But if, as Fussell insists, all war is a crime, what then are OTW—military operations Other Than War? Can war itself be decriminalized by separating it from ideology and vital interests and instead hitching it to moral imperatives and parceling it out as humanitarian actions? Or, as one of the Marine captains guarding a refugee camp in Albania put it to me, “If we go to war for economic reasons, why not for moral reasons? I don’t want to get emotional about it, but for Christ’s sake, man, is NEVER AGAIN just a bumper sticker?”
Both answers, the affirmative and the negative, seem applicable to the historical moment.
2. Slouching Toward Clintonism
In a Kosovo Liberation Army training camp in the foothills of northern Albania’s mountains, I ask Ilir, a young officer back from the front, the question du jour: Had he lost any family members in the ethnic cleansing? “Everybody who’s a victim in Kosovo is my relative,” he said emphatically, providing perhaps the only answer that could justify the existence of an insurgent army and its steady resolve against charges of terrorism.
One might be forgiven for thinking that Bill Clinton and the NATO leaders had reached the same impassioned conclusion about their own relationship with the Kosovars. Select crops of the administration’s “relatives” have sprung up near and far across the planet, while other tribes of victims have been, either ruefully or cynically, shamelessly or pragmatically, disowned. The selective motto I FEEL YOUR PAIN, embroidered over a scarlet background of apologies, is one of the more fickle pennants overflying America’s currently chivalrous foreign policy. But however freshly restyled its overt sentimentality, the philosophy of virtuous compassion urging us as a nation toward a higher calling has been seeded into the American experience since Day One.
Great powers always cast their actions as demonstrations of moral superiority. Our sense of exceptionalism arrives in nascent, quasi-mystical form with the New England Puritans, who believed they would supply a “moral example to all the world,” and flows, contracting and expanding but mostly unbroken, to the Vietnam War. Thomas Paine wanted America to begin the world over again. John Adams brazenly declared that the United States “will last forever, govern the globe and introduce the perfection of man.”
At the dawn of the American century, following the United States’ brief but ugly flirtation with colonial acquisition during the Spanish-American War (Mark Twain did not hesitate to call American soldiers terrorists for the atrocities they committed in the Philippines), it was Woodrow Wilson who imagined that America would provide “a positive moral example to all the world” by refusing to join Europe’s continental war and the insupportable callousness of its ruling classes. But Wilson failed even to persuade his own countrymen that his crusade was worth it. The naïveté and hubris of his sense of American moral superiority, compounded by the venal self-interests and ethnic hatreds of European politics, resulted in a peace badly made. Thus the first world war begat the second—the clear-eyed commitment to destroy Hitler and the Japanese, the Jehovah-like wrath of Dresden and Hiroshima—and the second, its intemperate sequel—the rise of the Soviet Empire and Maoist China, and postcolonial mayhem on three continents. After the tens of millions slaughtered, saving the world now meant saving it for democracy, which really meant defeating, or at the very least, stalemating, Marxism-Leninism in any of its various incarnations.
For this we were presented with a one-size-fits-all strategic tool, the Truman Doctrine. “It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. . . . ,” the president informed Congress in 1947, creating a foreign-policy environment of endless interests (containment of the Reds, which often meant active support for such thugocracies as Duvalier’s Haiti or Mobutu’s Zaire, Somoza’s Nicaragua or Suharto’s Indonesia), endless entanglements (Korea, the Persian Gulf, Cambodia, Cuba, Taiwan), and dishonorable intrigues (Guatemala in 1954, Iran in 1953, Chile in 1973). The Truman Doctrine committed the United States to the defense of legitimate governments against insurgencies. Legitimate simply described the immediate postwar status quo and its effete colonial handovers, before the Soviet Union launched its international juggernaut in its ascent as a superpower and a supercolonizer. America the missionary battled or subverted or boxed in the godless menace around the world, sometimes directly but more often clandestinely, through proxy wars of increasing intensity.
