Humiliation in War Redux

As a postscript to the above post on the Suleimani assassination, Nicholas Kristof, writing for the Times, recaps the results of the action:[1]

·       Iran has cast off nuclear curbs so that it is now potentially within five months of having enough fuel for a nuclear warhead, down from almost 15 years when Trump took office.

·       United States forces may be pushed out of Iraq, allowing Suleimani to achieve in death one of his foremost goals in life.

·       American forces in Syria may be difficult to support without the military presence in Iraq, so some or all of them might pull out as well, another strategic victory for Iran.

·       The military campaign against ISIS is on hold, giving terrorists a chance to regroup.

·       Iran’s regime, which had been threatened by enormous protests at home and in Iraq, has been rescued by Trump’s actions.  Iranians have rallied around the flag, and the Iraqi narrative has changed overnight from the bullying of Iranians to the bullying of Americans. 

·       Instead of bringing troops home, Trump had to deploy more to the Middle East at huge cost.  We may think we can’t afford universal pre-K, [or, for that matter, universal health care] but we don’t blink at lavishing billions of dollars on these military developments.

·       North Korea has gained leverage, because it knows that Trump has little appetite for two international security crises at the same time.  Kim Jong-un has also surely absorbed the lesson that he must never give up his nuclear warhead, as Trump will strike countries that lack nuclear weapons while schmoozing with leaders who have them.

As Kristof put it, “there’s too much confidence in the ability of the military toolbox to solve complex problems.”  One barely needs to point out that such overweening confidence has become the American way.  It’s perhaps inevitable for a nation that thinks it is, or aspires to be, the world hegemon, and our failure is not unlike the failures of all who have come before, contingent upon the hubris of assuming as destiny that which is merely desired, the hubris of exceptionalism.

Andrew Bacevich in his “report card on the American Project,” quotes President George H. W. Bush who makes specific reference to our own sense of exceptionalism, the sense the “United States would determine history’s onward course.”[2]  As Bush put it, declaring victory in the Cold War and explaining its significance:

As this new world takes shape, America stands at the center of a widening circle of freedom – today, tomorrow, and into the next century.  Our nation is the enduring dream of every immigrant who ever set foot on these shores and the millions still struggling to be free.  This nation, this idea called America, was and always will be a new world – our new world.

We have heard all this before, many times, but as Bacevich put it, “Bush had never shown himself to be a particularly original thinker,” and in some ways the very lack of originality in the proposition was its point.  That particular reading of history, that we were at the center of an ever-widening circle of freedom, “expressed a hallowed proposition, one which his listeners were both familiar and comfortable.”  It expressed not only “the essence of the nation’s self-assigned purpose,” but by “interpreting the zeitgeist in such a way as to merge past, present, and future into a seamless, self-congratulatory, and reassuring narrative of American power,” he was “describing history precisely as Americans – or at least privileged Americans – wished to see it.”   It declared as destiny that which was merely desired.

In Bacevich’s telling, our victory in the cold war had two broad effects.  In many respects, as he put it, “the Cold War began as an argument over who would determine Europe’s destiny,” and “our side won that argument.”  Eastern Europe was “liberated” from Soviet domination, and there’s little question that they are, as a result, “better off today than they were under the Kremlin’s boot.”  It turns out, however, to be something of a pyrrhic victory.   Europe today, particularly Great Britain, is not what it was in the colonial heyday.  One interesting aspect of the Netflix series, The Crown, is the slow attenuation of the British world role taking place in the background, as they became more “‘preoccupied and anemic,’” as it, and the rest of Europe, “slipped to the periphery.”   There is a longer story to be told here, but at the bottom line, “Europe’s traditional great powers were no long especially great,” and so far as European unity is concerned, “in very short order, new cleavages erupted in the Balkans, Spain, and even the United Kingdom, with the emergence of a populist right calling into question Europe’s assumed commitment to multicultural liberalism.”

