Hint: They\u2019re winning in other ways.<\/b>
\nAs America enters the 18th year of its war in Afghanistan and its 16th in Iraq, the war on terror continues in Yemen, Syria, and parts of Africa, including Libya, Niger, and Somalia. Meanwhile, the Trump administration threatens yet more war, this time with Iran. (And given these last years, just how do you imagine that\u2019s likely to turn out?) Honestly, isn\u2019t it time Americans gave a little more thought to why their leaders persist in waging losing wars across significant parts of the planet? So consider the rest of this piece my attempt to do just that.
Let\u2019s face it: profits and power should be classified as perennial reasons why US leaders persist in waging such conflicts. War may be a racket, as General Smedley Butler claimed long ago, but who cares these days since business is booming? And let\u2019s add to such profits a few other all-American motivations. Start with the fact that, in some curious sense, war is in the American bloodstream. As former New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges once put it, \u201cWar is a force that gives us meaning.\u201d Historically, we Americans are a violent people who have invested much in a self-image of toughness now being displayed across the \u201c global battlespace .\u201d (Hence all the talk in this country not about our soldiers but about our \u201c warriors .\u201d) As the bumper stickers I see regularly where I live say: \u201cGod, guns, & guts made America free.\u201d To make the world freer, why not export all three?
Add in, as well, the issue of political credibility. No president wants to appear weak and in the United States of the last many decades, pulling back from a war has been the definition of weakness. No one \u2014 certainly not Donald Trump \u2014 wants to be known as the president who \u201clost\u201d Afghanistan or Iraq. As was true of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the Vietnam years, so in this century fear of electoral defeat has helped prolong the country\u2019s hopeless wars. Generals, too, have their own fears of defeat, fears that drive them to escalate conflicts (call it the urge to surge) and even to advocate for the use of nuclear weapons, as General William Westmoreland did in 1968 during the Vietnam War.
Washington\u2019s own deeply embedded illusions and deceptions also serve to generate and perpetuate its wars. Lauding our troops as \u201c freedom fighters \u201d for peace and prosperity, presidents like George W. Bush have waged a set of brutal wars in the name of spreading democracy and a better way of life. The trouble is: incessant war doesn\u2019t spread democracy \u2014 though in the twenty-first century we\u2019ve learned that it does spread terror groups \u2014 it kills it. At the same time, our leaders, military and civilian, have given us a false picture of the nature of the wars they\u2019re fighting. They continue to present the US military and its vaunted \u201csmart\u201d weaponry as a precision surgical instrument capable of targeting and destroying the cancer of terrorism, especially of the radical Islamic variety. Despite the hoopla about them, however, those precision instruments of war turn out to be blunt indeed, leading to the widespread killing of innocents, the massive displacement of people across America\u2019s war zones, and floods of refugees who have, in turn, helped spark the rise of the populist right in lands otherwise still at peace.
Lurking behind the incessant warfare of this century is another belief, particularly ascendant in the Trump White House: that big militaries and expensive weaponry represent \u201c investments \u201d in a better future \u2014 as if the Pentagon were the Bank of America or Wall Street. Steroidal military spending continues to be sold as a key to creating jobs and maintaining America\u2019s competitive edge, as if war were America\u2019s primary business. (And perhaps it is!)
Those who facilitate enormous military budgets and frequent conflicts abroad still earn special praise here. Consider, for example, Senator John McCain\u2019s rapturous final sendoff, including the way arms maker Lockheed Martin lauded him as an American hero supposedly tough and demanding when it came to military contractors. (And if you believe that, you\u2019ll believe anything.)