But just as Wilson’s crusade for globalism had recoiled back into isolationism, the Truman Doctrine’s global embrace vanished in the jungles of Indochina. Vietnam imploded not just our sense of exceptionalism; the damage went beyond that. Americans started to believe there was something essentially wrong with our vision of the world. If there was such a thing as a national destiny vis-a-vis the world, we were fairly sick of it.
In 1975, after the humiliation in Southeast Asia and the angst of Watergate, sociologist Daniel Bell, one of the many voices announcing the nation’s descent into self-doubt, proclaimed the End of American Exceptionalism. Americans could no longer believe that their country had a uniquely moral role in world affairs, he wrote. We were, Bell concluded, “a nation like all other nations.” The idea sprang open a trapdoor in the American psyche, leading to the upwelling of malaise that Jimmy Carter dared to acknowledge. But a scant twelve years after Bell’s eulogy, Ronald Reagan had resold America to Americans, repaired the national spirit, rediscovered the nation’s place in the world, and set the stage for a new era of “crusading interventionism” despite the public’s indifference to or shallow understanding of America’s international role. The Iran hostage crisis not only demanded that Reagan seduce us back from self-induced impotence into proactive foreign affairs but spurred the extraordinary technological advance, professional competence, and increasingly unconventional shape of today’s military.
“In dealing with such Third World issues,” wrote Simon Serfaty, the director of the Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute, in 1987, “the Nixon-Kissinger-Ford foreign-policy administration had attempted to introduce the country to the imperatives of history—a predilection for might over right. . . . Next, the Carter administration sought to return the country to its historical right of birth—a predilection . . . for right over might. . . . Thus the Reagan administration’s opportunity was to attempt to develop a blend of right and might.”
Late in Reagan’s second term, political scientists noticed that he combined Carter’s vision of a virtuous American foreign policy with an image of strength and confidence, resurrecting the messianic idealism of Wilson. Whereas his predecessor had declared “our policy is designed to serve mankind,” Reagan upped the ante, echoing America is “the last best hope of man on earth,” and his ensuing call for a “crusade for Freedom” became known as the Reagan Doctrine, in which the president declared the legitimacy of active American military support for guerrilla insurgencies on three continents.
America then anointed teams of rebel surrogates in Nicaragua, Angola, and Afghanistan, avoiding the direct use of our own military forces except in Beirut and Grenada in 1983—the first a “peacekeeping” catastrophe, the second akin to a local 911 call. America was kept free from war until history could play Santa Claus for Reagan—the collapse of the Soviet Union, peace in Central America—and Reagan’s Cold War rebel surrogates would morph into Bush’s blue-helmeted UN surrogates in Bosnia.
It is more than a little ironic that whereas Reagan saw the globe through the eyes of a crusading liberal, drawing comparisons to himself with his Democratic predecessors in the White House and their robust rhetoric directed toward “saving” the world, Clinton sees it like the moderate, cautiously realistic Republican he appears to actually be. Still, the advocacy of human rights is a fundamentally interventionist posture. Human rights, the liberal cri de coeur during the Cold War’s final decades of realpolitik, have become a geopolitical beachhead for the rapidly evolving activism of international law and th
e apparently noble motivation for a steady deployment of battle-ready American troops—peacekeepers, we are told to call them.