Beyond that, and more to the current point, “the second exception to the Cold War’s less than momentous results relates to US attitudes toward military power.”  As Eisenhower realized, famously calling attention to the “military-industrial complex,” for the first time in our history, “the onset of the Cold war had prompted the United States to create and maintain a powerful peacetime military establishment.”  Insofar as our engagement in the Cold War was necessary, the maintenance of the military-industrial complex was itself necessary, and its mission, as Bacevich points out, was to “defend, deter, and contain.”  As it quickly became apparent, the mission to defend proved for the most part unnecessary.  Neither the US nor the Soviets were willing to attack the other’s homeland nor, for that matter, the proxy states within a divided Europe, in part because the presence of massed troops along the “iron curtain” and the mutually assured destruction of nuclear weapons were deterrent enough to prevent another world wide conflagration.   In retrospect, as our current diplomatic stalemate with North Korea demonstrates, the enormous expenditures during the so-called “arms race” proved to be mostly a matter of bragging rights, insofar as the maintenance of just a few nuclear warheads seems sufficient to deter even a rash actor like Trump.  So far as containment was concerned, the US was successful in Europe, less so in Asia, as demonstrated by the Korean and Vietnam wars.  The causes of both wars are perhaps too nuanced for a quick telling.  While the indigenous combatants, so to speak, were fighting for national identity, the “great powers,” to whom they variously turned for support and assistance, quickly subsumed their domestic disputes into the cold war rhetoric of containment – that is to say, the containment of “western imperialism” on the one hand and the containment of “communist aggression” on the other. 

At the end of the Cold War, again as Bacevich put it, “despite the absence of any real threats to US security, Washington policy makers decided to maintain the mightiest armed forces on the planet in perpetuity,” and the question is why?   Though I am not particularly qualified to make this assertion, one answer might well be economic – that is to say, the government investment in the military is an enormous on-going stimulus to the economy.  While the effects of military spending on economic growth seems to be a matter of some contention, it nevertheless remains that military spending is not only a direct investment in cash for salaries and the manufacture of equipment, both of which are direct bread and butter issues for many communities throughout the US, but also the results of R&D making its way into the civilian economy as commercial products – think GPS and your cell phone.  One wonders, of course, if a similar investment in transportation or health care would have the same salubrious (or deleterious) effects, but it perhaps goes without saying that a demobilization of the “military industrial complex” would have significant and unpredictable impact on the US economy.

The goal, however, had shifted subtly.  Implicit to early ideas of American exceptionalism was the corresponding sense of America, not as the global hegemon, but as the exemplary nation.  After the collapse of the Soviet Union, before the rise of China, there was a brief and shining moment when America was the global hegemon, no longer merely the exemplary nation, but the indispensable nation.  If the circle of freedom, conceived largely as the American way of life, and an international community amenable to our way of life, were to continue to expand – moreover, if the US were to maintain its role as the nation indispensable to that expansion – we needed to take a more active role.  As Bacevich recounts it, our more active role was tested first in Panama, where we ordered “US forces to intervene in Panama, overthrow the existing government there, and install in its place one expected to be more compliant.”  There is more than a hint of cynicism in “compliant.”  Powerful nations will always seek to advance their interests, which means, of course, that less powerful nations are expected to be amenable to those interests.  Realpolitik may supply a more convincing set of explanations, but the justification for the act remained rooted in American exceptionalism, a more active interventionist exceptionalism.  As Bacevich put it, Bush summarized the outcome of the Panama action “in three crisp sentences.”  “‘One year ago,’” Bush tells us, “’the people of Panama lived in fear, under the thumb of a dictator.  Today democracy is restored; Panama is free.  Operation Just Cause has achieved its objective.’”

Exercising our more active role on a global scale has proved more difficult, particularly in the Middle East.   If the US incursion into Panama was successful, it “proved to be the exception rather than the rule” for several comprehensible reasons.  On the level of realpolitik, the US has expressed a continuing interest in South America since at least the Monroe Doctrine and a specific economic interest in Panama since at least the first Roosevelt administration.  Our history with Panama goes back well over a century.  Since our intervention in Panama, however, the US entered “a period of unprecedented American military activism,” invading, occupying, bombing, or raiding, as Bacevich put it, “an astonishing array of countries.”   We are, again as Bacevich put it, “intoxicated by a post-Cold War belief in [our] own omnipotence,” and have allowed ourselves “to be drawn into a long series of armed conflicts,” almost all of them in the middle east, almost “all of them yielding unintended consequences and imposing greater than anticipated costs,” and almost all of them failing to accomplish their “assigned political purpose.”  We might have shaken off our intoxication quickly had the citizenry been more directly involved, as in Vietnam through the human sacrifice imposed by a draft or through the economic sacrifice imposed by proportionate tax increases.   Still and all, we might have sobered up had it not been for 9/11.

