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The End of (Military) History? The US, Israel, and the Failure of the Western Way of War
"In watching the flow of events over the past decade or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history." This sentiment, introducing the essay that made Francis Fukuyama a household name, commands renewed attention today, albeit from a different perspective.
Developments during the 1980s, above all the winding down of the Cold War, had convinced Fukuyama that the "end of history" was at hand. "The triumph of the West, of the Western idea," he wrote in 1989, "is evident... in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism."
Today the West no longer looks quite so triumphant. Yet events during the first decade of the present century have delivered history to another endpoint of sorts. Although Western liberalism may retain considerable appeal, the Western way of war has run its course.
For
Fukuyama, history implied ideological competition, a contest pitting
democratic capitalism against fascism and communism. When he wrote his
famous essay, that contest was reaching an apparently definitive
conclusion.
Yet from start to finish, military might had determined that competition's course as much as ideology. Throughout much of the twentieth century, great powers had vied with one another to create new, or more effective, instruments of coercion. Military innovation assumed many forms. Most obviously, there were the weapons: dreadnoughts and aircraft carriers, rockets and missiles, poison gas, and atomic bombs -- the list is a long one. In their effort to gain an edge, however, nations devoted equal attention to other factors: doctrine and organization, training systems and mobilization schemes, intelligence collection and war plans.
All of this furious activity, whether undertaken by France or Great Britain, Russia or Germany, Japan or the United States, derived from a common belief in the plausibility of victory. Expressed in simplest terms, the Western military tradition could be reduced to this proposition: war remains a viable instrument of statecraft, the accoutrements of modernity serving, if anything, to enhance its utility.
Grand Illusions
That was theory. Reality, above all the two world wars of the last century, told a decidedly different story. Armed conflict in the industrial age reached new heights of lethality and destructiveness. Once begun, wars devoured everything, inflicting staggering material, psychological, and moral damage. Pain vastly exceeded gain. In that regard, the war of 1914-1918 became emblematic: even the winners ended up losers. When fighting eventually stopped, the victors were left not to celebrate but to mourn. As a consequence, well before Fukuyama penned his essay, faith in war's problem-solving capacity had begun to erode. As early as 1945, among several great powers -- thanks to war, now great in name only -- that faith disappeared altogether.
Among nations classified as liberal democracies, only two resisted this trend. One was the United States, the sole major belligerent to emerge from the Second World War stronger, richer, and more confident. The second was Israel, created as a direct consequence of the horrors unleashed by that cataclysm. By the 1950s, both countries subscribed to this common conviction: national security (and, arguably, national survival) demanded unambiguous military superiority. In the lexicon of American and Israeli politics, "peace" was a codeword. The essential prerequisite for peace was for any and all adversaries, real or potential, to accept a condition of permanent inferiority. In this regard, the two nations -- not yet intimate allies -- stood apart from the rest of the Western world.
So even as they professed their devotion to peace, civilian and military elites in the United States and Israel prepared obsessively for war. They saw no contradiction between rhetoric and reality.
Yet belief in the efficacy of military power almost inevitably breeds the temptation to put that power to work. "Peace through strength" easily enough becomes "peace through war." Israel succumbed to this temptation in 1967. For Israelis, the Six Day War proved a turning point. Plucky David defeated, and then became, Goliath. Even as the United States was flailing about in Vietnam, Israel had evidently succeeded in definitively mastering war.
A quarter-century later, U.S. forces seemingly caught up. In 1991, Operation Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush's war against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, showed that American troops like Israeli soldiers knew how to win quickly, cheaply, and humanely. Generals like H. Norman Schwarzkopf persuaded themselves that their brief desert campaign against Iraq had replicated -- even eclipsed -- the battlefield exploits of such famous Israeli warriors as Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin. Vietnam faded into irrelevance.
For both Israel and the United States, however, appearances proved deceptive. Apart from fostering grand illusions, the splendid wars of 1967 and 1991 decided little. In both cases, victory turned out to be more apparent than real. Worse, triumphalism fostered massive future miscalculation.
On the Golan Heights, in Gaza, and throughout the West Bank, proponents of a Greater Israel -- disregarding Washington's objections -- set out to assert permanent control over territory that Israel had seized. Yet "facts on the ground" created by successive waves of Jewish settlers did little to enhance Israeli security. They succeeded chiefly in shackling Israel to a rapidly growing and resentful Palestinian population that it could neither pacify nor assimilate.
In the Persian Gulf, the benefits reaped by the United States after 1991 likewise turned out to be ephemeral. Saddam Hussein survived and became in the eyes of successive American administrations an imminent threat to regional stability. This perception prompted (or provided a pretext for) a radical reorientation of strategy in Washington. No longer content to prevent an unfriendly outside power from controlling the oil-rich Persian Gulf, Washington now sought to dominate the entire Greater Middle East. Hegemony became the aim. Yet the United States proved no more successful than Israel in imposing its writ.