Enter, then, William Jefferson Clinton onto the chaotic streets of world affairs, lungs full with the legacy of precedent, his eyes illumined by the exceptionalist light of hope, pockets heavy with the fervent globalism of the corporate class, all the while enjoying the most powerful military ever offered by history to back him up. The Clinton Doctrine, such as it is, is not quite a “new Wilsonianism.” These days America is not trying to save the world. Rather, we operate a sloppy triage, trying to keep the neighborhood from hemorrhaging in too many places at once; or we administrate a postnatal ward, indifferently or arrogantly baby-sitting the planet’s infant democracies. In zones of conflict, Clinton feels the compulsion neither to support existing governments (Truman) nor to undermine them (Reagan) but to Americanize them. The old “moral equivalency” of the American and European radical left (the United States and the Soviet Union said to represent two sides of the same evil coin) has been replaced by the new moral equivalency of the Anthony Lakes and Sandy Bergers and Madeleine Albrights (sans Slobodan Milošević): treat the terrorists and the pro-democracy coalitionists as equally legitimate forces in Haitian society; ditto Croats and Muslims in Bosnia, Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo, Palestinians and Jews in Israel—thereby avoiding the Somalia syndrome, where taking sides proved politically disastrous and cost the lives of American soldiers. What the president most seems to desire is the removal of images of atrocity (at the top of that list, scenes of lifeless American GIs dragged through the streets of some Third World dump like Mogadishu) and their substitution with images of virtue (soldiers helping hurricane victims in Honduras)—to replace war with operations other than war, an empty space in an army’s traditional reality, where there are no friends and no enemies, no front or rear, no victories and, likewise, no defeats, and no true endings. At the beginning of 1999 the United States had seven engaged deployments of its army somewhere around the world. Last year the Army’s Special Operations Forces alone deployed 35,500 personnel on 2,500 missions into 112 countries. Altogether there have been twenty-seven large military deployments to date, costing at least $20 billion, during Clinton’s deceptively maximalist administration. On average, he has ordered one cruise missile fired every three days of his administration. As the century ends, and the millennium with it, so ends a distinct epoch in the role of the American military—its identity, its use, its own worldview, the public’s perception of it.
And yet, until some unforseen day, the military’s culture is war, will always and must be war, not peace. Kill, win. Upon these roots only can be grafted the fruit of humanitarianism. Society’s responsibility here is to ask the questions: Kill whom? Win what?
3. War, the Rock Concert
Man-made humanitarian disasters—famines caused by civil wars as much as by ethnic cleansings or religious persecution—are directly wired to political meltdowns and spiritual bankruptcy. Outlaw states, failed states, lost states, self-murdering states, leaderless states; name the collective psychosis, and somewhere on the globe it is raging through a formerly stable society. Humanity has come this far only to look back into the future at its oldest archetype, its savage, predatory face. Heart-wrenching imagery, the pornography of violence, flashes into our living rooms from cameramen in the field but, as U.S. Army Captain Dave Johnson asked me during the annual Special Forces Conference and Exposition at Ft. Bragg last April, “A picture’s worth a thousand words, but what if every one of those words is irrational?”
The captain had a point. The Powell Doctrine required that the deployment of troops be contingent upon the support of the American people, but irrationality—impulse buying, obsession with lotteries, addiction to sensational entertainments—often describes the unreliable emotions within the consumerist soul. The increasingly preferred answer, I suppose, to the captain’s question is this: Pack your ruck, show up at the airstrip in the morning, get the bloodbath off the networks and cable by tomorrow afternoon.
The conference’s theme, Regional Engagement and the Future, had the high command wrangling over what the Army was going to look like in the year 2020—the Army After Next, as it had been formally titled and gamed. “There are still men in uniform wed to the past,” groused the towering chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Henry Shelton, who flew in from Washington after a night spent reviewing the Belgrade bombing target list with the Pentagon’s lawyers. At least the conference nailed the basics, unveiling quality-of-life improvements for soldiers in the field, including the next generation of gourmet MREs (meals ready to eat): seafood tortellini, black-bean burritos, and Hooah! energy bars. But the bigger issues—Who are we? Where are we headed? What are we supposed to do when we get there?—were still unresolved.
