Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Lessons from the long war
By Tom Engelhardt
Is it too early - or already too late - to begin drawing lessons from "the long
war"? That phrase, coined in 2002 and, by 2005, being championed by United
States Central Command Commander General John Abizaid, was meant to be a
catchier name for president George W Bush's "global war on terror".
That was in the days when inside-the-Beltway types were still dreaming about a
global Pax Americana and its domestic partner, a Pax Republicana, and imagining
that both, once firmly established, might last forever.
"The long war" merely exchanged the shock-'n'-awe geographical breadth of
Bush's chosen moniker ("global") for a shock-'n'-awe time span. The US's
all-out, no-holds-barred struggle against evil-doers would be nothing short of
generational as well as planetary. From Abizaid's point of view, perhaps a
little in-office surgical
operation on the nomenclature of Bush's war was, in any case, in order at a
time when the Iraq War was going disastrously badly and the Afghan one was
starting to look more than a little peaked as well. It was like saying: Forget
that "mission accomplished" sprint to victory in 2003 and keep your eyes on the
prize. We're in it for the long slog.
When Bush officials and Pentagon brass used "the long war" - a phrase that
never gained much traction outside administration circles and admiring
think-tanks - they were (being Americans) predicting the future, not commenting
on the past. In their view, the fight against Islamist terrorists and assorted
bad guys who wanted to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction and truly
bloody the American nose would be decades long.
And of that past? In the American tradition, they were Fordian (as in Henry) in
their contempt for most history. If it didn't involve British statesman Winston
Churchill, or the US occupying Germany or Japan successfully after World War
II, or thrashing the Soviet Union in the Cold War, it was largely discardable
bunk. And who cared, since the US had arrived at a moment of destiny when the
greatest country in the world had at its beck and call the greatest, most
technologically advanced military of all time. That was what mattered, and the
future - momentary pratfalls aside - would surely be the US's, as long as
Americans were willing to buckle down and fund an eternal fight for it.
Arm and regret
With the arrival of the Obama administration, "the long war," like "the global
war on terror," has largely fallen into disuse (even as the wars that went with
it continue). Like all administrations, Obama's, too, prefers to think of
itself as beginning at year zero and, as the new president emphasized more than
once, looking forward, not backwards, at least when it came to the Central
Intelligence Agency, the Bush Justice Department, and torture practices.
Perhaps, however, the long war shouldn't be consigned to the dust bin of
history just yet. It might still have its uses, if the US were to do the
un-American thing and look backward, not forward.
As we call a contentious era in European history the Hundred Years' War, so the
US war in "the Greater Middle East" has already gone on for 30 years, give or
take a few. If you wanted to date its exact beginning, you might consider
choosing president Ronald Reagan's brief, disastrous invasion of Lebanon in
1983, the occasion for the first suicide truck bombings of the modern American
era. (As Mike Davis has written, "Indeed, the suicide truck bombs that
devastated the US Embassy and marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 prevailed - at
least in a geopolitical sense - over the combined firepower of the
fighter-bombers and battleships of the US Sixth Fleet and forced the Reagan
administration to retreat from Lebanon.")
An even more reasonable date, however, might be July 3, 1979, when, at the
behest of national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, president Jimmy Carter
signed "the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet
regime in Kabul". In other words, six months before the actual Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan began, the US threw its support to the mujahideen, the Afghan
anti-Soviet fundamentalist jihadis.
As Brzezinski later described it, "[O]n the same day, I wrote a note to the
president in which I explained that in my opinion this aid would lead to a
Soviet military intervention." Asked whether he regretted his actions, given
the results so many years after, he replied, "Regret what? The secret operation
was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want
me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I
wrote to president Carter, saying, in essence: 'We now have the opportunity of
giving to the USSR its Vietnam War'."
Another inviting date for the start of the US's 30 years of war might be
January 23, 1980, when Carter, in a speech officially billed as a response to
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, outlined what came to be known as the
Carter Doctrine, which would put an armed American presence in the middle of
the globe's oil heartlands. Having described the flow of oil from the Persian
Gulf as a "vital interest" of the United States, Carter went on to state in the
speech's key passage, "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the
Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of
the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means
necessary, including military force."
What followed was the creation of a Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, meant in
a crisis to get thousands of US troops to the Gulf region quickly. In the
Reagan years, that force was transformed into the Central Command (CENTCOM, of
which General David Petraeus is now commander), while its area of
responsibility grew as the US built up a massive military infrastructure of
bases, weaponry, ships and airfields in the region.
Since then, war, however labeled, has been the name of the game: in
Afghanistan, the US's war began in 1979 and, in start-and-stop fashion, still
continues; in Iran, it's gone on largely in a proxy fashion, from 1979 to the
present moment; in Iraq, from the Gulf War in 1990 to now; briefly and
disastrously in Somalia in 1993 and intermittently in this new century; and
more recently in Pakistan.
The future is unknown, but as the president and his foreign policy team prepare
to make crucial decisions in the coming months about Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Iran and Iraq, shouldn't the US's 30 years across the oil heartlands of the
planet, essentially one disaster-hailed-as-a-victory after another, offer some
cautionary lessons? Shouldn't it raise the odd red flag of warning?
American jihad
Let me suggest just one lesson that seems to be on no one else's mind at a
moment when a key "option" being offered in Washington - especially by
Democrats not eager to see tens of thousands more US troops heading
Afghanistan-wards - is to arm and "train" ever-more thousands of Afghans into a
vast army and police security force for a government that hardly exists. Based
on the past three decades in the region, don't you think that the US should
pause and consider who exactly it is arming and who exactly it may be
supporting, and whether, given those 30 years of history, the US has the
slightest idea what it is doing?
With those questions in mind, here's a little potted history of the US's 30
years of war:
In the Afghan branch of it, the fervent American jihad of the 1980s involved
the CIA slipping happily into a crowded bed with the Saudis, the Pakistanis and
the most extreme Islamist fundamentalists among the anti-Soviet Afghan
fighters. In those years, the agency didn't hesitate to organize car-bomb and
even camel-bomb terror attacks on the Russian military (techniques endorsed by
CIA director William Casey). The partnership of these groups wasn't surprising
at the time, given that Casey, himself a Cold War fundamentalist and supporter
of Opus Dei, believed that the anti-communism of the most extreme Islamist
fundamentalists made them the US's natural allies in the region.
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