DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Failed war president or prince of peace?
By Nick Turse
When the Nobel committee awarded its annual peace prize to United States
President Barack Obama, it afforded him a golden opportunity seldom offered to
American war presidents: the possibility of success. Should he decide to go the
peace-maker route, Obama stands a chance of really accomplishing something
significant. On the other hand, history suggests that the path of war is a
surefire loser. As president after president has discovered, especially since
World War II, the US military simply can't seal the deal on winning a war.
While the armed forces can do many things, the one thing that has generally
escaped them is that ultimate endpoint: lasting victory. This might have been
driven home recently - had anyone noticed - when, in the midst of the
Washington debate over the Afghan war, a forgotten front in president George W
Bush's "war
on terror", the Philippines, popped back into the news. On September 25, New
York Times correspondent Norimitsu Onishi wrote:
Early this decade,
American soldiers landed on the island of Basilan, here in the southern
Philippines, to help root out the militant Islamic separatist group Abu Sayyaf.
Now, Basilan's biggest towns, once overrun by Abu Sayyaf and criminal groups,
have become safe enough that a local Avon lady trolls unworriedly for
customers. Still, despite seven years of joint military missions and American
development projects, much of the island outside main towns like Lamitan
remains unsafe.
In attempting to explain the uneven progress of
US counter-insurgency operations against Muslim guerillas in the region after
the better part of a decade, Onishi also noted, "Basilan, like many other
Muslim and Christian areas in the southern Philippines, has a long history of
political violence, clan warfare and corruption." While he remained silent
about events prior to the 1990s, his newspaper had offered this reasonably rosy
assessment of US counter-insurgency efforts against Muslim guerrillas on the
same island - 100 years earlier:
Detachments of the Twenty-third and
Twenty-fifth Infantry, with constabulary and armed launches assisting, are
engaged in disarming the Moros on Basilan Island. The troops are distributed
around the coast and are co-operating in a series of closing-in movements.
Days after Onishi's report appeared, two American soldiers were killed on
nearby Jolo Island. As a Reuters story noted, it "was the first deadly strike
against US forces deployed in the southern Philippines since a soldier in a
restaurant was killed in 2002 ..." As in Basilan, however, the US
counter-insurgency story in Jolo actually goes back a long way. In early
January 1905, to cite just one example, two members of the US military - the
14th Cavalry to be exact - were killed during pacification operations on that
same island.
That US forces are attempting to defeat Muslim guerrillas on the same two tiny
islands a century later should perhaps give Obama pause as he weighs his
options in Afghanistan and considers his recent award. It might also be worth
his time to assess the military's record of success in conflicts since World
War II, starting with the stalemate war in Korea that began in June 1950 and
has yet to end in peace, let alone victory. That quiescent but unsettled
conflict provides a ready-made opportunity for the president to achieve a
triumph that has long escaped the US military. He could help make a lasting
peace on a de-nuclearized Korean Peninsula and so begin earning his recent
award.
Vietnam and beyond
At the moment, Obama and his fellow Washington power-players are reportedly
immersed in the literature of the Vietnam War in an attempt to use history as a
divining rod for discovering a path forward in Afghanistan. At the Pentagon,
many evidently still cling to the notion that the conflict was lost thanks to
the weakness of public support in the US, pessimistic reporting by the media,
and politicians without backbones.
Obama would do well to ignore their revisionist reading list for a simple
reason: bluntly put, the US-funded French military effort to defeat Vietnamese
nationalism in the early 1950s failed dismally; then, a US-funded effort to set
up and arm a viable government in South Vietnam failed dismally; and finally,
the US military's full-scale, years-long effort to destroy the Vietnamese
forces arrayed against it failed even more dismally - and not in the cities and
towns of the United States, nor even in the halls of power in Washington, but
in the hamlets of South Vietnam. US efforts in neighboring Cambodia and Laos
similarly crashed and burned.
Victory aside, the US military proved incapable during the Vietnam War of
accomplishing much. Its true achievement lay in the pummeling it gave the
people of Southeast Asia, leaving the region blood-soaked, heavily cratered,
significantly poisoned, and littered with explosives that kill and maim
villagers to this day.
In the wake of out-and-out defeat in Indochina, Americans diagnosed themselves
as suffering from a "Vietnam Syndrome" (resulting in a less-muscular foreign
policy - embarrassing for a global superpower) and in need of a victory cure.
In the 1980s and 1990s, this led to "triumphs" over such powers as the tiny
Caribbean island of Grenada and Panama, a country whose "defense forces", in
total, numbered just 12,000 (about half the size of the US ground troops in the
invading force) - and cut-and-run flops in Lebanon and Somalia.
