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TechnoratiObama's Choice: Failed War President or the Prince of Peace?
While the armed forces can do many things, the one thing that has generally escaped them is that ultimate endpoint: lasting victory. This might have been driven home recently -- had anyone noticed -- when, in the midst of the Washington debate over the Afghan War, a forgotten front in President Bush's Global War on Terror, the Philippines, popped back into the news. On September 25th, New York Times correspondent Norimitsu Onishi wrote:
"Early this decade, American soldiers landed on the island of Basilan, here in the southern Philippines, to help root out the militant Islamic separatist group Abu Sayyaf. Now, Basilan's biggest towns, once overrun by Abu Sayyaf and criminal groups, have become safe enough that a local Avon lady trolls unworriedly for customers. Still, despite seven years of joint military missions and American development projects, much of the island outside main towns like Lamitan remains unsafe."
In attempting to explain the uneven progress of U.S. counterinsurgency operations against Muslim guerillas in the region after the better part of a decade, Onishi also noted, "Basilan, like many other Muslim and Christian areas in the southern Philippines, has a long history of political violence, clan warfare and corruption." While he remained silent about events prior to the 1990s, his newspaper had offered this reasonably rosy assessment of U.S. counterinsurgency efforts against Muslim guerrillas on the same island -- 100 years earlier:
"Detachments of the Twenty-third and Twenty-fifth Infantry, with constabulary and armed launches assisting, are engaged in disarming the Moros on Basilan Island. The troops are distributed around the coast and are co-operating in a series of closing-in movements."
Days after Onishi's report appeared, two American soldiers were killed on nearby Jolo Island. As a Reuters story noted, it "was the first deadly strike against U.S. forces deployed in the southern Philippines since a soldier in a restaurant was killed in 2002..." As in Basilan, however, the U.S. counterinsurgency story in Jolo actually goes back a long way. In early January 1905, to cite just one example, two members of the U.S. military -- the 14th Cavalry to be exact -- were killed during pacification operations on that same island.
That U.S. forces are attempting to defeat Muslim guerrillas on the same two tiny islands a century later should perhaps give President Obama pause as he weighs his options in Afghanistan and considers his recent award. It might also be worth his time to assess the military's record of success in conflicts since World War II, starting with the stalemate war in Korea that began in June 1950 and has yet to end in peace, let alone victory. That quiescent but unsettled conflict provides a ready-made opportunity for the president to achieve a triumph that has long escaped the U.S. military. He could help make a lasting peace on a de-nuclearized Korean peninsula and so begin earning his recent award.
Vietnam and Beyond
At the moment, Obama and his fellow Washington power-players are reportedly immersed in the literature of the Vietnam War in an attempt to use history as a divining rod for discovering a path forward in Afghanistan. At the Pentagon, many evidently still cling to the notion that the conflict was lost thanks to the weakness of public support in the U.S., pessimistic reporting by the media, and politicians without backbones.
Obama would do well to ignore their revisionist reading list for a simple reason: bluntly put, the U.S.-funded French military effort to defeat Vietnamese nationalism in the early 1950s failed dismally; then, a U.S.-funded effort to set up and arm a viable government in South Vietnam failed dismally; and finally, the U.S. military's full-scale, years' long effort to destroy the Vietnamese forces arrayed against it failed even more dismally -- and not in the cities and towns of the United States, nor even in the halls of power in Washington, but in the hamlets of South Vietnam. U.S. efforts in neighboring Cambodia and Laos similarly crashed and burned.
Victory aside, the U.S. military proved capable during the Vietnam War of accomplishing much. Its true achievement lay in the merciless pummeling it gave the people of Southeast Asia, leaving the region blood-soaked, heavily cratered, significantly poisoned, and littered with explosives, which kill and maim villagers to this day.
In the wake of out-and-out defeat in Indochina, Americans diagnosed themselves as suffering from a "Vietnam Syndrome" (resulting in a less muscular foreign policy -- embarrassing for a global superpower) and in need of a victory cure. In the 1980s and 1990s, this led to "triumphs" over such powers as the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada and Panama, a country whose "defense forces," in total, numbered just 12,000 (about half the size of the U.S. ground troops in the invading force) -- and cut-and-run flops in Lebanon and Somalia.
