DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Don't ask and don't
tell By Peter Van Buren
We had a debate club back in high school.
Two teams would meet in the auditorium, and Mr
Garrity would tell us the topic, something
1970s-ish like "Resolved: Women Should Get Equal
Pay for Equal Work" or "World Communism Will Be
Defeated in Vietnam". Each side would then try,
through persuasion and the marshalling of facts,
to clinch the argument. There'd be judges and a
winner.
Today's presidential debates are a
long way from Mr Garrity's club. It seems that the
first rule of the debate club now is: no
disagreeing on what matters most. In fact, the two
candidates rarely interact with each other at all,
typically ditching whatever the question might be
for some rehashed set of campaign talking points,
all with the complicity of the celebrity media moderators
preening about democracy in action. Waiting for
another quip about Big Bird is about all the
content we can expect.
But the joke is on
us. Sadly, the two candidates are stand-ins for
Washington in general, a "war" capital whose
denizens work and argue, sometimes fiercely, from
within a remarkably limited range of options. It
was DC on autopilot last week for domestic issues;
the next two presidential debates are to be in
part or fully on foreign policy challenges (of
which there are so many).
When it comes to
foreign - that is, military - policy, the gap
between Barack and Mitt is slim to the point of
non-existent on many issues, however much they may
badger each other on the subject. That old saw
about those who fail to understand history
repeating its mistakes applies a little too easily
here: the last 11 years have added up to one
disaster after another abroad, and without a
smidgen of new thinking (guaranteed not to put in
an appearance at any of the debates to come), we
doom ourselves to more of the same.
So in
honor of old Mr Garrity, here are five critical
questions that should be explored (even if all of
us know that they won't be) in the foreign
policy-inclusive presidential debates scheduled
for October 16 and 22 - with a sixth, bonus
question, thrown in for good measure.
1. Is there an end game for the global
war on terror? The current president,
elected on the promise of change, altered very
little when it came to George W Bush's Global War
on Terror (other than dropping the name). That
jewel-in-the-crown of Bush-era offshore
imprisonment, Guantanamo, still houses over 160
prisoners held without trial or hope or a plan for
what to do with them. While the US pulled its
troops out of Iraq - mostly because our Iraqi
"allies" flexed their muscles a bit and threw us
out - the war in Afghanistan stumbles on. Drone
strikes and other forms of conflict continue in
the same places Bush tormented: Yemen, Somalia,
and Pakistan (and it's clear that northern Mali is
heading our way).
A huge national security
state has been codified in a host of new or
expanded intelligence agencies under the Homeland
Security umbrella, and Washington seems able to
come up with nothing more than a whack-a-mole
strategy for ridding itself of the scourge of
terror, an endless succession of killings of
"al-Qaeda Number 3" guys. Counter-terrorism tsar
John Brennan, Obama's drone-meister, has put it
this way: "We're not going to rest until al-Qaeda
the organization is destroyed and is eliminated
from areas in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen,
Africa, and other areas."
So, candidates,
the question is: What's the end game for all this?
Even in the worst days of the Cold War, when it
seemed impossible to imagine, there was still a
goal: the "end" of the Soviet Union. Are we really
consigned to the Global War on Terror, under
whatever name or no name at all, as an infinite
state of existence? Is it now as American as apple
pie?
2. Do today's foreign policy
challenges mean that it's time to retire the
constitution? A domestic policy crossover
question here. Prior to September 11, 2001, it was
generally assumed that our amazing Constitution
could be adapted to whatever challenges or
problems arose. After all, that founding document
expanded to end the slavery it had once supported,
weathered trials and misuses as dumb as
Prohibition and as grave as Red Scares, Palmer
Raids, and McCarthyism.
The First
Amendment grew to cover comic books, nude art
works, and a million electronic forms of
expression never imagined in the eighteenth
century. Starting on September 12, 2001, however,
challenges, threats, and risks abroad have been
used to justify abandoning core beliefs enshrined
in the Bill of Rights. That bill, we are told,
can't accommodate terror threats to the Homeland.
Absent the third rail of the Second Amendment and
gun ownership (politicians touch it and die),
nearly every other key amendment has since been
trodden upon.
The First Amendment was
sacrificed to silence whistleblowers and
journalists. The Fourth and Fifth Amendments were
ignored to spy on Americans at home and kill them
with drones abroad. (September 30 was the first
anniversary of the Obama administration's first
acknowledged murder without due process of an
American - and later his teenaged son - abroad.
The US has similarly killed two other Americans
abroad via drone, albeit "by accident". )
So, candidates, the question is: Have we
walked away from the US Constitution? If so,
shouldn't we publish some sort of notice or
bulletin?
