Andrew Bacevich: Anti-Imperialist

The Information Age has spawned two insidious clichés. The one relates to speed, the other to distance, with the first reinforcing the second. 

According to the first cliché, the very tempo of human existence is rapidly accelerating.  We live today in a “fast” world. Change is omnipresent. Success—even survival—requires that people and institutions be quick, nimble, and responsive. To stand still is to be left behind.

According to the second cliché, distances are collapsing. Oceans have been reduced to puddles, mountain ranges into minor inconveniences. Day by day, the world is shrinking and becoming ever more interconnected. 

Now many clichés contain elements of wisdom. John F. Kennedy had it exactly right:  Life is unfair. The same with Charles de Gaulle: Old age is a shipwreck.

The problem with the clichés of the Information Age is that they are entirely bogus. Worse than bogus: They are pernicious.

All the yapping about our supposedly fast, flat, and wired world fosters bizarre expectations. Computers, we are told, possess and confer power. Out of power comes mastery.

Don’t believe it. The fact of the matter is this: We live in a world characterized not by ever-greater speed but by never-ending surprise.  No one—not the pope, the president, or even a fast-world guru like Thomas Friedman—knows what’s going to happen next. Those who pretend otherwise are frauds. 

The Information Age has not notably enhanced our ability either to anticipate the future or to respond to the problems that catch us when we are looking the other way.  

What prompts these thoughts is the ongoing, slow-motion environmental catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. On April 20, an oil platform located 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana exploded, burned, and collapsed, killing 11 and injuring many more. As a consequence, according to The New York Times, crude oil is now spilling into the Gulf at an estimated rate of 5,000 barrels per day. Meanwhile, nine days later—that’s nine days, folks—U.S. government agencies along with BP, the rig’s owner and operator, are still trying to figure out what to do. 

Distance doesn’t matter? Heck, the pipe that’s gushing crude is only 5,000 feet under water—less than a mile. In this case, of course, it might just as well be 5,000 miles. Current estimates say that it may take 90 days to plug the leak. So much for “fast.”

Yet if we consider the disasters of the last decade, the Gulf oil spill doesn’t even make it into the front rank. Crowding it out for top honors are the 9/11 attacks and the mismanagement of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars; the collapse of Enron, the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, the global economic implosion of 2008; and the oh-so-ponderous response to natural disasters such as the hurricanes that devastated New Orleans and Haiti.

The future is opaque. Whatever is coming will contain much that is bad along with some that is good. All the iPods, iPhones, and iPads in the world won’t change the proportion between the two.

Buckle up.

I recently traveled to New Orleans, my first visit to the Crescent City in more than thirty years. Although I was there to give a talk, the occasion provided an opportunity to assess (however belatedly) the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina nearly five years ago.  With that in mind, my host generously offered to give me a guided tour through some of the city’s worst-hit precincts.

Recovery remains a work in progress, with much accomplished and much more remaining to be done. In affluent neighborhoods like the Garden District or at Tulane University where I spoke, evidence of the hurricane’s passing is conspicuous by its absence. In poorer neighborhoods, the scars are omnipresent and raw.

Yet even in places like the impoverished Lower Ninth Ward, heartening signs of renewal are everywhere visible—businesses and schools reopened, homes being rebuilt or built anew from scratch. Federal money is making a difference not only in fixing residential neighborhoods, but in funding major improvements to hospitals and schools. Private initiatives by churches or charitable organizations are also contributing. Although I’m not a particular fan of the actor Brad Pitt, his Make It Right project has erected more than two dozen new homes that are striking in appearance, while also being environmentally hip.  More such houses are to come. Make It Right is making a difference.

That said, there are still countless buildings that stand abandoned, their roofs caved in, windows covered with plywood, entire structures gradually being enveloped by the local flora. Concrete slabs, stripped bare and surrounded by weeds, litter the landscape. They exist in the thousands. Some number will no doubt eventually serve as foundations for new residences; one guesses that more than a few will simply remain as they are, offering mute testimony to what was once a flourishing community—a sort of twenty-first century American version of Pompeii.

To an outsider, the overall mood is one of sturdy, matter-of-fact, un-heroic heroism. The truth is that however much the plight of those caught in Katrina’s path elicited concern and sympathy back in 2005, most of us have long since moved on. The people of New Orleans are on their own. Whether the Big Easy finally emerges from this epic disaster better or worse, bigger or smaller, richer or poorer, its culture intact or fatally compromised will be for those who live there to decide.

