The Only Good Muslim Is a Dead Muslim. Did We Just Say That to the Muslim World?

I'm afraid that's just what we did tell the Muslim world with the exposure of a course taught at America's own Joint Forces Staff College that suggested the only way to secure America might require wiping out the Muslim population.   Nuking Mecca for starters.

And that's from the West's military head office, the US Defense Department.   We can't take it back now.   The course materials have been posted online.   Every Muslim with computer access is going to be able to read every demented line of it.

Now let's say you're a Muslim doctor with a wife and three kids.  You've been barraged with all this Jihadi stuff for years but you've chosen to sit passively on the fence.   And now all that "Crusader" stuff that's been thrown in your face for so long, why it's true.   There it is, in writing.   They're talking about wiping out your wife and kids because that's necessary for their own security.   Hell, they're talking about genocide of your entire Muslim population.   That's 1.4-billion faithful from North Africa to Indonesia.

Now how do you feel about Iran getting a nuclear weapon or twenty or a hundred?   Every Muslim nation could use a little thermonuclear insurance policy now, couldn't they?   Time's a wastin.

And what if you're a farmer working your fields in Afghanistan?   How do those "peacekeepers" look to you now?

Oh dear.   We, or rather the Americans, have really stepped in it this time and they may have undone any good they have achieved in quite a long time.

Brilliant. Gerald Caplan Explores How Canada Has Jumped Aboard America's Permanent War

This should make the Liberal faithful cringe - a lot.   Gerald Caplan explains how our leaders enlisted Canada into service of the most warlike nation ever, the United States.  As Caplan so rightly points out, we are joining America on the path to permanent war.  That's probably understandable from the radical Right but it's an abomination coming from someone who purports to lead the Liberal Party.

Read Caplan's piece and then ask yourself if the Liberal Party or Canada has anything to gain from this sort of leadership.  Caplan notes the passing last week of the American Chalmers Johnson.   Here's what the late Mr. Johnson thought about your Liberal Leader:

During the post-9/11 period of American enthusiasm for imperialism, one of its most influential proselytizers was Michael Ignatieff, a harvard professor and self-appointed spokesman for  "humanitaian imperialism,"  also known as " Empire Lite."   As the demand for his cheerleading faded in light of the Iraq war, Ignatieff decided to return to his native Canada and become a politician.  Back in Toronto, he acknowledged to a journalist that his many essays and op-eds had all been written as if he were an American, and he apologized for having use " we" and " us" some forty-three times throughout his essay entitled " Lesser Evils," which is a defense of official torture.

In the New York Times Magazine of January 5, 2003, Ignatieff proudly asserts, 'Ever since George Washington warned his countrymen against foreign entanglements, empire abroad has been seen as the republic's permanent temptation and its potential nemesis.  Yet what word but 'empire' describes the awesome thing that America is becoming?  It is the only nation that polices the world through five global military commands; maintains more than a million men and women at arms on four continents; deploys carrier battle groups on watch in every ocean; guarantees the survival of countries from Israel to South Korea; drives the wheels of global trade and commerce; and fills the hearts and minds of an entire planet with its dreams and desires.'


In numerous one-liners, Ignatieff sings the praises of American imperialism: 'Multilateral solutions to the world's problems are all very well, but they have no teeth unless America bares its fangs...  Regime change is an imperial task par excellence, since it assumes the empire's interest has a right to trump the sovereignty fo a state...  The question, then, is not whether America is too powerful but whether it is powerful enough.'


Michael Neumann, a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, compares Ignatieff's epistles to the Americans to 'a sprig of cilantro on the nouveau-imperialist bucket of KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken), transforming Bush's blunderings into a treat for liberal white folks the world over.'

 Oh, I know, I know.   That was the American Michael Ignatieff, not the Canadian Michael Ignatieff who came to restore the Liberal Party to its former greatness.  Really?  Well guess what?  It's up to Michael Ignatieff to explain how someone claiming to be fit to lead the Liberal Party could have so recently and so persistently embraced the American warfare state.  How can a highly educated person simply ditch such boldly stated and repugnant views simply by returning to Canada?  On this, Mr. Ignatieff does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.  The burden of proving - and explaining - his transformation lies squarely with Mr. Ignatieff himself.  We're waiting.

Learning to Live With America in the 21st Century

Ever since September 11, 2001, I have questioned Washington's objectives and its intentions.  From the outset it seemed obvious that terrorism was a criminal matter that should have been entrusted, not entirely perhaps but primarily, to international law enforcement agencies.  In the subsequent nine years that view has been amply borne out.   Law enforcement and national security agencies have been vastly more successful at ferreting out terrorists and disrupting their activities than any military force - hands down more successful.

While a clumsy military ineptly led has done no end of good to al Qaeda by furnishing free fuel to stoke the fires of Islamic radicalism, a new form of global warfare has set in, one that threatens to do far more harm to all concerned even as it makes no promises of success and holds itself to no metrics of accountability.   This is what has become aptly known as the "Long War" or GCOIN, the war of Global Counterinsurgency.

There are a great many problems with the notion of Long War that go largely unnoticed, unmentioned.   These are issues that need a full airing not just in the United States but in every NATO ally nation.   Canadians need to discuss these questions because we, like our NATO partners, seem poised to become America's Foreign Legion in its state of permanent war (which is really nothing more than the Long War taken to its logical conclusion or lack of conclusion).

American military doctrine is something most of us rarely consider which explains why so many fundamental changes have occurred in it with so few of us noticing.   It is a saga that spans an era from the Vietnam War through to today's conflict in Afghanistan and the several wars that will certainly follow.  The questions for Canadians become should we be signing on to them and will we?