The "lessons" of Vietnam were declared officially buried forever in the scorching deserts of the Middle East in March 1991. "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!" President George H.W. Bush triumphantly exclaimed at the end of the First Gulf War -- and yet Saddam Hussein, the enemy autocrat, remained firmly ensconced in power in Baghdad and the conflict continued at a less than triumphant simmer for over a decade until his son, George W. Bush, again took the country to war against the same Iraqi leader his father had fought and again declared the mission accomplished.
Following a lightning-fast march on Baghdad in 2003, much like the speedy pseudo-victory in Kuwait in Gulf War I, U.S. forces again proved unable to seal the deal. Bush administration efforts to dominate the country politically by writing Iraq's constitution, while circumventing real elections, were quickly laid low by Iraq's most powerful religious leader, the Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Then, the U.S. military was sent reeling for years by a Sunni insurgency. Though violence is currently tamped down to what is often called "an acceptable level," Iraq remains a war zone and Barack Obama is the fourth president to preside over a seemingly never-ending, irresolvable set of conflicts in that country. (The U.S.-allied Iraqi government has already proclaimed the U.S. a loser, announcing a "great victory" over the U.S. occupation in June 2009 and comparing the withdrawal of most U.S. forces from the country's cities to a historic 1920 Iraqi revolt against British forces. American officials have not disagreed.)
During the 1980s, U.S. proxies in Afghanistan, Muslim mujahideen guerrillas, fought the Soviet occupation. Today, U.S. troops are the occupiers, fighting some of those same mujahidin and in the ninth year of this latest war in Afghanistan, victory still appears to be nowhere on the mountainous horizon, while failure, according to Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal, is once again a possibility.
Late last year, at the 26th Army Science Conference, I listened to one of the top-ranking enlisted men in the Army, a highly decorated veteran of the Global War on Terror, and a draftee during America's losing war in Vietnam, candidly admit that U.S. troops in Afghanistan simply could not keep up with enemy forces. The lightly-armed, body-armor-less guerrillas were too mobile and too agile, he said, for up-armored, heavily weighed-down American troops. When I asked him about the comment later, a colleague of the same rank and fellow Global War on Terror veteran quickly jumped to his defense, declaring, "Yeah, I can't run the mountain with them, but I'll still get them -- eventually." Almost a year later, the better part of a decade into the fight, the unanswered question remains, "When?"
Peace President
The U.S. military is unquestionably powerful and has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to mete out tremendous amounts of destruction and death. From Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia to Iraq and Afghanistan, enemy fighters and unfortunate civilians, military base camps and people's homes have been laid waste by U.S. forces in decade after decade of conflict. Yet sealing the deal has been another matter entirely. Victory has repeatedly slipped through the fingers of American presidents, no matter how much technology and ordnance has been unleashed on the poor, sometimes pre-industrial populations of America's war zones.
Now, the Nobel Committee has made a remarkable gamble. It has seen fit to offer Barack Obama, who entered the Oval Office as a war president and soon doubled down the U.S. bet on the expanding conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan, an opportunity for a lasting legacy and real achievement of a sort that has long escaped American presidents. Their prize gives him an opportunity to step back and consider the history of American war-making and what the U.S. military is really capable of doing thousands of miles from home. It's an unparalleled opportunity to face up honestly to the repeatedly demonstrated limits of American military power. It's also the president's chance to transform himself from war-maker by inheritance to his own kind of peace-maker, and so display a skill possessed by few previous presidents. He could achieve a more lasting victory, while limiting the blood, American and foreign, on his -- and all Americans' -- hands.
More than 100 years after their early counterinsurgency efforts on two tiny islands in the Philippines, U.S. troops are still dying there at the hands of Muslim guerillas. More than 50 years later, the U.S. still garrisons the southern part of the Korean peninsula as a result of a stalemate war and a peace as yet unmade. More recently, the American experience has included outright defeat in Vietnam, failures in Laos and Cambodia; debacles in Lebanon and Somalia; a never-ending four-president-long war in Iraq; and almost a decade of wheel-spinning in Afghanistan without any sign of success, no less victory. What could make the limits of American power any clearer?
