Middle East : THE WAR NOBODY WON--Part 2: The new Agincourt
Asia Times OnLine By Henry C K Liu
* Part 1: Chaos, crime and incredulity
John Lewis Gaddis, Robert A Lovett professor of military and naval history at Yale University, recently published an article called "A Grand Strategy of Transformation" in which he described President George W Bush's national-security strategy as representing the most sweeping shift in US grand strategy since the beginning of the Cold War. But Gaddis warned that its success depends on the willingness of the rest of the world to welcome US power with open arms.
The importance of this article by Gaddis is in its analysis of the Bush world view, not that the Bush world view is necessarily valid. In a larger sense, no state can justify waging war on another on the basis of political morals, since no state is perfect. War is always about national interest, not morality, neo-liberal propaganda notwithstanding. The issue is whether the Bush Grand Strategy is in the United States' long-term national interest. There is strong argument that it falls very short on that measure.
Gaddis observes that Bush's report on National Security Strategy of the United States of America (NSSUSA), released on September 17, 2002, is framed by the attacks of September 11, 2001. It echoes the president's speech at West Point on June 1, 2002, and sets out three tasks: "We will defend the peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great powers. We will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent."
Bush's equation of terrorists with tyrants as sources of danger, an obvious outgrowth of September 11, is highly problematic. Anarchists, assassins and saboteurs have always operated without clearly identifiable sponsors. Their actions have rarely shaken the stability of states or societies because the number of victims they targeted and the amount of physical damage they caused had been relatively small. September 11 showed that terrorists can now inflict levels of destruction that only states wielding military power used to be able to accomplish.
Weapons of mass destruction were the last resort for those possessing them during the Cold War, the NSSUSA points out. "Today, our enemies see weapons of mass destruction as weapons of choice." That elevates terrorists to the level of tyrants in Bush's thinking, and that prompts him to insist that preemption must be added to - though not necessarily in all situations replace - the tasks of containment and deterrence: "We cannot let our enemies strike first." That is the rationale for preemptive strikes. The doctrine of unilateralism is spelled out in the NSSUSA: "The United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community." But "we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country".
Preemption in turn requires hegemony. Although Bush speaks, in his letter of transmittal, of creating "a balance of power that favors human freedom" while forsaking "unilateral advantage", the body of the NSSUSA makes it clear that "our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States".
The West Point speech put it more bluntly: "America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge." The president had at last approved, therefore, Paul Wolfowitz's controversial recommendation to this effect, made in a 1992 "Defense Planning Guidance" draft subsequently leaked to the press and then disavowed by the first Bush administration. It's no accident that Wolfowitz, now deputy secretary of defense, has been at the center of the new Bush administration's strategic planning, Gaddis wrote.
The qualifying balance-of-power caveat is not at odds with maintaining military strength beyond challenge. Gaddis the historian points out that in practice and in history, other great powers prefer management of the international system by a single hegemon as long as it's a relatively benign one. When there's only one superpower, there's no point for anyone else to try to compete with it in military capability. International conflict shifts to trade rivalries and other relatively minor quarrels, none of them worth fighting a war about. Compared with what great powers have done to one another in the past, this state of affairs is no bad thing. Gaddis also argues that US hegemony is acceptable because it's linked with certain values that all states and cultures - if not all terrorists and tyrants - share.
As the NSSUSA puts it: "No people on Earth yearn to be oppressed, aspire to servitude, or eagerly await the midnight knock of the secret police." It's this association of power with universal principles, Bush argues, that will cause other great powers to go along with whatever the United States has to do to preempt terrorists and tyrants, even if it does so alone. For, as was the case through most of the Cold War, there's something worse out there than US hegemony.
The invasion of Iraq punctured the myth behind this theory. It showed the world that US hegemony spells arbitrary misapplication of moral values and selective US occupation in the name of liberation. The inescapable conclusion is that superpower hegemony breeds terrorism rather than suppresses it.
The final innovation in the Bush strategy deals with the longer-term issue of removing the causes of terrorism and tyranny. Here again, Gaddis observes that the president's thinking parallels an emerging consensus within the neo-conservative intellectual community. For it's becoming clear to neo-cons that poverty wasn't what caused a group of middle-class and reasonably well-educated Middle Easterners to fly three airplanes into buildings and another into the ground. It was, rather, resentments growing out of the absence of representative institutions in their own societies, so that the only outlet for political dissidence was religious fanaticism. Yes, there is oppression, but the oppression comes from the victims' own society and culture, not from the neo-liberal West, goes the argument.