3. What do we want from the
Middle East? Is it all about oil? Israel?
Old-fashioned hegemony and containment? What is
our goal in fighting an intensifying proxy war
with Iran, newly expanded into cyberspace? Are we
worried about a nuclear Iran, or just worried
about a new nuclear club member in general? Will
we continue the 19th century game of supporting
thug dictators who support our policies in
Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Libya (until
overwhelmed by events on the ground), and opposing
the same actions by other thugs who disagree with
us like Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Syria's Bashar
al-Assad? That kind of policy thinking did not
work out too well in the long run in Central and
South America, and history suggests that we should
make up our mind on what America's goals in the
Middle East might actually be. No cheating now -
having no policy is a policy of its own.
Candidates, can you define America's
predominant interest in the Middle East and sketch
out a series of at least semi-sensical actions in
support of it?
4. What is your plan to
right-size our military and what about downsizing
the global mission? The decade - and
counting - of grinding war in Iraq and Afghanistan
has worn the American military down to its lowest
point since Vietnam. Though drugs and poor
discipline are not tearing out its heart as they
did in the 1970s, suicide among soldiers now takes
that first chair position. The toll on families of
endless deployments is hard to measure but easy to
see.
The expanding role of the military
abroad (reconstruction, peacekeeping, disaster
relief, garrisoning a long necklace of bases from
Rota, Spain, to Kadena, Okinawa) seems to require
a vast standing army. At the same time, the
dramatic increase in the development and use of a
new praetorian guard, Joint Special Operations
Command, coupled with a militarized CIA and its
drones, have given the president previously
unheard of personal killing power. Indeed, Obama
has underscored his unchecked solo role as the
"decider" on exactly who gets obliterated by drone
assassins.
So,
candidates, here's a two-parter: Given that a huge
Occupy Everywhere army is killing more of its own
via suicide than any enemy, what will you do to
right-size the military and downsize its global
mission? Secondly, did this country's founders
really intend for the president to have unchecked
personal war-making powers?
5. Since no
one outside our borders buys American
exceptionalism any more, what's next? What is
America's point these days? The big one. We
keep the old myth alive that America is a special,
good place, the most "exceptional" of places in
fact, but in our foreign policy we're more like
some mean old man, reduced to feeling good about
himself by yelling at the kids to get off the lawn
(or simply taking potshots at them).
During the Cold War, the American ideal
represented freedom to so many people, even if the
reality was far more ambiguous. Now, who we are
and what we are abroad seems so much grimmer, so
much less appealing (as global opinion polls
regularly indicate). In light of the Iraq invasion
and occupation, and the failure to embrace the
Arab Spring, America the Exceptional, has, it
seems, run its course.
America the
Hegemonic, a tough if unattractive moniker, also
seems a goner, given the slo-mo defeat in
Afghanistan and the never-ending stalemate that is
the Global War on Terror. Resource imperialist?
America's failure to either back away from the
Greater Middle East and simply pay the price for
oil, or successfully grab the oil, adds up to a
"policy" that only encourages ever more
instability in the region. The saber rattling that
goes with such a strategy (if it can be called
that) feels angry, unproductive, and without any
doubt unbelievably expensive.
So
candidates, here are a few questions: Who exactly
are we in the world and who do you want us to be?
Are you ready to promote a policy of fighting to
be planetary top dog - and we all know where that
leads - or can we find a place in the global
community? Without resorting to the usual "shining
city on a hill" metaphors, can you tell us your
vision for America in the world? (Follow up: No
really, cut the b.s. and answer this one,
gentlemen. It's important!)
6. Bonus
Question To each of the questions above add
this: How do you realistically plan to pay for it?
For every school and road built in Iraq and
Afghanistan on the taxpayer dollar, why didn't you
build two here in the United States? When you
insist that we can't pay for crucial needs at
home, explain to us why these can be funded
abroad. If your response is we had to spend that
money to "defend America", tell us why building
jobs in this country doesn't do more to defend it
than anything done abroad.
Now that might
spark a real debate, one that's long, long
overdue.
Peter Van Buren, a
24-year veteran Foreign Service Officer at the
State Department, spent a year in Iraq. Now in
Washington and a TomDispatch regular, he writes
about Iraq, the Middle East, and US diplomacy at
his blog, We Meant Well. Following the publication
of his book We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose
the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi
People (the American Empire Project,
Metropolitan Books), the Department of State began
termination proceedings, stripping him of his
security clearance and diplomatic credentials.
Through the efforts of the Government
Accountability Project and the ACLU, Van Buren
instead retired from the State Department with his
full benefits of service.
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