The Irony of Manifest Destiny

by William Pfaff

  Since the end of the American war in Indochina, the final component war of the Cold War, the American government has carried out military interventions into the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, and (by intermediaries) in Cuba and Nicaragua, as well as in Somalia (partly under UN auspices) and in Bosnia and Serbia (to support the NATO Europeans, who had a UN “protection” mandate). It has fought in Iraq (twice); and in Afghanistan for the past nine years (with, at this writing, ancillary operations in Pakistan that imply an attempt to establish control of the hitherto quasi-impenetrable and unconquerable Pashtun tribal areas, and to force the Pakistan government to conduct military action to suppress domestic terrorism).

  The United States recently could scarcely be said to be conducting a “denatured” imperialism without war, but rather to have been conducting wars for an unacknowledged or undeclared or even unimagined empire—unimagined in that the mass of Americans would reject or even recoil from the notion of a formal empire. It is not popular ambition that drives American policy, but the assumptions and beliefs of an American elite concerned with foreign policy, which has a particular sense of an American international mission to use the nation’s power to establish a new international order, congenial to their notions of international as well as national destiny. This will assure America’s permanent access to oil and natural gas, reinforce the place of the United States in world history, and identify the elite as responsible figures in this achievement . Andrew Bacevich has described American foreign policy as “having long been the province of a small, self-perpetuating, self-anointed group of specialists … dedicated to the proposition of excluding democratic influences from the making of national security policy. To the extent that members of the national security apparatus have taken public opinion into consideration, they have viewed it as something to manipulate.”3

  I do not consider material interest an adequate explanation for the conduct of governments and nations, least of all the American, although I do not underestimate the importance of access to energy and material gain in the currents influencing policy in every world capital. Nonetheless, fundamental motives must be looked for in the intellectual and moral realms of national decision, and in the vulnerability of people—intellectuals and political professionals notably among them—to the vulgarization of ideas in political ideology, which, as the twentieth century demonstrated, can justify nearly anything—even the most outrageous (as measured by the norms of ordinary rationality).

  The proposition that the United States can or should devote the next fifteen, or fifty, years to “making” modern nations of Afghanistan or Pakistan, by means of a massive introduction into those countries of American officials, advisors, and teachers, as well as of soldiers to suppress military uprising or resistance to such an effort, at first proposed by the G. W. Bush administration, seems to me not ignoble, but simply breathtakingly ignorant, impractical, indifferent to historical experience and the political limits on nations, and contrary to the will as well as the interests of the peoples involved.* I would think that existing public support—or toleration—in the United States for such a project comes from the manipulation of that morbid fear that has been part of the American mood since 9/11.

  The “Long War” was actually going on well before George W. Bush promised to rid the world of tyranny. Since the Vietnam withdrawal, the United States has repeatedly been at war, yet with two exceptions (the two Iraq invasions, in neither of which was the Iraqi army disposed to fight), it has never fought a regular army, nor—rarely noted—has it ever since 1945 won a war, other than the invasion of the Dominican Republic, the pathetic conquest of Panama, and the successful seizure of that menacing member of the British Commonwealth, the Caribbean island nation of Grenada. It has not won a clear victory against a serious opponent since the Second World War. It failed to do so in the Korean War and in Vietnam. Its enemies have nearly always been dissenting political movements, guerrillas, insurgents, terrorists—which is to say civilians, acting within civilian society (“hiding behind civilians,” as Israelis as well as Americans claim when these enemies employ violence, “thereby forcing us to kill civilians”).4

  The commitment of the American government, or, to be more exact, of its political, foreign policy, and military elite, to semipermanent but unsuccessful war against changing enemies in the non-Western world has maintained public support by the identification of each enemy in turn as (to use the expression the Israelis like to use) an “existential” threat to America, or as contributing to such a threat. The Asian Communists had to be fought in Indochina so that Chinese political agents or armies would not overrun Asia with all its resources and manpower, isolating the West . Fighting them there would save Americans from fighting them at home. It is the same with “Islamic terrorists.” British prime minister Gordon Brown, speaking for NATO as well as Britain, used that exact phrase during the summer of 2009, while visiting British troops in Afghanistan. He said that NATO’s soldiers had been mobilized to fight in Afghanistan so that the terrorists (or the Taliban) would not have to be fought at home. The Australian analyst David Kilcullen, an anthropologist and former officer in his own country’s army, advisor to U.S. generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus, and a Pentagon consultant, discusses in a recent book the likelihood of a fifty- to one-hundred-year counterinsurgency campaign to defeat a global network of Islamic revolutionaries who want to conquer the West.*