During the 1990s, the Pentagon embarked willy-nilly upon what became its own variant of a settlement policy. Yet U.S. bases dotting the Islamic world and U.S. forces operating in the region proved hardly more welcome than the Israeli settlements dotting the occupied territories and the soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) assigned to protect them. In both cases, presence provoked (or provided a pretext for) resistance. Just as Palestinians vented their anger at the Zionists in their midst, radical Islamists targeted Americans whom they regarded as neo-colonial infidels.
Stuck
No one doubted that Israelis (regionally) and Americans (globally) enjoyed unquestioned military dominance. Throughout Israel's near abroad, its tanks, fighter-bombers, and warships operated at will. So, too, did American tanks, fighter-bombers, and warships wherever they were sent.
So what? Events made it increasingly evident that military dominance did not translate into concrete political advantage. Rather than enhancing the prospects for peace, coercion produced ever more complications. No matter how badly battered and beaten, the "terrorists" (a catch-all term applied to anyone resisting Israeli or American authority) weren't intimidated, remained unrepentant, and kept coming back for more.
Israel ran smack into this problem during Operation Peace for Galilee, its 1982 intervention in Lebanon. U.S. forces encountered it a decade later during Operation Restore Hope, the West's gloriously titled foray into Somalia. Lebanon possessed a puny army; Somalia had none at all. Rather than producing peace or restoring hope, however, both operations ended in frustration, embarrassment, and failure.
And those operations proved but harbingers of worse to come. By the 1980s, the IDF's glory days were past. Rather than lightning strikes deep into the enemy rear, the narrative of Israeli military history became a cheerless recital of dirty wars -- unconventional conflicts against irregular forces yielding problematic results. The First Intifada (1987-1993), the Second Intifada (2000-2005), a second Lebanon War (2006), and Operation Cast Lead, the notorious 2008-2009 incursion into Gaza, all conformed to this pattern.
Meanwhile, the differential between Palestinian and Jewish Israeli birth rates emerged as a looming threat -- a "demographic bomb," Benjamin Netanyahu called it. Here were new facts on the ground that military forces, unless employed pursuant to a policy of ethnic cleansing, could do little to redress. Even as the IDF tried repeatedly and futilely to bludgeon Hamas and Hezbollah into submission, demographic trends continued to suggest that within a generation a majority of the population within Israel and the occupied territories would be Arab.
Trailing a decade or so behind Israel, the United States military nonetheless succeeded in duplicating the IDF's experience. Moments of glory remained, but they would prove fleeting indeed. After 9/11, Washington's efforts to transform (or "liberate") the Greater Middle East kicked into high gear. In Afghanistan and Iraq, George W. Bush's Global War on Terror began impressively enough, as U.S. forces operated with a speed and élan that had once been an Israeli trademark. Thanks to "shock and awe," Kabul fell, followed less than a year and a half later by Baghdad. As one senior Army general explained to Congress in 2004, the Pentagon had war all figured out:
"We are now able to create decision superiority that is enabled by networked systems, new sensors and command and control capabilities that are producing unprecedented near real time situational awareness, increased information availability, and an ability to deliver precision munitions throughout the breadth and depth of the battlespace... Combined, these capabilities of the future networked force will leverage information dominance, speed and precision, and result in decision superiority."
The key phrase in this mass of techno-blather was the one that occurred twice: "decision superiority." At that moment, the officer corps, like the Bush administration, was still convinced that it knew how to win.
Such claims of success, however, proved obscenely premature. Campaigns advertised as being wrapped up in weeks dragged on for years, while American troops struggled with their own intifadas. When it came to achieving decisions that actually stuck, the Pentagon (like the IDF) remained clueless.
Winless
If any overarching conclusion emerges from the Afghan and Iraq Wars (and from their Israeli equivalents), it's this: victory is a chimera. Counting on today's enemy to yield in the face of superior force makes about as much sense as buying lottery tickets to pay the mortgage: you better be really lucky.
Meanwhile, as the U.S. economy went into a tailspin, Americans contemplated their equivalent of Israel's "demographic bomb" -- a "fiscal bomb." Ingrained habits of profligacy, both individual and collective, held out the prospect of long-term stagnation: no growth, no jobs, no fun. Out-of-control spending on endless wars exacerbated that threat.
By 2007, the American officer corps itself gave up on victory, although without giving up on war. First in Iraq, then in Afghanistan, priorities shifted. High-ranking generals shelved their expectations of winning -- at least as a Rabin or Schwarzkopf would have understood that term. They sought instead to not lose. In Washington as in U.S. military command posts, the avoidance of outright defeat emerged as the new gold standard of success.
As a consequence, U.S. troops today sally forth from their base camps not to defeat the enemy, but to "protect the people," consistent with the latest doctrinal fashion. Meanwhile, tea-sipping U.S. commanders cut deals with warlords and tribal chieftains in hopes of persuading guerrillas to lay down their arms.
