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Banned
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The New American Militarism: Do You Advocate More of It, Or a Pullback?
I was surprised to see this article on Paul Wolfowitz, by Andrew J. Bacevich in the June 6th issues of The American Conservative. It prompted me to start a thread to attract posts of opinions about your expectations. Are you getting what you expected from U.S. military activity of the last 42 months? Do you want to see more of it or less of it? Do you believe that it is strengthening our security or weakening it? Is this militarism justified or worth the costs? What do you want to see accomplished militarily in the next two years?
Quote:
http://amconmag.com/2005_06_06/article1.html
Trigger Man
In Paul Wolfowitz, messianic vision meets faith in the efficacy of force.
by Andrew J. Bacevich
.....As the end of the 20th century approached, Providence was clearly summoning the United States to rule. Yet for Wolfowitz, the summons to rule complemented rather than transcended America’s prior mission to redeem. If the New Rome, the United States also remained the New Jerusalem. As Wolfowitz saw it, the possession of great military power facilitated the merger of these seemingly antipathetic roles. America’s interests and American ideology were becoming indistinguishable.
One prospective result would be to free American statesmen from ever again aligning the United States with Stalin to defeat Hitler or with Mao to check Brezhnev. Never again would raison d’etat oblige presidents to soil themselves by associating with execrable tin-pot dictators. Through military power, the United States could recapture the innocence sullied in the aftermath of the nation’s rise to great-power status. An American-dominated military revolution could revive American Exceptionalism and disprove Niebuhr.............
................The inauguration of George W. Bush in 2001 positioned newly appointed Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz to advocate these ideas where advocacy counted most.
For Wolfowitz, therefore, the unspeakable tragedy of 9/11 also signified a unique opportunity, which he quickly seized. Urging that the global war against terror be recast as a global war on behalf of freedom, he placed himself in the vanguard of those calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. A war to liberate Iraq promised to change the face of American grand strategy. By irrevocably committing the United States to a broader and heavily militarized campaign aimed at liberating the entire Islamic world, it would signify the triumph of principles that Wolfowitz had long espoused.
But for that triumph to occur, the war needed to happen. In this sense, the yearnings for a peaceful resolution expressed by Wolfowitz and other senior Bush administration officials during the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom surely qualify as disingenuous. The object of the exercise was never to disarm Saddam peacefully. The aim was always to demonstrate the invincibility of American arms, thereby resetting in a fundamental way the international correlation of power globally, and especially in the Islamic world. Violence as such was a sine qua non, its use expected to endow the United States with greater reserves of leverage, influence, and respect....................
.....................Never has a deputy cabinet secretary played such a visible role in making the case for a policy so fraught with controversy. Cool, imperturbable, and relentlessly “on message,” Wolfowitz performed impressively. Only once did his mask of self-assurance slip: when the United States Army, in the person of its chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, ventured to say nay.
The clash between Shinseki and Wolfowitz received considerable media coverage. For some, it lives on as emblematic of the arrogance and over-confidence attributed to the Bush administration on the eve of war. But the full significance of this civil-military confrontation remains unappreciated. For Shinseki, an honorable soldier with few intellectual pretensions, was also in his own way the embodiment of specific forces, very much at odds with those that Wolfowitz had championed. Although couching his critique in green-eyeshade, bean-counting terms, the general set out to subvert the very project that represented the deputy defense secretary’s life’s work.
The administration, Shinseki told members of Congress, was badly underestimating the number of troops that pacifying Iraq was likely to require. Given that the requisite additional troops simply did not exist, Shinseki was implicitly arguing that the U.S. armed services were inadequate for the enterprise. Further, he was implying that invasion was likely to produce something other than a crisp, tidy decision; from a soldier’s viewpoint, a display of precision warfare was not likely to settle the matter. “Liberation” would leave loose ends. Unexpected and costly complications would abound.
In effect, Shinseki was offering a last-ditch defense of the military tradition that Wolfowitz was intent on destroying, a tradition that saw armies as fragile, that sought to husband military power, and that classified force as an option of last resort. The risks of action, Shinseki was suggesting, were far, far greater than the advocates for war had let on.
Shinseki’s critique elicited an immediate retaliatory response. One could safely ignore the complaints of liberal Democrats or the New York Times, not to mention those coming from a largely inchoate antiwar movement. But if the brass openly opposed the war, they could halt the march on Baghdad even before it began. Besides, how could Shinseki dare even to raise the question of an occupation? Wolfowitz was already on the record as declaring that the United States was “committed to liberating the people of Iraq, not to becoming an occupation force.” Shinseki had to be discredited then and there, lest the opportunity to validate the new American way of war be lost forever.
So the normally unflappable Wolfowitz responded with uncharacteristic brusqueness, caustically dismissing the general’s estimate as “wildly off the mark.” For his dissent, Shinseki paid dearly. Publicly rebuked and immediately marginalized, he soon retired, his fate an object lesson for other senior military professionals. (The episode affirmed the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz theory of civil-military relations: heap lavish public praise on soldiers in the ranks while keeping the generals and admirals on an exceedingly short leash.)
In the end, Wolfowitz got his war. Operation Iraqi Freedom provided the first salvo in an open-ended campaign to transform the Islamic world. Should the conduct of that campaign require the anticipatory use of force, it also provided ample precedent to do just that.
Two years later, Wolfowitz has won a promotion, having been elevated to the presidency of the World Bank. From this even more prominent position, he vows to bring to the eradication of global poverty the same energy that he demonstrated in revitalizing war. According to the standard Washington metric, his appointment qualifies as a triumphal vindication not only of the man but also of the policies he represents.