The record should be as sobering as it is dismal, while the costs to the peoples in those countries are as appalling as they are unfathomable to Americans. The blood and futility of this American past ought to be apparent to Nobel Peace Prize-winner Obama, even if his predecessors have been incredibly resistant to clear-eyed assessments of American power or the real consequences of U.S. wars.
Two paths stretch out before this first-year president. Two destinations beckon: peace or failure.
29 Comments so far
Show AllObama's Choice: Failed War President or the Prince of Peace?
[raises hand]: I know, I know!
Failed War President!
Oh... show my work? Well...
It took Bonnie Prince Barack about a week after his coronation to demonstrate that he never met a bankster or general he didn't like.
Getting a Nobel Peace Prize "on spec" isn't about to diminish Obama's obvious relish for playing Warlord-in-Chief, and swinging his War Boner like a drum major in the Rose Bowl halftime show.
I never bought into the bogus Lincoln parallel that was part of Obama's award-winning marketing campaign. Still-- true or false, one of the abiding clichés about Lincoln is that his heart was truly burdened by prosecuting a war, and that his anguish could be seen in his face.
Even LBJ, while undaunted, increasingly seemed steeped in angst.
I don't get so much as a scintilla of that from Obama; he's greenlighted the drones and signed orders authorizing assassinations. For all of his vaunted intellect and the breadth of his life-experience, he strikes me as superficial, and lacking compassion and real depth of character.
And his Cabinet is the same way. For all of the now-forgotten hype about Obama choosing a cabinet of rivals to challenge his thinking, and test his even-handedness, there's no anti-warmonger closer than the Pennsylvania Avenue sidewalk, beyond the perimeter and beyond the pale. Secretaries Clinton and Gates, in particular, are no less bloody-minded and bloody-handed than His Highness.
The malignant political bugaboo that, in part, destroyed JFK has never been exorcised from the Oval Office; it's on permanent loan from Bugaboo Central: the Pentagon. It's the lizard-brain monomaniacal hysteria to Show Toughness, literally at all costs.
Unyielding and invincible Toughness and Aggression, in service of inspiring Fear to daunt The Enemy AND soothe the anxious Homeland population.
Since JFK, what amounts to macho angst has been the default policy for the executive and military. It's deeper than "policy", actually, it's simply a GIVEN, a postulate, an a priori foundation upon which policy, strategy, and tactics are built.
It's a foundation made of sand, but those standing upon it either will not admit this peril, or are overmastered by it. And this self-perpetuating, escalating impulse to put brute force to the test in hopes that it will prevail necessarily is most potent in times of high crisis.
JFK had to confront the Cold War and wrestle with the demon of thermonuclear annihilation. But somehow, high crisis always returns to tempt the executive to Hang Tough, War Boner menacing and ready.
9/11 brought the concept of offensive military actions back, amped up as if on steroids. There's every reason to think Obama has enthusiastically accepted the traditional role of Warlord-in-Chief, and not much to show otherwise, beyond the distraction of lofty oratory and a clutch of sincere but benighted Scandanavians.
And yes, it's most unfortunately the case that Obama is hamstrung, not to say hog-tied, by a corrupt and reactionary opposition party and allied corporate media happy to demagogue the lumpen yahoo masses into squealing like stuck pigs at every opportunity.
So Obama is PARTICULARLY vulnerable to smears that he's Soft on National Security. But if he's not prepared to kick those Achilles' heels up and openly reject the above-cited bugaboo and its toxic sequellae, what's he doing on stage in the first place?
Tragically, I don't see Obama backtracking, much less reversing direction-- even in that second term he's counting on, he should be so lucky.
· Yr Obd't Servant
"It's deeper than "policy", actually, it's simply a GIVEN, a postulate, an a priori foundation..." (Obedient servant)
–Yes it is. It exists anterior to "policy."
It is more like a demiurge or an event horizon that begins and ends with itself and is intractable. It exists on a meta level. Nothing about it is 'chosen.'
Nor can it be subject to disputation.
It reconciles itself with nothing outside itself and is inscrutable.
In medical terms it can likened to a metastasis or a by-product of a malignancy, usually cancerous in nature. Strangely not much different from what America itself defaults to and perhaps always has. –(Jill Bains)
Excellent comments. Obama CHOSE to be a war president the moment he RAN for president.
it's been the ONLY choice for american presidents for a country whose ONE constant is WAR.
