Wednesday, November 2, 2005

Militarism with a clean shave

In a genuinely healthy democracy, most people would be ashamed to write something like this:  The High Cost of Primacy by Lt. Col. Nathan Freier (US Army Strategic Studies Institute; Oct 2005).

The essential argument Freier makes boils down to this: Maintaining the current US posture in the world is absolutely necessary and will require counterinsurgency wars like the one in Iraq into the indefinite future.  So the gutless civilians and the wimp Congress should just cheer for the wars and pony up whatever bundles of cash - and supplies of soldiers - the generals demand.

The first part of this op-ed piece is mostly vague rhetoric, and so general that it doesn't say much more than atmospherics.  Unless it's within a clear context, who can agree, disagree of plead no opinion on something like, "Few viable alternatives exist, other than the active defense of our position and interests"?

Whether something like that is good or bad has a lot to do with whether we're talking about, say, defending Michigan from being overrun by the Canadian army, or whether we're saying that keeping our seven military observers in Ethiopia/Eritrea is a critical "position" that must held at all costs.

The second part is not a lot more specific.  But it's a reminder that the word "militarism" needs to become a regular part of our domestic political vocabulary.  Freier lays out his case for likely instances of preventive war under the Bush Doctrine.

In this case, the brevity of the presentation emphasizes the megolamania of it:

We continue to be threatened by extremism and criminality originating from ungoverned or irresponsibly-governed territory. Further, serious destabilization or political collapse of a number of vulnerable states could result in a loss of responsible control over weapons of mass destruction, trigger contagious extremism, place the continued distribution of critical resources at risk, or spark combustible social upheaval that would undermine the security and governance of entire regions. The most dangerous of these circumstances will demand American-led responses; preferably before they reach crisis proportions. Some will present immediate, obvious security challenges to the United States. Others will challenge the United States more subtly in the near-term, but will grow in severity over time. Each remaining unchecked will increasingly defy all but the most extraordinary efforts to bring them under control. (my emphasis)

If the US accepts such things as "subtle" challenges or "combustible social upheaval" as standards for intervention based on US decisions alone, he is effectively saying the United States can and should intervene anywhere in the world our own government thinks should be attacked.

Meanwhile, the invincible US military is bogged down in a losing counterinsurgency war in Iraq.  Maybe our war zealots should wait until we've conquered Iraq before we send our soldiers off to God-knows-where all over over the world making war on "subtle" challenges and doing so "preferably before they reach crisis proportions".

And then he explains that the only barrier to this glorious vision of war without end are those worthless civilians who don't have the guts for such glory and insist on questioning the generals and the warmongers and their grand scheme and demand to vote and have opinions on whether they should be sent off to kill and die in some godforsaken corner of the earth for the benefit of Halliburton:

The costs associated with these small wars and interventions transcend straightforward accounting. Their human, physical, fiscal, political, psychological, and even moral demands challenge what is proving to be a very vulnerable grand strategic center of gravity for the United States—the population and its willingness to accept the high price of great power. Indeed, political elites and opinion leaders must either inure the body politic to the costs associated with exercising great power or face the consequences of diminished U.S. influence. ...

Today, the prospect of a slow voluntary retreat from dominant influence that might accompany popular underpreparedness and exhaustion challenges American primacy more than does any opponent’s deliberate cost imposing strategy. The structural and material prerequisites of continued great power are secure. The will to employ them is substantially more vulnerable. (my emphasis)

In the long run, perhaps the most valuable thing about democracy is that it gives ordinary men and women the ability to have some kind of say about war and peace.  And the funny thing is, most working people tend to think that war is a horrible thing.  And that fools who want to go to war based on "subtle" challenges or forged documents should be kept far away from power where they might do some crazy thing like invade and occupy Iraq without any serious idea of what comes next.

There are two possible readings of something like this that I can see.  One is that it's just straightforward militarism, expressed in terms that push the limits of "respectable" military writing.  Because how can you read a statement that the greatest enemy of the American armed forces is "popular underpreparedness and exhaustion challenges American primacy more than does any opponent’s deliberate cost imposing strategy" anything else?

The other is that it is wrapping a bunch of grand phrases around something a bit more prosaic: setting up a "stab-in-the-back" theory to exonerate the military for any blame in the disaster known as the Iraq War.

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