by Matt Kennard
As he looked back centuries later, Gibbon saw the same trajectory as Vegetius. “In the purer ages of the Commonwealth,” he wrote, “the use of arms was reserved for those ranks who had a country to love, a property to defend, and some share in enacting those laws which it was their interest, as well as duty, to maintain.”10 Gradually, though, things changed. “The common soldiers, like the mercenary troops of modern Europe,” writes Gibbon, soon became “drawn from the meanest, and very frequently from the most profligate, of mankind.”11 The Roman military had also opened its doors to the conquered enemies—a process referred to in the field as “barbarization,” which allowed mercenaries to receive Roman largesse in exchange for fighting the elite’s increasingly avaricious wars. The new additions created endless problems for a military that had been the envy of the world. As historian Arthur Ferrill, author of The Fall of the Roman Empire: The Military Explanation, writes, “Despite the impact of barbarization, Roman forces continued to fight according to traditional Roman tactics, yet those tactics, previously so superior, seemed absurd to the barbarians of the fifth century.”12 It had a significant and detrimental impact on the ability of the army to do its job. “To fight effectively in close order, troops require intensive drill and rigorous discipline,” says Ferrill. “Romans of the fifth century apparently maintained the old formations but abandoned the necessary training. As a result they combined the worst features of the Roman and barbarian styles of fighting.”13 The importance of the “careful choice of levies” has continued to occupy all the most renowned military thinkers. Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War that one of the ways “in which a ruler can bring misfortune upon his army” is by “employing the officers of his army without discrimination.”14 While Nicolo Machiavelli warned in his classic The Prince, “If a prince bases the defense of his state on mercenaries he will never achieve stability or security. For mercenaries are disunited, thirsty for power, undisciplined, and disloyal; they are brave among their friends and cowards before the enemy.”15 Both books were apparently favorites of American military planners before and during the War on Terror.
False Prophet
History doesn’t repeat itself exactly, but it often resonates and in the psyche of the country at large 9/11 assumed similar proportions to the sacking of Rome centuries earlier. Unlike the destruction of Rome, however, it wasn’t a verdict on the military weakness of the country—the US still had thousands of bases around the world and its defense budget was nearly as much as that of the rest of the world combined. But it did precipitate the War on Terror which, this book has shown, saw the decline and “barbarization” of the US military with the inclusion of domestic “undesirables” on a scale comparable to the later years of Rome. In fact, the American military’s deterioration has been considerably quicker and more dangerous, and the failures in Afghanistan and Iraq could foreshadow the diminution of American power along Roman lines. There has been a pervasive feeling since the War on Terror and financial crisis that power is slipping away. “American Decline” is now a vogue topic across the media and academia. But it may not be terminal. In Vegetius’s second address to the emperor he made a plea: “The expense of keeping up good or bad troops is the same,” he wrote, “but it depends wholly on You, most August Emperor, to recover the excellent discipline of the ancients to correct the abuses of later times. This is a reformation the advantages of which will be equally felt by ourselves and our posterity.”16 He could easily have been addressing US President Barack Obama in January 2009 on his ascension to power. Like the Roman Emperor, Obama was inheriting a military broken by the “abuses of later times”—or, more specifically, by the Bush administration. Its troops were scarred, many mentally unstable and untreated, ravaged by two wars and the subsequent occupations which the Pentagon was ill-prepared for. Countless families across the nation were (and are) dealing with loved ones who have changed forever, while the military had reached the lowest point in its history. “We’re on the brink,” said Thomas White, former Secretary of the Army, earlier in the War on Terror. “We are in a situation where we are grossly overdeployed, and it is unlike any other period in the 229-year history of the Army. We have never conducted a sustained combat operation with a volunteer force, with a force that we have to compete in the job market to hire every year.”17 It was a task without historical precedent and it fell to Obama to fix for posterity what had been so disastrously broken. “I thought by the end of Vietnam . . . we had broadly destroyed the US Army,” White added.18 “The non-commissioned officer leadership had vanished. Indiscipline rates were way, way up. We needed a complete rebuilding of the force from bottom to top. And that’s precisely what we engaged ourselves in for the next 20 years or so.” The US military establishment now has to engage itself for the next decade (and probably longer) doing the same thing.