In his book Washington Rules, career army officer turned history professor Andrew Bacevich evaluates the hegemonic doctrine that governs American diplomatic and military posture.  He contends that America claims global primacy, even supremacy to international law and norms, based on certain rules founded on heartfelt assumptions and deeply ingrained beliefs.   His premise is that these rules, born out of WWII and applied to today's war on terror, essentially doom America to wage permanent war.  Bacevich depicts it as something of a whirlpool into which those who get swept up (his America and her allies) face their end.

The Washington Rules comprise four assumptions.   The first is that the world must be organized.  In the absence of organization, chaos will surely reign.  The second holds that, only the United States possesses the capacity to prescribe and enforce such a global order.  No other nation has the vision, will and wisdom required to lead.  The third rule is that America's writ includes the charge of articulating the principles that should define the international order.  Those principles are necessarily American principles, which possess universal validity.  And the fourth rule is that, a few rogues and recalcitrants aside, everyone understands and accepts this reality.  despite pro forma grumbling, the world wants the United States to lead.

These Washington Rules have shaped American foreign policy over the past six decades and have come to be taken, in the minds of most Americans, as gospel.

"To cast doubts on the principles of global presence, power projection, and interventionism, as Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich did during the 2008 presidential primaries, is to mark oneself as an oddball or eccentric, either badly informed or less than fully reliable; certainly not someone suitable for holding national office."

The Washington Rules informed the policy of John Kennedy just as it did his successor, Lyndon Johnson.   This proved too much for Arkansas Democratic senator J. William Fullbright who, in 1966, wrote a book entitled The Arrogance of Power.  Power, Fullbright wrote, "tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations - to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is in its own shining image.  ...Once imbued with the idea of mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God's work.  The Lord, after all, would surely not choose you as His agent and then deny you the sword with which to work His will."

Do Fullbright's words sound eerily familiar?  Was it not George w. Bush who repeatedly told others, including our own Paul Martin, that he was an instrument of his god's will, that he was divinely directed?

Vietnam had a seismic impact on the Washington Rules but, like any temblor, it passed.  It did lead America's officer corps to rewrite military doctrine, banishing nation-building and counterinsurgency.  Under what came to be known as the Powell Doctrine, the military re-invented itself as a modern, technologically superior, warfighting machine.  War was to be a last resort but, once invoked, it was to be conducted quickly, with overwhelming force and brought to a prompt end.  Operation Desert Storm and the quick dispatch of Saddam's forces in Kuwait appeared to vindicate the Powell Doctrine but it quickly backfired.

At home, Desert Storm ushered in the era of long-distance killing by precision-guided munitions.   It was "bloodless war" at least for our side.   For America it wasn't even very expensive because U.S. costs were largely covered by donations from Japan, Germany and other nations.  In this way some prominent Americans, notably the neoconservatives, came to see war as a preferred alternative to diplomacy as an instrument of American foreign policy.   Henceforth the Washington Rules could be given life through the application of military force to achieve diplomatic purposes.  It is why the neocons came to hold the United Nations and other multinational organizations in such open contempt.

During the Clinton era, the efficacy of the Washington Rules was reaffirmed my Madeline Albright:

"Albright described the status to which the United States had risen as a consequence of its participation in the immense historical drama centered on Munich.  In this case the immediate context was one of recurring dustups with Saddam Hussein that punctuated the decade after Operation Desert Storm.  'If we have to use force,' Albright declared with the regard to the possibility of renewed air attacks against Iraq, 'it is because we are America.  We are the indispensable nation.  We stand tall.  We see further...into the future.'"

During the Clinton years the U.S. military embarked on the RMA or Revolution in Military Affairs.  This was the ultra-high tech rebirth of American military power:

"This RMA implied a new aesthetic of war.  Past conflicts had tended to be confusing brawls; in the digital age, military operations were to become carefully choreographed performances.,  ...Ability, precision, synchronization, and speed:  In the realm of military affairs, these were now emerging as the attributes defining operational excellence.

The RMA's semiwarriors believed ...if the Pentagon acted promptly, ...something approaching permanent military dominion would all but fall into the country's lap.  the mere contemplation of this prospect generated a sense of excitement verging on the erotic."

Bacevich points out that the Washington Rules transitioned flawlessly to this new reality:

"...the Washington rules once underpinned a strategy of containment:  Washington's declared aim had been to avert a domino effect, the loss of any one country to communism presumably leading to the loss of many others.  As reconfigured in the wake of 9/11, the Washington rules provided the basis for the United States to promote its own domino effect, the forceful 'liberation' of one or two countries in the Islamic world expected to unleash a wave of change eventually rippling across the entire Greater Middle East."

And so followed the Bush Doctrine of preventive war, war of aggression masked in some humanitarian cloak.  With this the path was opened to the conquest of Iraq.

9/11 became the midwife of permanent war.   One telltale of the arrival of permanent war is our astonishing ability to turn failure into victory and nowhere is this more obvious than in Iraq:

"....the larger purposes that had ostensibly impelled the United States to invade Iraq remained unfulfilled.  U.S. forces never did find the weapons of mass destruction that had imbued the invasion with such purported urgency.  The promised documentation linking Saddam Hussein to the jihadists who plotted the 9/11 attacks never materialized.  Expectations that the liberation of Iraq would trigger a wave of democratic change across the Islamic world remained a pipe dream.  No road to peace in Jerusalem was ever discovered in downtown Baghdad.  The presence of U.S. forces in Iraq failed to cow the mullahs ruling neighboring Iran."