On a day-to-day basis, living in New Orleans—especially in the blighted quarters—translates into learning how to cope or make do. Coping is a predicate for survival.

Not that this is somehow unique to post-Katrina New Orleans. Coping may be the chief response, individual or collective, to the difficulties inherent in the human condition.

One of the reasons that most of us have more or less forgotten Katrina is that the world has experienced a non-stop succession of other natural disasters since. Recent months alone have seen massively destructive earthquakes in Haiti and Chile and China. In Iceland, a volcano erupts, wreaking havoc across much of Europe. Famines ravage populations. The prospect of some new epidemic scares the hell out of us. Floods, droughts, forest fires, tsunamis, melting ice caps: it’s one damn thing after another.

And even if your community has been spared such disasters, it’s unlikely that your family has escaped unscathed. Unexpected death, crippling sickness, the loss of a job, the rupture of intimate relationships: when these things befall us, we cope.

Governments (or in the case of personal loss, friends) do their best to help out, of course.  Yet at the end of the day those directly affected have to figure things out. We have no alternative. So we make the best of things. We put our lives back together. That accomplished, we wait for the next bit of misfortune to come along, as it inevitably does.  Then we cope with that one too.

Forget about world peace, spreading freedom and democracy around the world, and finding true love and happiness. If as nations and individuals we can cope with the hand that fate deals us, we’re doing all that can be expected.

The violence unleashed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 persists, but Americans, from Barack Obama on down, are eager to declare the Iraq War at an end. Apart from a few diehard neoconservatives still keen to use Mesopotamia as a springboard for the pursuit of imperial fantasies, Americans can’t wait to shake the dust of Iraq from their feet and be done with the place.

Yet even as we leave, we should not forget. Common decency demands that we honor the service and sacrifice of those who bore the burden of waging that war. No doubt some committee will soon start lobbying for the construction of an Iraq War Memorial to be erected on the Mall in Washington. That effort deserves to succeed. 

My own view is that every American war, large or small, ought to be commemorated smack dab in the middle of the nation’s capital. Crowding every inch of the Mall with granite and marble war memorials—the bigger the better—just might help deflate the continuing American illusion that we are a peaceful people desirous of nothing except to be left alone. It might help us see ourselves as we really are.

Yet the commemoration of the Iraq War ought to have a second component: American soldiers and American citizens are owed an accounting of exactly what this war was about. Who devised it? What was its actual purpose? What did it achieve and at what cost? Why did so much go so wrong for so long? Who should be held accountable? 

As the U.S. military misadventure in Iraq approaches its conclusion, loose ends abound. We need to tie up as many of those loose ends as we possibly can—not too settle scores or engage in partisan posturing, but to get to the bottom of things. 

In Great Britain, the controversies provoked by the Iraq War produced an official investigation—a truth commission, of sorts. Inevitably, the Chilcot Inquiry didn’t satisfy everyone and didn’t answer every question. But it was an honorable and worthy effort, a tribute to British democracy.

Any effort to remember the Iraq War on this side of the water ought to include a similar undertaking. Congress should create and fund a nonpartisan commission of scholars and Iraq War veterans—no politicians and no generals—to investigate the war’s origins, conduct, and outcome. 

Where is the member of Congress who will champion this cause? Don’t hold your breath waiting for volunteers.

From a short dispatch in the New York Times, appearing on April 5, 2010:

"After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had, in fact, killed the women during the nighttime raid."

Of the three women killed, according to the Times, one was a pregnant mother of ten. A second was a pregnant mother of six. NATO officials had originally peddled the story that the victims had been stabbed to death by family members prior to the U.S. attack on the compound where they had gathered for some festive occasion. This turned out to be entirely bogus—in short, a lie.

Brigadier General Eric Tremblay, a NATO spokesman, manfully offered an apology on behalf of the alliance. “We deeply regret the outcome of this operation, accept responsibility for our actions that night, and know that this loss will be felt forever by the families.” Having read from what has become a set script, Tremblay presumably headed off to the gym for a workout or perhaps to the mess hall to enjoy some good army chow. 

Would such a ritualistic expression of sorrow suffice had the incident snuffed out the lives of pregnant women in Tremblay’s native Canada? Not likely. 

Who killed the women? How exactly did it happen? Who was in charge? Who has been held accountable and in what way? What actions have been taken to preclude any recurrence of such an event? Given the veil of secrecy behind which Special Operations Forces (SOF) operate, these questions don’t simply go unanswered. They don’t even get asked. 

If love means never having to say you’re sorry, then serving in SOF means leaving it to others to say sorry while you play by whatever rules you happen to find expedient.