A new conventional wisdom has taken hold, endorsed by everyone from new Afghan War commander General David Petraeus, the most celebrated soldier of this American age, to Barack Obama, commander-in-chief and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. For the conflicts in which the United States finds itself enmeshed, "military solutions" do not exist. As Petraeus himself has emphasized, "we can't kill our way out of" the fix we're in. In this way, he also pronounced a eulogy on the Western conception of warfare of the last two centuries.
The Unasked Question
What then are the implications of arriving at the end of Western military history?
In his famous essay, Fukuyama cautioned against thinking that the end of ideological history heralded the arrival of global peace and harmony. Peoples and nations, he predicted, would still find plenty to squabble about.
With the end of military history, a similar expectation applies. Politically motivated violence will persist and may in specific instances even retain marginal utility. Yet the prospect of Big Wars solving Big Problems is probably gone for good. Certainly, no one in their right mind, Israeli or American, can believe that a continued resort to force will remedy whatever it is that fuels anti-Israeli or anti-American antagonism throughout much of the Islamic world. To expect persistence to produce something different or better is moonshine.
It remains to be seen whether Israel and the United States can come to terms with the end of military history. Other nations have long since done so, accommodating themselves to the changing rhythms of international politics. That they do so is evidence not of virtue, but of shrewdness. China, for example, shows little eagerness to disarm. Yet as Beijing expands its reach and influence, it emphasizes trade, investment, and development assistance. Meanwhile, the People's Liberation Army stays home. China has stolen a page from an old American playbook, having become today the preeminent practitioner of "dollar diplomacy."
The collapse of the Western military tradition confronts Israel with limited choices, none of them attractive. Given the history of Judaism and the history of Israel itself, a reluctance of Israeli Jews to entrust their safety and security to the good will of their neighbors or the warm regards of the international community is understandable. In a mere six decades, the Zionist project has produced a vibrant, flourishing state. Why put all that at risk? Although the demographic bomb may be ticking, no one really knows how much time remains on the clock. If Israelis are inclined to continue putting their trust in (American-supplied) Israeli arms while hoping for the best, who can blame them?
In theory, the United States, sharing none of Israel's demographic or geographic constraints and, far more richly endowed, should enjoy far greater freedom of action. Unfortunately, Washington has a vested interest in preserving the status quo, no matter how much it costs or where it leads. For the military-industrial complex, there are contracts to win and buckets of money to be made. For those who dwell in the bowels of the national security state, there are prerogatives to protect. For elected officials, there are campaign contributors to satisfy. For appointed officials, civilian and military, there are ambitions to be pursued.
And always there is a chattering claque of militarists, calling for jihad and insisting on ever greater exertions, while remaining alert to any hint of backsliding. In Washington, members of this militarist camp, by no means coincidentally including many of the voices that most insistently defend Israeli bellicosity, tacitly collaborate in excluding or marginalizing views that they deem heretical. As a consequence, what passes for debate on matters relating to national security is a sham. Thus are we invited to believe, for example, that General Petraeus's appointment as the umpteenth U.S. commander in Afghanistan constitutes a milestone on the way to ultimate success.
Nearly 20 years ago, a querulous Madeleine Albright demanded to know: "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Today, an altogether different question deserves our attention: What's the point of constantly using our superb military if doing so doesn't actually work?
Washington's refusal to pose that question provides a measure of the corruption and dishonesty permeating our politics.
- Posted in
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53 Comments so far
Show AllI'll check that site out.
This guy sounds like a wannabe Carthaginian.
"Certainly, no one in their right mind, Israeli or American, can believe that a continued resort to force will remedy whatever it is that fuels anti-Israeli or anti-American antagonism throughout much of the Islamic world. To expect persistence to produce something different or better is moonshine."
Never underestimate the power of people to delude themselves with moonshine, then later justify their delusions with self-serving policy pronouncements and historical twaddle. For example, for 200 years or so most Americans have deluded themselves into believing that they live in some kind of 'democratic' state.
The business of war is big business and America's wars have made a small elite class extremely rich. The consequences of this massive investment in overseas slaughters and military bases on the middle class in America is of little importance to the defense industry scam artists. The politicians who front for the extracting elite are left to deal with the anger that comes from a middle class in crisis and the management of this problem is what the American presidency is all about.
Exactly. As long as wars are fought the small elite class makes huge profits. Who it hurts, or what it accomplishes or doesn't accomplish is of little concern to them.
First, create fear and distrust.
Second, sell arms.
Third, divide and profit.
That's right. You see actually "winning" a war would mean ending it, in which case the powers that be couldn't do any of the three things on your short (but insightful) list.
Yes. If we are able to create a peace movement in this country that manages to build some popular support it is certain that we will then be faced with a flury of the kind of situations arising all over the world that the military-industrial complex claims to be dealing with. There will be terrorist attacks on civilians, attacks on shipping, etc.
