Published on Thursday, May 12, 2016
by
Washington’s Military Addiction and the Ruins Still to Come
There are the news stories that genuinely surprise you, and then
there are the ones that you could write in your sleep before they happen. Let
me concoct an example for you:
“Top
American and European military leaders are weighing options to step up the
fight against the Islamic State in the Mideast, including possibly sending more
U.S. forces into Iraq, Syria, and Libya, just as Washington confirmed the
second American combat casualty in Iraq in as many months.”
Oh wait, that was actually the lead sentence in a May 3rd Washington
Times piece by
Carlo Muñoz. Honestly, though, it could have been written anytime in the
last few months by just about anyone paying any attention whatsoever, and it
surely will prove reusable in the months to come (with casualty figures
altered, of course). The sad truth is that across the Greater Middle East
and expanding parts of Africa, a similar set of lines could be written ahead of
time about the use of Special Operations forces, drones, advisers, whatever, as
could the sorry results of making such moves in [add the name of your country
of choice here].
Put another way, in a Washington that seems incapable of doing
anything but worshiping at the temple of the U.S. military, global policymaking
has become a remarkably mindless military-first process of repetition.
It’s as if, as problems built up in your life, you looked in the closet marked
“solutions” and the only thing you could ever see was one hulking, over-armed
soldier, whom you obsessively let loose, causing yet more damage.
How Much, How Many, How Often, and How Destructively
In Iraq and Syria, it’s been mission creep all the way.
The B-52s barely
made it to the battle zone for the first time and were almost instantaneously
in the air, attacking Islamic State militants. U.S. firebases are
built ever closer to
the front lines. The number of special ops forces continues to edge up.
American weapons flow in (ending up in god knows whose hands).
American trainers and advisers follow in ever increasing numbers, and
those numbers are repeatedly fiddled with to
deemphasize how many of them are actually there. The private
contractors begin to arrive in numbers never to be
counted. The local forces being trained or retrained have
their usual problems in battle.
American troops and advisers who were never, never going
to be “in combat” or “boots on the ground” themselves now have their boots
distinctly on the ground in combat
situations. The first American casualties are dribbling in.
Meanwhile, conditions in tottering Iraq and the former nation of Syria grow
ever murkier, more chaotic, and less amenable by the week to any solution
American officials might care for.
And the response to all this in present-day Washington?
You know perfectly well what the sole imaginable response can
be: sending in yet more weapons, boots, air power, special ops
types, trainers, advisers, private contractors, drones, and funds to
increasingly chaotic conflict zones across significant swaths of the
planet. Above all, there can be no serious thought, discussion, or debate
about how such a militarized approach to our world might have contributed to,
and continues to contribute to, the very problems it was meant to solve. Not in
our nation’s capital, anyway.
The only questions to be argued about are how much, how many,
how often, and how destructively. In other words, the only “antiwar”
position imaginable in Washington, where accusations of weakness or wimpishness
are a dime a dozen and considered lethal to a political career, is how much
less of more we can afford, militarily speaking, or how much more of somewhat
less we can settle for when it comes to militarized death and
destruction. Never, of course, is a genuine version of less or a
none-at-all option really on that “table”
where, it’s said, all policy options are kept.
Think of this as Washington’s military addiction in
action. We’ve been watching it for almost 15 years without
drawing any of the obvious conclusions. And lest you imagine that
“addiction” is just a figure of speech, it isn’t. Washington’s attachment
-- financial, tactical, and strategic -- to the U.S. military and its supposed
solutions to more or less all problems in what used to be called “foreign
policy” should by now be categorized as addictive. Otherwise, how can you
explain the last decade and a half in which no military
action from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen to Libya worked out
half-well in the long run (or even, often enough, in the short run), and yet
the U.S. military remains the
option of first, not last, resort in just about any imaginable situation?
All this in a vast region in which failed states are
piling up, nations are disintegrating, terror insurgencies are spreading,
humongous population upheavals are becoming the norm, and there are refugee flows of
a sort not seen since significant parts of the planet were destroyed during
World War II.
Either we’re talking addictive behavior or failure is the new
success.