This position of denial is widely held in the United States because of its own experience with domestic terrorism, which evidently had less to do with poverty than issues of liberty, but it is not at all obvious globally. Further, Americans take comfort in believing that poverty is the result of unfree systems, a belief that is verified by their own pride in America's riches. It never occurs to many Americans that their riches might have come from institutionalized and structural exploitation of other economies. Just as the race issue in the US is inseparable from the issue of poverty, the appeal of Islamic religious fundamentalism cannot be separated from poverty.
Hence, Bush insists, the ultimate goal of US strategy must be to spread democracy everywhere, particularly to regions deeply rooted in tribal and theocratic culture. "Democracy", a fashionable word that never appears in the US constitution nor the Declaration of Independence, is now a pretext for preemptive war to effectuate regime change everywhere, notwithstanding that the Declaration of Independence declares: "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes ..."
The Bush NSSUSA declares that the United States must finish the job that Woodrow Wilson (president 1913-21) started. The world, quite literally, must be made safe for democracy, even those parts of it, like the Middle East, that have so far resisted that tendency. Terrorism - and by implication the authoritarianism that breeds it - must become as obsolete as slavery, piracy, or genocide: "behavior that no respectable government can condone or support and that all must oppose". And within weeks! But imperialism is exempt from this list of evils.
Still, the record of Wilsonian world order was less than sterling. Wilson's own election was the result of a scandalous split among his Republican opponents over the controversial issue of the creation of the Federal Reserve System, a development strongly opposed by Populists. His Fourteen Points proposal for the post-World War I world order was considered naive by seasoned European diplomats and the Treaty of Versailles was rejected by the US Congress. The League of Nations was violently attacked by Republicans led by senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. Further, Wilsonian ideology was multilateral internationalism, a concept to which the Bush NSSUSA only pays lip service. Wilson's main legacy was the creation of the League of Nations, which was founded on the principle that all nations should settle disputes peacefully.
The Bush NSSUSA differs in several ways from its recent predecessors, according to Gaddis. Its proactive parts mostly interconnect, and Bush's analysis of how hegemony works and what causes terrorism is in tune with current neo-con academic thinking. And the Bush administration, unlike several of its predecessors, sees no contradiction between power and principles. It is, in this sense, thoroughly Wilsonian. Finally, the new strategy is candid. This administration speaks plainly, with no attempt to be polite or diplomatic or "nuanced". What you hear and what you read are pretty much what you can expect to get.
Coercive democracy becomes the justification for military preemption. And superpower hegemony is the means to achieve that end.
Gaddis thinks the Bush NSSUSA has a hidden agenda. It has to do with why the administration regards tyrants, in the post-September 11 world, to be at least as dangerous as terrorists.
Bush tried to explain the connection in his January 2002 State of the Union address when he warned of an "axis of evil" made up of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. The phrase confused more than it clarified, though, since Saddam Hussein, the Iranian mullahs, and Kim Jong-il are hardly the only tyrants around, nor are their ties to one another evident. Nor was it clear why containment and deterrence would not work against these tyrants, since they were all more into survival than suicide.
Both the West Point speech and the NSSUSA are silent on the "axis of evil". Gaddis raises a more important question: Why is Bush still so keen on burying Saddam Hussein? Despite his comment that this is "a guy that tried to kill my daddy", George W Bush is no Hamlet, agonizing over how to meet a tormented parental ghost's demands for revenge. Gaddis the historian suggests that Shakespeare might still help, if you shift the analogy to Henry V. That English monarch understood the psychological value of victory - of defeating an adversary sufficiently thoroughly that you shatter the confidence of others, so that they'll roll over themselves before you have to roll over them.
For Henry V, the demonstration was Agincourt, the famous victory over the French in 1415. The Bush administration got a taste of Agincourt with its victory over the Taliban at the end of 2001. Suddenly, it seemed, American values were transportable, even to the remotest and most alien parts of the world. The vision that opened up was not one of the clash among civilizations, but rather, as the NSSUSA puts it, a clash "inside a civilization, a battle for the future of the Muslim world". In that battle, it is curious that it should start with Iraq, the most secular and modernized state in the region, and by far not the poorest, at least until US sanctions began a decade ago.
Yet, lest we forget, Agincourt was part of the Hundred Years' War. The battle demonstrated the effectiveness of longbow archers over heavily armored French knights. It marked the end of warfare appropriate for the age of chivalry. Prior to the battle, King Henry spoke to his troops from a little gray horse. French accounts state that in his speech he told his men that he and the dukes, earls and other nobles had little to worry about if the French won because they would be captured and ransomed for a good price. The common soldier, on the other hand, was worth little and so he told them that they had better fight hard.
Gaddis is right that historians view the Agincourt victory as having overshadowed English political and economic unrest. Yet for Bush, the overshadowing may turn out to be as short-lived as the war itself.
