Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Serial war as a way of life
By David Bromwich
On July 16, in a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago, Secretary of Defense
Robert Gates said that the "central question" for the defense of the United
States was how the military should be "organized, equipped - and funded - in
the years ahead, to win the wars we are in while being prepared for threats on
or beyond the horizon." The phrase “beyond the horizon” ought to sound ominous.
Was Gates telling his audience of civic-minded business leaders to spend more
money on defense in order to counter threats whose very existence no one could
answer for? Given the public acceptance of American militarism, he could speak
in the knowledge that the awkward challenge would never be posed.
We have begun to talk casually about our wars; and this should
be surprising for several reasons. To begin with, in the history of the United
States war has never been considered the normal state of things. For two
centuries, Americans were taught to think war itself an aberration, and "wars"
in the plural could only have seemed doubly aberrant. Younger generations of
Americans, however, are now being taught to expect no end of war - and no end
of wars.
For anyone born during World War II, or in the early years of the Cold War, the
hope of international progress toward the reduction of armed conflict remains a
palpable memory. After all, the menace of the Axis powers, whose state
apparatus was fed by wars, had been stopped definitively by the concerted
action of Soviet Russia, Great Britain and the United States. The founding of
the United Nations extended a larger hope for a general peace. Organizations
like the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and the Union of Concerned
Scientists reminded people in the West, as well as in the Communist bloc, of a
truth that everyone knew already: the world had to advance beyond war. The
French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut called this brief interval "the Second
Enlightenment" partly because of the unity of desire for a world at peace. And
the name Second Enlightenment is far from absurd. The years after the worst of
wars were marked by a sentiment of universal disgust with the very idea of war.
In the 1950s, the only possible war between the great powers, the US and the
Soviet Union, would have been a nuclear war; and the horror of assured
destruction was so monstrous, the prospect of the aftermath so unforgivable,
that the only alternative appeared to be a design for peace. John F Kennedy saw
this plainly when he pressed for ratification of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty -
the greatest achievement of his administration.
He signed it on October 7, 1963, six weeks before he was killed, and it marked
the first great step away from war in a generation. Who could have predicted
that the next step would take 23 years, until the imagination of Ronald Reagan
took fire from the imagination of Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik? The delay
after Reykjavik has now lasted almost another quarter-century; and though
Barack Obama speaks the language of progress, it is not yet clear whether he
has the courage of Kennedy or the imagination of Gorbachev and Reagan.
Forgetting Vietnam
In the 20th century, as in the 19th, smaller wars have "locked in" a mentality
for wars that last a decade or longer. The Korean War put Americans in the
necessary state of fear to permit the conduct of the Cold War - one of whose
shibboleths, the identification of the island of Formosa as the real China, was
developed by the pro-war lobby around the Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang
Kai-shek. Yet the Korean War took place in some measure under UN auspices, and
neither it nor the Vietnam War, fierce and destructive as they were, altered
the view that war as such was a relic of the barbarous past.
Vietnam was the by-product of a "containment" policy against the Soviet Union
that spun out of control: a small counterinsurgency that grew to the scale of
almost unlimited war. Even so, persistent talk of peace - of a kind we do not
hear these days - formed a counterpoint to the last six years of Vietnam, and
there was never a suggestion that another such war would naturally follow
because we had enemies everywhere on the planet and the way you dealt with
enemies was to invade and bomb.
America's failure of moral awareness when it came to Vietnam had little to do
with an enchantment with war as such. In a sense the opposite was true. The
failure lay, in large part, in a tendency to treat the war as a singular
"nightmare", beyond the reach of history; something that happened to us, not
something we did. A belief was shared by opponents and supporters of the war
that nothing like this must ever be allowed to happen again.
So the lesson of Vietnam came to be: never start a war without knowing what you
want to accomplish and when you intend to leave. Colin Powell gave his name to
the new doctrine; and by converting the violence of any war into a cost-benefit
equation, he helped to erase the consciousness of the evil we had done in
Vietnam. Powell's symptomatic and oddly heartless warning to George W Bush
about invading Iraq - "You break it, you own it" - expresses the military
pragmatism of this state of mind.
For more than a generation now, two illusions have dominated American thinking
about Vietnam. On the right, there has been the idea that we "fought with one
hand tied behind our back". (In fact the only weapons the US did not use in
Indochina were nuclear.) Within the liberal establishment, on the other hand, a
lone-assassin theory is preferred: as with the Iraq War, where the blame is
placed on secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, so with Vietnam the culprit of
choice has become secretary of defense Robert McNamara.
This convenient narrowing of the responsibility for Vietnam became, if
anything, more pronounced after the death of McNamara on July 6th. Even an
honest and unsparing obituary like Tim Weiner's in the New York Times peeled
away from the central story relevant actors like secretary of state Dean Rusk
and General William Westmoreland. Meanwhile, president Richard Nixon and his
national security adviser Henry Kissinger seem to have dematerialized entirely
- as if they did nothing more than "inherit" the war. The truth is that
Kissinger and Nixon extended the Vietnam War and compounded its crimes. One
need only recall the transmission of a startling presidential command in a
phone call by Kissinger to his deputy Alexander Haig. The US would commence,
said Kissinger, "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia [using] anything that
flies on anything that moves".
No more than Iraq was Vietnam a war with a single architect or in the interest
of a single party. The whole American political establishment - and for as long
as possible, the public culture as well - rallied to the war and questioned the
loyalty of its opponents and resisters. Public opinion was asked to admire, and
did not fail to support, the Vietnam War through five years under president
Lyndon Johnson; and Nixon, elected in 1968 on a promise to end it with honor,
was not held to account when he carried it beyond his first term and added an
atrocious auxiliary war in Cambodia.