Yet the current narrative is that Petraeus transformed certain defeat in Iraq into victory thanks to "the surge."   What a load of nonsense!   Violence fell but that was mainly due to the completion of murderous ethnic cleansing in Baghdad.   The Sunni tribes had come to fear al Qaeda and offered to switch sides in exchange for American cash.   Muqtada al Sadr decided to wait it out in Tehran and ordered his Mahdi Army to lay low.   Baghdad kept postponing the promised referendum to decide the Kurdish claim to the city of Kirkuk and its surrounding oilfields.   Even today, nearly eight months after the last elections, no central government has emerged in Baghdad.   That's not victory.   It's a disastrously failed military campaign that left in its wake one, two, possibly three civil wars waiting to erupt.

But, in Washington, appearances trump reality.   And so, as the price of momentarily redeeming George w. Bush's Iraq legacy, the U.S. military leadership has survived its own failures:

"..with Petraeus lionized for all but single-handedly redeeming a lost cause, the surge tilted the balance of civil-military authority back in favor of the top brass.

A determination to avoid protracted conflict had been a core conviction for the generations of officers who had served in Vietnam.  According to Gen. Colin Powell, the best known member of that generation, wars should occur infrequently.  For Powell the supreme value was not warfighting but preparedness.  ...When conflict did occur, Powell favored the employment of overwhelming force to end the fighting quickly and achieve decisive results.

The generation  of officers represented by Petraeus now reached different conclusions.  They came to view war as commonplace, a quasi-permanent aspect of everyday reality.  Moreover, their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan persuaded them to see armed conflict as an open-ended enterprise.  To be a soldier was either to be serving in a war or to be recently returned.  ...Wars n o longer ended.  At best, they subsided."

Which pretty much brings us to where we are today.   Afghanistan remains "an open ended enterprise" with no end in sight.   Even as Afghanistan languishes, neighbouring (nuclear-armed) Pakistan becomes increasingly destabilized.  Iran looms ever larger as a fledgling nuclear-armed power in waiting.   The entire Middle-East/South Asia region has been transformed into a Hydra from which America, quite probably, can no longer extricate itself with honour even as it begins to wobble under the weight of its massive debts.

America today finds itself in a position similar to that of ancient Rome.   It can no longer field the armies it requires for its overseas adventures and has become increasingly hungry for foreign reserves.  It wants its allies to sign on and it's not unreasonable to expect Washington to become far more vocal in its demands over the coming decade.

What should Canada do?   How do we fit into America's plans?   How do we cope with a nation that has lapsed into permanent war; that has embraced an entirely different foreign policy, one in which diplomacy is replaced by military force?   Are we willing to toe the line, to validate the Washington Rules?

Bear in mind that, for the balance of this century at least, the world is going to become steadily less stable and more dangerous as the impacts of climate change, overpopulation, resource depletion and other scourges settle in.   The notion that we can operate independently, magically hovering above Washington's blundering ways, is a fantasy unto itself.   However if we are to forge an independent Canadian posture that remains somewhat compatible with America's now is the time we need to begin turning our minds to the problem.   This is an issue on which we cannot allow ourselves to be overtaken by events.

America's Cancerous Militarism - Part 3

Why should Americans or anyone else not directly in their boresights care about U.S. hyper-militarism?  Well, American or not, there are plenty of reasons.

One is the health of the United States itself.   For a long time America has been writing militaristic cheques counting on its foreign creditors to make them good.  When you're in hock to everybody and still running in the red in every way imaginable you can't afford to spend more than every other nation combined on militarism.   Why fix Afghanistan instead of fixing Detroit?   At the federal, state, municipal, corporate and individual levels, America is awash in debt.  When your military budget runs to $700-billion a year plus tens of billions more off the books that can really clog your fiscal arteries.

It's not as though Washington has reaped any great financial recovery from its wars in Afghanistan or Iraq.   It thought it would but it also thought those wars would be won decisively and very quickly.  America isn't even remotely safer due to those adventures.   If anything the Afghanistan and Iraq wars have degraded America's security.   They showed that all the King's horses and all the King's men can't always win all the King's wars.  They showed there are ways around America's technical and firepower superiority.   They showed that America's generals are, at best, mediocre especially when saddled with ideologically-bound political leadership.

Another reason is that America has become used to leaning on its "allies" to join in its military misadventures.   Being allied for some purposes doesn't mean being allied for all.  Being allied doesn't mean signing on to become another country's Foreign Legion.   Heads of allied countries are going to have a tougher time with their voters in future in selling protracted military campaigns in support of the United States.

Yet another reason is that American values are less compatible with other nations' these days.   Not everybody sees affluence as the equivalent of liberty, not everyone looks to its military to anchor its prosperity.  Christian fundamentalism hasn't taken hold elsewhere as it has in America and a lot of outsiders are leery at its impact on America's agenda.  Neoconservatism may be trying to stage a comeback in the United States but it's a movement that's alien to other cultures.   America is coming to look less and less like a liberal democracy with each passing year and, in the process, is distancing itself from its traditional allies.  It is by no means clear that Obama will manage to reverse that before Movement Conservative Republicans reclaim control of Congress.

American militarism has facilitated American bellicosity and that undermines global security and stability.    American forces conquered small countries at either end of Iran but that did nothing to contain or weaken Iran.   Instead it transformed Iran into the major player in its corner of the Middle East/South Asia.

Another reason is that the great problems confronting us in the 21st century simply cannot be resolved by military force.   You can't address global warming with superior firepower.   Airpower cannot overcome spreading desertification.  Artillery and tanks won't arrest deforestation or the collapse of global fish stocks.  The world's most powerful blue water navy cannot fix the world's freshwater crisis. If we're going to find global answers to these global threats, it won't be through the coercive powers of militarism.   The only role militarism can play in these dilemmas is if and when we utterly fail to find effective global solutions in time.   If anything, American militarism will distract the United States from confronting these potentially existential challenges perhaps until it's too late.