  What lies behind this? The material interests involved in the Middle East are obvious, of course, but they do not explain the element of unreasonableness present . In what respect, for example, was Saddam Hussein “a threat to the world,” as former Prime Minister Tony Blair described him on January 30, 2010, to the formal inquiry the government had ordered into the origins of Britain’s participation in the invasion of Iraq in 2003? The George W. Bush administration’s invasion first of Afghanistan and then of Iraq constituted decisive developments in international relations. The period that began in the supreme drama of the 9/11 New York and Washington attacks was exploited by the Bush administration to support longstanding conservative American as well as Israeli foreign policy objectives (Iraq’s and Iran’s disarmament, with development of Iraq as a U.S. strategic base). This was accompanied by the effort of the president and vice president to establish a novel conception of “wartime” executive power as subsuming or overriding existing legislative and judicial power in the United States, as well as established common law, amounting to a challenge to the traditional interpretation of the American constitutional division of powers.

  The Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote soon after the al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon that they had shattered “the boundaries between everyday existence and a dangerous world.” He compared this with the British attack on Washington and burning of the Capitol in 1814, events that he said had confirmed the wisdom of the policy of isolating the American nation from Europe, recommended by the nation’s founders.

  He did not, however, commend the founders’ wisdom to President Bush; instead he approvingly compared George Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 with the actions of successive American presidents after 1814, characterized by Gaddis as “preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony.” Annexation of Spanish Florida, expulsion of the Seminole Indians across the Mississippi, annexation of Texas, war with Mexico, and seizure of California and the “derelict territories” of present-day Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada were all meant, according to Gaddis, to preempt threats and install democracy. It was destiny.5

  The invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was unsuccessful in capturing the al Qaeda leaders but was successful in destroying the reactionary and repressive Taliban government in Kabul, which had provided refuge to the kindred Islamist al Qaeda movement after the United States had forced the latter’s expulsion from Sudan. The invasion of Iraq in 2003—as soon became evident—was primarily to unseat Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with al Qaeda or the 9/11 attacks, and to instal
l in Iraq a major American strategic base and a friendly elected government that might inspire a movement toward representative government throughout the region.

  One could think that the wars and military interventions of the United States in Southwest and Central Asia and the Middle East since 2001 have been directed by American leaders and ratified by the public as what might be called a homeopathic or symbolic response to a generalized fear of the disorders that had come to be seen as threats newly developing in the world beyond the known terrain of the Cold War, NATO Europe, Japan, and the established American security sphere in Israel and Saudi Arabia. Beyond that is where President Bush’s “terror” (or “Evil”) dwells and must be fought . Since the Cold War’s end to 9/11 there were no specific military threats to North America or NATO Europe of any gravity. The Yugoslav wars posed no threat beyond the Balkans. Terrorist attacks do not jeopardize national existence. Even since 2001 the only significant threats have been virtual (a nuclear Iran, the fear of terrorist mass-destruction weapons, the nightmare of a new global caliphate ruled by fanatical Arabs). Militarism is the domination of the military in society, an undue deference to military demands, and an emphasis on military considerations, spirit, ideals, and scales of value, in the lives of states. “It has meant also the imposition of heavy burdens on a people for military purposes, to the neglect of welfare and culture, and the waste of a nation’s best manpower in unproductive army service.” I quote the definition of the distinguished modern historian of militarism (“civilian and military,” as he notes) Alfred Vagts (1892–1986). He served in the German army in the First World War emigrating to the United States before the Second, to an appointment at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.

  There were aspects of militarism evident in the European professional armies of the pre-Westphalian period (indeed the Assyrian army of antiquity was a fighting organization of great efficiency, complete with Imperial Life Guards, chaplains, and an emphasis on “smartness”—a distinctly militarist quality). However, the term entered the modern political vocabulary together with the imperialism as a term of abuse during the French Second Empire (1852–1870). The republican and socialist enemies of the government applied the two epithets to the rule of Napoleon III, which embraced the Crimean War, the French-Piedmontese war with Austria, from which France withdrew after the battle of Solferino (1859), the Mexican imperial adventure (from which the United States ousted Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Maximilian, in 1866), and the war with Prussia and capitulation of the Second Empire at Sedan in 1870.

  Imperialism and militarism are coeval because both are concerned with extending domination, the first over an enlarged territory, and the latter to increase state power (meaning men and funds for the army). “The two hardly ever exist by themselves. Both are tendencies largely ‘justified’ by history—that is, they cover their demands with a cloak of tradition … ”

  Vagts distinguished militarism from military science, the professional practice of wartime strategy and tactics to obtain victory. “Modern militarism has, nonetheless, specific traits,” and is vulnerable to narcissism. An army so built that it serves military men’s ambition rather than war is militaristic; “so is everything in an army which is not preparation for fighting, but merely exists for diversion or to satisfy peacetime whims like the long-anachronistic cavalry.” (A contemporary accusation could be made that the United States Air Force and Navy both display instances of this narcissism. The former does so with its obsession with aircraft so technologically advanced as to be useless in contemporary war, such as the B-1 bomber and the F-22 fighter—obsolescent in that they exist to counter Soviet weapons systems that never were and never will be built. The Navy, as William Lind, a prominent military theorist, notes, maintains eleven large aircraft carrier battle groups “structured to fight the Imperial Japanese Navy [although] submarines are today’s and tomorrow’s capital ships; the ships that most directly determine the control of blue waters.”6