The contrast with the fate of his chief antagonist could hardly be more vivid. General Shinseki has all but vanished. In an age when senior officers with scores to settle typically vent their spleen by publishing self-exculpatory memoirs or becoming political partisans, Shinseki, ever the traditionalist, has maintained a studied silence. Immensely generous to Wolfowitz, fate has seemingly treated Shinseki unfairly.
Yet this immediate accounting deceives. A balanced assessment of Wolfowitz’s legacy must note that he leaves behind unfinished business and unresolved questions related to precisely those matters about which he cared most: the political utility and moral implications of military power. The forces that he represented and the events that he helped set in motion have yielded at best mixed results.
In its trial run, the doctrine of preventive war—Wolfowitz’s handiwork as much as the president’s—has produced liberation and occupation, a crisp demonstration of “shock and awe” and a protracted, debilitating insurgency, the dramatic toppling of a dictator and horrifying evidence implicating American soldiers in torture and other abuses. The Iraq War has now entered its third year with no end in sight, taxing U.S. forces to the limit. The ongoing conflict has divided the nation like no event since Vietnam. Like Vietnam, it is sapping our economic strength and has already done immeasurable damage to our standing in the world. Despite expectations of Saddam’s overthrow paving the way for what some expected to be a foreign policy of moral incandescence, the United States finds itself obliged once again to compromise its ideals, cozying up to little Saddams like Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf and Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov.
The forces that Paul Wolfowitz helped unleash—a dangerous combination of hubris and naďveté—are exacting an ever mounting cost. His considerable exertions notwithstanding, truth in matters of statecraft remains implacably gray. Even assuming honorable intentions on the part of those who conceived this war, wielding power in Iraq has left the United States up to its ankles, if not up to its knees, in guilt.
In his solitude, General Shinseki can await the final judgment of history with considerable confidence. At the pinnacle of professional success, Paul Wolfowitz must look forward to a different verdict that will be anything but kind.
http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=5625
........War, in fact, is increasingly the American way of life and, to a certain extent, it's almost as if no one notices.
Well, not quite no one. Andrew J. Bacevich has written a book on militarism, American-style, of surpassing interest. Just published, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195173384/antiwarbookstore/">The New American Militarism, How Americans Are Seduced by War</a> would be critical reading no matter who wrote it. But coming from Bacevich, a West Point graduate, Vietnam veteran, former contributor to such magazines as the Weekly Standard and the National Review, and former Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, it has special resonance.
Bacevich, a self-professed conservative, has clearly been a man on a journey. He writes that he still situates himself "culturally on the Right. And I continue to view the remedies proffered by mainstream liberalism with skepticism. But my disenchantment with what passes for mainstream conservatism, embodied in the present Bush administration and its groupies, is just about absolute. Fiscal irresponsibility, a buccaneering foreign policy, a disregard for the Constitution, the barest lip service as a response to profound moral controversies: these do not qualify as authentically conservative values. On this score my views have come to coincide with the critique long offered by the radical Left: it is the mainstream itself, the professional liberals as well as the professional conservatives who define the problem."
I've long recommended Chalmers Johnson's book on American militarism and military-basing policy, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805077979/antiwarbookstore/">The Sorrows of Empire.</a> Bacevich's The New American Militarism, which focuses on the ways Americans have become enthralled by, and found themselves in thrall to, military power and the idea of global military supremacy, should be placed right beside it in any library. Below, you'll find the first of two long excerpts from the book, slightly adapted and posted with the kind permission of the author and of his publisher, Oxford University Press. This one introduces Bacevich's thoughts on the ways in which, since the Vietnam War, our country has been militarized, a development to which, as he writes, the events of September 11 only added momentum. On Friday, I'll post an excerpt on the second-generation neoconservatives and what they contributed to our new militarism.
An excerpt from <a href="http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=5625">The New American Militarism, How Americans Are Seduced by War</a>
"In public life today, paying homage to those in uniform has become obligatory and the one unforgivable sin is to be found guilty of failing to "support the troops." In the realm of partisan politics, the political Right has shown considerable skill in exploiting this dynamic, shamelessly pandering to the military itself and by extension to those members of the public laboring under the misconception, a residue from Vietnam, that the armed services are under siege from a rabidly anti-military Left.
In fact, the Democratic mainstream – if only to save itself from extinction – has long since purged itself of any dovish inclinations. "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about," Madeleine Albright demanded of General Colin Powell, "if we can't use it?" As Albright's question famously attests, when it comes to advocating the use of force, Democrats can be positively gung ho. Moreover, in comparison to their Republican counterparts, they are at least as deferential to military leaders and probably more reluctant to question claims of military expertise.
Even among Left-liberal activists, the reflexive anti-militarism of the 1960s has given way to a more nuanced view. Although hard-pressed to match self-aggrandizing conservative claims of being one with the troops, progressives have come to appreciate the potential for using the armed services to advance their own agenda."..............
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I want the best outcome for my country, especially for our countrymen in uniform. I do not know what to advise as the next step, or over the next two years, because I do not believe that the president or his associates have openly and truthfully communicated the current military policy and goals.
Until I see them willing to trust us with this information, I have to advocate an end to militarism and a rapid withdrawal of our troops from Iraq. Our military has failed to secure Iraqi infrastructure, or a six mile length of road to Baghdad airport and cannot seem to protect it's own members,
and certainly not the Iraqi people. The presence of our troops seems to serve as a catalyst for further violence. |