Put all of this together and what you\u2019re likely to come up with is the American version of George Orwell\u2019s famed formulation in his novel 1984: \u201cwar is peace.\u201d
Twenty years ago, when I was a major on active duty in the US Air Force, a major concern was the possible corroding of civil-military relations \u2014 in particular, a growing gap between the military and the civilians who were supposed to control them. I\u2019m a clipper of newspaper articles and I saved some from that long-gone era. \u201cSharp divergence found in views of military and civilians,\u201d reported the New York Times in September 1999. \u201cCivilians, military seen growing apart,\u201d noted the Washington Post a month later. Such pieces were picking up on trends already noted by distinguished military commentators like Thomas Ricks and Richard Kohn. In July 1997, for instance, Ricks had written an influential Atlantic article, \u201cThe Widening Gap between the Military and Society.\u201d In 1999, Kohn gave a lecture at the Air Force Academy titled \u201cThe Erosion of Civilian Control of the Military in the United States Today.\u201d
A generation ago, such commentators worried that the all-volunteer military was becoming an increasingly conservative and partisan institution filled with generals and admirals contemptuous of civilians, notably then-President Bill Clinton. At the time, according to one study, 64% of military officers identified as Republicans, only 8% as Democrats and, when it came to the highest levels of command, that figure for Republicans was in the stratosphere, approaching 90%. Kohn quoted a West Point graduate as saying, \u201cWe\u2019re in danger of developing our own in-house Soviet-style military, one in which if you\u2019re not in \u2018the party,\u2019 you don\u2019t get ahead.\u201d In a similar fashion, 67% of military officers self-identified as politically conservative, only 4% as liberal.
In a 1998 article for the US Naval Institute\u2019s Proceedings, Ricks noted that \u201cthe ratio of conservatives to liberals in the military\u201d had gone from \u201cabout 4 to 1 in 1976, which is about where I would expect a culturally conservative, hierarchical institution like the US military to be, to 23 to 1 in 1996.\u201d This \u201ccreeping politicization of the officer corps,\u201d Ricks concluded, was creating a less professional military, one in the process of becoming \u201cits own interest group.\u201d That could lead, he cautioned, to an erosion of military effectiveness if officers were promoted based on their political leanings rather than their combat skills.
How has the civil-military relationship changed in the last two decades? Despite bending on social issues (gays in the military, women in more combat roles), today\u2019s military is arguably neither more liberal nor less partisan than it was in the Clinton years. It certainly hasn\u2019t returned to its citizen-soldier roots via a draft. Change, if it\u2019s come, has been on the civilian side of the divide as Americans have grown both more militarized and more partisan (without any greater urge to sign up and serve). In this century, the civil-military divide of a generation ago has been bridged by endless celebrations of that military as \u201cthe best of us\u201d (as Vice President Mike Pence recently put it).
Such expressions, now commonplace, of boundless faith in and thankfulness for the military are undoubtedly driven in part by guilt over neither serving, nor undoubtedly even truly caring. Typically, Pence didn\u2019t serve and neither did Donald Trump (those pesky \u201c heel spurs \u201d). As retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich put it in 2007: \u201cTo assuage uneasy consciences, the many who do not serve [in the all-volunteer military] proclaim their high regard for the few who do. This has vaulted America\u2019s fighting men and women to the top of the nation\u2019s moral hierarchy. The character and charisma long ago associated with the pioneer or the small farmer \u2014 or carried in the 1960s by Dr. King and the civil-rights movement \u2014 has now come to rest upon the soldier.\u201d This elevation of \u201cour\u201d troops as America\u2019s moral heroes feeds a Pentagon imperative that seeks to isolate the military from criticism and its commanders from accountability for wars gone horribly wrong .
Paradoxically, Americans have become both too detached from their military and too deferential to it. We now love to applaud that military, which, the pollsters tell us, enjoys a significantly higher degree of trust and approval from the public than the presidency, Congress, the media, the Catholic church, or the Supreme Court. What that military needs, however, in this era of endless war is not loud cheers, but tough love.
As a retired military man, I do think our troops deserve a measure of esteem. That said, the military does not deserve the deference of the present moment, nor the constant adulation it gets in endless ceremonies at any ballpark or sporting arena. Indeed, deference and adulation, the balm of military dictatorships, should be poison to the military of a democracy.
With US forces endlessly fighting ill-begotten wars, whether in Vietnam in the 1960s or in Iraq and Afghanistan four decades later, it\u2019s easy to lose sight of where the Pentagon continues to maintain a truly winning record: right here in the USA. Today, whatever\u2019s happening on the country\u2019s distant battlefields, the idea that ever more inflated military spending is an investment in making America great again reigns supreme \u2014 as it has, with little interruption, since the 1980s and the era of President Ronald Reagan.