Yr Ob't Servant and Amfortas wound: bitter but brilliant analysis of what has indeed been a "default" position of U.S. politics.
NT knows better - there is only one option available for 'peace':
Guarantee continued profits for the corporate war profiteers.
By law, a war profiteering Corporation has one duty: profits for shareholders. Whether those profits come from death and destruction or not, the Corporation, by law, does not care, as long as the profits are coming.
At the moment, said Corporations are profiteering greatly from our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan without which most would go bust.
So we promise them no profit loss - hey, it's the same taxpayer money either way - and their Kill More Lobby disappears, and then actual Peace starts looking like a real possibility...
Too bad there is not some way to make peace profitable and war unprofitable. Or how about, make peace patriotic for the 85% of the sheeple and war Un American, treasonous and terrorist, which like someone said: war is only terrorism with a bigger budget.
This is an end-stage world monopoly game.
At the top echelons of the US American piles of filthy lucre that they call freedom and democracy are the people that are so rich and have priveleged positions of power in finance, media, and corporate boards, that they can believe that they own the corporations, own the government and own the military, and through the media that they own the people.
Of course you probably do not feel owned, and you can shout all you like, but power, position and money are a monopoly commodity here, and the monopoly game has been going on for hundreds of years, with some inheritance of players seats and concentrations of wealth and power. It is an international game now, with all workers competing with international slave labor.
The presidential office job is a top PR position, and is definitely not an ownership or player position. The top monopoly players only fund the man who will put on the best show for them.
Obama got the best corporate and wall street funding, so we can expect a good show. But it is mostly theatre. Obama has his personal charm and intelligence, but the board game is already stacked with people looking after their own money, power and ownership empires. This is also the case with other governments, parliamentary or otherwise. Politicians are run by their backers. Successful politicians do not have a vision of their own. They are paid middlemen and negotiaters. This works in the short term for the backers, and keeps the nation running, as long as the underlying ecosystem supplies the resources to fund the economy and people. There are elections now and then, but nothing fundamental will change.
It could be worse. The worse case is the politician who is also a player or owner. The corruption is then direct.
If you want change, it has to be in the billionaire end-stage monopoly player perceived interests, or no deal. They cannot action anything that might threaten their own interests.
Now you might say that having a liveable planet and human society in a hundred years time would be in everyones interest, but to a monopoly player only the current competitive state of game matters. They will sell us all into slavery , create a war or a genocidal wipeout, if they think it suits their interests versus another player, or just keeps them in the game. For the player the future is heavily discounted by the requirements of the current deal. Considerations of environment, overpopulation, climate change do not enter the decision world of the player, and so many of them are dependent on fossil fuel wealth. Only being taken out of the game by losing is like death. Human beings can die in great numbers and can always over-populate again. What do they care?
It seems like most of us are already dead. For us to make change, we must change the players.
"It seems like most of us are already dead. " –(B3nign)
Precisely! An insightful comment. If America itself were an art work it would be an installation of death, a site of death, a necropolis.
This feeling accounts for the 'hollowness' and eerie dread– the free floating anxiety that is all but omnipresent in the malignant and hopeless catastrophe of American life. An endgame that has ended.
All the more so that no will admit to it, the ghost world...
It is indicative of a dead people and a dead culture with nothing to offer except the death it already lives.
And insists on exporting over and over again...
The 'smiley face' decal embossed on the fuselage of a Predator drone is the American apotheosis. A missive from the land of the dead.
–(Jill Bains)
This author seems to believe that it is within Obama’s power to change the course of the United States foreign policy. Assuming that he does indeed have such power, the important questions are “is he willing to and does he have courage to”? His actions (not rhetoric) indicate otherwise. In almost all major international conflicts Obama always sides with the continuation of hostility. The current disagreement within the White House over Afghanistan/Pakistan war is about military tactics not a question of war or peace. Obama has already said a while ago that withdrawal is not on the table. At the very best, his effort for peace is half hearted. Does he really believe that nuclear weapon free world can be achieved by insisting that the US nuclear weapons are non-negotiable and the Israeli nuclear weapons are not to be questioned? Time for us to expect (wish) Obama to be something other than he actually is over.