This is intolerable. Behavior that, at a minimum, involved the wrongful deaths of noncombatants combined with concealing the truth is both wrong and stupid. It makes a mockery of the claim, repeated up and down the chain of command, that the presence of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is benign, with every action carefully calibrated to win the hearts and minds of the people.

Along with accepting responsibility for incidents such as this, NATO needs to fix responsibility. Doing so necessarily entails disciplinary action swiftly administered and publicly acknowledged. 

Afghans no doubt view expressions of regret such as those offered by Brigadier General Tremblay as transparently insincere. They are right to do so. Were you an Afghan, you would feel the same. 

For most Americans, the 30th anniversary of the Carter Doctrine – promulgated by President Jimmy Carter during his January 1980 State of the Union Address – came and went without notice. 

The oversight ranks as an unfortunate one. To an extent that few have fully appreciated, the Carter Doctrine has had a transformative impact on U.S. national security policy. Both massive and lasting, its impact has also been almost entirely pernicious. Put simply, the sequence of events that has landed the United States in the middle of an open-ended war to determine the fate of the Greater Middle East begins here. 

The Carter Doctrine stands in relation to the ongoing Long War as the Truman Doctrine stood in relation to the Cold War. 

In 1947, President Truman announced that it was “the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Truman’s immediate purpose was to persuade Congress to approve his request for security assistance to Greece and Turkey. Yet under Truman’s successors, his doctrine morphed into something more than he probably envisioned or intended. Under the guise of resisting Communist mischief-making, the Truman Doctrine provided a rationale for U. S. intervention, covert and overt, around the world.  

Carter’s immediate aim in January 1980 was also limited. When he declared that "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,” to be “repelled by any means necessary,” his primary purpose was to warn the Kremlin against entertaining any thoughts about asserting Soviet dominion over the world’s energy heartland. Yet each of Carter’s successors has reinterpreted his eponymous doctrine, broadening its scope and using it to justify ever larger ambitions. The ultimate effect has been to militarize U.S. policy across various quarters of the Islamic world. 

Prior to January 1980, the Pentagon and the rest of the national security establishment had viewed the Middle East as a backwater. In terms of U. S. strategic priorities, that region of the world lagged well behind Europe and East Asia and probably behind Latin America, as well. 

Jimmy Carter’s announcement that the Persian Gulf constituted a vital U.S. national security interest changed all that. In short order, the aims implied by the Carter Doctrine expanded. Within a decade, the United States was not content to prevent outside powers from controlling the Gulf. It sought to claim for itself a dominant position in the region. Within two decades, the arena in which the United States sought that dominant role had expanded, eventually encompassing the entire Greater Middle East.

Directly or indirectly, the Carter Doctrine provided the rationale or justification for the following episodes involving the use of force by the United States: 

• Afghanistan War I (1979-1989), the U.S.-led effort to punish the Soviet Union for occupying that country.

• The Beirut Bombing (1983), the name by which Americans choose to remember Ronald Reagan’s intervention in Lebanon.

• The war against Khaddafi (1981-1988), a series of inconclusive skirmishes with the Libyan dictator, culminating in the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103. 

• The Tanker War (1984-1988), waged by U. S. naval forces against Iran to maintain the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz.

• Iraq War I (1990-1991), the first U. S. armed confrontation with Saddam Hussein, commonly but erroneously thought to have ended with the liberation of Kuwait.

• The Somalia Intervention (1992-1993), abruptly terminated by the notorious Mogadishu firefight.

• Afghanistan War II (2001-2003), launched in the wake of 9/11, but left in abeyance by the Bush administration’s decision to shift the weight of U.S. military efforts elsewhere.

• Iraq War II (2003), the resumption of large-scale hostilities against Saddam Hussein, leading to his overthrow, but inducing chaos.

• Iraq War III (2004-2010?), a war to pacify Iraq in the face of resistance by indigenous insurgents and Islamic radicals raised up by Iraq War II.

• Afghanistan War III (2009 --), the conflict that Bush’s successor rediscovered, renewed, and expanded; given the deepening U.S. military involvement in Pakistan, this war might alternatively be called the AfPak War. 

The Carter Doctrine was intended to secure U.S. interests in a region of ostensibly great strategic importance. Those who have applied the Carter Doctrine have assumed that the presence of U.S. forces and the periodic application of American hard power serve to enhance regional stability. Yet the record of the past 30 years suggests just the opposite: The U. S. military presence and activities have served only to promote greater instability. Our exertions, undertaken at great cost to ourselves and others, are making things not better, but worse.