The auguries for the Obama presidency were good. Despite all the public-relations hype surrounding his election campaign, in the military there were real reasons to hold out hope for change. As we have seen, Obama was forceful in denouncing the use of veterans as guinea pigs to test new drugs on. He had come out equally strongly against the discriminatory Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy on homosexuals. He had backed the post-9/11 GI Bill, proposed by Jim Webb, which would pay out $78 billion in education benefits to veterans who had served in the military after September 11. John McCain, his presidential opponent, was against it. Obama’s soaring rhetoric was even sweeter. “What this new generation of veterans must know is this,” he opined. “Our nation’s commitment to all who wear its uniform is a sacred trust that is as old as our republic itself. It is one that, as President, I consider a moral obligation to uphold.”19 Obama announced a new twenty-first-century Veterans Health Administration which would make it easier for veterans with PTSD to receive the medical benefits they deserved, while the GI Bill would also open up educational opportunities and job training to those coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. It seemed he was aware that if the government continued to get the reintegration of its soldiers back into civilian society wrong, it would have disastrous effects for America for decades to come.
But it didn’t take long for cracks to appear in the shiny veneer. Obama had originally opposed the war in Iraq and his campaign had been built partly on his ironclad commitment to end the war. “As a candidate for this office, I pledged I would end this war. As President, that is what I am doing,” he said in August 2010. “We have brought home more than 90,000 troops since I took office. We have closed or turned over to Iraq hundreds of bases. In many parts of the country, Iraqis have already taken the lead for security.”20 But, in fact, many of the Bush administration’s most destructive policies were simply kept in place. The final 40,000 non-combat US troops were brought home in 2011, but many called it the privatization of the occupation, as security contractor numbers continued to rise. At the same time, Obama ratcheted up operations in the other front in the War on Terror: within a year of his inauguration he announced a “surge” in Afghanistan which would increase troop levels by 30,000, keeping up the pressure on the broken military. In 2011, just 34 percent of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan believed the wars had been worth fighting. At the same time, both veterans and active-duty personnel were less likely to approve of Obama than the rest of the population.
The Corporate Model Wins Out
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been the longest combat operations in American history. Millions of lives have been destroyed in the process and whole societies traumatized. The project ended up as a humanitarian catastrophe for the occupied populations but, contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t a failure for the ideologues who started the conflagrations. Rumsfeld’s vision of an eviscerated civilian military was, in the end, and at great human cost, realized. Trying to keep the army small when the wars demanded large numbers of troops meant the military acted more and more like a corporation; unfortunately it was a corporation without enough employees. Morten G. Ender at the Military Academy in West P
oint, New York, put it this way: “What’s new is the all volunteer force. The military now has to rely on the corporate model. If people don’t come to your business you have to compromise your standards or lower your expectations.”21 In power, Obama ended up using more private security contractors than even the Bush administration had, despite early concerns about what journalist Jeremy Scahill calls their “unconstitutional” use. In truth it was impossible to do without them: the broken US military could not long stand on its own two feet. The fact that its armed forces have become US military Inc. should be extremely worrying for the American public, for the military planners whose concern is projecting power around the world, and for those who may be next on the receiving end of their bombs.
It is clear from the stories in this book that the military’s drop in standards unleashed a significant tranche of mentally unstable, extremist, and violent individuals upon the Iraqi and Afghan populations. Many of the most sickening of the atrocities committed by US service members—from the Abu Ghraib torture scandal to the Mahmudiyah massacre—were directly related to the loosening of standards. It might be a felon who had received a “moral waiver” but couldn’t shake off his criminal impulses, or a neo-Nazi granted a newfound freedom in the military. It could be a drunk soldier who picked up his weapon in the middle of a binge and went out to take pot-shots at the locals. This in itself has profound implications for the pretext of the whole War on Terror, billed as a moral crusade to bring democracy to the benighted Middle East. Indeed, it shifts the entire frame through which we should look at the whole venture. For modern military occupations, destruction of the occupied society is usually de rigueur. But the evidence strongly suggests that a military rife with alcoholics and gang-bangers is even more likely to grievously harm the society it occupies. The Irregular Army also ended up as the largest anthropological experiment in history, with US service members as the guinea pigs. In 1992, as Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had said, “The military is not a social welfare agency . . . We aren’t there to run social experiments. We are there to fight and win wars,” but under his administration’s watch a “social experiment” is what it became.22 It bought together groups that would never come across each other in their everyday lives. Neo-Nazis from Iowa broke bread with gang-bangers from Chicago in Baghdad, and alcoholics supped “hajji juice” with the mentally ill in Fallujah. It engendered weird alliances. In November 2010, for example, it was reported that Mexican drug cartels were enlisting white supremacists to smuggle illegal drugs across the border.23 Members of both of groups had been enlisted in the military in considerable numbers during the War on Terror. Did the relationship begin there? The military’s recruitment policy will contribute to social degeneration back home for decades to come. From the mentally scarred soldiers who are refused treatment (many of whom end up in the criminal justice system) to heavily trained gang-bangers stalking the streets of US cities, the “barbarization” of the US armed forces will be a theme that returns again and again as it touches on so many of the ills plaguing US society.