The US govt is just like those people who are so terribly busy minding someone else's business that their own lives are in complete disarray.
The way the US behaves—and the way the world is—is just one of many possibilities. Those possibilities arise from collective consciousness. If collective consciousness cannot express and practice those things that will effectively make life better, if imagination is lacking, if peace and harmony are lacking in national consciousness, then the resulting governments will have very mixed, low-grade results.
The thing is, too many people all over are terribly resigned to the way things have been. They do not see a way out. And when big mistakes are committed, mistakes like war, it is extremely difficult to get out of them. Wrong action is immensely costly and difficult to rectify.
We have to stop choosing lose-lose actions which come from extremely limited awareness. War is precisely that kind of action. It is the province of the ignorant and the lazy of mind.
On the other hand, right action, action which involves little or no loss, is what has to come to the fore. Everyone has experience of this kind of action. When you slice a pie for your family, you must take care to do it fairly. And even as a parent, when you must mete out punishment, it should be done wisely, with higher purpose and even love.
War? That's another matter, a choice which should never be in the hands of a man like the last US president, a man whose brain is riddled with holes. Today we still pay the price of his ignorance. May the bill for that be paid in full, and tomorrow would not be soon enough.
I'm not convinced it's either accurate or politically wise to contend that since the end of WWII, "the US military simply can't seal the deal on winning a war."
Turse acknowledges Ronald Reagan's wag-the-dog photo op campaign in Grenada, and George H W Bush's snatch of Noreiga from Panama and the fairly quick "liberation" of Kuwait do qualify as military successes. There is no mention of Kosovo. Or Haiti. Or short term "successes" in thinly disguised US military/CIA black ops interventions in Chile, Indonesia, and various central American and African countries during the Cold War.
Indeed, what about the Cold War itself? If containment was the strategy, the Pentagon closed the deal (at staggering cost) quite well. For my money, it's the CIA that has the really embarassing historical track record of blunders and fiascos (Bay of Pigs, anyone?), not to mention blowback.
I did a 13-month tour of duty on the DMZ in South Korea in the late 60's. Today, the domestic Korean economy south of the parallel is enviable, and there is a vibrant, multi-party democratic political system. So was the Korean War really a Pentagon failure? Certainly not in the sense that Vietnam clearly was a categorical defeat, and nothing but.
That said, what I really think is going on is a dumbing down of what passes in public discourse as military "success", or in Turse's terminology "closing the deal." So long as US casualties can be held to an "acceptable" level over there and nothing goes bang in the night over here, military interventionists intoxicated with American exceptionalism will look you straight in the eye and proudly declare that endless low intensity warfare, at scattered spots across the globe, is actually proof that the system works.
Obama does have a rare opportunity to constrain the post World War II military-industrial-national security complex that has grown to dominate and distort the federal government's priorities, and spread so much misery in the world. If Barack Obama choses not to do so, then the fault is entirely his. And if a premature Nobel Peace prize provides him some cover for making the right decision on reversing course in Afghanistan, I'll be the first to stand up and cheer.
Bill from Saginaw
according to the New York Times today -- Vice President Biden is in Romania - and without mentioning in his speech that Romania's government just collapsed and is now "interim".......patted the USA's "former east bloc" nations for being "democratic" ...
and urges them to "spread democracy...we shall stand with you"......
he might very well have said the TRUTH:
"PLEASE HELP THE USA SPREAD ITS FASCISTIC CORPORATE EMPIRE some more...we NEED YOU...or ELSE!!!"
It is probably not coincidental that Joe Biden is in Romania.
It has been, I believe, corroborated that Romania is the locus of several of the extra legal 'black sites' where the CIA 'rendered' and perhaps tortured those whom it kidnapped. Part of the American 'offshore' Gulag.
Certainly no country would be more appropriate to celebrate the REAL American 'democracy.' Hosting an arch warmonger only 'frosts the cake.'
–(Jill Bains)
A good chronology, but there are two other, longer, wars which the United States of America is supporting and ensuring will continue. They are the "Wars as a way of life" involving Israel and its neighbors and the chronic warring of India.
Don't forget the "successful" and still going War On Drugs!!!
