Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Serial war as a way of life
By David Bromwich
Wars beyond the horizon
Couple the casualty-free air war that NATO conducted over Yugoslavia with the
Powell doctrine of multiple wars and safe exits, and you arrive somewhere close
to the terrain of the Af-Pak war of the present moment. A war in one country
may now cross the border into a second with hardly a pause for public
discussion or a missed step in appropriations. When wars were regarded as, at
best, a necessary evil, one asked about a given war whether it was strictly
necessary. Now that wars are a way of life, one asks rather how strong a
foothold a war plants in its region as we prepare for the war to follow.
A new-modeled usage has been brought into English to ease the change of view.
In the language of think-tank papers and
journalistic profiles over the past two years, one finds a strange conceit
beginning to be presented as matter-of-fact: namely the plausibility of the US
mapping with forethought a string of wars. Robert Gates put the latest thinking
into conventional form, once again, on 60 Minutes in May. Speaking of the
Pentagon's need to focus on the war in Afghanistan, Gates said: "I wanted a
department that frankly could walk and chew gum at the same time, that could
wage war as we are doing now, at the same time we plan and prepare for
tomorrow's wars."
The weird prospect that this usage - "tomorrow's wars" - renders routine is
that we anticipate a good many wars in the near future. We are the ascendant
democracy, the exceptional nation in the world of nations. To fight wars is our
destiny and our duty. Thus the word "wars" - increasingly in the plural - is
becoming the common way we identify not just the wars we are fighting now but
all the wars we expect to fight.
A striking instance of journalistic adaptation to the new language appeared in
Elisabeth Bumiller's recent New York Times profile of a key policymaker in the
Obama administration, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy.
Unlike her best-known predecessor in that position, Douglas Feith - a
neo-conservative evangelist for war who defined out of existence the rights of
prisoners-of-war, Flournoy is not an ideologue. The article celebrates that
fact. But how much comfort should we take from the knowledge that a calm
careerist today naturally inclines to a plural acceptance of "our wars"?
Flournoy's job, writes Bumiller:
Boils down to this: assess the threats
against the United States, propose the strategy to counter them, then put it
into effect by allocating resources within the four branches of the armed
services. A major question for the QDR [Quadrennial Defense Review], as it is
called within the Pentagon, is how to balance preparations for future
counterinsurgency wars, like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, with plans for
conventional conflicts against well-equipped potential adversaries, like North
Korea, China or Iran.
Another quandary, given that the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan have lasted
far longer than the American involvement in World War II, is how to prepare for
conflicts that could tie up American forces for decades.
Notice
the progression of the nouns in this passage: threats, wars, conflicts,
decades. Our choice of wars for a century may be varied with as much cunning as
our choice of cars once was. The article goes on to admire the coolness of
Flournoy's manner in an idiom of aesthetic appreciation:
Already Ms
Flournoy is a driving force behind a new military strategy that will be a
central premise of the QDR, the concept of "hybrid" war, which envisions the
conflicts of tomorrow as a complex mix of conventional battles, insurgencies
and cyber threats. 'We're trying to recognize that warfare may come in a lot of
different flavors in the future,' Ms. Flournoy said.
Between
the reporter's description of a "complex mix" and the planner's talk of "a lot
of different flavors", it is hard to know whether we are sitting in a bunker or
at the kitchen table. But that is the point. We are coming to look on our wars
as a trial of ingenuity and an exercise of taste.
Why the constitution says little about wars
A very different view of war was taken by America's founders. One of their
steadiest hopes - manifest in the scores of pamphlets they wrote against the
British Empire and the checks against war powers built into the Constitution
itself - was that a democracy like the United States would lead irresistibly
away from the conduct of wars. They supposed that wars were an affair of kings,
waged in the interest of aggrandizement, and also an affair of the hereditary
landed aristocracy in the interest of augmented privilege and unaccountable
wealth. In no respect could wars ever serve the interest of the people.
Machiavelli, an analyst of power whom the founders read with care, had noticed
that "the people desire to be neither commanded nor oppressed”, whereas "the
powerful desire to command and oppress”. Only an appetite for command and
oppression could lead someone to adopt an ethic of continuous wars.
In the third of the Federalist Papers, written to persuade the former colonists
to ratify the Constitution, John Jay argued that, in the absence of a
constitutional union, the multiplication of states would have the same unhappy
effect as a proliferation of hostile countries. One cause of the wars of Europe
in the eighteenth century, as the founders saw it, had been the sheer number of
states, each with its own separate selfish appetites; so, too, in America, the
states, as they increased in number, would draw external jealousies and
heighten the divisions among themselves. "The Union," wrote Jay, "tends most to
preserve the people in a state of peace with other nations."