But Agincourt was a real battle and the victory was earned. The Iraq war was a no-show by the enemy. The victory is as bogus is the pretext for the war.
This bogus victory is in fact built on a pile of political defeats. This war did serious damage to multilateral internationalism, weakened the United Nations, and soiled the credibility of US values. US hegemony is built on economic power, which in turn is based on globalization, which in turn requires multilateral internationalism. Abandoning multilateral internationalism is to jeopardize US hegemony.
Far from providing conclusive demonstration of US invincibility and political resolve, the non-war leaves the vulnerability of US political will to sustain heavy war casualties untested, and turned a much-heralded holy war to spread democracy into a dirty scheme of petty bribery. It has won the United States a reputation of being as capable and eager to use the same evil devices as its condemned enemy. This war has not eliminated the axis of evil, it merely added the US to the axis. The war between good and evil is won by good turning evil.
How, Gaddis asks, to maintain the momentum, given that the Taliban are no more and that al-Qaeda isn't likely to present itself as a conspicuous target? Gaddis thinks this is where Saddam Hussein came in: Iraq was the most feasible place where the US could strike the next blow. If we can topple this tyrant, went the reasoning, if we can repeat the Afghan Agincourt on the banks of the Euphrates, then we can accomplish a great deal. We can complete the task the Gulf War left unfinished. We can destroy whatever weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein may have accumulated since. We can end whatever support he's providing for terrorists elsewhere, notably those who act against Israel. We can liberate the Iraqi people. We can ensure an ample supply of inexpensive oil. We can set in motion a process that could undermine and ultimately remove reactionary regimes elsewhere in the Middle East, thereby eliminating the principal breeding ground for terrorism. And, as Bush did say publicly in a powerful speech to the United Nations on September 12, 2002, we can save that organization from the irrelevance into which it will otherwise descend if its resolutions continue to be contemptuously disregarded.
Gaddis views this as a truly grand strategy for transforming the entire Muslim Middle East: for bringing it, once and for all, into the modern world. There's been nothing like this in boldness, sweep, and vision since Americans took it upon themselves, more than half a century ago, to democratize Germany and Japan, thus setting in motion processes that stopped short of only a few places on Earth, one of which was the Muslim Middle East.
Gaddis acknowledges that these plans depend critically, however, on Americans' being welcomed in Baghdad if they invaded, as they were in Kabul. If they aren't, the whole strategy collapses, because it's premised on the belief that ordinary Iraqis will prefer a US occupation over the current conditions in which they live. There's no evidence that the Bush administration is planning the kind of military commitments the United States made in either of the two world wars, or even in Korea and Vietnam. This strategy relies on getting cheered, not shot at.
The trouble with Agincourts - even those that happen in Afghanistan - is the arrogance they can encourage, along with the illusion that victory itself is enough and that no follow-up is required. It's worth remembering that, despite Henry V, the French never became English. And the war went on for a hundred years. The United States has already lost the moral high ground by resorting to a coalition of the willing. Gaddis makes a perfect point: A nation that sets itself up as an example to the world in most things will not achieve that purpose by telling the rest of the world, in some things, to shove it.
Terrorists fully anticipated a hardening of reaction from the US to the horrors they perpetrated on September 11, 2001, as embodied in the NSSUSA, for it is this hardening of reaction that will produce more terrorists.
As Charles Clover of the Financial Times reported from Baghdad: "Over the next few months in Baghdad I will get to see 'nation-building': the curious process of international intervention I have witnessed throughout Eurasia in the past decade that seems to enrich about 10 percent of the population while the rest get 'civil society'. Iraq will be transformed from a pariah dictatorship into a normal dysfunctional, underdeveloped country with ethnic violence, IMF [International Monetary Fund] programs, and satellite dishes. Charlie Company patrolling the streets of Baghdad will give way to a weak and politicized local police force, then a rickety power-sharing arrangement, and finally a 'national army'. Will it be worth it?"
If a democratic election, reflecting the honest and freely expressed wishes of the Iraqi people, produces a leader deemed insufficiently committed to the goals set out by the NSSUSA, the Bush administration will be forced to affirm or reject its alleged attachment to the principle of democracy. Worse yet, if such a democratically elected leader should decide that Iraq need weapons of mass destruction for its own defense in response to WMD already present in the region, would the NSSUSA call for a re-invasion of Iraq, this time against a democratically elected government, or a Central Intelligence Agency-induced coup, as in Venezuela?
This was not a war. It was a spectacular reality-TV production that caused the death of thousands of extras. The only real war had been the verbal duel between Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the inquisitive Pentagon press corps.
Henry C K Liu is chairman of the New York-based Liu Investment Group.