We have a right to steal their oil because we've spent a trillion and a half and 5,000 of our dead soldiers trying to steal it.
if you drive a gas powered car or have oil based heat or any other oil based product in your home you are part of the problem, and not part of the answer,
It's not their oil.
It's U.S. oil.
THEY merely had the poor judgement to situate their homes upon it countless generations ago. And currently display a troublesome lack of gratitude toward the righteous occupation established to relieve them of this burden.
. . . history suggests that the path of war is a surefire loser.
This is true but Obama is an interchangeable part in the USA Death and Pillage Machine and he'll be firing on all cylinders because that's the function of his part.
Tell that to every Jew living in Germany in the 1930s
some times war as ugly as it is is the answer
anbsmith, news for you: American men and women in their 80s and 90s who lived in Germany in the 1930s are not running American foreign policy. Wait a minute, let me check with AIPAC, maybe they are!
Why SHOULD the fact that US soldiers are killed on the same Island 100 years apart mollify Barack Obama and the MIC?
That is exactly as intended. It will ensure another 100 years of out of control Military spending with the "NEED" to bring peace , liberty and security to these regions over and over again.
It perpetuates the warfare state.
It interesting to note, and little reported on , that shortly before the US sent "troops" back to the Philipines, a US National with ties to the CIA was arrested in a Hotel room after having accidently setting off a bomb in that same room. The bomb he was assmebling the same type as these "Muslim Terrorists" use.
It also interesting to note that The State Department immediately sent high ranking officials into that country to whisk that same agent away under their protection.
We all remember the British Agents dressed as Arabs arrested inside Iraq with a carload of IEDS and trheir rescue.
Nick Turse's "learn from history" approach to appealing to Obama's good senses is entirely reasonably. Where it falls flat is in any indication so far that Obama has any intention of learning from these lessons. He shows more, in fact, of the attitude of one who thinks he is invincible from the laws of normal human behavior and the lessons of history, because of the well-demonstrated charisma which always takes the form: "it has been said unto you old...but I say unto you, follow me." The mindless support of his adoring public for a health care reform bill that is no reform at all, and their willingness to maintain an attitude of infinite patience with the slow pace of his delivery on campaign promises, must seem to Obama as carte blanch for him to pursue the military agenda in Af/Pak and elsewhere. And why not? When people who don't like your war agenda continue to support you and give you peace prizes, why would you not continue on that militaristic path? However much people like Michael Moore may addresses "letters to Obama" with these expressions of hope that he will "earn" his prize, that he will grasp the "unique" opportunity that the recognition opens to him, I have the feeling that the President simply stores away his prizes and, like Audrey II in the Little Shop of Horrors, keeps saying "feed me Seymour" as he chases after the next bit of public adulation. (Next week, Florida!)
Even while he was US Senator, Obama rarely voted against a war spending bill. Just like Obama took lessons on Raygun for the economy, he took lessons from Dubya on foreign policy. If I remember correctly, Obama's first mentor when he was senator was Joe Liebermann of all Democrats ! Looking back at the lessons and warnings George Lakoff wrote about how neoconservatives frame words and ideas this way and that, Obama happily fell for neoconservative corruption training and his disappointments started and piled up from there. If you noticed the trend, he has gone from faking sympathy to being "bold" enough to stand up for Wall $treet and Big Military all the while coolly making excuses against Main Street and counting on his loyalist supporters to annoy and irritate us with that "make me do it" excuse. I could almost hate that man for acting so slick and hideous.
Turse sez: "Victory aside, the U.S. military proved capable during the Vietnam War of accomplishing much. Its true achievement lay in the merciless pummeling it gave the people of Southeast Asia ... "
***
No, its true achievement was enriching its various suppliers, the result of a political motivation which has increased exponentially into the 21st Century. It is unfortunate so many words were spent on this historical compendium without mention of that primary cause for all this military "intervention".
Excellent point. War profiteering is at the core of all conflicts. Thucydides, the 6th century B.C. Greek historian observed this so many centuries ago and it is even more valid today.
The Nobel Committee made a fool out of the President Mr. Turse. Anyone who remotely believes it was deserved or even thinks it was anything but a political ploy is a fool who will fit right in with this bunch of Chicago gangsters.