Here, one might suggest that 9/11 should have been a sobering event.  It pointed not only to our failed political objectives in the world of realpolitik, if indeed those objectives were at all clearly defined, but also our failed idealism, a failed “new era in world affairs” governed by “this idea called America.”  It seems clear enough that a good portion of the world rejected the American idea, not in the facile way articulated by the latter Bush, “for our freedoms,” but perhaps more profoundly for our modernity.  Although a somewhat troubling word, as Smith points out, modernity can be located historically with the 18^th century enlightenment.  It has come “to be associated with the sovereign individual as the unique locus of moral responsibility; the separation of state and civil society as distinct realms of authority,” aka, laissez faire economics; “the secularization of society” or the separation of church and state and a consequent “lessening of the public role of religion; the elevation of science and scientific forms of rationality as the standard of knowledge,” and finally a political regime based on the recognition of rights” as one pillar of its legitimacy, the other being the consent of the people represented by a majority.[3]  As Bacevich points out, “implicit in the American idea that lay at the heart of [the elder] Bush’s State of the Union address was an expectation of modernity removing religion from politics,” in part because, or so it seemed, questions surrounding religion and the state had been asked and answered by Enlightenment thinkers, and that “the global advance of secularization would lead to the privatization of faith,” along with markets, “was accepted as a given in elite circles.”  Perhaps.  While the elder Bush never really questioned his “belief in the fundamental benevolence of the West,” it has nevertheless been challenged, almost from the outset, as Smith put it, “by the rise of a series of oppositional ideologies – communism, fascism, and more recently political Islam or ‘Islamism’ – all of which claim to respond to a moral and spiritual void at the core of modernity.”[4]  It perhaps goes without saying that Smith left out the rise of another oppositional ideology, one whose roots go deep within American soil – political Christianity.            

The tragedy of 9/11 served the younger Bush as a Pearl Harbor of sorts, justifying the continuation of our massive investment in the military and our continued engagement in the Middle East, now a war against “Radical Islam” and its tactical use of “terror.”  As a pretext for continued military expenditures, the war on terror seemed a suitable substitute for the war on communism, the rhetoric associated with our engagement against radical Islam echoing the rhetoric of defense, deterrence, and containment of the war on communism.  There were, nevertheless, two difficulties with this posture.  First, of course, was the asymmetry between the US and the elements of radical Islam.  Although the 9/11 strike did inestimable damage to the psyche of the American people, as most policy makers realized, it was a failure, not of defense, but of intelligence. The Patriot Act (Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act) greatly expanded the capabilities of the surveillance state in response.  While the efficacy and the actual appropriateness of the so-called “tools” authorized by the Act can and should continue to be debated, it was nevertheless a response in the right direction—if, that is, the goal was the deterrence and containment (i.e. the prevention) of terrorist attacks through the preemptive intervention of law enforcement.  Although there was at the time a comprehensible, if wrong-headed, cry for retaliation, our continued military intervention was a response in the precisely the wrong direction, in part because it was disproportionate.  The US military is highly professional, well-equipped by any comparable standard within the Middle-East, and as such, simply reaffirmed resentments, the anti-American and anti-western sentiments present at least since the rise of Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini in Iran.