It is morally reprehensible to resort to military force to bolster a nation's prosperity and economic dominance.   America cannot parlay its position as the dominant global beggar into global economic hegemon by relying on militarism to sustain an unsustainable economic advantage.   America's emerging rivals won't have that.  Neither will America's friends.   That can only lead to a state of perpetual warfare that none of us can continue to bear.

The charade is over.  Anybody who ever was willing to believe in a benign, much less benevolent, American foreign policy anchored in coercive force has seen the light.   America is at risk of acquiring the legitimacy in its foreign policy once reserved for the Soviet Union.   America does not go to war to defend ideals but to advance American interests.  We get it.

The Project for the New American Century, once put in practice, became the project for the fizzled American decade.   American exceptionalism is a spent force, at least beyond America's borders where it once mattered.

If, as Bascevich claims, militarism took hold in the United States at least in part due to its perceived utility, it's difficult to imagine how that motive could survive into the 21st century.   What possible utility remains in militarism post-Iraq and post-Afghanistan?   America's potential rivals will not be thwarted by U.S. militarism from claiming their share of the pie, that is global resources.   American militarism may in fact drive smaller, resource-rich countries away from the United States and directly into the arms of ascendant countries like China.

Today China is making deep inroads into resource-rich Africa.   America, by contrast, was rebuffed by African states when it sought to establish its own military command for their continent, Africa Command or AfriCom.  They weren't interested in American assurances that AfriCom would not meddle in their affairs.   American aid has been immensely popular in Africa but American militarism remains unwelcome and who could be surprised at that?

During the Cold War it was much easier for the major powers to impose their will over small states.  Nations were aligned ideologically - Western (capitalist), Soviet (communist), or simply non-aligned.  Today small states are more apt to be aligned on regional or economic groupings in which ties to major powers are looser and more transferable.   South America, long the preserve of the United States, has broken free to forge an independent, regional alliance.   Africa, once almost entirely colonized by the West, today finds itself drawn elsewhere to Asia and the Middle East.  The Caucasus, once under the heel of Soviet masters now finds itself courted by rivals Russia and the United States.  Spheres of influence, once tidily arranged, are today vague and shifting, diminishing the importance of coercive militarism.

In a multi-polar world America may pay dearly for choosing coercion over persuasion as its foreign policy.   But if the benefits are dwindling as the risks climb ever higher, why would America not simply abrogate militarism entirely?   Probably because it's a habit not easily shed.    In fact, Bacevich argues that dislodging today's embedded militarism will require fundamental change in the way the United States is governed:

Heed the Intentions of the Founders

...Although politicians make a pretense of revering [the Constitution], when it comes to military policy they have long since fallen into the habit of treating it as a dead letter.

...Nothing in that compact ...commits or even encourages the United States to employ military power to save the rest of humankind or remake the world in its own image...  To the contrary the Preamble of the Constitution expressly situates military power at the center of the brief litany of purpose enumerating the collective aspirations of "we the people.  It was 'to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense,  promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."

...Only if citizens remind themselves and remind those exercising political authority why this nation exists will it be possible to restore the proper relationship between military power and that purpose..,.

Revitalize the Concept of Separation of Powers

...An essential step toward curbing the new American militarism is to... call upon Congress to reclaim its constitutionally mandated prerogatives.   Indeed, legislators should insist upon a strict constructionist definition of war such that any use of force other than in direct and immediate defense of the United States should require prior congressional approval.

The Cold War is history.  The United States no longer stands eyeball-to-eyeball with a hostile superpower.   Ensuring our survival today does not require, if it ever did, granting to a single individual the authority to unleash the American military arsenal however the perception of threats, calculations of interest, or flights of whimsy might seem to dictate.

View Force as a Last Resort

This requires an explicit renunciation of the Bush doctrine of preventive war, which in arrogating to the United States prerogatives allowed to no other nation subverts international stability and in the long run can only make Americans less secure.  In its place, the United States should return to a declaratory policy more consistent with its own established moral and religious traditions, with international law, and with common sense.

Enhance U.S. Strategic Self-Sufficiency

With globalization a fact of life, autarky [a policy of self-sufficiency and non-reliance on imports or foreign aid] is more than ever a chimera.   The argument here calls for something more modest:  taking prudent steps to limit the extent of U.S. dependence on foreign resources, thereby reducing the pressures to intervene abroad on behalf of ostensibly 'vital' material interests.

Ever since the onset of the Cold War, Americans have persuaded themselves that their well-being requires the guarantee of unencumbered access to the world's resources...  For decades, this notion has provided an infinitely elastic rationale for sticking America's nose in other people's business.

Organize U.S. Forces explicitly for National Defense

Focusing on defense rather than on power projection implies jettisoning the concept of 'national security,' an artifact of the Cold War employed as a device to justify everything from overthrowing foreign governments to armed intervention in places that most Americans could not locate on a map.

Devise an Appropriate Gauge for Determining U.S. Defense Spending

...Militarists and those who dream of global empire have proposed their own answer.   Their requirement is quite simple:  they want more next year than last, and more still the year beyond that, regardless of the situation prevailing beyond U.S. borders.

A better approach, one more likely to limit adventurism abroad while still meeting essential U.S. security requirements, would be to peg U.S. expenditures in relation to what others are spending.  To stipulate, for example, that the United States should match the next ten most lavishly spending powers combined would assure U.S. military capabilities not only far in excess of any potential adversary but also in excess of any remotely plausible combination of adversaries.

Enhance Alternative Instruments of Statecraft

The natural accompaniment to a doctrine that views hard power as a last resort is to increase the attention given to so-called soft power, the ability to influence rather than merely coerce and to build rather than merely demolish.