A democratic and constitutional union, he went on to say in Federalist 4, would
act more wisely than absolute monarchs in the knowledge that "there are
pretended as well as just causes of war”. Among the pretended causes favored by
the monarchs of Europe, Jay numbered:
A thirst for military glory,
revenge for personal affronts; ambition or private compacts to aggrandize or
support their particular families, or partisans. These and a variety of
motives, which affect only the mind of the Sovereign, often lead him to engage
in wars not sanctified by justice, or the voice and interests of his people.
When, thought Jay, the people are shorn of their slavish dependence, so that
they no longer look to a sovereign outside themselves and count themselves as
"his people”, the motives for war will be proportionately weakened.
This was not a passing theme for the Federalist writers. Alexander Hamilton
took it up again in Federalist 6, when he spoke of "the causes of hostility
among nations”, and ranked above all other causes "the love of power or the
desire of preeminence and dominion": the desire, in short, to sustain a
reputation as the first of powers and to control an empire. Pursuing, in
Federalist 7, the same subject of insurance against "the wars that have
desolated the earth”, Hamilton proposed that the federal government could serve
as an impartial umpire in the Western territory, which might otherwise become
"an ample theatre for hostile pretensions”.
Consider the prominence of these views. Four of the first seven Federalist
Papers offer, as a prime reason for the founding of the United States, the
belief that, by doing so, America will more easily avert the infection of the
multiple wars that have desolated Europe. This was the implicit consensus of
the founders. Not only Jay and Hamilton, but also George Washington in his
Farewell Address, and James Madison and Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams as
well as John Quincy Adams. It was so much part of the idealism that swept the
country in the 1780s that Thomas Paine could allude to the sentiment in a
passing sentence of The Rights of Man. Paine there asserted what Jay and
Hamilton in the Federalist Papers took for granted: "Europe is too thickly
planted with kingdoms to be long at peace."
Have we now grown too used to the employment of our army, navy, and air force
to be long at peace, or even to contemplate peace? To speak of a perpetual war
against "threats" beyond the horizon, as the Bush Pentagon did, and now the
Obama Pentagon does, is to evade the question whether any of the wars is,
properly speaking, a war of self-defense.
At the bottom of that evasion lies the idea of the United States as a nation
destined for serial wars. The very idea suggests that we now have a need for an
enemy at all times that exceeds the citable evidence of danger at any given
time. In The Sorrows of Empire, Chalmers Johnson gave a convincing
account of the economic rationale of the American national security state, its
industrial and military base, and its manufacturing outworks.
It is not only the vast extent and power of our standing army that stares down
every motion toward reform. Nor is the cause entirely traceable to our pursuit
of refined weapons and lethal technology, or the military bases with which the
US has encircled the globe, or the financial interests, the Halliburtons and
Raytheons, the DynCorps and Blackwaters that combine against peace with demands
in excess of the British East India Company at the height of its influence.
There is a deeper puzzle in the relationship of the military itself to the rest
of American society. For the American military now encompasses an officer class
with the character and privileges of a native aristocracy, and a rank-and-file
for whom the best possibilities of socialism have been realized.
Barack Obama has compared the change he aims to accomplish in foreign policy to
the turning of a very large ship at sea. The truth is that, in Obama's hands,
"force projection" by the US has turned already, but in more than one
direction. He has set internal rhetorical limits on our provocations to war by
declining to speak, as his predecessor did, of the spread of democracy by force
or the feasibility of regime change as a remedy for grievances against hostile
countries. And yet we may be certain that none of the wars the new
undersecretary of defense for policy is preparing will be a war of pure
self-defense - the only kind of war the American founders would have
countenanced. None of the current plans, to judge by Bumiller's article, is
aimed at guarding the US against a power that could overwhelm us at home. To
find such a power, we would have to search far beyond the horizon.
The future wars of choice for the Defense Department appear to be wars of heavy
bombing and light-to-medium occupation. The weapons will be drones in the sky
and the soldiers will be, as far as possible, special forces operatives charged
with executing "black ops" from village to village and tribe to tribe. It seems
improbable that such wars which will require free passage over sovereign states
for the Army, Marines, and Air Force, and the suppression of native resistance
to occupation, can long be pursued without de facto reliance on regime change.
Only a puppet government can be thoroughly trusted to act against its own
people in support of a foreign power.
Such are the wars designed and fought today in the name of American safety and
security. They embody a policy altogether opposed to an idealism of liberty
that persisted from the founding of the US far into the twentieth century. It
is easy to dismiss the contrast that Washington, Paine, and others drew between
the morals of a republic and the appetites of an empire. Yet the point of that
contrast was simple, literal, and in no way elusive. It captured a permanent
truth about citizenship in a democracy. You cannot, it said, continue a free
people while accepting the fruits of conquest and domination. The passive
beneficiaries of masters are also slaves.
David Bromwich, the editor of a selection of Edmund Burke's speeches, On
Empire, Liberty, and Reform, has written on the constitution and America's wars
for The New York Review of Books and The Huffington Post.
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