Keep in mind, for instance, that the president who came into
office swearing he would end a disastrous war and occupation in Iraq is now
overseeing a new war in an even wider region that includes Iraq, a country that
is no longer quite
a country, and Syria, a country that is now officially kaput. Meanwhile,
in the other war he inherited, Barack Obama almost immediately launched a
military-backed “surge” of U.S. forces, the only real argument being over
whether 40,000 (or
even as many as 80,000)
new U.S. troops would be sent into Afghanistan or, as the “antiwar” president
finally decided, a mere 30,000 (which made him an absolute wimp to his
opponents). That was 2009. Part of that surge involved an announcement that
the withdrawal of American combat forces would begin in 2011. Seven years
later, that withdrawal has once again been halted in
favor of what the military has taken to privately calling a “generational
approach” -- that is, U.S. forces remaining in Afghanistan into at
least the 2020s.
The military term “withdrawal” may, however, still be
appropriate even if the troops are staying in place. After all, as with
addicts of any sort, the military ones in Washington can’t go cold turkey
without experiencing painful symptoms of withdrawal. In American
political culture, these manifest themselves in charges of “weakness” when it
comes to “national security” that could prove devastating in the next
election. That’s why those running for office compete with one another in
over-the-top descriptions of what they will do to enemies and terrorists (from
acts of torture to carpet-bombing)
and in even more over-the-top promises of
“rebuilding”
or “strengthening” what’s already the largest, most expensive military on the
planet, a force better funded at present than those of at least the next seven nations
combined.
Such promises, the bigger the better, are now a necessity if you
happen to be a Republican candidate for president. The Democrats have a
lesser but similar set of options available, which is why even Bernie
Sanders only calls for
holding the Pentagon budget at its present staggering level or for the most modestof
cuts, not for reducing it significantly. And even when, for instance, the
urge to rein in military expenses did sweep Washington as part of an overall
urge to cut back government expenses, it only resulted in a half-secret slush fund or
“war budget” that kept the goodies flowing in.
These should all be taken as symptoms of Washington’s military
addiction and of what happens when the slightest signs of withdrawal set
in. The U.S. military is visibly the drug of choice in the American
political arena and, as is only appropriate for the force that has, since
2002, funded,
armed, and propped up the planet’s largest supplier of
opium, once you’re hooked, there’s no shaking it.
Hawkish Washington
Recently, in the New York Times Magazine, journalist
Mark Landler offered a political portrait entitled “How
Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk.” He laid out just how the senator and
later secretary of state remade herself as, essentially, a military groupie,
fawning over commanders or former commanders ranging from then-General David
Petraeus to Fox analyst and retired general Jack Keane; how, that is, she
became a figure, even on the present political landscape, notable for her
“appetite for military engagement abroad” (and as a consequence, well-defended
against Republican charges of “weakness”).
There’s no reason, however, to pin the war-lover or “last true
hawk” label on her alone, not in present-day Washington. After all, just
about everyone there wants a piece of the action. During their primary
season debates, for instance, a number of the Republican candidates spoke repeatedly
about building up the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, while making that
already growing force sound like a set of decrepit barges.
To offer another example, no presidential candidate these days
could afford to reject the White House-run drone assassination program.
To be assassin-in-chief is
now considered as much a part of the presidential job description as
commander-in-chief, even though the drone program, like so many other
militarized foreign policy operations these days, shows little
sign of reining in terrorism
despite the number of “bad guys” and terror “leaders” it kills (along
with significant
numbers of civilian
bystanders).
To take Bernie Sanders as an example -- because
he’s as close to an antiwar candidate as you’ll find in the present election
season -- he recently put something
like his stamp of
approval on the White House drone assassination project and the
“kill list”
that goes with it.
Mind you, there is simply no compelling evidence that the usual
military solutions have worked or are likely to work in any imaginable sense in
the present conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa. They
have clearly, in fact, played a major role in the creation of the present disaster,
and yet there is no place at all in our political system for genuinely antiwar
figures (as there was in the Vietnam era, when a massive antiwar movement created
space for such politics). Antiwar opinions and activities have now been
driven to the peripheries of the political system along with a word like, say,
“peace,” which you will be hard-pressed to find, even rhetorically, in the
language of “wartime” Washington.
The Look of “Victory”
If a history were to be written of how the U.S. military became
Washington’s drug of choice, it would undoubtedly have to begin in the Cold War
era. It was, however, in the prolonged moment of triumphalism that
followed the Soviet Union’s implosion in 1991 that the military gained its
present position of unquestioned dominance.