The second difficulty lay in the specific religious character of our enemy.  The war on communism targeted a secular ideology, one that grew out of the same core assumption of modernity that animated liberal capitalist democracy.  Ostensibly, at least, it represented a scientific or, more precisely, an engineering approach to man’s condition.  Just as the governing imperative of the scientist is to make the whole of physical nature subject to man’s will, communism shared with liberal democracy, as Niebuhr put it, “modern man’s confidence in his power over historical destiny.”  They shared the dream of “bringing the whole of human history under the control of the human will,” differing not in the what, but in the how.[5]  As many have noted, however, the society that categorically set itself against religion, considering it a “consolation for weak hearts who have failed to master life’s ‘extraneous forces,’” itself took on the characteristics of religion with its sacralization of Marx along with a chosen people, the proletariat.  One might also argue that it shares with religion another characteristic, an eschatology, a belief “that it is possible for man, at a particular moment in history, to take ‘the leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.’”  For Niebuhr, the “cruelty of communism” can, at least in part, be attributed to this eschatology and “the absurd pretension that the communist movement stands on the other side of this leap and has the whole of history in its grasp” and the consequent frustration when the pretention is frustrated by reality, when the communist overlords “discover that the ‘logic’ of history does not conform to their delineation of it” and they feel compelled to make it conform through the state’s monopoly of violence.[6]  For many conservatives, Christian conservatives, Niebuhr among them, the crusade against communism was implicitly, though not explicitly, a religious crusade against a perverse secularization of religion.  Or as Niebuhr put it, not without irony, “the rise of communism in our world is comparable to the rise of Islam and its challenge of Christian civilization in the high Middle Ages.”  When Niebuhr was writing, it appeared as though Islam, at least Islamic power, lay among the detritus of history, “destroyed not so much by its foes as by its own inner corruptions,” its failure to maintain the modern distinction between the secular and the sacred, the church and state.  The perverse communist theocracy failed for the same reason Islamic theocracy failed. “The Sultan of Turkey,” as he put it, “found it ultimately impossible to support the double role of political head of a nation and the spiritual head of the Islamic world.”  It was thus that Niebuhr, along with others, reconciled the ways of modernity with the ways of religion, through the separation of the secular and the sacred.   The secular provides a check on the eschatological pretentions of the sacred and its consequent violence in the name of an ideal.  The sacred conversely provides an ironic check on the overweening hubris of modern man.  Each a safeguard against the corruptions of the other.[7]  

The war on terror was, at least for Christian conservatives, not only a suitable substitute for the Cold War against communism, it was the ideal substitute.  As Bacevich reminds us, we should have seen it coming.  He writes that, as early as, November of 1979, radical Islamists shocked the House of Saud by seizing the Grand Mosque in Mecca.”  He then goes on to point out, “the Saudi Royal family resolved to prevent any recurrence of such a disaster by demonstrating beyond the shadow of a doubt its own fealty to the teachings of Allah … by expending staggering sums through the Ummah to promote a puritanical form of Islam known as Wahhabism.”  In short, “Saudi Arabia became the principle underwriter of what would morph into Islamist terror.”  For Bin Laden and others of like mind, modern secular America was “blasphemous, intolerable, and a justification for war.”   We should have seen coming in another sense as well. Daniel Bell suggested that humans are motivated not only by a “will to power,” but also what “William James called ‘the will to believe,’ the ‘passional and volitional’ tendencies to drive men to go beyond logic to satisfy emotional needs.”[8]   It’s a subject for a longer discussion, but suffice it to say, along with Bell, that the “breakdown of religious attachments, the turn to this-worldly concerns, the spur of modernity all gave impetus to the ascent up the faith ladders of secular utopias,” all of which failed, communism being the last to give up the ghost with the end of the Cold War.  At least initially and for many smaller nations attempting to throw off the shackles of colonialism, communism as a secular religion had satisfied the “will to believe” – had, that is, provided an “all-inclusive system of comprehensive reality,” a “set of beliefs infused with passion,” the “yearning for a cause” and ultimately “the satisfaction of deep moral feelings.”[9]  The final defeat of communism and “the desiccation of the older ideologies,” not without irony, gave impetus to a “’revolt against modernity,’” as Bell put it, the “return of the repressed, the surging impulses of religious fundamentalisms which invoke both traditional symbols as well as accommodations to the wealth of the world or, as in Islam, a martyrdom in the next one.”[10] 

