The Militaristic Undercurrent of American Discourse

"You'll be sorry you messed with the US of A - 'cause we'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way." - Toby Keith, Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (2002)

There was an old story I remember hearing once or twice back during my days as an intelligence analyst, about how the Soviet Union responded when four of its diplomats were kidnapped in the mid-1980s.  The Lebanese militia called Hezbollah kidnapped the diplomats to get the Soviets to put pressure on Syria, which was making life hard for Hezbollah at the time.  Well, this didn't sit well with the Soviet Union, and it responded rather uniquely.  The legend goes that the KGB tracked down a key Hezbollah leader's relative, castrated him and sent his testicles to the Hezbollah leader, then shot him (the relative) in the head.  The KGB then guaranteed Hezbollah that it would treat the militia members' in a similar fashion if the Soviet diplomats weren't released immediately.  This evidently was enough to convince Hezbollah to free the Soviet hostages.  Now, the part about Hezbollah kidnapping four Soviet diplomats is true, but the rest sounds like an urban legend.  Although, the KGB has never shied away from these types of brutal tactics, which makes this story at least a bit plausible.

So why did I bring up that story? Because it's indicative of an undercurrent of militarism undercurrent running through American society.  The story usually came up after the US had suffered an attack on its interests, such as the kidnapping of a US citizen or terrorist attack against an overseas US installation, and it often ended with a statement along the lines of "Those Russians didn't fuck around, and nobody messed with them.  Maybe if we [the US] were more like that. . ." It reflects a desire for America to be tougher, more ruthless, less restrained in the use of force.  A mindset that thinks force is the first and best solution to solving a conflict.  And it's not limited to overseas issues such as hostile nations or international terrorism:

Dealing drugs? Harsh punishments and long jail terms.

Rogue state saber-rattling? Bomb the shit out of 'em.

Civil disobedience? Make it legal to run protestors over.

You kind of see it in a lot of places if you think to look for it; hell, you see it all over the place even without looking for it.  You see it in social media posts and news article comments in the aftermath of a terrorist incident ("Let's round all those people up and throw them in camps! They ain't got no rights!") or when a hostile nation does some saber-rattling ("We should just turn that country into glass.") And, of course, you see it on the campaign trail, when politicians )who have usually never spent a day in uniform) try to outdo each other with their "tough guy" talk (for example, here's Ted Cruz in 2015, boasting that he'll "carpet bomb" ISIS if he becomes president.)

And, to nobody's surprise, we see this militaristic attitude emanate from the White House frighteningly often.  We saw it on the campaign trail.  We saw it in the belligerent rhetoric toward North Korea.  We saw it in the decision to drop the MOAB on an insurgent stronghold in Afghanistan.  And most recently, we saw it while watching a video of a drone strike, Trump showed he had no qualms with killing the target's family in the strike.

"Watching a previously recorded strike in which the agency held off on firing until the target had wandered away from a house with his family inside, Trump asked, “Why did you wait?” one participant in the meeting recalled." (Washington Post)

Let's try a thought experiment and imagine that Trump's stance becomes military doctrine.  Would it be effective? That is, would it help the military achieve its objectives? Research shows that, at least in Afghanistan, the answer is no.  I suspect that the answer would be the same for Iraq, for Syria, and for any of the other places that the United States is engaged in counterterrorism operations - because common sense tells you that people who get hit want to hit back.  History is full of cases where people fought back hard against their persecutors.  Despite being outnumbered and outgunned.  Despite whatever unimaginable atrocities a Goliath-like military can inflict upon them.  The Eastern Front, World War II.  Gaza, now.  Afghanistan, the 1980s.  I think it's safe to say that Trump's tactics would not only be unhelpful, they would be counterproductive.

And in case you're thinking that upping the brutality high enough will eventually lead to victory - it's probably been tried already.  Crop destruction, land mines, torture, destroying entire villages - all of these things have been used in the past, and none of them helped achieve victory.  Further, some countries have been more brutal than the United States could ever imagine being, yet they couldn't brutalize their way to victory.  And even if they had been successful, is that the kind of behavior we want to copy?

If it seems like I'm worried about this out of some softhearted concern for ISIS or the Taliban or whoever, rest assured, I'm not.  Do the names John Walker Lindh, Jose Padilla, or Anwar al-Awlaki ring any bells? Lindh was a US citizen captured in Afghanistan and convicted of fighting against US forces; Padilla was a US citizen convicted of aiding terrorists; and Awlaki was the leader of an anti-US terrorist cell in Yemen.  Awlaki was killed by a Hellfire missile, while Padilla and Lindh are still serving prison sentences.  I don't particularly care what happens to them, or to any other US citizen who takes up arms against his or her own countrymen; if they happen to be in a great deal of agonizing pain before they die, I don't feel any sympathy.