The rest of Bacevich's recommendations deal with reforming the American military itself.  He advocates the return of the "citizen soldier" concept to connect the American public directly to their military.  He endorses restoring the traditional role of the National Guard and Reserve forces who are intended to be actual "reserves" rather than bodies available to incorporate into an imperial army.   Finally he wants to reconcile the American military profession to American society.   This is his most radical recommendation.   The former West Point professor recommends that the officer corps be drawn solely from candidates who have obtained their bachelor's degree at a civilian university.

Bacevich urges Americans to heed the warnings of their Founding Fathers:

...George Washington pointedly advised his fellow citizens to be wary of 'those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.

...of this Washington was certain: to cultivate military power for its own sake and to indulge in the ambitions to which large armies gave rise was alien to the entire conception of the New World.  To seek safety in an overgrown military establishment was to replicate the errors of the Old World, home to kings an d sepulchres and empires but not to freedom and republican virtue.

Bacevich warns that his countrymen have fallen into the trap of delusion:

...Misremembering both bad wars and good, Americans fostered a fresh set of illusions.  These illusions - not only or even in particular our outsized martial pretensions - constitute the heart of the problem that is present-day American militarism.   For from these illusions come expectations that George Washington would find astonishing: that through the determined exercise of its unquestioned military dominance the United States can perpetuate American global primacy and impress its values on the world at large.

If it persists in these expectations, then America will surely share the fate of all those who in ages past have looked to war and military power to fulfill their destiny.   We will rob future generations of their rightful inheritance.  We will wreak havoc abroad.  We will endanger our security at home.  We will risk the forfeiture of all that we prize.

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In preparing this three-part examination of Bacevich's The New American Militarism, I was wary of coming across as another anti-American Canadian.   Yet what I have done is to simply restate the wisdom of an intensely patriotic American, a career U.S. Army officer who served from Vietnam to the Persian Gulf; an academic who lost a son, himself a U.S. Army lieutenant, to an IED in Iraq.

I am not remotely anti-American nor have I been at least since I did my undergrad in the U.S. back when the Vietnam war was raging.    Canada needs the United States and, in so many ways, we will be affected by the health and wisdom of that country as we meet the many challenges that confront mankind in this 21st century.   As I noted above, the path American is on, this hyper-militarism, will not help our continent meet the environmental, social and security calamities coming our way.  If anything it will distract, perhaps even destabilize, America when we'll need it most.

America's Cancerous Militarism - Part 2

  

America has been gradually overtaken by a type of hyper-militarism that, unless checked, could threaten its future as a democratic republic.   That is the warning of Andrew J. Bacevich in his book, The New American Militarism.   This former career US Army officer turned academic sees a confluence of forces that arose from the Reagan era through the administrations of Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and, now, Obama to ensnare his country in a militarism that now dominates American policy, foreign and domestic.

Yesterday, in part one, we looked at Ronald Reagan as the Founding Father of Americn Militarism and the role played by the marriage of fundamentalist Christianity and the US military.   This part will deal with Bacevich's exploration of the roles played by right wing ideologues, the neoconservatives, and the far right academics who spawned them together with the role they have played in boosting America's hyper-militarism.

Several years ago Lewis Lapham wrote that the end of his beloved America was foretold in the Nixon years when, as he put it, Americans came to "equate wealth with virtue."  It's an interesting premise and one that's fairly easily made out.   Bacevich carries it one step further.   In dealing with the "blood for oil" argument, he contends that today's American militarism came about when his countrymen came to view affluence as liberty itself.

The marriage of Extremist Ideology and Far Right Intellectualism with American Militarism.

It's pretty standard for modern governments to rely on intellectuals to assist in formulating policy.   This is particularly true in matters of foreign affairs, a truly multi-disciplinary pursuit.   In the United States, however, academics ventured far beyond matters of diplomacy to reach deeply into the very guts of military strategy.   In doing so, Bacevich argues, academics formed the High Priestdom of American Militarism.   They became the alchemists of modern warfare charged with solving the age-old dilemma:

"Since the beginning of the industrial age, war has time and again proven itself to be all but ungovernable.  The shattered reputations of generals and statesman who presumed to bring it under their control litter the twentieth century."

The end of WWII and the advent of the nuclear age triggered great changes in America's concept of warfighting.  Before then matters of tactics and strategy had been the near exclusive preserve of top generals and their political masters.   Think Guderian, think Rommel, think Patton.   But even the best generals suffered occasional defeats, something that had greater significance in the context of a nuclear exchange.

Bacevich chronicles how, in the wake of WWII, academics reformulated warfare.   No longer would the chief purpose of the military establishment be to win wars.   Instead the prime function of a modern military would be to avoid war.  At least that was the thinking in the 1950's.

The University of Chicago-trained Bernard Brodie advanced the notion of deterrence, "threatening force in order to persuade would be adversaries to forego misbehavior, with success making the actual use of force unnecessary."

"Brodie ...formed the basis of a new profession, its members known as defense intellectuals.  It gave birth to new institutions such as the RAND Corporation, the federally funded research facility...   The defense intellectuals produced a vast literature, most of it highly classified and bristling with jargon - 'not incredible counterforce first strike' and 'Doomsday Machine,' 'overkill' and 'mutual annihilation,' 'MAD' and "N=1.' "

But Brodie was wrong.   "Hiroshima had not, in fact, robbed violence of its political utility.  It had certainly not made war obsolete."  The Pentagon, notes Bacevich, really wasn't interested in high-minded ways to prevent another Hiroshima.   Instead it wanted answers on how to, "perpetuate the advantages that had accrued to the United States as a consequence of Hiroshima..  ..without triggering WWIII.   This was the challenge that imbued nuclear strategy with excitement and allure."

