All-Volunteer Wars

After a week away, here's my advice: in news terms, you can afford
to take a vacation. When I came back last Sunday, New Orleans was
bracing for tough times (again). BP, a drill-baby-drill oil company
that made $6.1 billion in the first quarter of this year and lobbied against "new, stricter safety rules" for offshore drilling, had experienced an offshore disaster for which ordinary Americans are going to pay through the nose (again).
News photographers were gearing up for the usual shots of oil-covered
wildlife (again). A White House -- admittedly Democratic, not
Republican -- had deferred to an energy company's needs, accepted its
PR and lies, and then moved too slowly when disaster struck (again).

Okay, it may not be an exact repeat. Think of it instead as history
on cocaine. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, already the size of
the state of Delaware, may end up larger than the disastrous Exxon Valdez spill
in Alaska, and could prove more devastating than Hurricane Katrina.
Anyway, take my word for it, returning to our world from a few days
offline and cell phone-less, I experienced an unsettling deja-vu-all-over-again feeling. What had happened was startling and horrifying -- but also eerily expectable, if not predictable.

And, of course, when it came to our frontier wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq -- you remember them, don't you? -- repetition has long been the
name of the game, though few here seem to notice. With an immigration
crisis, Tea Partying,
that massive oil spill, and a crude, ineptly made car bomb in Times
Square, there's already enough to worry about. Isn't there?

All-Volunteer Wars

Still, there was this headline awaiting my return: "Afghan lawmaker says relative killed after U.S. soldiers raided her home." Sigh.

After nine years in which such stories have appeared with unceasing
regularity, I could have written the rest of it myself while on
vacation, more or less sight unseen. But here it is in a nutshell:
there was a U.S. night raid somewhere near the Afghan city of
Jalalabad. American forces (Special Operations forces, undoubtedly),
supposedly searching for a "Taliban facilitator," came across a man
they claimed was armed in a country in which the unarmed man is
evidently like the proverbial needle in a haystack. They shot him
down. His name was Amanullah. He was a 30-year-old auto mechanic and
the father of five. As it happened, he was also the brother-in-law of
Safia Siddiqi, a sitting member of the Afghan Parliament. He had, as
she explained, called her in a panic, thinking that brigands were
attacking his home compound.

And
here was the nice touch for those U.S. Special Operations guys, who
seem to have learning abilities somewhat lower than those of a hungry
mouse in a maze when it comes to hearts-and-minds-style
counterinsurgency warfare. True, in this case they didn't shoot two
pregnant mothers and a teenage girl, dig
the bullets out of the bodies, and claim they had stumbled across
"honor killings," as Special Operations troops did in a village near
Gardez in eastern Afghanistan in March; nor did they handcuff seven schoolboys and a shepherd and execute them, as evidently happened in Kunar Province in late December 2009; nor had they shot a popular imam
in his car with his seven-year-old son in the backseat, as a passing
NATO convoy did in Kabul, the Afghan capital, back in January; nor had
they shadowed a three-vehicle convoy by helicopter on a road near the
city of Kandahar and killed 21 while wounding 13 via rocket fire, as U.S. Special Forces troops did in February. They didn't wipe out a wedding party -- a common enough occurrence in our Afghan War -- or a funeral, or a baby-naming ceremony (as they did in Paktia Province, also in February), or shoot up any one of a number of cars, trucks, and buses loaded with innocent civilians at a checkpoint.

In
this case, they killed only one man, who was unfortunately -- from
their point of view -- reasonably well connected. Then, having shot
him, they reportedly forced the 15 inhabitants in his family compound
out, handcuffed and blindfolded
them (including the women and children), and here was that nice touch:
they sent in the dogs, animals considered unclean in Islamic society,
undoubtedly to sniff out explosives. Brilliant! "They disgraced our
pride and our religion by letting their dogs sniff the holy Koran, our
food, and the kitchen," Ms. Siddiqi said angrily. And then, the American military began to lie about what had happened, which is par for the course. After the angry legislator let them have it ("...no one in Afghanistan is safe -- not even parliamentarians and the president himself") and the locals began to protest, blocking the main road out of Jalalabad and chanting "Death to America!," they finally launched an investigation. Yawn.

If I had a few bucks for every "investigation" the U.S. military
launched in Iraq and Afghanistan over the years after some civilian or
set of civilians died under questionable circumstances, I might be on
vacation year around.

The U.S. military can, however, count on one crucial factor in its
repetitive war-making: kill some pregnant mothers, kill some
schoolboys, gun down a good Samaritan
with two children in his car trying to transport Iraqis wounded in an
Apache helicopter attack to a hospital, loose a whirlwind that results
in hundreds of thousands of deaths -- and still Americans at home
largely don't care. After all, for all intents and purposes, it's as
if some other country were doing this on another planet entirely, and
"for our safety" at that.

In that sense, the American public licenses its soldiers to kill
civilians repetitively in distant frontier wars. As a people -- with
the exception of relatively small numbers of Americans directly
connected to the hundreds of thousands of American troops abroad -- we
couldn't be more detached from "our" wars. Repetition, schmepetition.
The real news is that Conan O'Brien "got very depressed at times" after
ceding "The Tonight Show" to Jay Leno (again) and that the interview
drove CBS's "60 Minutes" to a ratings success.

The creation of the All-Volunteer Army in the 1970s was a direct
response to the way the draft and a citizen's army undermined an
imperial war in Vietnam. When it came to paying attention to or caring
about such wars, it also turned out to mean an all-volunteer situation
domestically (and that, too, carries a price, though it's been a hard
one for Americans to see).