There is little reason to suspect that the US was immune to this “revolt against modernity,” particularly among those for whom “religious attachments” formed not only the core of personal and social identity, but also those for whom “religious attachments” channeled resentment through a nationalist “cause.” Conservative political strategists, like Kevin Phillips, understood this better than their liberal adversaries.  In their so-called “southern strategy,” they drew on a deep-seated cultural intransigence, rooted in religious fundamentalism, that mirrored the resentments of Islamic fundamentalists in their own revolt against the modern age.  As a cause, it extended “private” evangelicalism to “political” evangelicalism on the world stage, a resurgence of American exceptionalism with roots as deep as Winthrop.  As Phillips points out, “in the late 1970s and 1980s, the nascent religious right became a vocal participant” in the Cold War, “with prominent evangelical ministers arguing that Christianity could not convert the world for Christ with the Soviet atheism in the way.”  Consequently, “when the Soviet Union collapsed between 1989 and 1991, US religious conservative quickly identified a roster of replacements,” with “Islam as the primary evil force and Iraq and Saddam Hussein, respectively, as (1) the re-embodiment of the evil Babylon; and (2) the leading new contender for the role of antichrist.”[11]  Clearly enough, Christianity could not convert the world for Christ with Islam in the way.  Along with the bellicosity of political evangelicalism, there was also a “public perception of moral unraveling in the United States.”  It was not just and not only a reaction to the hedonism that the 60s had set loose on American society, though often GOP state platforms, particularly those with strong rural constituencies, often “read like a Pentecostal critique of US society: opposition to homosexual marriage, New Age influence in education, abortion, surrogate motherhood, sex education, school-based health clinics,” not to mention “don’t ask, don’t tell.”[12]  One signal of moral unraveling is failure in war, or perhaps more precisely those moral virtues which solicit God’s favor, allowing individuals and nations to be successful defenders and activist extenders of “the faith.”  The moral unraveling of the US can be traced through four Democratic presidents, Truman’s stalemate in Korea, Johnson’s Vietnam defeat, Carter’s botched rescue of the 53 Iranian hostages, and finally, worst of all, Clinton’s “youthful anti-Vietnam War stance, his impolitic emphasis during his first week in office on permitting gays to serve in the military, and the analogy posed by the Hollywood movie Wag the Dog, which caricatured a president who waged war in the Middle East to take Americans’ eyes off a sexual liaison.”[13]  The 9/11 attack, in short, came as both affirmation and punishment – affirmation of the world struggle against Islam and punishment for our moral unraveling – creating what Phillips called “a textbook opportunity for a response rooted in the conjunction of religious and political fundamentalism” exemplified by the younger Bush. 

Of course, neither the elder nor the younger Bush were particularly successful in their Middle East adventures.  If the elder Bush drew on the support of religious conservatives more overtly than his predecessor, the younger Bush, perhaps out of a sincere commitment to the “higher powers,” doubled down.  Phillips points out that “in mid-2004, when George W. Bush was campaigning among the Old Order Amish in south-central Pennsylvania, the Lancaster New Era ran a report that he told one gathering, ‘I trust God speaks through me.  Without that, I couldn’t do my job.”  He goes on to point out that, in the same summer, “Time commented that ‘however often Bush defends Islam as a religion of peace, his case for war now rests less on high-fiber geopolitical arguments than on the suggestion that the 3^rd Infantry Division be used as an instrument of God’s will to share the gifts of liberty with all people.”  Phillips cites several “experts” worried that “Bush’s fusion of a religious outlook with administration policy is a striking shift in rhetoric.  Other presidents petitioned for blessings and guidance.  Bush positions himself as a prophet, speaking for God.”  Altogether, it appeared that “Bush’s global gospel of freedom and liberty was a ‘theological version of Manifest Destiny.’”[14]   Subsequent to Bush, one suspects, the Obama administration attempted to reverse the theocratic turn.  By refusing, for example, to acknowledge “radical Islam,” Obama did his best to maintain the conflict on purely secular and geo-political grounds.  Our adversary was not a religion, no matter how radical, but an illegal “political” tactic already condemned by international law. He was, however, unsuccessful with conservatives – in part because his refusal provided conservatives with a potent talking point, particularly with the evangelical right – in part because he faced the Johnson/Nixon dilemma.  Obama was assailed domestically by the rise of “political fundamentalism” on the right, the fundamentalist and evangelical churches that had, by then, co-opted the Republican party by providing a reliable base of support and organizing “grass-roots” political efforts.  He was confronted internationally by an impossible dilemma.  In too deep to simply withdraw without losing credibility on the one hand and throwing the region over to the very wolves we were ostensibly protecting against, the US found itself in the unenviable position of being both the proximate cause of (or at least a significant exacerbation of) the Middle East troubles and “indispensable” to their eventual resolution in ways acceptable to the world at large, meaning primarily our traditional allies in Western Europe concerned principally with access to shipping routes and oil, not to mention the threat of nuclear proliferation in Iran.[15]