Al-Qaeda and most other terrorist groups have been used for decades by U.S. and other western intelligence services as an instrument of policy. It is safe to assume they will be used again to maintain the flow of tax dollars to the military-industrial complex.
Good riddance.
Thanks for the very informative article. I've read some of Andrews work in the past and find his ability to make logical connections refreshing. Many people, usually on the right, just don't seem to understand this process. It's actually based on science. That's why you find such things as political science and social science at universities along with hard sciences like chemistry and biology. One problem with the scientific approach is that it can't explain evil and emotional/psychological trappings that non-scientific theories can.
It is this inability of science that gets exploited by demagogues to manipulate, usually by creating fear, in the populace. This is what FOX news and many on the political right are so good at. Sadly, they seem to be rarely held to account for their transgressions and fear-mongering.
I believe that he is right about military solutions not working anymore. Though, they have never really worked. As that line Sting wrote in one of his songs says,
"Never seen no military solution
that didn't always turn into something worse"
Fukuyama is a moron. There's no end to anything in human history. Human beings will keep doing what they are doing whether it works or not.
My biggest complaint with this Bacevich article, along with his book "Limits of Power" is that he doesn't really address the morals of warfare.
Sure... maybe we can devise new strategies for warfare that were as effective as the ones that destroyed and subjugated the natives of America, that stole 1/2 of Mexico, that destroyed Latin America in the 80s, that invaded Panama and totally destroyed Iraq in the 90s, etc etc... but the real question should not be to question strategies. The real question is why do we need to be constantly at war in the first place. Just because we won the Gulf War doesn't mean that it was legal to fight it in the first place. Just because we had the military power to steal 1/2 of Mexico doesn't mean it was moral to do so.
America has been at war with some population of people since its founding. It is time to rid America of imperial wars, not because they are a strategic blunder, but because they are morally wrong.
War is the dumbest thing our species does. It is difficult to "rid America of imperial wars" when the US was a result of imperial conquest. White Europeans "destroyed and subjugated the natives of America".
Another imperative brother Tar Heel is that, along with ending the killing wars, we must reconquer the Dookie Devils in the battle of basketball.
HIstorically, more people have favored war as a noble endeavor. I pray that, just as slavery is now almost universally condemned, I may live to see such a day when war is no longer tolerated. Yes, America has been at war since its founding, but the Quakers are no longer alone in seeing the moral wrongness of this our beloved country.
The United States, imho, is the worst of the worst in that respect.
Add that American Jews who would not dream of joining the US military are enlisting in Israel's IDF. Our military minded politicians must be standing proud, giving Israel money to fund the recruitment of its soldiers in the US.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/in-desperate-search-for-recruits-israeli-army-targets-foreigners-2004793.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/in-desperate-search-for-
recruits-israeli-army-targets-foreigners-2004793.html
"The second was Israel, created as a direct consequence of the horrors unleashed by that cataclysm." -- the Second World War
I wanted to read this article until I reached that statement.
It is rather pathetic that a history professor could claim this. Israel came about through a multi-decade Zionist campaign for a Jewish state. Not because of ww2.
Apparently there is nothing that WW2 did not cause to happen.
Really pathetic, Baaacevich. You have many important things to say and pollute them with simplistic origin stories.
Yes, WWII is a convenient alibi for everything, just as 9/11 serves as a handy rhetorical ploy in debates on every issue under the Sun since that fateful day. Here's a more careful scholar dissecting the myth of a direct link between WWII and creation of Israel:
To this day, it is the mantle of the Judeocide that covers the actions of the Zionist state, in the eyes not only of the Israeli population or Jews of the diaspora, but Western opinion at large. Historically, however, there was little or no connexion between them. By 1947, the fighters of the Haganah and Irgun were well aware of what had happened to the Jews trapped in Nazi Europe. But they would not have acted otherwise even if every compatriot had been saved. Zionist objectives had been laid down well before Hitler came to power, and were not altered by him. Ben-Gurion once said he was willing to sacrifice the lives of half the Jewish children of Germany, if that was the price of bringing the other half to Palestine, rather than leaving them all safely in England. Of how much less account was the fate of the Arabs, children or adults. The goal of a Jewish national state in the Middle East admitted of no other solution than that which was forcibly realized by the Nakba. After the event, the Judeocide has served as pretext or mitigation, but it had no immediate bearing on the outcome. In Europe and America, it gained external sympathy for the Zionist war of independence, but this was never a decisive factor in its success.
http://www.newleftreview.org/A2330
A profound and mostly true description of our history and of Fukuyama's short-sightedness, if not blatant folly, but too glib in its conclusions. "Certainly, no one in their right mind, Israeli or American, can believe that a continued resort to force will remedy whatever it is that fuels anti-Israeli or anti-American antagonism throughout much of the Islamic world." True, but the inmates have been in charge of the asylum for many decades. Why not address that big problem?
