Serial Denial and the Permanent War System

Two months ago, I wrote that the Obama administration and the U.S. command in Afghanistan faced an "Iraq 2006 moment"
in the second half of 2010 - a collapse of domestic political support
for a failed war paralleling the political crisis in Bush's Iraq War in
2006. Now comes Republican Congressman Frank Wolf to make that parallel
with 2006 eerily precise.

Wolf published a letter to President Obama
last week calling for the immediate establishment of an
"Afghanistan-Pakistan Study Group". It would be the son of the Iraq
Study Group. Wolf is the Congressman who authored the legislation in
2005 creating the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group to come up with fresh
ideas for that failing war. The Wolf proposal came nearly a year after
American public had turned against the war decisively in January 2005,
when support for the war fell to 39 percent.

The U.S. public had withdrawn its support because it had become obvious
that the war was a failure. The Bush administration had overthrown the
Saddam Hussein regime only to unleash a violent Sunni-Shi'a sectarian
power struggle that the U.S. military couldn't control. Even worse, the
U.S. military presence was objectively supporting one side in that
power struggle by building up a clearly sectarian military and police
sector, even as it pretended by the honest broker between Sunni and
Shi'a.

By
2006 it had become apparent even to the political elite that the war
was failing and that something had to be done. But for war supporters
like Wolf, the idea was not to find a way out of a criminally stupid war
but to tweak the war strategy so that the administration could rebuild
public support for it.

The
problem with the Baker-Hamilton group was not that it didn't have the
information it needed to call for end to the U.S. war. Bob Woodward's The War Within reveals
that the commander of all U.S. ground forces in Iraq, Pete Chiarelli,
told the Iraq Study Group that the sectarian character of the
Shi'a-dominated Iraqi government was the primary problem. And the
officer in charge of training the Iraqi army, Gen. Martin Dempsey, told
the group that, without Sunni-Shi'a reconciliation, "[T]here are not
enough troops in the world to provide security."

Elementary
logic would have suggested that with Sunni-Sh'ia reconciliation there
would be no need for U.S. troops and that without it, U.S. troops would
be unable to change the situation. Either way, the U.S. military
presence was irrelevant to the future of Iraq. After nearly four years
of fighting, with enormous casualties on both sides, the U.S. military
had succeeded only in helping Iran consolidate Shi'a rule in Iraq.

Nevertheless the Study Group's report went along with an indefinite continuation of the U.S. military role in Iraq.

Now we have the same nightmare of a stupid war that the political class can't bring itself to end.

Wolf
says he's been talking with retired figures in the national security
elite, who tell him that "our Afghanistan policy is adrift". And he
warns of a "palpable shift in the nation's mood and in the halls of
Congress" on the war. He notes that 62 percent of the American public
in a July 2010 poll said the war is "going badly".

So
now Wolf proposes the same kind of bipartisan study group that he says
helped rebuild support for the Iraq war to come up with "fresh
strategies" for the war in Afghanistan. Wolf makes no effort to hide
his hope to "reinvigorate national confidence in how America can be
successful" in Afghanistan.

Wolf
is the poster child for the deep denial on U.S. wars practiced by a
very large segment of the political elite. On one hand, his proposal is
the clearest evidence of the desperation that has overtaken Washington
about the palpable failure of Obama's war. But on the other hand, Wolf
suggests that all we need is a group of "respected" war supporters to
offer a new strategy for the Afghan War to be back on the road to
victory again.

This
refusal to face up to reality that the United States cannot succeed in
Afghanistan, despite all the evidence to the contrary, suggests that
something much deeper is going on here. Wolf and his fellow deniers in
the political elite are not just refusing to give up on the specific war
in Afghanistan. They are doing it because they are desperately
clinging to the broader system of global military hegemony which impels
the U.S. national security state to continue that war.

In his latest book, Washington Rules,
historian Andrew Bacevich points to this largely un-discussed aspect of
recent U.S. wars. The "Washington rules" to which the title refers are
the basic principles of U.S. global policy that have been required
beliefs for entrance into the U.S. political elite ever since the United
States became a superpower. The three rules are U.S. global military
presence, global projection of U.S. military power and the use of that
power in one conflict after another.

Bacevich
suggests that personal and institutional interests bind the U.S.
political elite and national security bureaucrats to that system of
global military dominance. The politicians and bureaucrats will continue
to insist on those principles, he writes, because they "deliver profit,
power and privilege to a long list of beneficiaries: elected and
appointed officials, corporate executives and corporate lobbyists,
admirals and generals, functionaries staffing the national security
apparatus, media personalities and policy intellectuals from
universities and research organizations."

That
description of the problem provides a key to understanding the
otherwise puzzling serial denial by the political elite on Iraq and
Afghanistan. It won't do much good for anti-war people to demand an end
to the war in Afghanistan unless they are also demanding an end to the
underlying system that has now produced quasi-permanent American war.