",,,the really interesting arguments were not with the hopelessly naive One Worlders or the hopelessly simple-minded generals but with the economists, mathematicians and political scientists across the corridor or down the hall, whether at RAND or any of the other institutions such as Harvard, MIT, and the University of Chicago where members of the priesthood congregated."

Foremost among these was Albert Wohlstetter, a mathematical logician, who went on to mentor the likes of Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz.   Wohlstetter, claims Bacevich, dislodged America from the perch of deterrence to more activist militarism, "...to enhance the ability of the United States to fight, whether all-out wars or limited ones, whether brief or protracted, whether employing nuclear or conventional weapons.   A wider range of robust military capabilities (necessarily requiring increases in defense spending), more options available to decision makers and a blunt willingness to go to the mat; these alone could keep the Red menace at bay."

"...Thus at the end of the 1950s did Wohlstetter's fallacious (even fraudulent) case for vulnerability nudge the strategic priesthood around a corner and down a path ending some four decades later in a fully developed argument for preventive war as the cornerstone of U.S. strategy."

The academics restored the concept of limited war, offering, "...the prospect of enhancing the direct political relevance of American military power.  Intelligently employed, force could enable the United States to dispose of garden-variety irritants, thereby reducing the likelihood of having to confront the big problem of an all-out nuclear showdown with the Soviet bloc."

Wohlstetter's influence continued for decades.  He was a forceful champion of the development of precision-guided munitions, not for minimizing civilian casualties or other humane advantages, but to enhance, "...the efficacy of American striking power.   ...Wohlstetter posited that a 'tenfold improvement in accuracy is roughly equal in effectiveness to a thousand-fold increase in the explosive energy released by a weapon.'  ...This prospect in turned opened up whole new vistas for the application of force.  At a minimum it promised to make war more readily available as an instrument of advancing U.S. security objectives.

Wohlstetter's crowning achievement in his decades-long effort to reconceptualize warfare came when he cochaired the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy.  "Under the guise of reinforcing deterrence, this panel candidly advanced the case for a national security strategy incorporating the anticipatory use of force, eliminating threats before they could mature."  Bacevich refers to this as an "important milestone on the road to the Bush Doctrine."

Much of Wohlstetter's thinking was proven out in Operation Desert Storm when Saddam Hussein's armies were swept out of Kuwait.   But Wohlstetter saw the campaign as a failure in that it ended with Hussein still in power. 

Bacevich credits this as the final step in the 'evolving logic' leading to a strategy of preventive war.  "By their very existence dictatorships constituted an unacceptable threat.  The only sure remedy to the problem of vulnerability..  ..was to bring despotic regimes into full compliance with American norms, using force if necessary to do so."

Thus Wohlstetter and his successors ushered in the reality of military force supplanting diplomacy in America's foreign affairs.

Wholstetter's evolving wisdom was readily embraced by his ideological kin, the neoconservatives.   During the Cold War their focus was on maintaining an adequate force to defeat the threat of communism.   When the Soviet Union imploded, the second generation of neoconservatives looked for a new purpose and found it in pressing for America's unipolar military superiority to be employed to maintain their country's military and economic supremacy into perpetuity.

During the Clinton years, the Latter-Day Neo-Cons, massed themselves into an outfit they called The Project for the New American Century.  Above all else they wanted Saddam gone and the Arab Middle East reformed to comply with American values.  Clinton gave them the brush off but Cheney brought them straight into the White House when Bush II came to power.

Bacevich labels the neoconservative movement an "insurgency," an ideological counter-revolution.

"The conception of politics to which neoconservatives paid allegiance owed more to the ethos of the Left than to the orthodoxies of the Right.  Their ultimate ideological objective was not to preserve but to transform.  They viewed state power not as a necessary evil but as a positive good to be cultivated and then deployed in pursuit of large objectives."

As argued by one of the founders of first-generation neoconservatism, Norman Podhoretz, "...America had a mission and must never 'come home.'  ...Alternatives to or substitutes for American global leadership simply did not exist.   ...History had singled out the United States to play a unique role as the chief instrument for securing the advance of freedom, which founded its highest expression in democratic capitalism."

In the wake of the Cold War, neoconservatives grew fearful of being rendered irrelevant and cast about for a new mission.

"The neoconservative writer George Weigel put his finger on the problem in 1992:  to leave the post-Cold War foreign policy debate to the newly ascendant realists ...meant that isolationism would ultimately prevail.  ...all that the neoconservatives had struggled for would be lost.  Hence, wrote Weigel, the imperative or reenergizing the cause of 'democratic internationalism' - an approach to U.S. foreign policy based on the old neoconservative precepts of global engagement, assertiveness, and activism backed by military power."

The second-generation neocons, according to Bacevich, organized themselves on several precepts:

 1.  "...the certainty that American global dominion is, in fact, benign and that other nations see it as such."

2.  "Failure of the United States to sustain its imperium would inevitably result in global disorder, bloody, bitter and protracted."

3.  "Employing ...military might with sufficient wisdom and determination would bring within reach peace, prosperity, democracy, respect for human rights, and American global primacy extending to the end of time."

4.  "Military strength alone will not avail unless used actively to maintain a world order which both support and rests upon American hegemony."

5.  "Military conquest has often proved to be an effective means of implanting democracy.  Michael Ledeen went even further, declaring that, 'the best democracy program ever invented is the U.S. Army.  Peace in this world only follows victory in  war."

And so the neoconservatives laid the basis for what would become lifted straight out of their playbook to be enshrined as American policy in the Bush Doctrine.   Obama has notionally repudiated the Bush Doctrine but, as Bacevich reveals, that's infinitely easier said than done.


Blood for Oil, Affluence as Liberty and Militarism to Preserve American Prosperity.

