Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (19 page)

Yet Afghanistan proved no more winnable than Iraq had been, at least not within the limits of what the United States could afford and the American public was willing to pay. The U.S. troops who burned Korans, defiled Taliban corpses, and gunned down innocent civilians in shooting sprees made it difficult for Afghans to appreciate the Jane Addams side of the American soldier. As for John Wayne, Hollywood had thought better than to film him urinating on dead enemy fighters. By 2012, an epidemic of “green-on-blue” incidents—Afghan security forces murdering their U.S. counterparts—revealed the absurdity of Brooks’s blithe assertion that Afghans “want what we want” and “root for American success.”
21
What most Americans wanted was to be done with Afghanistan.
22
In hopes of arranging a graceful withdrawal, they might allow Washington to prolong the war a bit longer, but with the usual terms fixed firmly in place: only so long as someone else’s kid does the fighting and future generations get stuck with the bill.

ENABLERS

None of this implies that American writers and public intellectuals succumbed en masse to militarism. On the contrary, ever since the Cold War ended, a cadre of thoughtful observers had warned against the “superpower temptation” of inordinate ambition, while expressing skepticism regarding Washington’s growing penchant for using armed force.
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Even larger numbers spoke out against specific government actions, Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 offering a notable example.

However imperfectly, the course of events over the past decade has largely vindicated the views of these critics. Whatever your opinion of Patrick Buchanan’s politics, in warning against the folly of turning the Global War on Terrorism into a grand crusade against evil, the anti-interventionist conservative turned out to be more right than wrong.
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The same might be said of Buchanan’s left-wing counterparts such as Boston University’s Howard Zinn and Yale’s Immanuel Wallerstein. Already in mid-2002, Zinn was predicting that attacking Iraq, a country with “no logical connection” to the events of 9/11, would serve chiefly to “further inflame anger against the United States” throughout the Islamic world.
25
At about the same time, declaring that the “Pax Americana is over,” Wallerstein correctly forecast that an invasion of Iraq would find Washington biting off considerably more than it could chew.
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Yet apart from allowing them to say “I told you so,” the critique they fashioned barely dented the reigning foreign policy consensus. There are several reasons for this. First, Washington did not take well to the charge that in mortgaging America’s well-being to U.S. military prowess it had committed a fatal error. After all, the mortgage papers had long since been signed, and the terms suited Washington just fine. Second, many ordinary citizens bridled at the suggestion that Iraqi and Afghan beneficiaries of “liberation” might with justification see U.S. forces as unwelcome intruders, with Washington’s claims of high-mindedness no more credible than similar claims made by previous waves of foreign invaders. Allow for the possibility that American purposes do not differ greatly from those of the British, French, or Germans in the heyday of European colonialism, and the moral basis for exercising “global leadership” begins to look shaky.

But there exists a third reason as well: efforts by intellectuals (or quasi intellectuals) eager to do the bidding of power more than offset the efforts of those intent on holding power accountable. Writing in 1917, soon after the United States had entered World War I, the essayist Randolph Bourne identified the issue with devastating precision. For a particular category of intellectuals, entranced by the aphrodisiac of power, independence is a pose willingly abandoned when the prospect of “relevance” beckons. Faced with an opportunity to “matter,” they rush to conform. For a considerable number of American intellectuals, 9/11 offered just such an opportunity.

Bourne bitterly opposed U.S. involvement in World War I. A great majority of American intellectuals had shared that position—until President Woodrow Wilson declared it incumbent upon the United States to join hands with Great Britain, France, and Russia in making “the world safe for democracy.” With that, the intellectual stampede in favor of war commenced.