What I do care about is what the way we treat these individuals says about our country and its values. There's a giant difference between sympathizing with the country's enemies and raising objections about our conduct toward those enemies.  Let's take torture: the intentional inflicting of suffering and physical harm on someone who doesn't pose any threat, and which produces questionable results.  What does it look like when a country - any country - endorses torture as an acceptable and effective method? Especially a country that prides itself on being "the land of the free" and a "beacon of democracy." The president recently nominated a CIA agent who supervised a black site where torture was routine to lead the Agency; that's not a good look for a country that has played a major role in capturing and prosecuting perpetrators of war crimes over the past several decades.  And it's not just torture; our country should be moving away from things like "preemptive" wars of choice and indiscriminate killing, yet our current head of state is okay with it. And around 40% of the citizenry are okay with him.

Ask yourselves: is a country that has a "might makes right" approach to conflict resolution the kind of country you want to live in?

Lessons (not) learned from Vietnam

The recent PBS series on the Vietnam War and the recent debate over the national anthem got me thinking about the parallels between then and now, and I'm putting my thoughts into this stream-of-consciousness post about how little has changed since the end of the war.  Specifically, how little we (as a country) have learned since then.  Let's look at the lessons we thought we learned, but then discarded.

First, the US government (the White House and the Pentagon) fell back into the habit of sending troops to fight wars for flimsy justifications, vaguely-defined objectives, and inadequate equipment and resources.  This hasn't happened all the time, but more often than not, the troops went in without what they needed for victory: a coherent plan, resources that matched the objective, and a valid reason to fight.  When it comes to smaller, shorter conflicts, the score is about even.  Grenada and Panama didn't become quagmires, but Somalia and Lebanon did.  In regard to large-scale conflicts, the tally is pretty one-sided.  The 1990-91 Gulf War had a clear mission and sufficient resources, if a rationale that was more about economics than security; but on the other side of the ledger, we have Afghanistan, the Balkans, and Iraq Part II.

There was supposed to be a deep discussion about America's use of military power in the wake of Vietnam, but it never really got off the ground.  Not enough to lead to any meaningful changes, anyway.  The senior officers who hoped to avoid a repeat of the Vietnam quagmire succeeded for a few years, and during that time they managed to implement meaningful reforms.  For example, when Colin Powell served in the White House as a military assistant to Secretary Weinberger, he helped craft the "Weinberger Doctrine", which acted as a litmus test for when to commit US troops.  The war hawks eventually outmaneuvered those senior officers, though, and critics who charged that the Doctrine was so narrow that it practically guaranteed US troops would never be deployed anywhere.  Vaguely-defined missions began to come back into favor in the 1990s, and became standard procedure after 9/11.

Washington also ably deflected any deep discussion by transitioning from a draftee military to an all-volunteer force.  Richard Nixon wisely calculated that halting the draft would deflate anti-war protests, and he was right.  Once the overall population stopped having a stake in America's wars, they stopped worrying that they might someday get dragged into a quagmire conflict.  This weakened the bond between the military and the general population, and gave military leadership much more license to send the military anywhere they wanted.  Somewhere along the way, Congress (which holds the power to declare war) stopped holding the president accountable in any meaningful way.  How it got there is a story about a lot of boring political maneuvering, but the moral of the story is that "accountability" was a sham.  Political appointees and mid-level staffers took the fall for military failures, partisan bickering replaced debate, and nobody asked the questions that should have been asked after Vietnam.  Which brings us to the present, where history is repeating itself.

I'm almost done here, but I'd like to make one more point.  To me, this isn't an academic debate.  I served in the Army for four years and spent five years after that as a defense contractor.  During that time, I made several trips to combat zones and deployed locations.  My experiences have made me very skeptical of how the government employs the military, to the point where I oppose a military intervention by default unless I see a very good reason for it.  I'm probably not evaluating a military intervention impartially, but I don't really care if I'm being fair or not.  I think being extremely skeptical is preferable to not being skeptical enough.  Every soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine is someone's child/parent/sibling/friend, and if the president and the senior generals put them in harm's way, they need to be absolutely certain that the sacrifice is worth it.  Anything less is morally repugnant in my opinion.