevich)

So General McChrystal may get to retire with four stars after all, even though regulations seem pretty clear that he should have to have had the fourth star for three years, not his one. But the Obama administration "will do whatever is necessary" to get around the rule. (Meanwhile Bill O'Reilly, backed up by that odds-on favorite for "world's most pulingly dishonest guttersnipe," Bernard Goldberg, is speculating that McChrystal may have deserved his downfall for being -- or so it's rumored! -- a stinking liberal!)

"In explaining his decision to change commanders without changing course in Afghanistan, the president offered this rhetorical flourish: 'Americans don't flinch in the face of difficult truths.' In fact, when it comes to war, the American people avert their eyes from difficult truths."

-- Andrew J. Bacevich, in a Washinton Post op-ed piece,

"Endless war, a recipe for four-star arrogance"

by Ken

The American people avert their eyes from difficult truths? You're being much too kind, Professor Bacevich. Not just when it comes to war do Americans run kicking and screaming from difficult truths.

My goodness, what a strange feeling -- a Washington Post op-ed piece that makes a real point and sets you to thinking! How'd that slip past the usually hypervigilant Villager Fred Hiatt? Just to complete the thought begun in the title of this post:

Long wars are antithetical to democracy. Protracted conflict introduces toxins that inexorably corrode the values of popular government. Not least among those values is a code of military conduct that honors the principle of civilian control while keeping the officer corps free from the taint of politics. Events of the past week -- notably the Rolling Stone profile that led to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's dismissal -- hint at the toll that nearly a decade of continuous conflict has exacted on the U.S. armed forces. The fate of any one general qualifies as small beer: Wearing four stars does not signify indispensability. But indications that the military's professional ethic is eroding, evident in the disrespect for senior civilians expressed by McChrystal and his inner circle, should set off alarms.

"Earlier generations of American leaders," says Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, "military as well as civilian, instinctively understood the danger posed by long wars."

"A democracy cannot fight a Seven Years War," Gen. George C. Marshall once remarked. The people who provided the lifeblood of the citizen army raised to wage World War II had plenty of determination but limited patience. They wanted victory won and normalcy restored.

The wisdom of Marshall's axiom soon became clear. In Vietnam, Lyndon B. Johnson plunged the United States into what became its Seven Years War. The citizen army that was sent to Southeast Asia fought valiantly for a time and then fell to pieces. As the conflict dragged on, Americans in large numbers turned against the war -- and also against the troops who fought it.

And the situation was only made worse when the U.S. "abandoned its citizen army tradition, oblivious to the consequences." In its place," says Professor Bacevich. "it opted for what the Founders once called a 'standing army' -- a force consisting of long-serving career professionals." And "this so-called all-volunteer force, only tenuously linked to American society, appeared to be a master stroke" -- for a while. "Washington got superbly trained soldiers and Republicans and Democrats took turns putting them to work." Americans watched all these engagements from a distance. "The costs appeared to be negligible. Their role was simply to cheer."

This happy arrangement now shows signs of unraveling, a victim of what the Pentagon has all too appropriately been calling its Long War.

The Long War is not America's war. It belongs exclusively to "the troops," lashed to a treadmill that finds soldiers and Marines either serving in a combat zone or preparing to deploy.

To be an American soldier today is to serve a people who find nothing amiss in the prospect of armed conflict without end. Once begun, wars continue, persisting regardless of whether they receive public support. President Obama's insistence to the contrary notwithstanding, this nation is not even remotely "at" war. In explaining his decision to change commanders without changing course in Afghanistan, the president offered this rhetorical flourish: "Americans don't flinch in the face of difficult truths." In fact, when it comes to war, the American people avert their eyes from difficult truths. Largely unaffected by events in Afghanistan and Iraq and preoccupied with problems much closer to home, they have demonstrated a fine ability to tune out war. Soldiers (and their families) are left holding the bag.

Throughout history, circumstances such as these have bred praetorianism, warriors becoming enamored with their moral superiority and impatient with the failings of those they are charged to defend. The smug disdain for high-ranking civilians casually expressed by McChrystal and his chief lieutenants -- along with the conviction that "Team America," as these officers style themselves, was bravely holding out against a sea of stupidity and corruption -- suggests that the officer corps of the United States is not immune to this affliction. [Emphasis added.]

The ignominious end of General McChrystal's career, Professor Bacevich says, "however clumsily, issued a warning that deserves our attention."

The responsibility facing the American people is clear. They need to reclaim ownership of their army. They need to give their soldiers respite, by insisting that Washington abandon its de facto policy of perpetual war. Or, alternatively, the United States should become a nation truly "at" war, with all that implies in terms of civic obligation, fiscal policies and domestic priorities. Should the people choose neither course -- and thereby subject their troops to continuing abuse -- the damage to the army and to American democracy will be severe.

We've seen, throughout the G.W. Bush and Obama presidencies, the obvious ways in which promoting perpetual wars encourages the degradation of democracy, in the all but automatic assault on even the most basic American liberties. Lunkheads like "Big Dick" Cheney and John "Dial Y for Torture" Yoo really believe that war gives the president powers beyond any kind of check whatsoever, which applied to perpetual war means . . . um . . . gulp . . .

That what we've already talked about may be only the tip of the iceberg seems to me something well worth thinking about. Again:

"Protracted conflict introduces toxins that inexorably corrode the values of popular government."

#