Tough guys don't need to dance
By William J Astore
It's early in 1965, and president Lyndon B Johnson faces a critical decision.
Should he escalate in Vietnam? Should he say "yes" to the request from United
States commanders for more troops? Or should he change strategy, downsize the
American commitment, even withdraw completely, a decision that would help him
focus on his top domestic priority, the "Great Society" he hopes to build?
We all know what happened. LBJ listened to the generals and foreign policy
experts and escalated, with tragic consequences for the United States and
calamitous results for the Vietnamese people on the receiving end of American
firepower. Drawn deeper and deeper into Vietnam, LBJ would soon lose his way
and
eventually his will, refusing to run for re-election in 1968.
President Barack Obama now stands at the edge of a similar precipice. Should he
acquiesce to General Stanley A McChrystal's call for 40,000 to 60,000 or more
US troops for Afghanistan? Or should he pursue a new strategy, downsizing our
commitment, even withdrawing completely, a decision that would help him focus
on national health care, among his other top domestic priorities?
The die, I fear, is cast. In his "war of necessity", Obama has evidently
already ruled out even considering a "reduction" option, no less a withdrawal
one, and will likely settle on an "escalate lite" program involving more troops
(though not as many as McChrystal has urged), more American trainers for the
Afghan army, and even a further escalation of the drone war over the Pakistani
borderlands and new special operations actions.
By failing his first big test as commander-in-chief this way, Obama will likely
ensure himself a one-term presidency, and someday be seen as a man like LBJ
whose biggest dreams broke upon the shoals of an unwinnable war.
The conventional wisdom: military escalation
To whom, we may ask, is Obama listening as he makes his decision on Afghanistan
strategy and troop levels? Not the skeptics, it's safe to assume. Not the
free-thinkers, not today's equivalents of Mary McCarthy or Norman Mailer.
Instead, he's doubtless listening to the generals and admirals, or the former
generals and admirals who now occupy prominent "civilian" positions at the
White House and inside the Beltway.
By his actions, Obama has embraced the seemingly sober, conventional wisdom
that senior military officers, whether on active duty or retired, have, as they
say in the corridors of the Pentagon, "subject matter expertise" when it comes
to strategy, war, even foreign policy.
Don't we know better than this? Don't we know, as Glenn Greenwald recently
reminded us, that McChrystal's strategic review was penned by a "war-loving
foreign policy community", in which the usual suspects - "the Kagans, a
Brookings representative, Anthony Cordesman, someone from Rand" - were rounded
up to argue for more troops and more war?
Don't we know, as Tom Engelhardt recently reminded us, that Obama's "civilian"
advisors include "Karl W Eikenberry, a retired lieutenant general who is the US
ambassador to Afghanistan, Douglas Lute, a lieutenant general who is the
president's special advisor on Afghanistan and Pakistan (dubbed the "war czar"
when he held the same position in the Bush administration), and James Jones, a
retired Marine Corps general, who is national security advisor, not to speak of
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a former director of the Central
Intelligence Agency"?
Are we surprised, then, that when we "turn crucial war decisions over to the
military, [we] functionally turn foreign policy over to them as well"? And that
they, in turn, always opt for more troops, more money, and more war?
One person unsurprised by this state of affairs would have been Norman Mailer,
who died in 2007. War veteran, famed author of the 1948 war novel The Naked and
the Dead as well as the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1968 report on
Vietnam-era protests, The Armies of the Night, self-styled tough guy who
didn't dance, Mailer witnessed (and dissected) the Vietnam analog to today's
Afghan events. Back in 1965, Mailer bluntly stated that the best US option was
"to get out of Asia." Period.
The unconventional wisdom: military extrication
Can Obama find the courage and wisdom to extricate our troops from Afghanistan?
Courtesy of Norman Mailer, here are three unconventional pointers that should
be driving him in this direction:
1.Don't fight a war, and clearly don't escalate a war, in a place which
means so little to Americans. In words that apply quite readily to
Afghanistan today, Mailer wrote in 1965: "Vietnam [to Americans] is faceless.
How many Americans have ever visited that country? Who can say which language
is spoken there, or what industries might exist, or even what the country looks
like? We do not care. We are not interested in the Vietnamese. If we were to
fight a war with the inhabitants of the planet of Mars there would be more
emotional participation by the people of America."
2.Beware of cascading dominoes and misleading metaphors, whether in
Southeast Asia or anywhere else. The domino theory held that if
Vietnam, then split into north and south, was united under communism, other
Asian countries, including Thailand, the Philippines, perhaps even India, would
inevitably fall to communism as well, just like so many dominoes toppling.
Instead, it was communism that fell or, alternately, morphed into a version
that we could do business with (to paraphrase former British prime minister
Margaret Thatcher).
We may no longer speak metaphorically of falling dominoes in today's Af-Pak
theater of operations. Nevertheless, our fears are drawn from a similarly
misleading image: if Afghanistan falls to the Taliban, Pakistan will surely
follow, opening a nuclear Pandora's Box to anti-American terrorists in which,
in our fevered imaginations, smoking guns will once again become mushroom
clouds.
Despite the fevered talk of falling dominoes in his era, Mailer was unmoved.