Our victory in WWII ironically has had a terrible effect upon all Americans. We keep reliving that war in movies, in speeches, on holidays, in novels, in video games--always we see ourselves as good and noble, fighting for the right--and we win. Evil is defeated. War makes glorious sense. (It wasn't that way after WWI. That war came to be seen as foolish posturing among nation-states, each one puffing itself up and daring the others to join the fray. It had nothing to do with our security.)
We are still living in the aftermath of the Second World War even as the last soldiers die off. Vietnam was not enough to choke off the patriotic bluster that accompanied victory over Japan and Germany. Later, the Gulf War fit the American narrative of struggle against an evil dictator (Hussein)--and it was repeated in 2002. Attempts to cast the Taliban as evildoers have not been so successful with the American people; we have had enough.
But our leaders haven't. They want to play the same song again, the same song playing ever since 1945. Ironic isn't it? That war, so long ago, which we won unequivocally, has served as the ideological basis of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In the victory over Germany and Japan, the seed of our defeat decades later was sown.
When a nation gets its way through war, it cannot be taught that war is not an viable policy option - no matter how many wars it may subsequently lose.
Yes. The myth of military victory is not eradicated until it defeats the victor.
Given the mass and deployment of military personnel and equipment and the subsequent casualties, my feeling is that, in one country WW2 never ended: the USA has been fighting it by various means since 1941.
Another reason to say this is the obvious and constant propagandist use of misguided thinking in the US that has clearly rotted the minds of US citizens and may yet even destroy the English language. So for example, the USA did not win WW2. It was on the victor's side. The decisive victor was the Russians. Nevertheless, but for the over all behaviour of the USA since then it could be said that the USA won the peace.
Another example of propaganda is the use of the word American to denote US citizen. This is blatantly untrue. Everyone on the American continents is American. To assume that word belongs solely to US citizens is blatant, Orwellian Swinish chauvinism.
DROSERA: Good comments, yet you might have taken them farther. Sometimes we confuse the smokescreen with the cause, the smoke with the mirrors. War has to be dressed up and sold (or as Andrew Card put it, marketed as PRODUCT) to the taxpayers who ultimately fund it. Yet beyond all the stated objectives is the influence of those who directly profit. Think the dark facts exposed by John Perkins and Smedley Butler. The MIC has to justify itself, so it becomes its own self-fulfilling prophecy. The more it can convince the public (and those who pay its inflated bills) that danger is out there, the greater its chances at longevity. Just as there were no WMDs in Iraq till the U.S. let a slew of DU loose, the acts of aggression taken to other lands ensures that new enemies WILL be created. How would any of us feel if a bomb was suddenly dropped on our home and half our relatives died? Would the fact that some computer screen got the data wrong and an apology was issued make any difference?
"Gee, sorry, folks. We really DID think an enemy insurgent was living there!"
"We are still living in the aftermath of the Second World War even as the last soldiers die off."
This is SO true. The American military still fondly romanticizes WWII. Fifty million died worldwide, half in the Soviet Union. The military still want to fight that kind of horrendous, so-called conventional land war. Unfortunately for them, the invention and subsequent use of nuclear weapons, followed by the creation of the Hydrogen Bomb and the ICBM, doomed their chances. Now they're stuck with these bush league wars against hottentots and untermenschen, not blond Nazis in their spiffy uniforms or barbaric Japanese screaming and waving samurai swords as they suicide charge massive lines of USA machine guns. How Petraeus and McChrystal yearn for that kind of righteous slaughter. Af-ganef-stan is like eating at Denny's after years of dining at 21. Counterinsurgency is such a crashing bore.
I wish Professor Bacevich had had a post in the Obama Cabinet. He might have been able to neutralize some of its hawkish elements.
It's a nice wish, but it assumes that Obomber would be interested in having a dovish voice. He said all through his campaign that he was going to expand the war in Afghanistan. Not exactly the voice of peace.
The end of military history? Possibly, but there remain 2 weapons of mass destruction.
The United States and Israel....what do we do about them?
Good Article, Some mistakes.
Zionist were searching for a state as early as the late 1800's and immigrating to form a state in Palestine well before WWII.
The total devastation of war is not new.
In fact the horrors of Fallujah are modeled on ancient and medieval war tactics in which all the population would be slaughterd and the city state burnt and salted if there was not unconditional surrender.
But one must agree that the effects of DU are horribly unique in the annals of history for its longevity and insidiousness.
Also modern warfare can more rapidly destroy larger areas.
But total destruction is not new.
Considering the morphing of the USA government and Corporations into a single entity one must conclude that the USA is a fascist state.
Consequences of modern warfare are irrelevant to those in power as long as they live long enough to profit materially.
Neatly put.
There is nevertheless a glaring inadequacy in the reference to China. It has never ''stolen a page from an old American playbook'' There is and has always been a paradigm shift between China and the West, so much so that to see China through Western eyes is simple, pure, and blatant chauvinism. This translates directly into an embarrassing inadequacy of the English mind.