  The American national elections in 2006 and 2008 had as their main issue whether to continue the wars in Iraq, or in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan, since by 2008 the possibility of intervention or incursion into that country was clearly visible). In 2006 and 2008 the electorate voted for withdrawal from Iraq, and in 2008 it gave Barack Obama an ambiguous mandate concerning Afghanistan, endorsing the continued pursuit of al Qaeda (after eight years of that group’s successful defiance of the United States) on Mr. Obama’s promise that while closing down the Iraq war he would prosecute the “right” war in Afghanistan, but without clarifying his intentions with respect to the Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Both cases posed issues of “regime change” to which he seemed to have given little serious thought .

  The election of 2008 brought into office a sympathetic new president, internationally appreciated, more open to dialogue with opponents than his predecessors, but under immensely powerful political pressures not to change existing security policy. These were reinforced in Congress by the overwhelming force of Pentagon institutional thinking and Pentagon-allied industrial interests, as well as the influence of that vast majority of the professional foreign policy community in Washington and academic circles who accept the current ideology. The housing for the hundreds if not thousands of new personnel for the new civilian as well as military “surge” to “reform” and remake Afghanistan’s (and conceivably Pakistan’s) government (and “way of life”) was already being purchased, and the American personnel assigned to the task were being trained even before Barack Obama’s election.

  No doubt it was on the recommendations of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Central Command commandant General David Petraeus that the new president named General Stanley McChrystal to the Afghanistan command and sent him to Kabul to assess the situation. On his return the general produced a plan already drafted by the ascendant Petraeus-led faction in the Pentagon, which enjoys the support of the so-called “clear and hold” program, used successfully in Malaya by the British after the Second World War (when the insurgency against the Malay majority was based in the Chinese minority, supported from Communist China), and again, unsuccessfully, late in the war in Vietnam.*

  There was in fact no reason to expect President Obama to do otherwise than follow McChrystal’s recommendations. Wholly lacking military experience, preoccupied by the world economic crisis and his legislative campaign for health care reform, Mr. Obama already had accepted the interpretation of the Afghanistan and Pakistan situation generally held in Washington and the press. Indeed, his campaign advisers had proposed a considerably exaggerated version of the dominant Washington scenario, emphasizing the risk of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons falling into terrorist hands (and seemingly deaf to the risk of powerful Pakistani popular as well as official reactions against U.S. interference in the country’s affairs.)†

  The future of the war in Central Asia is generally presumed in military (as well as critical civilian) assessments to involve American energy and pipeline interests, although it requires optimism to plan major infrastructure projects in the chaotic conditions that now seem likely to prevail for a long time to come. In searching for the motives for American policy it seems to me profitable to recall Schumpeter’s “expansion for its own sake,” always in need of pretexts to justify it .

  A deep change has taken place in the nature of American government, creating a solid obstacle to the effort to carry out actions that would seem so obviously appealing to public opinion as to end a vast war of obscure relevance to citizens and of distressing prospects. The nature of American government itself has changed during the two decades since the Reagan administration, inviting private or corporate influence and participation in the making and execution of foreign and military policy.7

  Energy is not the only American industrial interest involved. The “war against terror,” in an era of privatized governmental functions, has been enormously profitable to many American corporations. It is reported by the Pentagon that in the sec
ond quarter of 2009 the number of private security contractors working in Iraq for the American military rose by 23 percent, and in Afghanistan by 29 percent, so that private contractors, which is to say private American business, now provides half the American armed force and military activity in those countries, constituting a privatization of war and transformation of it into a profit-center for corporate enterprise that is without precedent . This augments the enormous scale of American government spending today on past and future armaments, including hyper-technological weaponry of scarcely any imaginable utility short of a future invasion of the United States from Mars.

  Certainly the American investment in global bases and in the technological means potentially to control space and cyberspace—or if they cannot be controlled or preemptively occupied, to deny military access to them by any other government or political actor—assumes potential or actual threats consistent only with some version of major war. Who will be the enemies? The only imaginable candidates are China, Russia, the European Union or one of its individual members (which is most implausible), or conceivably one of the larger developing states such as Brazil—or Pakistan.

  The present level of American arms spending sustains the national economy (and increases national indebtedness) at a time of business and financial crisis resulting from the abandonment of (or release from) regulations and values that constrained financial recklessness in the past, notably Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal regulation of banking and markets, and regulations dating from the Progressive Era at the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.