In those days, people were still speculating about whether the
country would reap a “peace dividend” from the end of the Cold War. If there
was ever a moment when the diversion of money from the U.S. military and the
national security state to domestic concerns might have seemed like a
no-brainer, that was it. After all, except for a couple of rickety “rogue
states” like North Korea or Saddam Hussein's Iraq, where exactly were this
country’s enemies to be found? And why should such a muscle-bound
military continue to gobble up tax dollars at such a staggering rate in a
reasonably peaceable world?
In the decade or so that followed, however, Washington’s dreams
turned out to run in a very different direction -- toward a “war dividend” at a
moment when the U.S. had, by more or less universal agreement, become the
planet’s “sole superpower.” The crew who entered the White House with
George W. Bush in a deeply contested election in 2000 had already been mainlining the
military drug for years. To them, this seemed a planet ripe for the
taking. When 9/11 hit, it loosed their dreams of conquest and control,
and their faith in
a military that they believed to be unstoppable. Of course, given the
previous century of successful anti-imperial and national independence
movements, anyone should have known that, no matter the armaments at hand,
resistance was an inescapable reality on Planet Earth.
Thanks to such predictable resistance, the drug-induced imperial
dreamscape of the Busheviks would prove a fantasy of the first order, even if,
in that post-9/11 moment, it passed for bedrock (neo)realism. If you
remember, the U.S. was to “take the gloves
off” and release a military machine so beyond compare that nothing
would be capable of standing in its path. So the dream went, so the drug
spoke.
Don’t forget that the greatest military blunder (and crime) of
this century, the invasion of Iraq, wasn’t supposed to be the end of something,
but merely its beginning. With Iraq in hand and garrisoned, Washington
was to take down Iran and sweep up what Russian property from the Cold War era
still remained in the Middle East. (Think: Syria.)
A decade and a half later, those dreams have been shattered, and
yet the drug still courses through the bloodstream, the military bands play on,
and the march to... well, who knows where... continues. In a way, of
course, we do know where (to the extent that we humans, with our limited sense
of the future, can know anything). In a way, we’ve already been shown a
spectacle of what “victory” might look like once the Greater Middle East is
finally “liberated” from the Islamic State.
The descriptions of one widely hailed victory over
that brutal crew in Iraq -- the liberation of the city of Ramadi by a
U.S.-trained elite Iraqi counterterrorismforce backed
by artillery and American air power -- are devastating. Aided and abetted
by Islamic State militants igniting or demolishing whole neighborhoods of that
city, the look of Ramadi retaken should give us a grim sense of where the
region is heading. Here’s how the Associated Press recently
described the scene, four months after the city fell:
“This is
what victory looks like...: in the once thriving Haji Ziad Square, not a single
structure still stands. Turning in every direction yields a picture of
devastation. A building that housed a pool hall and ice cream shops -- reduced
to rubble. A row of money changers and motorcycle repair garages --
obliterated, a giant bomb crater in its place.
The square’s Haji Ziad
Restaurant, beloved for years by Ramadi residents for its grilled meats --
flattened. The restaurant was so popular its owner built a larger, fancier
branch across the street three years ago. That, too, is now a pile of concrete
and twisted iron rods.
“The
destruction extends to nearly every part of Ramadi, once home to 1 million
people and now virtually empty.”
Keep in mind that, with oil prices still deeply depressed, Iraq
essentially has no money to rebuild Ramadi or anyplace else. Now imagine, as
such “victories” multiply, versions of similar devastation spreading across the
region.
In other words, one likely end result of the thoroughly
militarized process that began with the invasion of Iraq (if not of
Afghanistan) is already visible: a region shattered and in ruins, filled
with uprooted and impoverished people. In such circumstances, it may not
even matter if the Islamic State is defeated. Just imagine what Mosul,
Iraq’s second largest city and still in the Islamic State's hands, will be like
if, someday, the long-promised offensive to liberate it is ever truly
launched. Now, try to imagine that movement itself destroyed, with its
“capital,” Raqqa, turned into another set of ruins, and remind me: What exactly
is likely to emerge from such a future nightmare? Nothing, I suspect,
that is likely to cheer up anyone in Washington.
And what should be done about all this? You already know
Washington’s solution -- more of the same -- and breaking such a cycle of
addiction is difficult even under the best of circumstances.
Unfortunately, at the moment there is no force, no movement on the American
scene that could open up space for such a possibility. No matter who is
elected president, you already know more or less what American “policy” is
going to be.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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