“Expanding War, Contracting Meaning“, Andrew J. Bacevich, posted at Tom Dispatch, 30 October 2008 — “The Next President and the Global War on Terror.”
I strongly recommend reading Bacevich’s latest article, written by one of the finest geopolitical analysts of our time. This post provides an excerpt, which does not do justice to the whole.
Baceich’s opening demonstrates how history repeats itself, but not always in a humorous fashion. Keep the following in mind when reading it.
In February 1968, when the great controversy raged over whether to limit intervention {in Vietnam}, General Mathew Ridgway was called in by President Johnson to discuss the war. And there was one moment which reflected the simplicity and toughness of mind which he and others had exhibited in 1954 {to stay out of Vietnam}, and the fuzziness of the 1965 decision making. Ridgway was sitting talking with Johnson and VP Humphrey when the phone rang. When Johnson picked it up, Ridgway turned to Humphrey and said there was one thing about the war which puzzled him.
“What’s that?” Humphrey asked.
“I have never known what the mission for General Westmoreland was” Ridgway said.
“That’s a good question” said Humphrey, “Ask the President.”
But when Johnson returned, he immediately go into one of his long monologues about his problems, pressures from every side, and the question was never asked.
— From David Halberstam’s The Best and The Brightest, chapter 8
Introduction by Tom Engelhardt
At the very least, they are ensuring that, when that next president enters the Oval Office, he will be embroiled in a wider war across an inflamed Middle East. As the ground war in Afghanistan has grown worse, for example, another border-crossing set of actions, a CIA-operated air war in the Pakistani borderlands, only increases in intensity. The Times recently offered the following figures on its front page: “at least 18 Predator [missile-armed drone] strikes since the beginning of August, some deep inside Pakistan’s tribal areas, compared with 5 strikes during the first seven months of 2008.”
In Afghanistan itself, an increasingly unpopular U.S. air war, with all its “collateral damage,” continues. Only last week, in a “friendly fire” incident, American planes leveled an Afghan Army checkpoint, killing nine Afghan soldiers and wounding three. (After its usual initial reluctance, the Pentagon magnanimously blamed those casualties on “a case of mistaken identity on both sides.”) And southwest of Kabul, reports came in that another American air strike had killed at least 20 private security guards for a road construction project.
You can say one thing: To the bitter end the Bush administration clings to a fundamentalist belief that military power offers the royal path to all solutions. It’s a conclusion that has already left an area from Somalia to Central Asia unsettled and increasingly aflame, and that seems only to draw more nations into the President’s “global war” with, as Andrew Bacevich makes vividly clear, ever less of a rationale. You can listen to a podcast interview with Bacevich, whose bestselling book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism is a must for your post-election bookshelf, by clicking here.
Excerpts from Bacevich’s article
A week ago, I had a long conversation with a four-star U.S. military officer who, until his recent retirement, had played a central role in directing the global war on terror. I asked him: what exactly is the strategy that guides the Bush administration’s conduct of this war? His dismaying, if not exactly surprising, answer: there is none.
… In this sense, the global war on terror relates to terrorism precisely as the war on drugs relates to drug abuse and dependence: declaring a state of permanent “war” sustains the pretense of actually dealing with a serious problem, even as policymakers pay lip-service to the problem’s actual sources. The war on drugs is a very expensive fraud. So, too, is the Global War on Terror.
Anyone intent on identifying some unifying idea that explains U.S. actions, military and otherwise, across the Greater Middle East is in for a disappointment. During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt laid down “Germany first” and then “unconditional surrender” as core principles. Early in the Cold War, the Truman administration devised the concept of containment, which for decades thereafter provided a conceptual framework to which policymakers adhered. Yet seven years into its Global War on Terror, the Bush administration is without a compass, wandering in the arid wilderness. To the extent that any inkling of a strategy once existed — the preposterous neoconservative vision of employing American power to “transform” the Islamic world — events have long since demolished the assumptions on which it was based.
… In neighboring Pakistan, meanwhile, there is the war-hidden-in-plain-sight. Reports of U.S. military action in Pakistan have now become everyday fare. Air strikes, typically launched from missile-carrying drones, are commonplace, and U.S. ground forces have also conducted at least one cross-border raid from inside Afghanistan. Although the White House doesn’t call this a war, it is — a gradually escalating war of attrition in which we are killing both terrorists and noncombatants. Unfortunately, we are killing too few of the former to make a difference and more than enough of the latter to facilitate the recruitment of new terrorists to replace those we eliminate.
There’s nothing inherently wrong in fighting simultaneously on several fronts, as long as actions on front A are compatible with those on front B, and together contribute to overall success. Unfortunately, that is not the case with the Global War on Terror. We have instead an illustration of what Winston Churchill once referred to as a pudding without a theme: a war devoid of strategic purpose.
This absence of cohesion — by now a hallmark of the Bush administration — is both a disaster and an opportunity. It is a disaster in the sense that we have, over the past seven years, expended enormous resources, while gaining precious little in return.
Afterword
If you are new to this site, please glance at the archives below. You may find answers to your questions in these, such as the causes of the present crisis. I have been writing about these events for several years; since November 2007 on this site. As you will see explained in these posts, the magnitude of the events now happening is beyond what most Americans have — or can — imagine.
Please share your comments by posting below. Please make them brief (250 words max), civil, and relevant to this post. Or email me at fabmaximus at hotmail dot com (note the spam-protected spelling).
For more information
To read other articles about these things, see the FM reference page on the right side menu bar. Of esp interest these days:
- about the Modern warfare’s top experts – the library
- an archive of Andrew Bacevich’s work
Interviews with Bacevich:
- “The Delusions of Global Hegemony“, TomDispatch, 23 May 2006 — Part 1 of 2.
- “Drifting Down the Path to Perdition“, TomDispatch, 25 May 2006 — Part 2 of 2.
- Transcript of Interview on Bill Moyer’s Journal, 15 August 2008