"You'll Never See It Coming"

I came back from vacation to several other headlines that I could have sworn I'd read before I left. Take, for instance, the Washington Postheadline: "Amid outrage over civilian deaths in Pakistan, CIA turns to smaller missiles." So here's the "good" news, according to the Post
piece: now we have a new missile weighing only 35 pounds, with the
diameter of "a coffee cup," and "no bigger than a violin" -- who thinks
up these comparisons? -- charmingly named the Scorpion. It has been
developed to arm our drone aircraft and so aid the CIA's air war
against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the Pakistani tribal borderlands.
According to the advocates of our drone wars,
the new missile has the enormous benefit of being so much more precise
than the 100-pound Hellfire missile that preceded it. It will, that
is, kill so much more precisely those we want killed, and so
(theoretically) not spark the sort of anti-American anger that often
makes our weaponry a rallying point for resistance.

Talk about repetitious. The idea that ever more efficient and "precise" wonder weapons
will solve human problems, and perhaps even decisively bring our wars
to an end, is older than... well, than I am anyway, and I'm almost 66.
After six-and-a-half decades on this planet and a week on vacation, I
know one thing, which I knew before I left town: there's no learning
curve here at all.

Oh, and however crucial our night raids, and nifty our new weaponry, and despite the fact that we're now filling the skies with new aircraft on new missions in our undeclared war in Pakistan, I returned to this headline in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes:
"Report: Still not enough troops for Afghanistan operations." The
Pentagon had just released its latest predictable assessment of the
Afghan War, which included the information that, of the 121 districts
in the country that the U.S. military identifies as critical to the war
effort, NATO only has enough forces to operate in 48. (U.S. troop
strength in Afghanistan has nonetheless risen by 56,000 since President
Obama took office.) The news was grim: the Taliban remains on the
rise, controlling ever larger swaths of the countryside, and the
government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai is increasingly unpopular.
What you can already feel here is the rise of something else hideously
predictable -- the "need" for, and lobbying for, more American troops
-- even though the latest polling data indicate that Afghan anger and
opposition may be rising in areas U.S. troops are moving into.

Or what about this headline in the British Guardian that
a friend emailed me as I returned? "Afghanistan forces face four more
years of combat, warns NATO official." Four more years! Doesn't that
sound repetitiously familiar -- and not as a line for Obama's
reelection campaign either. Think of all this as a kind of predictable
equation: more disastrous raids and offensives plus more precise
weapons for more attacks = the need for more troops plus more time to
bring the Afghan War to a "satisfactory" conclusion.

Oh, and let me mention one last repetitive moment. You may remember
that, in March 2004, just a year after he launched the invasion of
Iraq, President George W. Bush appeared at the annual black-tie dinner
of the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association and narrated a jokey slide show. It showed him looking under White House furniture and around corners for those weapons of mass destruction
that his administration had assured Americans would be found in Iraq in
profusion, and which, of course, were nowhere to be seen. "Those
weapons of mass destruction," the president joked, "have got to be here
somewhere."

Hard to imagine such a second such moment, certainly not from the
joke writers of Barack Obama, who appeared at a White House
Correspondents' Association dinner while I was gone, and garnered this
positive headline
at the wonk Washington political website Politico.com for his sharp
one-liners: "Obama Tops Leno at WHCD." The accompanying piece hailed
the president for showing off "his comedic chops" and cited several of
his quips to make the point. Here was one of them, quoted but not
commented on (nor even considered worth a mention in the main Washington Post piece on his appearance, though it was noted in a Post blog):
"The Jonas Brothers are here!... Sasha and Malia are huge fans but boys
don't get any ideas. I have two words for you: Predator Drones. You'll
never see it coming."

The audience at the correspondents' dinner reportedly "laughed approvingly." And why not?
Assassinate the Jonas brothers by remote control if they touch his
daughters? What father with access to drone killers wouldn't be
tempted to make such a joke? We're talking, of course, about the
weaponry now associated with what media pieces still laughably call
the CIA's "covert war" or "covert missions" in Pakistan. So covert
that a quip about them openly slays the elite in Washington. Of
course, you might (or might not) wonder just how funny such a one-liner
might seem at a Pakistani media roast.

And I wonder as well just what possessed another American president
to do it again? Okay, it's not an oil spill off the coast of planet
Earth or an actual air strike in some distant land, just a joke in a
nation that loves stand-up, even from its presidents. Still, I think
you'll have to admit that the repetition factor is eerie.

By the way, don't mistake repetition for sameness. If you repeat
without learning, assessing, and changing, then things don't stay the
same. They tend to get worse. The thought, for instance, that either
a giant oil company or the Pentagon will solve our problems is
certainly a repetitive one. So is the belief that, when they make a
mess, they should be in charge of "investigating" themselves and then
responding. While predictable, the results, however, do not simply
leave us in the same situation.

And don't say you didn't read it here: If American wars continue to
exist as if in a galaxy far, far away, and the repeats of the repeats
pile up, things will get worse (and, in the most practical
terms, life will be less safe). Once we're all finally distracted from
the possibility of the Gulf of Mexico being turned into a dead sea by
the next 24/7 crisis, if nothing much changes, expect repeats. After
all, what happens when, in the "tough oil" era, the BPs of this world hit the melting Arctic with their deep water rigs in really bad climates?

In such circumstances, repetition doesn't mean sameness; it means a
wrecked world. And here's the worst of it: predictable as so much of
this may be, the odds are you'll never see it coming.