The online edition of the New York Review of Books has up a new article worth checking out: The Making of a Mess by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. New York Review of Books 09/23/04 issue. NY Review doesn't provide permanent links for non-subscribers. But they do leave their articles available for several weeks online.
Schlesinger has some good comments on the torture issue, why it's important and why the use of torture is a bad idea. His viewpoint makes straightforward good sense and is consistent with existing law. But seeing statement of this was a reminder of how little we've been seeing this kind of thing. It's a crying shame.
The disclosures about the torture practiced by US soldiers have intensified the awareness of the mess in Iraq and deepened perspectives on the meaning of the war. Torture escaped the attention of the allegedly intrepid American press and television. We now know that there was considerable debate behind the scenes, with memoranda flowing back and forth among the Departments of Defense and Justice and the White House about stretching the ban on torture to permit coercive techniques of interrogation.
... The revelations by the Red Cross and in US reports of systematic abuse undermined the "bad apples" defense [that blamed only a few low-level soldiers]; nor did the military act promptly to halt the abuses and punish the abusers. There is an obvious need for a full-scale congressional investigation.
There are at least three reasons that the US should not be involved with torture. The first is that the Geneva Conventions protect American GIs who fall into enemy hands. Terrorists of course do not observe the Conventions, but the revelations about Abu Ghraib fatally weaken our case against terrorism throughout the world and expose the men and women in our armed forces to being tortured themselves. The second is that information extracted by torture is often worthless. Tortured people will say anything that stops the torture. A third reason is that the abuse of captives brutalizes their captors; the heart of darkness can be corrupting and it is contagious.
He also discusses the disgraceful failure of the mainstream news media to act as a critical watchdog on government during the runup to the Iraq War. He gives several sad examples, to which dozens could be added, of fairly obvious ways in which the mainstream media failed at that. And he points out that on the Bush administration's attempts to open a new front in the nuclear arms race with the development of "mini-nukes," the press is exhibited the same indifference and gullibility.
The rightwingers have spent over three decades chanting about the Liberal Media. That was also an ideology rather than an analysis. But what has happened, not least because of the actions of the Republicans acting on their anti-Liberal-Media dogma have taken, is that we now have a news media dominated by trivia and scandal, and seriously deficient in the kind of critical investigation and vetting of governmental claims on critical issue that are essential for a democracy.
It's good to see Schlesinger highlighting the problem. Americans can repeat until our eyes glaze over that the US is "the greatest nation on earth," as Bush said in his acceptance speech Thursday. But our democratic system has some serious problems. One of them - possibly the most dangerous of them - is that the press is failing badly in its role of providing citizens critical information about the most important public issues. The media "free market" may be able to live without that. Democracy can't.
Schlesinger, a liberal who debated the concept of "empire" as applied to the United States with the so-called New Left in the 1960s, also discusses the neoconservative notion of American empire and points to some of its flaws. And he looks at the differences between the prevailing conservative attitude toward foreign policy since the Second World War and the radical perspective of the "neoconservatives." He says:
The neocons, with their imperial dreams, might take a look at Emmanuel Todd's After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order. It is not an anti-American rant by an aggrieved French intellectual. Todd has a formula by which, through an analysis of demographic and economic factors, he accurately predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union in his first book, La Chute Finale. This was in 1976 when the neocons' Committee on thePresent Danger and the CIA's Team B were predicting that the Soviet Union would very likely win the arms race.
In his new book Todd applies a similar formula to the United States. He may underrate the resilience of the American economy, but in a not unsympathetic way he raises intelligent and disturbing questions about the American future. Regarding the Iraq War, Todd writes, "The real America is too weak to take on anyone except military midgets...such outdated remains of a bygone era as North Korea, Cuba, and Iraq." Even war against a pathetic Iraqi opponent seems to have strained our military manpower to the limit. Todd concludes, "If [the US] stubbornly decides to continue showing off its supreme power, it will only end up exposing to the world its powerlessness."
That is a reality that pretty plain to see. But if the Bush administration sees it, we didn't have a whisper of evidence of it at the Republican convention last week. To make the US capable of a series of wars of liberation in the Middle East will require a vast expansion of the number of soldiers through military conscription, aka the draft. It will require developing a whole new contingent of military and civilian personnel for long-term occupation duty.
Schlesinger's experiences in the 1960s contending with the New Left may have left him a bit reluctant to look at the commonalities of the neoconservatives' grand scheme, which Bush himself embraced with the Iraq War and expounded in theory in his acceptance speech last week, with the experiences of overtly colonial powers in the last century, like Britain, France and Portugal. The neocon mission is not to establish large numbers of American settlements in the countries like Iraq that we conquer and occupy. But to implement their grandiose vision, it will require a military radically different from the Don Rumsfeld "military transformation" that focuses primarily on "shock and awe" quick-victories in conventional wars and on the quixotic missile-defense boondoggle.
But wrestling with those issues shouldn't make the public or the Congress lose sight of the point Schlesinger makes in that last quotation. The United States currently spends about half the military budgets of the entire world, the entire world. And yet, in the war that we're actually fighting in Iraq, we don'thave the numbers of troops or the personnel with the proper training to actually succeed in the counterinsurgency effort we've taken on.
It's no doubt funny, in a grim sort of way, when Bush tries to define this lack of what it takes to achieve the goals he's set in Iraq as the result of "catastrophic success." But the notion that the guerrilla war arose because the conventional war was over so quickly is, at best, ducking the point. The US military was trained, equipped and staffed to win that conventional war and do it quickly. They are not trained, equipped or staffed for the counterinsurgency war that the Bush administration took on.
The books he's formally reviewing for the article include:
Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet by James Mann
A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies by James Bamford
After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order by Emmanuel Todd, trans. from the French byC. Jon Delogu
He also refers approvingly to Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire by Anne Norton.
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