The "lessons" of Vietnam were declared officially buried forever in the
scorching deserts of the Middle East in March 1991. "By God, we've kicked the
Vietnam syndrome once and for all!" president George H W Bush triumphantly
exclaimed at the end of the First Gulf War - and yet Saddam Hussein, the enemy
autocrat, remained firmly ensconced in power in Baghdad and the conflict
continued at a less than triumphant simmer for over a decade until his son,
George W Bush, again took the country to war against the same Iraqi leader his
father had fought and again declared the mission accomplished.
Following a lightning-fast march on Baghdad in 2003, much like the speedy
pseudo-victory in Kuwait in Gulf War I, US forces again proved unable to seal
the deal. Bush administration efforts to dominate the country politically by
writing Iraq's constitution, while circumventing real elections, were quickly
laid low by Iraq's most powerful religious leader, the Shi'ite cleric Grand
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
Then, the US military was sent reeling for years by a Sunni insurgency. Iraq
remains a war zone and Obama is the fourth president to preside over a
seemingly never-ending, irresolvable set of conflicts in that country. (The
US-allied Iraqi government has already proclaimed the US a loser, announcing a
"great victory" over the US occupation in June 2009 and comparing the
withdrawal of most US forces from the country's cities to a historic 1920 Iraqi
revolt against British forces. American officials have not disagreed.)
During the 1980s, US proxies in Afghanistan, Muslim mujahideen guerrillas,
fought the Soviet occupation. Today, US troops are the occupiers, fighting some
of those same mujahideen and in the ninth year of this latest war in
Afghanistan, victory still appears to be nowhere on the mountainous horizon,
while failure, according to Afghan war commander, General Stanley McChrystal,
is once again a possibility.
Late last year, at the 26th Army Science Conference, I listened to one of the
top-ranking enlisted men in the army, a highly decorated veteran of the "war on
terror", and a draftee during America's losing war in Vietnam, candidly admit
that US troops in Afghanistan simply could not keep up with enemy forces. The
lightly armed guerrillas, operating without body armor, were too mobile and too
agile, he said, for armored, heavily weighed-down American troops.
When I asked him later about the comment, a colleague of the same rank and
fellow "war on terror" veteran quickly jumped to his defense, declaring, "Yeah,
I can't run the mountain with them, but I'll still get them - eventually."
Almost a year later, the better part of a decade into the fight, the unanswered
question remains, "When?"
Peace president
The US military is unquestionably powerful and has repeatedly demonstrated the
ability to mete out tremendous amounts of destruction and death. From Korea,
Vietnam, and Cambodia to Iraq and Afghanistan, enemy fighters and unfortunate
civilians, military base camps and people's homes have been laid waste by US
forces in decade after decade of conflict. Yet sealing the deal has been
another matter entirely. Victory has repeatedly slipped through the fingers of
American presidents, no matter how much technology and ordnance has been
unleashed on the poor, sometimes pre-industrial populations of America's war
zones.
Now, the Nobel committee has made a remarkable gamble. It has seen fit to offer
Obama, who entered the Oval Office as a war president and soon doubled down the
US bet on the expanding conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan, an opportunity
for a lasting legacy and real achievement of a sort that has long escaped
American presidents. Their prize gives him an opportunity to step back and
consider the history of American war-making and what the US military is really
capable of doing thousands of miles from home.
It's an unparalleled opportunity to face up honestly to the repeatedly
demonstrated limits of American military power. It is also the president's
chance to transform himself from war-maker by inheritance to his own kind of
peace-maker and so display a skill possessed by few previous presidents. He
could achieve a more lasting victory, while limiting the blood, American and
foreign, on his - and all Americans' - hands.
More than 100 years after their early counter-insurgency efforts on two tiny
islands in the Philippines, US troops are still dying there at the hands of
Muslim guerillas. More than 50 years later, the US still garrisons the southern
part of the Korean Peninsula as a result of a stalemate war and a peace as yet
unmade. More recently, the American experience has included outright defeat in
Vietnam, failures in Laos and Cambodia; debacles in Lebanon and Somalia; a
never-ending four-president-long war in Iraq; and almost a decade of
wheel-spinning in Afghanistan without any sign of success, no less victory.
What could make the limits of American power any clearer?
The record should be as sobering as it is dismal, while the costs to the
peoples in those countries are as appalling as they are unfathomable to
Americans. The blood and futility of this American past ought to be apparent to
Nobel Peace Prize-winner Obama, even if his predecessors have been incredibly
resistant to clear-eyed assessments of American power or the real consequences
of US wars.
Two paths stretch out before this first-year president. Two destinations
beckon: peace or failure.
Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a
2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson
Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles
Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. A paperback
edition of his book
The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives(Metropolitan
Books), an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America, has
recently been published. His website is NickTurse.com.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