Bacevich contends that, while  the Cold War could be considered WWIII, America has, as far back as the Carter Administration, been waging WWIV, the war to secure American access to cheap Middle East oil against all rivals and threats.

Since 1945 when Franklin Roosevelt met with then Saudi King Ibn Saud, there existed an understanding that Saudi Arabia could rely on America to guarantee its security and the U.S. could count on Saudi Arabia for preferential treatment (access) to the kingdom's vast reserves of oil.  U.S. power, however, was to remain low-key and whenever possible out of sight.   That came to an end in 1979 due to the Iranian Revolution and the rise of an Islamist regime hostile to the United States and the Soviet military excursion into Afghanistan.   That led to the pronouncement of the Carter Doctrine, "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."

"...each of President Carter's successors has expanded the level of U.S. military involvement and operations in the region.  Even today (pre-Obama) American political leaders cling to their belief that the skillful application of military power will enable the United States to decide the fate ...of the entire Greater Middle East.

"...What was true of the other three presidents who had committed the U.S. to world wars - Wilson, FDR, and Truman - remained true in the case of President Carter and World War IV as well.  The overarching motive for action was the preservation of the American way of life.

":...What Americans wanted for themselves and demanded from their government was freedom, defined as more choice, more opportunity, and above all greater abundance measured in material terms.  That meant ...assured access to cheap oil and lots of it."

"On the surface the exchange might entail blood-for-oil, but beneath the surface the aim was to guarantee the ever-increasing affluence that underwrites the modern American conception of liberty."

A fascinating concept - ever-increasing affluence as the foundation of liberty.   An interpretation that begets the use of constant military force to ensure access to the lifeblood of liberty, oil.

"Only by enjoying unquestioned primacy in the region - initially defined as "Southwest Asia" but eventually to encompass all of the Persian Gulf, the Caucasus, and Central Asia - could the government of the United States guarantee American prosperity and therefore American freedom.

From the outset, that is, dominance was the aim.  What Winston Churchill had said with regard to European maneuvering in the Persian Gulf at the beginning of the twentieth century remained true as the century drew to a close, 'mastery itself was the price of the venture.'"

Here lay the driving force behind U.S. actions in what became World War IV; not preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction; not stemming the spread of terror' certainly not liberating oppressed peoples or advancing the cause of women's rights.   The prize was mastery of a region that leading members of the American foreign policy elite, of whatever political persuasion, had concluded to be critically important to the well-being of the United States.

"...the problem was one that demanded a military solution; this, at least, was the initial presumption, never thereafter subjected to serious scrutiny.  ...This is where Reagan made his most lasting contribution.

"Those who view World War IV as either sinister in its motivation or misguided in its conception will include Reagan in their bill of indictment.   From their perspective, it was Reagan who seduced his fellow citizens with promises of material abundance without limit.  It was Reagan who made the fusion of military strength with American Exceptionalism the centerpiece of his efforts to revive national self-confidence.  It was Reagan's enthusiastic support of Afghan 'freedom fighters' - eminently defensible in the context of World War III - that produced not freedom but a Central Asian power vacuum, Afghanistan becoming a cesspool of Islamic radicalism and safe haven for America's chief adversary in World War IV.   Finally, it was Reagan's inconclusive forays in and around the Persian Gulf that paved the way for still larger if equally inconclusive interventions to come"

From Bacevich's viewpoint, World War IV, has progressed in three distinct phases.   Phase One spanned the Islamist takeover of Iran and the Soviet entry into Afghanistan up to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.   Phase Two covered the Iraqi conquest of Kuwait, Saddam's ouster and the decade of containment.    Phase Three began with the attacks of 9/11, leading to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the sorry aftermath of that folly.

Bacevich warns that the outcome of World War IV remains dangerously hanging in the balance:

"...American shortsightedness played a large role in creating this war.  American hubris has complicated it unnecessarily, emboldening the enemy, alienating old allies, and bringing U.S. forces close to exhaustion.  Yet like it or not, Americans are now stuck with their misbegotten crusade.

"...Still, even if the United States ultimately prevails - thereby reinvigorating the several conceits informing the new American militarism - the prospects for the future will be hardly less discouraging.  On the far side of World War IV, a time which we are not presently given to see, there await others who will not readily concede to the United States the prerogatives and the dominion hat Americans have come to expect as their due.  The ensuing collision between American requirements and a noncompliant world will provide the impetus for more crusades.  Each in turn will be justified in terms of ideals rather than interests, but together they may well doom the United States to fight perpetual wars in a vain effort to satisfy our craving for freedom without limit and without end."

What seems to be missing from this book is any mention of a particularly powerful force in American hyper-militarism, the military-industrial complex and its recent hellspawn the industrial warfighting complex exemplified in corporations such as Blackwater, Halliburton, Kellog Root & Brown and so many others.  The private sector no longer provides just the instruments of war but now rakes in massive profits from actually participating in America's wars, even from warfighting itself.  In effect this influential private sector has everything to gain and nothing to lose from war without end and its voice is well heard in America's "bought and paid for" Congress.

Tomorrow:  Bacevich's formula for undoing America's hyper-militarism; the parallels between American militarism and the British experience toward the end of the British empire; and the role Canada and NATO should play in the future of American militarism. 

America's Cancerous Militarism

Ever so steadily America has fallen into the clutches of militarism, a crippling disease that could doom the republic and one that is going to be extremely difficult to reverse.

The state of 21st century American militarism is chronicled and dissected by career soldier turned academic Andrew Bacevich in his book, The New American Militarism.   The author explores how militarism took hold during the Reagan administration, how it came to be embraced by the American public and how it has been employed by every president since Reagan, Clinton no exception.