It’s difficult to suggest that Trump has a “doctrine,” through it is clear enough that he doubles down on the Bush era stance.  If Bush saw himself as a prophet in the battle of good and evil, Trump sees himself in a more messianic role, engaged in the same battle, though it has become more consolidated around the personality of Trump himself.  For his more stalwart supporters, the good is what the messianic leader says is good, with the implicit declaration that “if you’re not with Trump, you’re against us” – which spawns, to borrow a phrase from Phillips, “rigidity, a crisis-forged, red, white, and blue ideology of religion, patriotism, and respect for authority.”[16]  Trump’s assassination of Iran’s Suleimani was a case in point.  There seems to have been little thought either for the “justification” of the act or its consequences, but he quickly reverts to type in the face of criticism.  He retweets a doctored image of Nancy Pelosi in Muslim garb, ostensibly to “send the message that Democrats are on the side of terrorists,” but clearly, unapologetically, “wielding the ‘dress’ and ‘religious beliefs’ of millions of Muslim Americans as a ‘slur.’”  It was a reminder to the faithful within his base that we are engaged, not in realpolitik, but a crusade against Islam.  As the Times reports, “in recent months, public anger over joblessness, economic anxiety and corruption has emerged as a potentially existential threat to Iran’s hardline regime.”  Also, or so it appeared, “the bleak economy” appeared to temper “the willingness of Iran to escalate hostilities with the United States, its leaders cognizant that ward could profoundly worsen national fortunes.”  If the Suleimani assassination was intended as a “wag-the-dog” operation, undercutting popular protest and reigniting nationalist, anti-American sentiment among the Iranian people to distract from impeachment, it briefly succeeded.  Having said that, however, ultimately reality will assert itself, and one of the realities we must face is Trump’s dumb luck.  The Iranian government and military proved itself incompetent, accidently shooting down a commercial jet containing both Iranian and Canadian passengers, reigniting domestic protest as well as international condemnation.  The slide into open war seems to have been averted, and Iran seems willing, despite threats to the contrary, to continue abiding by the Obama era nuclear agreement.  Disaster was averted by a disaster, and meanwhile life goes on.              

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[1] Nicolas Kristof, New York Times, January 8, 2020.

[2] Andrew Bacevich, TomDispatch.com, January 7, 2020.

[3] Steven B. Smith, Modernity and Its Discontents, ix.

[4] Smith, Modernity and Its Discontents, 5.

[5] Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, 2.

[6] Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, 3.

[7]There is a longer discussion here.  For Niebuhr, the Christian world and specifically an American Christian world view is “ironic.”  On the one side, it suggests that “our dreams of bringing the whole of human history under the control of the human will are ironically refuted by the fact that no group of idealists can easily move the pattern of history toward the desired goal of peace and justice.”  Consequently, we must not reject, but embrace an “older conception of an overruling providence in history,” along with “the Christian idea of the ambiguity of human virtue.”

[8] Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology, 444.

[9] Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology, 400.

[10] Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology, 444.

[11] Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy, 251.

[12] Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy, 188.

[13] Kevin Phillips, American theocracy, 180.

[14] Phillips, American Theocracy, 207-08.

[15] A hypothesis that needs to be tested against further research.

[16] Phillips, American Theocracy, 204.