Western people better read Chinese history, better study Chinese thought and structures of understanding. They are not Western; so different as to constitute a virtually alternative planet. To attribute Western thinking to the Chinese is brattishly childish.
In the Chinese culture tradition they have never regarded conquest as a viable alternative. Any military action has always rested on an understanding of assimilation and despite having to use the English word assimilation in this statement, the intention of the word is Chinese.
The significance and power of the present Chinese prominence is not economic, social, military, scientific, or any other such abstraction. It is mental, meaning all. For a Westerner, who listens and does not pronounce, who does not pontificate and assume in China, the West is an excruciating embarrassment; an adult body, with all the strengths and capabilities of such, but with a child's mind; a half-wit with an idiot grin wearing a crown and waving a sceptre (his 'Big' Dick). Countless, much kinder statements to this effect have been made over a long time time by Chinese figures of, amongst others, civil, military, academic, scientific, religious and cultural authority.
And God, but the Westerner is an embarrassing idiot! And the Westerner who cannot see it, is a dangerous, hopeless child who needs to he protected from himself, he whom he believes to be God!
Playing with words, I say that for his own good and the good of the planet the Westerner better, immediately, learn to speak Chinglish, that is English with a Chinese meaning.
I will do anything effective to destroy and obliterate the West as it is.
The unidentified/unspoken elephant in the room:
Trans national corporations.
They who learned ,and took to heart, the lessons
audited from AIPAC: "This is the way".
Now you're serfs in the "Globalization of
Corporate Feudalism: AKA Global Fascism.
"Developments during the 1980s, above all the winding down of the Cold War, had convinced Fukuyama that the "end of history" was at hand."
I remember reading for the first time Fukuyama's "end of history" statement. I thought: what a jackass. This guy will go far.
Well said, everyone (except for you, mightymite).
“Events made it increasingly evident that military dominance did not translate into concrete political advantage. Rather than enhancing the prospects for peace, coercion produced ever more complications.”
Evidently neither the US nor Israel, both nations with a serious “we’re-on-a-mission-from-god” complex, learned from the experiences of Germany in the USSR.
HOW IS THE WORLD RULED AND HOW DO WARS START?
DIPLOMATS TELL LIES TO JOURNALISTS-- AND THEN BELIEVE WHAT THEY READ.
KARL KRAUS, AUSTRIAN PRESS, 1874-1936.
Sounds Simplistic, But Perhaps He Was Right.
Excellent, insightful article. I read it all the way through, despite my aversion to the subject of war.
"... In 1991, Operation Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush's war against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, showed that American troops like Israeli soldiers knew how to win quickly, cheaply, and humanely."
Humanely? My foot! Much inhumanity, savagery, cruelty, and war crimes were committed in this war. Just read Ramsey Clark's book "The Fire This Time: U.S. Crimes in the Gulf".
Check out the summary of "War Crimes--A report on United States War Crimes against Iraq" at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/International_War_Crimes/War_Crimes_Iraq_Tribunal.html
Brzezinski and Kissinger at their best! The idea is a "Never Ending War"! with an enemy that you created, funded , and continually arm!
Again, Congress approved using 400 million dollars to destabilize Iran in July 2008...The group Bush/Cheney chose to receive most of the money, Jundallah.....Jundallah is a Taliban led group and is sponsored by the same people implicated in the attacks of 9/11: ISI of Pakistan (Ally of CIA since 1980) and Saudi Arabia....Oh, Jundallah was once led by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the guy that was tortured for 5 years and brainwashed into confessing that he planned the attacks of 9/11....If he did, How did he get NORAD to plan five practice exercises on 9/11 so that none of the hijacked planes could be intercepted?
Nobody wants to go back to 9/11! And, that was part of the plan!
american hypocrisy and lies created the current morass the world is 'stuck' in. had the US truly developed the UN as an instrument to address the grievances of the people the world over - actually listening to the concerns of subjugated people - rather than using the UN security council as a means of promoting it's own economic and geopolitical interests; the world could have become a more peaceful place.
instead, the security council of the UN became an extension of american hegemony. american puppets were propped up on the world stage, military contractors flourished and the corporate sector became the dominant institution in our culture.
the democratic values espoused by the liberal western powers were never sincere. one reason many in the world distrust us. our values are blatantly corrupt. when the people of the world embrace the oneness of their humanity – a single government will emerge that will be the end of modern military history.
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" I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. "
……………..
"With all my heart I believe that the world's present system of sovereign nations can only lead to barbarism, war and inhumanity, and that only world law can assure progress towards a civilized peaceful community."
Albert Einstein....
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"... we have been warned by the power of modern weapons, that peace may be the only climate possible for human life itself ... There must be law, steadily invoked and respected by all nations, for without law, the world promises only such meager justice as the pity of the strong upon the weak."
President Dwight D. Eisenhower
...peace...