Such rhetoric suggests, he wrote in 1965, "that we are not protecting a
position of connected bastions so much as we are trying to conceal the fact
that the bastions are about gone - they are not dominoes, but sand castles, and
a tide of nationalism is on the way in. It is curious foreign policy to use
metaphors in defense of a war; when the metaphors are imprecise, it is a
swindle."
To this I'd add that, in viewing countries and peoples as so many dominoes,
which by the actions - or the inaction - of the United States are either set up
or knocked down, we vastly exaggerate our own agency and emphasize our sense of
self-importance. And before we even start in on the inevitable argument about
"Who lost Afghanistan?" or "Who lost Pakistan?" is it too obvious to say that
never for a moment did we own these countries and peoples?
3.Carrots and sticks may work together to move a stubborn horse, but not
a proud people determined to find their own path. As Mailer put it,
with a different twist: "Bombing a country at the same time you are offering it
aid is as morally repulsive as beating up a kid in an alley and stopping to ask
for a kiss."
As our Predator and Reaper drones scan the Afghan terrain below, launching
missiles to decapitate terrorists while unintentionally taking innocents with
them, we console ourselves by offering aid to the Afghans to help them improve
or rebuild their country. As it happens, though, when the enemy hydra loses a
head, another simply grows in its place, while collateral damage only leads to
a new generation of vengeance-seekers. Meanwhile, promised aid gets funneled to
multi-national corporations or siphoned off by corrupt government officials,
leaving little for Afghan peasants, certainly not enough to win their
allegiance, let alone their "hearts and minds".
If we continue to speak with bombs while greasing palms with dollars, we'll get
nothing more than a few bangs for our $228 billion (and counting) bucks .
What if LBJ had listened to Mailer in 1965?
Not long before LBJ crossed his Rubicon and backed escalation in Vietnam, he
could have decided to pull out. Said Mailer:
The image had been
prepared for our departure - we heard of nothing but the corruption of the
South Vietnam government and the professional cowardice of the South Vietnamese
generals. We read how a Vietcong army of 40,000 soldiers was whipping a
government army of 400,000. We were told in our own newspapers how the Vietcong
armed themselves with American weapons brought to them by deserters or captured
in battle with government troops; we knew it was an empty war for our side.
Substitute "the Hamid Karzai government" for "the South Vietnam government" and
"Taliban" for "Vietcong" and the same passage could almost have been written
yesterday about Afghanistan. We know the Karzai government is corrupt, that it
stole the vote in the last election, that the Afghan army is largely a figment
of Washington's imagination, that its troops sell their American-made weapons
to the enemy. But why do our leaders once again fail to see, as Mailer saw with
Vietnam, that this, too, is a recognizably "empty war for our side"?
Mailer experienced the relentless self-regard and strategic obtuseness of
Washington as a mystery, but that didn't stop him from condemning Johnson's
decision to escalate in Vietnam. For Mailer, LBJ was revealed as "a man driven
by need, a gambler who fears that once he stops, once he pulls out of the game,
his heart will rupture from tension". Johnson, like nearly all Americans,
Mailer concluded, was a member of a minority group, defined not in racial or
ethnic terms but in terms of "alienat[ion] from the self by a double sense of
identity and so at the mercy of a self which demands action and more action to
define the most rudimentary borders of identity".
This American drive for self-definition through constant action, through
headlong acceleration, even through military escalation, the novelist
described, in something of a mixed metaphor, as "the swamps of a plague" in
which Americans had been caught and continued to sink. He saw relief of the
desperate condition coming only via "the massacre of strange people".
To be honest, I'm not sure what to make of Mailer's analysis here, more
emotionally Heart of Darkness than coolly rational. But that's precisely
why I want someone Mailer-esque - pugnacious, free-swinging, and prophetical,
provocative and profane - advising our president. Right now.
As Obama's military experts wield their battlefield metrics and call for more
force (to be used, of course, with ever greater precision and dexterity), I
think Mailer might have replied: we think the only thing they understand is
force. What if the only thing we understand is force?
Mailer, I have no doubt, would have had the courage to be seen as "weak" on
defense, because he would have known that Americans had no dog in this
particular fight. I think he would intuitively have recognized the wisdom of
the great Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, who wrote more than 2,000 years ago in The
Art of War that "to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is
not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of
skill". Our generals, by way of contrast, seem to want to fight those 100
battles with little hope of actually subduing the enemy.
What Obama needs, in other words, is fewer generals and ex-generals and more
Norman Mailers - more outspoken free-thinkers who have no interest in staying
inside the Pentagonal box that holds Washington's thinking tight.
What Obama needs is to silence the endless cries for more troops and more war
emanating from the military and foreign policy "experts" around him, so he can
hear the voices of today's Mailers, of today's tough-minded dissenters. Were he
to do so, he might yet avoid repeating LBJ's biggest blunder - and so avoid
suffering his political fate as well.
William J Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), 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. He
can be reached at wastore@pct.edu.
(Note on sources: Most of the Mailer quotations in this piece are drawn from a
speech he wrote for "Vietnam Day", May 25, 1965, in Berkeley, California, as
reprinted in Cannibals and Christians (New York, 1966), a fascinating
collection of cutting prose and dreadful poetry.)
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