Bacevich examines how America's hyper-militarism has been bolstered and nurtured by neo-conservatism, evangelism and one branch of academia.   He lays bare the powerfully addictive nature of militarism once it evolves from a means of defence into an instrument of foreign policy and a vehicle to assure the affluence of the American people.   Finally he warns what lies in store if America's militarism continues unchecked and the many difficult measures his country must take to break its hold on the nation.

Reagan, the Founding Father of American Militarism

How did a bumbling fool like Ronald Reagan ever become so immensely popular with the American people?   Easy.   Like many successful charlatans, Reagan won the hearts and minds of his public by making them feel good about themselves.   Reagan prevailed by being the anti-Carter.

Bacevich points out that Carter's Calvinist realism, embodied in his "Crisis of Confidence" speech of July, 1979, was tailor-made for a shyster like Reagan:

"In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.   Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.  But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.  We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose."

Carter went on to urge his countrymen to break their addiction to oil, calling on them as "an act of patriotism" to lower thermostats, observe the speed limit and use carpools.

Bacevich, who plainly considers Carter a bungler, says that Carter foretold America's greater problem:

"To the extent that "foreign oil" refers implicitly to the Persian Gulf - as it did then and does today - Carter was in essence proposing to arrest the growing strategic importance attributed to that region.  He sensed intuitively that a failure to reverse the nation's energy dependence was sure to draw the United States every more deeply into the vortex of Persian Gulf politics..."

"This is, of course precisely what has come to pass, with massive and problematic implications for the nation's security and for U.S. military posture and priorities.  [Since Carter's 1979 speech] the energy-rich regions of the world - the Caucasus and Central Asia in addition to the Persian Gulf - have absorbed an ever increasing amount of attention by the American military.   ...Today, increasingly, the profile of the American military presence abroad corresponds to the location of large oil and natural gas reserves."

That speech, while prescient, was fodder for Carter's political adversaries:

"...Ronald Reagan first and foremost - offered a different message, not of a need to cut back but of abundance without end.   [He] assured Americans not only that compromising their lifestyle was unnecessary but that the prospects for economic expansion were limitless and could be had without moral complications or great cost.  This, rather than nagging about shallow materialism, was what Americans wanted to hear."

The final nail in Carter's presidential coffin was the botched rescue mission to free American hostages held in Iran.  Reagan pounced:

"...As [neo-conservative founder] Norman Podhoretz has noted, Reagan 'made free and frequent use of patriotic language and engaged in an unembarrassed manipulation of patriotic symbols; he lost no opportunity to praise the armed forces, to heighten their morale, to restore their popular prestige.'  As a result, 'he also helped restore confidence ...in the utility of military force as an instrument worthy of political purposes.'"

Once in power, Reagan became the Founding Father of American militarism.  Reagan transformed America's all volunteer force.   The Pentagon's budget doubled during the Reagan years, the quality of recruits vastly improved, and the mythologizing of American military prowess was exploited at every opportunity.  America was once again "standing tall" thanks to its embrace of militarism:

"To substantiate Reagan's claim that 'as a nation, we've closed the books on a long, dark period of failure and self doubt and set a new course,' one needed to look no further than the freshly minted fighter jets, tanks and helicopters entering the force and the eager young men and women who crewed them.

Thus did military might - rather than, say, the trade balance, income distribution, voter turnout, or the percentage of children being raised in two-parent families - become the preferred measure for gauging the nation's strength."

Bacevich contends that Reagan's conjuring act became standard fare for his successors:

"Reagan showed that in post-Vietnam America, genuflecting before soldiers and playing to the pro-military instincts of the electorate wins votes.

Given their pronounced political utility, neither the myths that Regan conjured up - about past American wars, about the purposes of American military power, and about those who served in uniform - nor the techniques he devised to exploit those myths disappeared with Reagan himself retired from office.   Rather they became enshrined as permanent aspects of American political theatre."


The Marriage of Militarism and Evangelism and the Birth of Evango-Militarism

While America has always been a profoundly Christian nation, the relationship between religion and the military was, until recently, somewhat distanced.   Those barriers, however, came crashing down with the ascendancy of Christian evangelism and the Christian right.

"Certain in their understanding of right and wrong, growing in numbers, affluence, and sophistication, and determined to reverse the nation's perceived decline, conservative evangelicals after the 1960s assume the role of church militant.  Abandoning their own previously well established skepticism about the morality of force and inspired in no small measure by their devotion to Israel, they articulated a highly permissive interpretation of the "just war" doctrine, the cornerstone of Christian thinking about warfare.   And they developed a considerable appetite for wielding armed might on behalf of righteousness, more often that not indistinguishable from America's own interests.

...evangelicals looked to soldiers to model the personal qualities that citizens at large needed to rediscover if America were to reverse the tide of godlessness and social decay to which the 1960s had given impetus.

Militant evangelicals imparted religious sanction to the militarization of U.S. policy and helped imbue the resulting military activism with an aura of moral legitimacy."

Bacevich contends the role of evangelism in the rise of 21st century American militarism is profound:

"Conservative Christians have conferred a presumptive moral palatability on any occasion on which the United States resorts to force.  They have fostered among the legions of believing Americans a predisposition to see U.S. military power as inherently good, perhaps even a necessary adjunct to the accomplishment of Christ's saving mission.   In doing so they have nurtured the preconditions have have enabled the American infatuation with military power to flourish.

Put another way, were it not for the support offered by several tens of millions of evangelicals, militarism in this deeply and genuinely religious country becomes inconceivable."

Tomorrow - the High Priesthood of Militarism, America's Intellectual Right; Militarism as a Substitute for Diplomacy; Affluence Equated to Liberty and Militarism as Guardian of American Prosperity.