I agree with your assessment of the UN and the UNSC. It is not only a means of the totalitarian minority of powerful nations to achieve "a means of promoting it's own economic and geopolitical interests,"—it is a star chamber where all those who commit crimes can be sanctioned or attacked except those present, making such decisions, with their consent required for any decision: the veto power of the five WWII winners and nuclear weapons possessors.
If anything will bring about a widely believed need for a better system of world governance, it will be he current unfolding military, economic, environmental, political world megacrisis. Part of the unfolding crisis is the growing military parity between powerful nations and subnational militias. Once the militias (AQ and AQish groups) acquire ICBRN WMD weapons and deploy them, which has started, Bacevich's end to military history will be complete, in a flash of destruction, presaged and foreshadowed by 9/11. ICBRN stands for incendiary, chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear. 9/11 was, essentially, incendiary. Without the fires, the buildings would not have collapsed.
Until then, we are stuck with the trend Bacevich describes, accurately I think, which is the whittling away of the US/Anglo Empire with thousands of cuts rather than a decisive blow (up). By "stuck" I mean events which will not motivate the transformation towards a transformation of global governance along democratic republic lines. (Such as Monbiot's global parliament idea.)
So what remains for progressive strategists to help create a soft landing out of the megacrisis? And how can we PREVENT the trend towards subnational militias from acquiring and deploying ICBRN WMD weapons, which current policies are accelerating? I suggest JFK's words: "those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."
How to have a peaceful revolution in the US? What kind of peaceful revolution to have? I think looking at primary causes is paramount. What CAUSED the UNSC to become a star chamber of the global totalitarian minority rather than a wise counsel of the global democratic majority? I suggest that an early ultimate cause is the US Constitution and its enshrining of a veto-wielding legislature that is fundamentally non-representative, disproportionate, white, old, male and conservative—the Senate. Plus the "balance of powers" model, duplicated nowhere else in the world, has fully four day-to-day veto-holding governmental institutions (House, Senate, Executive, USSC). This structure is essentially a confusion ploy to hide who is responsible for a totalitarian government whose policies veer conservative from the desired policies of the democratic majority. At makes the nation so frozen as to be unable to solve problems except how to keep power and wealth flowing to the illegitimate few who control it.
Ben Ferencz, former Nuremberg prosecutor (www.benferencz.org) is on record in saying that the UNSC has the veto power of the big five due to the Senate, which otherwise would not have passed the UN Charter and the UN would then not have formed as a world body to prevent war.
What does this mean? It means that the task of progressives is to engage in the critical and important endeavor of constitutional and structural reform. If the US public, which is our inherent and inalienable right, were to alter our form of government based on the wishes of the democratic majority of voting age US citizens along modern lines (like Germany or New Zealand or Sweden or Norway) we'd have a government that expressed rather than sabotaged public opinion.
For more on that endeavor, see the work of these progressive scholar/activists for structural, constitutional reform:
Larry Sabato: A More Perfect Constitution
Steven Hill: 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy; and Fixing Elections
Dan Lazare: The Frozen Republic; and The Velvet Coup
Larry Lessig: www.callaconvention.org
Jeffrey Clements: www.freespeechforpeople.org
Mike Gravel: http://ni4d.us/
David Cobb: www.movetoamend.org
Sanford Levinson: Our Undemocratic Constitution
Akhil Amar: For the People
James Fishkin and Bruce Ackerman: Deliberation Day
...
Earthian,
thanks for the thoughtful reply and for threshing these ideas out more thoroughly.
i agree that crisis precipitates meaningful change and i hope that the american public, for the sake of all humanity, can understand our responsibility/role in the crisis (megacrisis) unfolding before our eyes. despite my abhorrence to violence, i've believed for sometime a nuclear explosion (created through a variety of hypothetical situations unfolding) would be a very effective and fast way of supercharging mass consciousness (certainly globally).
however, the amazing effectiveness of the propaganda campaign implemented in the US after 911 was very discouraging. not the fact that the campaign existed (we all expected right-wing backlash) but the all-encompassing acceptance of the propaganda by the american public was more then i expected.
the horror of a nuclear explosion in any large metropolitan area, displayed on cnn/al jazerra/bbc etc.. should 'wake up' the public... i just don't know how much confidence i have in the average americans' ability/capacity to see the causes of crisis and to adequately address these crises, especially in the light of the zeitgeist of propaganda post 911 and the way the peace movement was marginalized after the instigation of the iraq war (ongoing 20 year occupation of iraq).
i agree w/ your observation that our constitution is structurally flawed and that these flaws emerged in the charter of the UN.
your remedies were spot on. "engage in the critical and important endeavor of constitutional and structural reform." - - instant run off voting, proportional representation in the legislature, campaign finance reform.
thanks for the links and references esp. monbiot's idea - which is paraphrased in this article from 2007
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The best way to give the poor a real voice is through a world parliament: Global governance as it stands is tyranny speaking the language of democracy. We need a directly elected assembly - Monbiot 4/4/07
{http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/apr/24/comment.politics1}
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the jfk quote is haunting my mind as i scribble, let's continue to create that peaceful revolution for all of our children today and for those who will live seven generations down the genetic road.