Wilson depicted the war as a contest pitting civilization against barbarism. Not buying this line, Bourne took out after intellectuals who did. “Only in a world where irony was dead,” he wrote, “could an intellectual class enter war at the head of such illiberal cohorts in the avowed cause of world-liberalism and world-democracy.” In his view, the issues at stake had little to do with liberal democratic values. To believe otherwise was to allow a faux patriotism to eclipse independent judgment. Yet once Congress declared war, a demand for slavish compliance swept through editorial offices and faculty lounges like a hurricane. “In a time of faith,” Bourne wryly observed, “skepticism is the most intolerable of all insults.”

Here was testing time for members of the American intelligentsia. In Bourne’s eyes, they flunked. Allowing the passions of the moment to displace reasoned analysis, they became enablers. During the years of U.S. neutrality, he continued,

our intellectual class might have … spent the time in endeavoring to clear the public mind of the cant of war, to get rid of old mystical notions that clog our thinking. We might have used the time … for setting our house in spiritual order, [turning] not to the problem of jockeying the nation into war, but to the problem of using our vast neutral power to attain democratic ends … without the use of the malevolent technique of war. They might have failed. The point is that they scarcely tried.

Abandoning principle in order to serve power, intellectuals instead devised arguments to justify “what is actually going on or what is to happen inevitably tomorrow,” all in the vague hope that as “responsible thinkers” they might be of some use to the mighty, while “those who obstructed the coming of war” were “cast into outer darkness.” The demands of power were severe and uncompromising: “Be with us,… or be negligible [and] irrelevant.”
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This describes the dilemma facing American intellectuals before and after 9/11. Not all succumbed to the allure of putative relevance, of course. Some opted for integrity over influence. But others did succumb, and through their rabble-rousing books, columns in the prestige press, and appearances as knowing TV commentators, they helped make respectable Washington’s infatuation with armed force as
the
preferred tool of statecraft.
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By extension, they suppressed any inclination to probe the large political and moral defects of the nation’s military system, content merely to add their voices to others in professing admiration for “the troops.” For this group, jockeying the nation into war became a priority, if not an obsession. Even today, they cling to that priority despite successive disappointments and despite the travails the troops have endured, in which, needless to say, they themselves have not partaken. Although this might not meet the strict definition of treason, it certainly qualifies as grotesque and contemptible irresponsibility.

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DRONING ON

Since the creation of the all-volunteer military, America’s warriors have not lacked for opportunities to practice their craft. In the eyes of the policy elite, an elite military combines the best features of both thoroughbred and draft horse. It’s optimized to run fast and work hard. As a result, over the past forty years, decision makers in Washington have launched U.S. forces into a bewildering array of contingencies. Let’s do a quick inventory.

Since the draft ended, along with Iraq (twice) and Afghanistan, U.S. ground forces have intervened for stays ranging from weeks to years in Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Smaller groups on special missions secretly entered Iran in 1980 (a humiliating failure) and Pakistan in 2011 (a celebrated success). Other long-duration, quasi-covert operations occurred in El Salvador, Honduras, and Colombia. In 2012, with little fanfare, President Obama added to the list of South of the Border interventions, sending U.S. Marines to patrol the western coast of Guatemala as part of the “war on drugs.”
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In addition to many of the places listed above, American bombs and missiles have on various occasions in recent decades rained down on Libya, the Sudan, and Yemen. The American military narrative becomes so crowded that some episodes just get lost in the shuffle. Who today remembers the 1975
Mayaguez
incident, in which eighteen Americans were killed while attempting to regain control of a container ship shanghaied by the Khmer Rouge? Or how about the “Tanker War” of 1984–88? Highlights included a crippling Iraqi attack on the USS
Stark
—with Washington readily accepting Saddam Hussein’s apology for killing thirty-seven American sailors—and the USS
Vincennes
shooting down an Iranian commercial airliner—with Washington refusing to apologize for killing 290 passengers and crew.

