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| Total Failure Folks - It is all "Bla-Bla-Bla-Bla" |
A hundred years ago, the armies of World War I fought to a bloody
stalemate on the Western Front and desperately searched for ways to
break it and gain an edge. They field-tested tanks and poison gas,
rolling barrages and storm-trooper tactics.
Today, the United States is
stuck in an analogous stalemate in the Middle East and Islamic world in
general. And we are field-testing all manner of novelties, much like the
great armies of Europe mired in the trenches: the so-called Revolution
in Military Affairs and counterinsurgency, precision-guided munitions
and unmanned aerial vehicles, not to mention such passing fancies as
“overwhelming force,” “shock and awe,” and “air occupation.”
Yet as was the case a century ago, the introduction of some new
battlefield technique does not necessarily signify progress. On the
contrary, it only deepens the stalemate.
To reflect on this longest of American wars—why it goes on and on,
and at such a cost of blood and treasure—is to confront two questions.
First, why has the world’s mightiest military achieved so little even
while absorbing very considerable losses and inflicting even greater
damage on the subjects of America’s supposed beneficence? Second, why in
the face of such unsatisfactory outcomes has the United States refused
to chart a different course? In short, why can’t we win? And since we
haven’t won, why can’t we get out?
The answer to these questions starts with questioning the premise.
The tendency to see the region and Islamic world primarily as a problem
that will yield to an American military solution is, in fact, precisely
the problem. To an unseemly and ultimately self-destructive degree, we
have endorsed the misguided militarization of U.S. foreign policy. As a
consequence, we have allowed our country to be pulled into the
impossible task of trying to “shape” the region through martial means.
It’s long past time to stop trying (a conclusion that even President Obama appears to be
edging his way toward, judging from his recent comments to The Atlantic).
The United States plunged militarily into the Middle East out of the
mistaken belief that the privileged status that Americans take as their
birthright was at risk. Way back in 1948, George Kennan, State
Department director of policy planning, noted that the United States
then possessed “about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3
percent of its population.” The challenge facing U.S. policymakers, he
believed, was “to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us
to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to
our national security.” The overarching aim of American statecraft, in
other words, was to sustain the uniquely favorable situation to which
the United States had ascended by the end of World War II.
A half century later, that strategy succeeded and the Soviet Union
collapsed.
But the passing of the Cold War period left our massive
national security apparatus underemployed while rendering obsolete the
policy underlying postwar U.S. military policy—energetically preparing
for global war in order to prevent it.
The armed services and their
various clients came face to face with a crisis of the first order. With
the likelihood of World War III subsiding to somewhere between remote
and infinitesimal—with the overarching purpose for which the postwar
U.S. military establishment had been created thereby fulfilled—what
exactly did that establishment and all of its ancillary agencies,
institutes, collaborators, and profit-making auxiliaries exist to do?
The US Pentagon wasted no time in providing an answer to that question.
Rather than keeping the peace, it declared, the new key to perpetuating
Kennan’s position of disparity was to “shape” the global order. Shaping
now became the military’s primary job. In 1992, the Defense Planning
Guidance drafted under the aegis of Paul Wolfowitz spelled out this
argument in detail. Pointing proudly to the “new international
environment” that had already “been shaped by the victory” over Saddam
Hussein the year before, that document provided a blueprint explaining
how American power could “shape the future.”
The Greater Middle East was to serve—indeed, was even then already
serving—as the chosen arena for honing military power into a utensil
that would maintain America’s privileged position and, not so
incidentally, provide a continuing rationale for the entire apparatus of
national security. That region’s predominantly Muslim population
thereby became the subjects of experiments ranging from the nominally
benign—peacekeeping, peacemaking and humanitarian intervention—to the
nakedly coercive. Beginning in 1980, U.S. forces ventured into the
Greater Middle East to reassure, warn, intimidate, suppress, pacify,
rescue, liberate, eliminate, transform and overawe.
They bombed, raided,
invaded, occupied and worked through proxies of various stripes. In
1992, Wolfowitz had expressed the earnest hope of American might
addressing the “sources of regional instability in ways that promote
international law, limit international violence, and encourage the
spread of democratic government and open economic systems.” The results
actually produced over the course of several decades of trying have
never come even remotely close to satisfying such expectations.
The events that first drew the United States military into the
Greater Middle East and that seemed so extraordinary at the time—the
Iranian Revolution and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan—turned out
to be mere harbingers. Subsequent upheavals have swept through the
region in waves: revolutions and counterrevolutions, episodes of terror
and counterterror, grotesque barbarism and vast suffering.
Through it
all, a succession of American leaders—Republican and Democratic,
conservative and liberal, calculating and naive—persisted in the belief
that the determined exercise of U.S. military power will somehow put
things right. None have seen their hopes fulfilled.
In the 21st century, the prerequisites of freedom, abundance and
security are changing. Geopolitically, Asia is eclipsing in importance
all other regions apart perhaps from North America itself. The emerging
problem set—coping with the effects of climate change, for example—is
global and will require a global response. Whether Americans are able to
preserve the privileged position to which they are accustomed will
depend on how well and how quickly the United States adapts the existing
“pattern of relationships” to fit these fresh circumstances.
Amid such challenges, the afflictions besetting large portions of the
Islamic world will undoubtedly persist. But their relative importance
to the United States as determinants of American well-being will
diminish, a process even today already well advanced even if U.S.
national security priorities have yet to reflect this fact.
In this context, the War for the Greater Middle East becomes a diversion that Americans "and Europe, which has blindly followed the US's lead in this drama can ill afford".