"those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."
...peace...
Got the message Iowablackbird. Much thanks and may we continue the dialogue. I suppose that to be alive in such a time is a blessing, for we get, collectively, to make a real difference for future generations if we are fortunate enough to bring about a peaceful revolution so the will of the people becomes the law of the nation, and the world.
I'd like to add that all that you say makes sense to me.
If there is a way to prevent an escalation of the conflict between the US and the militias (such as AQ) which are planning violent attacks, then we must work diligently in that direction.
The solution is as simple in concept as it is difficult in implementation: substitute the rule of law in US foreign policy over the rule of force.
The good news is that the US public wants this as does nearly every other nation's governments aside from the US, Israel and perhaps Russia. Germany, for example, as constitutional requirements not to use force without explicit UNSC approval. They can be in Afghanistan, but couldn't have invaded it or Iraq. Japan is the same.
So we've got work to do to elect more progressives (short term) and to create real constitutional, structural reform (long term).
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IOWA: Nice to see you, and your words of insight, back in the forum.
EARTHIAN: Good post, too.
Thanks Siouxrose. Keep up the good posting yourself!
head strong... dead wronged...
around their breath a heart did beat...
to thumping drums from marching feet...
cloned moans of suffering echo through...
a toughened ground where violence grew...
dead roots drew hold as overkilled blood...
spilled puddles of loot for footprints of...
a scouraged duty boots leave behind...
after uneven tread wipes out in line...
the air took sick as its stomach turned...
each churning chunk of memories burned...
by that hot iron torch tied to branded men...
from scorching hands who commanded them...
earthy dirt spots where the children once played...
cover potboy shots dropping bodies for graves...
as limping legs fall upon small plastic guns...
of kid toys pretending to blast all in fun...
the atmosphere thickens as horror clings...
on particles sparring to rinse fearful things...
dreadful needs head out to shower off grime...
by a mission accomplished in some record time...
a slower flow trickles up clogged nowhere drains...
resistant to bubbles cleaning troublesome pain...
brass spigots open for high-pressured valves...
to wash away doubt throwing in any towels...
recycled by dust stirring death's molecules...
facades of refreshment get served up to fool...
amid corpses of chores letting time pass on by...
to hide uniform cries before their last dying sigh...
a ratified gain in moves of mistakes to destroy...
life gives itself living for future sacrifice ploys...
false notions breed faster than any disease...
and perpetuate motion that won't let it be...
dismembered innocence cut to the core...
remembers each piece beaten up by a war...
taking thoughts past a way of unthinkable acts...
to claim curses far worse with rehearsed artifacts...
in syndromes of deeds upon hard tattered yards...
the battlefield remnants yield permanent scars...
as basket case caskets foretell ghostly tales...
that won't cremate hell until eternity fails!...
tell your lawmakers... wake up our government!... to care about the basics!... and stop misleading!... and end this war!... and don't waste anymore!...
(and here's one of many links you can use)... http://www.congress.org/congressorg/dbq/officials
the best of wishes'n'ways'n'todays to each'n'everyone!... :)
I'm a little surprised that in the very worthwhile analysis by Bacevich, he made no mention of what may happen with respect to Iran, an issue very much front and center at the present time. Also, there is little discussion about how our politicians, foremost among them Obama, have subscribed to the military option, because of élite and corporate interests. He only hints on these phenomena when he mentions the word "corruption".
For some time I have wondered about the capacity for war "mobilization."
At the height of the Viet Nam war we mobilized half a million soldiers, a fraction of those mobilized for WWII. OTOH it is said that we ended up dropping more bombs on SE Asia than on all of Europe and Japan during WWII. "We" tried to bomb North Viet Nam "back to the Stone Age." We did not "win" that war.
Then came the "shock & awe" campaigns of both Bush presidents against Iraq, a sort of Fourth of July spectacle that made me wonder how long they could actually keep it up (pun intended).
As the United States has outsourced its capacity for industrial production, has it also outsourced its capacity to make war?
By 20th century standards the "wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan (actually occupations) are genuinely puny.
Wars also require financing (See Churchill and FDR visiting for weeks in the White House planning for WWII and how to finance it).
I suspect that the West has exhausted itself as the Bacevich article hints.
War is Entropy made concrete. Nuclear weapons of any kind (including DU) create the ultimate entropy.
There must be some old Chinese proverb that explains all this:
In strength, weakness; in weakness, strength.
I really do not know who "our" "enemies" are, but it seems obvious to me that they merely have to have patience as we exhaust our idiotic economy and drive ourselves into the ground. Pogo had it right.
-30-
It would be nice if the author of this article had told all the individual who repudiated Madeline Notquiteright for her war mongering silliness, lunacy at the time as it was none other than Colin Powell.
AD