The FBI reported that it had carried out over 14 million background checks on Americans wanting to purchase weapons and explosives in 2009, up 10 percent from 12.7 million the year before. That represents more guns than the number held by the biggest militaries in the world—combined.24 As I write this, Jared Loughner, a delusional young loner, has just murdered six people in Arizona and nearly killed Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords with a semi-automatic weapon. It has since transpired that Loughner had tried to join the military in late 2008—and his experience is instructive. He was refused entry, which would seem to contradict the thesis of the Irregular Army. In truth, it was a demonstration of all the military shortcomings outlined above. Loughner passed the ASVAB easily and was soon in one of the Military Entrance Processing Stations (MEPS)—which gauges recruits’ applicability—where he was asked the standard question of whether he had “used illegal drugs or abused prescription drugs.”25 He answered honestly that he used marijuana, and according to the military they barred him on this basis. But he could have lied about it—as thousands of others had done in the War on Terror and before. He could also have been the recipient of a “medical waiver” or “moral waiver” even if he had a conviction. In other words, had he been smart he could have gotten in with no problem and been sent off to war. “It’s bizarre,” a military official said. “I certainly wouldn’t go through the whole process only to say, ‘Hey, I’ve been smoking marijuana for the past couple of years.’”26 There are undoubtedly many other Loughners who were smarter and went on to serve—maybe some of them appear in this book. Over the coming decade, with military training and access to weapons, they will be stalking the streets of both the US and the Middle East. America will pay for this in the blood of its own citizens as will the subject populations of the countries its military occupies. A warning shot was fired in March 2011 when the FBI arrested Kevin William Harpham, a thirty-six-year-old member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, in Spokane, Washington, on suspicion of planting a bomb at a Martin Luther King Day celebration which if detonated would have killed hundreds of people. Harpham had served in the US army for two years in the mid-1990s.
Lies Into Iraq
But pointing the finger is too easy. We have to take some blame ourselves, as we were as indiscriminate in our trust in our leaders as they were with their choice of soldiers. As the wars went on, we believed their crocodile tears when American troops died. We bought their soaring rhetoric about their commitment to service members, when in fact they were often cutting veterans’ access to benefits and health care. It was just a continuation of the lies we were told to take us into war in the first place. For people like Charlie P. Gaffney Jr., who picked up a gun again at the age of forty in an effort to help bring democracy to the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, these lies ended their lives. While the Bush administration cast the invasion as a “liberation” to “free the Iraqi people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein,” the uncomfortable fact that during the 1980s the US had supported Hussein was scrubbed from history. Declassified files show that the Reagan administration and its special Middle East envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, had done “little to stop Iraq developing weapons of mass destruction in the 1980s, even though they were fully aware that Saddam was using chemical weapons ‘almost daily’ against Iran,” reports the Guardian. The declassified documents detail how Reagan and Rumsfeld had allowed the export of biological weapons, including anthrax, ingredients for chemical weapons, and cluster bombs. In 1983, the then Secretary of State George Shultz received intelligence of “almost daily use” of chemical weapons by Iraq. A mere twenty-five days after this information was received, Reagan gave a secret order allowing the administration to do “whatever was necessary and legal” to help Iraq win the war over Iran. In December of that year, Rumsfeld met Saddam in Baghdad and stated the United States’ desire to restore diplomatic relations. This support and flow of arms continued long after the end of the Iran–Iraq war, right up until the first Gulf War in 1990—even after Saddam had shelled the Kurdish town of Halabja in March 1988 with gas bombs, killing an estimated 5,000 civilians and maiming thousands more.
The lie was no different in the UK. In December 2009 I was sent by my newspaper at the time, the Financial Times, down to the National Archives in Kew Gardens, London, to write a series of articles based on secret British state documents, which were then being released under the thirty-year disclosure rule. I would be viewing documents from 1979, the same year Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq in a bloody coup. I was particularly interested in how the British had viewed the event, and reading the reactions of the British ambassador to the coup was an eye-opening experience. Saddam became president in July 1979 in what the ambassador described as “the first smooth transfer of power in Iraq since 1958,” when a group of army officers had overthrown the monarchy.27 The ambassador noted, however, what this “smooth transfer” had involved: Within the first twenty-four hours of Saddam�
�s rule, “21 prominent Iraqis, including five members of the ruling Revolutionary Command Council, [were] executed.” Britain was confident of Saddam’s ability to crush dissent. “Strong-arm methods may be needed to steady the ship,” wrote a Foreign Office official. “Saddam will not flinch.” A Foreign Office briefing said Saddam was “personable in appearance” and wore “well-cut clothes, reputedly London-made.” He was said to elicit “fear mixed with grudging admiration” and gave “an impression in conversation of quiet but determined concentration, unusual in the Ba’ath leadership.”