Yet ever since senator Joe McCarthy accused the Democrats of "20 years of
treason" - the charge that, under presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and
Harry Truman, the US had lost a war against Communist agents at home we did not
even realize we were fighting - it has become a folk truth of American politics
that the Republican Party is the party that knows about wars: how to bring them
on and how to end them.
Practically, this means that Democrats must be at pains to show themselves more
willing to fight than they may feel is either prudent or just. As the legacy of
Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton attests, and as the first half year of Obama
has confirmed, Democratic presidents feel obliged either to start or to widen
wars in order to prove themselves worthy of every kind of trust. Obama
indicated his grasp of the logic of the Democratic candidate in time of war as
early as the primary campaign of 2007, when he assured the military and
political establishments that withdrawal from Iraq would be compensated for by
a larger war in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
We are now close to codifying a pattern by which a new president is expected
never to give up one war without taking on another.
Humanitarian intervention to wars of choice
Our confidence that our selection of wars will be warranted and our killings
pardoned by the relevant beneficiaries comes chiefly from the popular idea of
what happened in Kosovo. Yet the 11 weeks of North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) bombings from March through June 1999 - an apparent exertion of humanity
(in which not a single plane was shot down) in the cause of a beleaguered
people - was also a test of strategy and weapons.
Kosovo, in this sense, was a larger specimen of the sort of test war launched
in 1983 by Ronald Reagan in Grenada (where an invasion ostensibly to protect
resident Americans also served as aggressive cover for the president's retreat
from Lebanon), and in 1989 by George H W Bush in Panama (where an attack on an
unpopular dictator served as a trial run for the weapons and propaganda of the
First Gulf War a year later). The NATO attack on the former Yugoslavia in
defense of Kosovo was also a public war - legal, happy, and just, as far as the
mainstream media could see - a war, indeed, organized in the open and waged
with a glow of conscience. The goodness of the bombing was radiant on the face
of Tony Blair. It was Kosovo more than any other engagement of the past 50
years that prepared an American military-political consensus in favor of serial
wars against transnational enemies of whatever sort.
An antidote to the humanitarian legend of the Kosovo war has been offered in a
recent article by David Gibbs, drawn from his book First Do No Harm.
Gibbs shows that it was not the Serbs but the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)
that, in 1998, broke the terms of the peace agreement negotiated by Richard
Holbrooke and thus made a war inevitable. Nor was it unreasonable for Serbia
later to object to the American and European demand that NATO peacekeepers
enjoy "unrestricted passage and unimpeded access" throughout Yugoslavia - in
effect, that it consent to being an occupied country.
Americans were told that the Serbs in that war were oppressors while Albanians
were victims: a mythology that bears a strong resemblance to later American
reports of the guilty Sunnis and innocent Shi'ites of Iraq. But the KLA, Gibbs
recounts, "had a record of viciousness and racism that differed little from
that of [Serbian leader Slobodan] Milosevic's forces." And far from preventing
mass killings, the "surgical strikes" by NATO only increased them. The total
number killed on both sides before the war was about 2,000. After the bombing
and in revenge for it, about 10,000 people were killed by Serb security forces.
Thus, the more closely one inquires the less tenable Kosovo seems as a
precedent for future humanitarian interventions.
Clinton and Kosovo rather than Bush and Iraq opened the period we are now
living in. Behind the legitimization of both wars, however, lies a broad
ideological investment in the idea of "just wars" - chiefly, in practice, wars
fought by the commercial democracies in the name of democracy, to advance their
own interests without an unseemly overbalance of conspicuous selfishness.
Michael Ignatieff, a just-war theorist who supported both the Kosovo and Iraq
wars, published an influential article on the invasion of Iraq, "The American
Empire: The Burden," in New York Times Magazine on January 5, 2003, only weeks
before the onset of "shock and awe". Ignatieff asked whether the American
people were generous enough to fight the war our president intended to start
against Iraq. For this was, he wrote:
A defining moment in America's
long debate with itself about whether its overseas role as an empire threatens
or strengthens its existence as a republic. The American electorate, while
still supporting the president, wonders whether his proclamation of a war
without end against terrorists and tyrants may only increase its vulnerability
while endangering its liberties and its economic health at home. A nation that
rarely counts the cost of what it really values now must ask what the
'liberation' of Iraq is worth.
A Canadian living in the US,
Ignatieff went on to endorse the war as a matter of American civic duty, with
an indulgent irony for its opponents:
Regime change is an imperial task
par excellence, since it assumes that the empire's interest has a right to
trump the sovereignty of a state ... Regime change also raises the difficult
question for Americans of whether their own freedom entails a duty to defend
the freedom of others beyond their borders ... Yet it remains a fact - as
disagreeable to those left wingers who regard American imperialism as the root
of all evil as it is to the right-wing isolationists, who believe that the
world beyond our shores is none of our business - that there are many peoples
who owe their freedom to an exercise of American military power ... There are
the Bosnians, whose nation survived because American air power and diplomacy
forced an end to a war the Europeans couldn't stop. There are the Kosovars, who
would still be imprisoned in Serbia if not for Gen Wesley Clark and the Air
Force. The list of people whose freedom depends on American air and ground
power also includes the Afghans and, most inconveniently of all, the Iraqis.
And why stop there? To Ignatieff, the example of Kosovo was central and
persuasive. The people who could not see the point were "those left wingers"
and "isolationists”. By contrast, the strategists and soldiers willing to bear
the "burden" of empire were not only the party of the far-seeing and the
humane, they were also the realists, those who knew that nothing good can come
without a cost - and that nothing so marks a people for greatness as a
succession of triumphs in a series of just wars.
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