Mechanistic Destruction: American
Foreign Policy at Point Zero
by Gabriel Kolko
www.antiwar.com, August 10, 2007
The United States has rarely lost any
conventional military battle since at least 1950. Nor has it,
at the same time, ever won a war. It has successfully overthrown
governments through interventions or subversion but the political
results of all its efforts - as in Afghanistan in the 1980s and
Iran in 1953 - have often made its subsequent geopolitical position
far, far more tenuous. In a word, in international affairs it
bumbles very badly and it has made an already highly unstable
world far more precarious than it otherwise would be if only the
U.S. had left the world alone. No less important, Americans would
be far better off thereby. Because - to repeat a critical point
- it has failed to attain victory in any of the real wars it has
fought since Korea. Its adversaries learned as long ago as the
Korean War that decentralization would stymie America's overwhelming
firepower, which was designed for concentrated armies, and provided
a successful antidote for massive, expensive technology.
All this is very well known. The real
issue is why the U.S. makes the identical mistakes over and over
again and never learns from its errors.
At the present time it is losing two wars
and creating a vast arc of profound strategic and political instability
from the Mediterranean Sea to South Asia, it has resumed the arms
race in Europe, and it is making Russia an enemy when it could
easily have been friendly. Economically, it has run up the biggest
deficits in American history, brought on the decline of the dollar,
and wherever one turns this administration has been at least as
bad as any in two centuries of American history - perhaps even
the worst. We now have an unprecedented disaster in the conduct
of American power, both overseas and at home, in part because
of the people who now rule - ambitious men and women who calculate
only what is best for their careers - but also because the imperatives
and inexorable logic of past policies and conventional wisdom
have brought us to this critical juncture. All the old mistakes
have been repeated; nothing had been learned from the past, and
official myopia is timeless.
A large part of the United States' problem,
whether Republicans or Democrats are in power, is that it believes
it has the right and obligation to intervene everywhere, in whatever
forms they choose, and that its interests are global. Interventionism
- so the consensus among Republicans and Democrats goes - is the
cost of its global interests and mission, because it has been
convinced for almost a century that it was preordained to remedy
the world's many wrongs - and to do so by whatever means it chooses.
There is nothing whatever that is unique in this regard in the
present Bush Administration. This pretension, which first began
during the 19th century and which Woodrow Wilson articulated,
is simply not functional and it has led it into countless morasses,
bad for the U.S. and far worse for the countries it has interfered
with. The fact is that no nation has ever been able to assume
such an international role, and those that have attempted to do
so came to no good end - they exhausted their resources and passions
and follies.
Political conflicts are not solved by
military interventions, and that they are often incapable of being
resolved by political or peaceful means does not alter the fact
that force is dysfunctional. This is truer today than ever with
the spread of weapons technology. The U.S. is not exempt from
the facts that have guided international affairs for centuries.
The U.S. has already lost the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan for the very same reasons it lost all of
its earlier conflicts. It has the manpower and firepower advantage,
as always, but these are ultimately irrelevant in the medium-
and long-run. They were irrelevant in many contexts in which the
U.S. was not involved, and they explain the outcome of many armed
struggles over the past century regardless of who was in them,
for they are usually decided by the socio-economic and political
strength of the various sides - China after 1947 and Vietnam after
1972 are two examples but scarcely the only ones. It is a transcendent
truism of global politics that wars are more determined by socio-economic
and political factors than any other, and this was true long before
the U.S. attempted to regulate the world's affairs.
But Why?
But all this still begs the issue of why
the U.S. repeatedly makes the same drastic errors. Are there vested
interests in preparing for war? Are illusions based on them, or
ideologies - or both?
In part, expensive equipment and incredibly
inflated military budget is premised on the traditional assumption
that owning complex weapons gives America power, which is determined
by arms in hand rather than what happens in a nation's politics
and society. In fact, the reverse is often the case, especially
when enemies find the weaknesses in this sort of technology and
exploit it - as they increasingly have done over the past decades.
Then the cost of fighting wars becomes a liability - and America's
technological military an immense weakness when the government
has huge deficits or lacks funds to repair its aging public infrastructure
- a fact that was highlighted when the collapse of a bridge in
Minneapolis earlier this month led to the striking revelation
that 70,000 bridges in the U.S. are rated deficient. The Vietnam
War should have resolved the issue of the relevance of technology
to the America's military ambitions, but it did not. The real
question is: why?
To a critical but scarcely exclusive sense,
the Pentagon's penchant for military toys makes an ambitious,
aggressive foreign policy essential. Without enemies and conflicts,
real or potential, there is no reason to spend money, and this
reality often colored its definition of Soviet goals after 1947
- despite the objections of senior CIA analysts. But the Defense
Department, and national security establishments in general, are
immense and all kinds of constituencies exist in them: there are
procurement experts who draw up budgets and go after equipment
mindlessly, people who have always dominated its actions, but
thinkers too. Each does their own thing and they are often very
different. It has always had these contradictions.