The military\u2019s purpose should be, as Richard Kohn put it long ago, \u201cto defend society, not to define it. The latter is militarism.\u201d With that in mind, think of the way various retired military men lined up behind Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, including a classically unhinged performance by retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn (he of the \u201clock her up\u201d chants) for Trump at the Republican convention and a shout-out of a speech by retired General John Allen for Clinton at the Democratic one. America\u2019s presidential candidates, it seemed, needed to be anointed by retired generals, setting a dangerous precedent for future civil-military relations.
A few months back, I wrote a note to one of my senators to complain about America\u2019s endless wars and received a signed reply via email. I\u2019m sure you won\u2019t be surprised to learn that it was a canned response, but no less telling for that. My senator began by praising American troops as \u201ctough, smart, and courageous, and they make huge sacrifices to keep our families safe. We owe them all a true debt of gratitude for their service.\u201d OK, I got an instant warm and fuzzy feeling, but seeking applause wasn\u2019t exactly the purpose of my note.
My senator then expressed support for counterterror operations, for, that is, \u201cconducting limited, targeted operations designed to deter violent extremists that pose a credible threat to America\u2019s national security, including al-Qaeda and its affiliates, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), localized extremist groups, and homegrown terrorists.\u201d My senator then added a caveat, suggesting that the military should obey \u201cthe law of armed conflict\u201d and that the authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) that Congress hastily approved in the aftermath of 9\/11 should not be interpreted as an \u201copen-ended mandate\u201d for perpetual war.
Finally, my senator voiced support for diplomacy as well as military action, writing, \u201cI believe that our foreign policy should be smart, tough, and pragmatic, using every tool in the toolbox \u2014 including defense, diplomacy, and development \u2014 to advance US security and economic interests around the world.\u201d The conclusion: \u201crobust\u201d diplomacy must be combined with a \u201cstrong\u201d military.
Now, can you guess the name and party affiliation of that senator? Could it have been Lindsey Graham or Jeff Flake, Republicans who favor a beyond-strong military and endlessly aggressive counterterror operations? Of course, from that little critical comment on the AUMF, you\u2019ve probably already figured out that my senator is a Democrat. But did you guess that my military-praising, counterterror-waging representative was Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts?
Full disclosure: I like Warren and have made small contributions to her campaign. And her letter did stipulate that she believed \u201cmilitary action should always be a last resort.\u201d Still, nowhere in it was there any critique of, or even passingly critical commentary about, the US military, or the still-spreading war on terror, or the never-ending Afghan War, or the wastefulness of Pentagon spending, or the devastation wrought in these years by the last superpower on this planet. Everything was anodyne and safe \u2014 and this from a senator who\u2019s been pilloried by the right as a flaming liberal and caricatured as yet another socialist out to destroy America.
I know what you\u2019re thinking: What choice does Warren have but to play it safe? She can\u2019t go on record criticizing the military. (She\u2019s already gotten in enough trouble in my home state for daring to criticize the police.) If she doesn\u2019t support a \u201cstrong\u201d US military presence globally, how could she remain a viable presidential candidate in 2020?
And I would agree with you, but with this little addendum: Isn\u2019t that proof that the Pentagon has won its most important war, the one that captured \u2014 to steal a phrase from another losing war \u2014 the \u201chearts and minds\u201d of America? In this country in 2018, as in 2017,2016, and so on, the US military and its leaders dictate what is acceptable for us to say and do when it comes to our prodigal pursuit of weapons and wars.
So, while it\u2019s true that the military establishment failed to win those \u201chearts and minds\u201d in Vietnam or more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, they sure as hell didn\u2019t fail to win them here. In Homeland, USA., in fact, victory has been achieved and, judging by the latest Pentagon budgets, it couldn\u2019t be more overwhelming.
If you ask \u2014 and few Americans do these days \u2014 why this country\u2019s losing wars persist, the answer should be, at least in part: because there\u2019s no accountability. The losers in those wars have seized control of our national narrative. They now define how the military is seen (as an investment, a boon, a good and great thing); they now shape how we view our wars abroad (as regrettable perhaps, but necessary and also a sign of national toughness); they now assign all serious criticism of the Pentagon to what they might term the defeatist fringe.
The wrongs the US\u2019s self-professed warriors committed, and continue to commit, in our name will not be truly righted until Americans begin to reject rampant militarism, bloated militaries and endless wars.
William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel with the US Air Force, is a TomDispatch regular. He has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School, and now teaches history at the Pennsylvania College of Technology.
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