The conference’s most repeated slogans—EQUIP THE MAN, NOT MAN THE EQUIPMENT, and HUMANS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN HARDWARE—signaled the cause of the confusion. In the next fifteen or twenty years, the development of on-the-ground technology, the battlefield immersion into virtual reality, and the real-time communications network, both visual and auditory via personal satellite hookups wired into helmets and headsets, means soldiering will finally be transformed into the much prophesized ultimate video game, with targets—people, machines, buildings—zapped off microscreens like so many bloodless clumps of electrons. Way cool, the next iteration of extreme sport, and only the bad guys eat it.
In the language of pop culture, it’s no-pain, high-gain Baby Boomer warfare, executed by Generation X technokillers who, because of the increased lethality and precision of evolving weapons systems, can close down the rock and roll in a time frame more associated with dance marathons and spring break—weeks, days, hours—unless the politicians screw things up. This is not the vernacular the military thinks in, however. Pointing with laser pens to high-tech graphics projected ubiquitously throughout the conference hall, the brass spoke of politicians or chiefs of state as “clients”; they talked about “what sells”; about “how to guarantee the product”; about “zero defects” (translation: everyone on our side comes back alive); and made knowledgeable references—“the holistic approach,” “our core ideology”—to a professional-development book entitled Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. They talked, as you might expect from the largest politically correct institution in the galaxy, about “enabling” and “empowering” their men and women to explore their own capabilities to be all that any locked and loaded human being could possibly be.
It did indeed sound brilliant and farseeing. But there was a sense at the conference–as the cruise missiles slammed into Belgrade from Navy ships and Air Force bombers, as the Marines lashed out at Serbia from their floating platforms in the Adriatic, as Special Forces forward observers ripped off their American flag shoulder patches and slipped into Kosovo (a KLA colonel told me), and as the 1st Infantry hunkered red-faced in Macedonia minus three POWs—that maybe the conventional army itself was lagging toward a form of obsolescence, a big, brawny scarecrow, overmuscled, risk-averse, and not so productive, the last ones interpreting the Powell Doctrine’s criterion of marshaling overwhelming force against an enemy to mean a whole bunch of people with a lot of heavy equipment but nothing much to do. There wasn’t even a demand for 155mm howitzer rounds anymore. In the new tactical environment, in which the Gulf War was more of an aberration than a foreshadowing, one last spectacular hurrah for conventional infantry and artillery, the Army could at least take comfort in the fact that it was no longer being fielded as cannon fodder. “No casualties” by definition meant, first and foremost, no ground wars. The Air Force didn’t shape the battlefield in Iraq, it destroyed it, and all the Army had to do was sweep up. In the absence of monolithic threats, the soldiers were going to be occupiers, the folks who drag ass into town after the pilots and Marines and Special Operations snake-eaters had taken care of dirty business. Well, it’s a job.
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sp; Any understanding of the Army’s fin de siècle thought process begins with its perception of the changing nature of the enemies on the horizon, described in military-speak as asymmetric threats: terrorism, guerrilla warfare, information warfare, enemies taking sanctuary in inaccessible and urban terrains, theater missile defenses, the byzantine relationships forming between terrorists, criminals, failed states and non-states, and of course the spread of weapons of mass destruction, biological, chemical, nuclear. The Pentagon, closely examining the decade’s operations other than war to determine what the dimensions might be for real warfare, noticed a trend: the bad guys were paying attention, learning from our mistakes as well as our successes. Compounding the problem was the accelerated exportation of state-of-the-art technology that the military would rather keep for itself. “The operational edge—owning the night [with night-vision equipment]—is not as decisive as it once was because of the international market,” lamented General John Abrams, who runs the US Army Training and Doctrine Command, a lesson the Russians barely lived to regret in Chechnya. In Albania, at Task Force Hawk, I’d hear another Army officer shrug and say, on background, “There’s very little we can hold on to. All technology gains are temporary.” For the past fifty years, the central tenet of the United States military strategy has been to make war far too expensive a proposition for anyone who might dare to challenge us, which has worked on the macro level, superpower to superpower. But history’s Goliaths have trouble remembering that stones are free and slingshots easily stolen.
Kingdoms in the Air Page 34