But that those who run military establishment
have technological illusions, which many ordinary people share
in this and other domains of human existence, keeps immense sums
of money flowing to arms manufacturers and their minions. There
is a very profound consensus between the two parties on arms spending,
which began under the Democrats a half-century ago and it will
not go away - no matter how neglected the bridges and infrastructure,
health, or the like. Arms lobbies are not only very powerful in
Washington but create crucial jobs in most states and military
spending keeps the economy afloat. Weapons producers make money
regardless of whether the Pentagon wins or loses its wars - and
making money is their only objective. It is surely a key causal
factor even if it is far from being the sole explanation of why
the U.S. intervenes where it shouldn't.
It is close to impossible to assign some
weight or priority to the arms industry but it must be taken into
account that the arms manufacturers have power, strategic lobbies
in Washington, contribute heavily to politicians who need campaign
funding, and gain financially whether America wins or loses it
wars. They are the "x-factor" in the equation but scarcely
the sole one. But, at the least, they are very important even
when not decisive.
Another explanation is ambitious politicians,
who will say and do whatever is required to stay in power or gain
it. This factor is so familiar that it scarcely requires repeating,
but the cynical ways politicians treat polls and American public
opinion is a crucial aspect of this question. There are indeed
problems with the public but it invariably senses realities and
its constraints well before the politicians - who use he public
and then ignore it. The party out of office will cater to mass
opinion but usually forgets it once it comes to power - as the
recent Democratic Party trajectory shows. This is usually the
rule but public opinion is an element that cannot be merely gainsaid,
and the Korean and Vietnam wars proved, it could play a decisive
role. An increasing majority of the people think the war in Iraq
is not worth fighting, and the President is among the most unpopular
in history. The public may be impotent or far too passive for
its own good, and generally is, but it is far less brainwashed
than the advocates of "manufactured consent" concede.
How, when, or if its role becomes more crucial is a matter of
conjecture. Its influence is usually negligible and takes far
too much time to have an impact. Follies are committed long after
the public condones them. But that it eventually becomes critical
is a fact of life which one cannot make too much of, or too little.
Consensus on ideology and goals is crucial
also but that policies fail to work and are increasingly dangerous
as a guide to action has been true for a long time and is more
obvious as years elapse. The Bush Administration encapsulates
it but the basic problem has existed for many decades. What the
Bush coterie has seen is the culmination of a logic that is much
older. It presides over a catastrophe that began many years ago.
But all in all, these factors have delivered
us to our present mess, which may very well exceed any in American
history.
Some of the most acute criticisms made
of the gross simplisms which have guided interventionist policies
were produced within the military, especially after the Vietnam
experience traumatized it. My history of the Vietnam War was purchased
by many base libraries, and the military journals treated it in
detail and very respectfully. The statement at the end of July
by the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael
G. Mullen, that "no amount of troops in no amount of time
will make much of a difference" if Iraqi politics fails to
change drastically reflects a current of realism that has existed
among military thinkers for some decades (whether he acts on this
assumption is another matter and depends greatly on considerations
outside of his control). Like the CIA, the military has acute
strategic thinkers, and the monographs of the U.S. Army's Strategic
Studies Institute - to name one of many - are often very insightful
and critical. Academics tend to be irrelevant and dull by comparison.
The problem, of course, is that few (if
any) at the decisive levels pays any attention to the critical
ruminations that the military and CIA consistently produce. There
is no shortage of insight among U.S. official analysts - the problem
that policy is rarely formulated with objective knowledge is a
constraint on it. Ambitious people, who exist in ample quantity,
say what their superiors wish to hear and rarely, if ever, contradict
them. Iraq is but an example, for the entire mess there was predicted.
If reason and clarity prevailed, America's role in the world would
be utterly different.
Those in power simply ignore the critical
military's insights, and the vast bulk of officers obey orders.
Many of them know better. They have learned the hard way - experience.
Neocon intellectuals and scribblers utterly lack it.
We are at point zero in the application
of American power in the world: the U.S. cannot win its extremely
expensive adventures nor will it abstain from policies which increasingly
lead to disasters for the nations in which it intervenes and for
itself as well. All the factors I have mentioned - its myopia
regarding technology, the policy consensus that binds ambitious
politicians and often makes public opinion irrelevant, the arms
makers and their local interests, or the limits of rational inputs
- have all combined to deliver us to this impasse. It is difficult
not to be pessimistic when - as it should be - realism rather
than illusions guide our political assessments. But realism is
the only way to avoid cynicism.
American
Empire page
Home Page