Tuned-out Americans are generally no more familiar with these events, their causes, or their connection to one another than they are with why the First Seminole War happened or how it led to the Second Seminole War. Mainstream commentary on foreign policy provides little by way of remedial instruction. Once Washington identified Saddam Hussein as a villain in 1990, U.S. support for Iraq during its war of aggression against Iran in the 1980s—that’s why President Ronald Reagan so generously accepted Saddam’s mea culpa in the
Stark
affair—retained no more relevance than U.S. connivance with the freebooters who overthrew Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokalani in 1893. Once George W. Bush promulgated (and Barack Obama subsequently endorsed) the depiction of present-day Iran as a country led by madmen, the possibility that the Iranians might have some legitimate gripes with the United States—the downing of Iran Air flight 655 in 1988 along with the CIA’s overthrow of a democratically elected government in 1953 offering two glaring examples—became inadmissible.

Taken together, just what “story” does this bloody sequence of wars, skirmishes, and kerfuffles tell? Upon examination, three distinct threads emerge, the first relating to
ideology
, the second to
geography
, the third to
operational purpose
(and by extension methods). To trace these narrative threads is to appreciate just how far in the wrong direction the military exertions of the past four decades have carried the United States.

IDEOLOGY: THE RISE OF BOYKINISM

From the late 1940s to the late 1980s, communism provided the overarching ideological rationale for American globalism and for the deployment of U.S. military power. With the passing of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet empire, that rationale vanished. In the 1990s, the national security elite sought to define threats in nonideological terms, with rogue states, ethnic strife, and mere instability among the concepts floated. None of these provided a sufficiently robust justification for continued American globalism.

With the advent of the Global War on Terrorism, however, ideology came roaring back. Islamism succeeded communism as the body of beliefs that, if left unchecked, threatened to sweep across the globe with dire consequences for freedom. So at least members of the national security establishment professed to believe. Yet as a rallying cry, Islamism presented real difficulties. As much as policy makers struggled to prevent Islamism from merging with Islam in the popular mind, some Americans—whether genuinely fearful or mischief-minded—saw this as a distinction without a difference. Efforts by the Bush administration to work around this problem by framing the post-9/11 threat as
terrorism
ultimately failed because the term offered no explanation for motive. And motive seemed somehow bound up with matters of religion.

During the Cold War, religion had figured as a prominent component of American ideology. Communist antipathy toward religion helped invest both anticommunism and the Cold War foreign policy consensus with their remarkable robustness. That communists were godless sufficed to place them beyond the pale. For many Americans, the Cold War derived its moral clarity from the conviction that here was a contest pitting the God-fearing against the God-denying. Since we were on God’s side, it appeared axiomatic that God should repay the compliment.

From time to time during the decades when anticommunism provided much of the animating spirit that informed policy, American strategists (culturally Judeo-Christian, although not necessarily believers themselves), drawing on the theologically correct proposition that Christians, Jews, and Muslims all worship the same God, sought to enlist Muslims in the cause of opposing the godless. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 seemingly presented an ideal opportunity to do just that. To inflict pain on the Soviet occupiers, Washington threw its weight behind the Afghan resistance, religious zealots that U.S. officials styled as “freedom fighters.” When the Red Army eventually withdrew in defeat, God’s verdict seemed plain to all. The God-fearing had prevailed. Yet not long after the Soviets pulled out, Afghan freedom fighters morphed into the fiercely anti-Western Taliban, providing sanctuary to Al Qaeda, formerly part of the anti-Soviet phalanx, but now claiming to act at God’s behest as it plotted attacks on the United States.
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Previously an asset to the formulation of foreign policy, religion suddenly threatened to become a net liability.

So where to situate God in the post-9/11 ideological frame posed challenges for U.S. policy makers, not least of all George W. Bush, who believed, no doubt sincerely, that God had chosen him to save America in its time of maximum danger. Unlike communists, Islamists did not deny God’s existence. Far from it: they embraced God with startling fervor. Indeed, in their vitriolic denunciations of the satanic United States and in perpetrating acts of anti-American violence, radical Islamists audaciously presented themselves as God’s avenging agents. In confronting the Great Satan, they claimed to be serving God’s purposes.