Andrew Bacevich’s "The Age of Illusions" (Review, Part 2 of 4)

Bacevich implicitly uses 1991 as the end of the Cold War, a more clearly defined dividing point than the Owl of Minerva can usually identify. He takes the war that year to push Iraq out of Kuwait as the historical demarcation line, a conflict called at the time the Gulf War. (The beginning of the Cold War is conventionally dated somewhere between 1945 to 1948.)

The Emerald City Presidencies

The press and public perception of that war would prove to be a crucial element of the often miserable US experiences with wars the next three decades:

The conclusion of the Cold War showed that the U.S. military could win without fighting. The Persian Gulf War showed not only that America's armed forces could still fight, but that they were seemingly invincible.

So the nation's military narrative added a chapter: After Vietnam there now came Desert Storm. The latter did not expunge the former. Yet the military failure in Southeast Asia now lost much of its relevance. By putting a ragtag Iraqi army to flight, the United States had emphatically "kicked the Vietnam syndrome," as President George H. W. Bush put it at the time. With that, reticence about using force evaporated, especially in elite circles. In a post-Cold War world that awaited shaping, America's manifest superiority in all things military positioned it to do whatever needed to be done.

This is key to understanding Bacevich’s understanding of what the book’s subtitle describes as the US squandering its Cold War victory and the destructive hubris that was integral to it. Freed from the balance-of-power considerations of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and the policy limits imposed by the negative public view of the Vietnam War, the US could now indulge in war after war without the prospect of a major domestic political backlash.

Bacevich quotes a prime example of the American Exceptionalist rhetoric characteristic of the Emerald City era, this one from Colin Powell in 1992:

No other nation on earth has the power we possess. More important, no other nation on earth has the trusted power that we possess. We are obligated to lead. If the free world is to harvest the hope and fulfill the promise that our great victory in the Cold War has offered us, America must shoulder the responsibility of its power. The last best hope of earth has no other choice. We must lead.

In reality, the enormous popularity that President G.W. Bush enjoyed in 1991 after the successful conclusion of the war with Iraq did not prove sufficient to get him re-elected against Bill Clinton in 1992.

As the Owl of Minerva can now clearly see, the “successful” conclusion of the First Gulf War actually meant continuing low-level air war of the US against Iraq, punctuated by the big escalation of the very unfortunately named Operation Desert Fox in 1998. (See: Andrew Corseman, The Military Effectiveness Of Desert Fox: A Warning About the Limits of the Revolution in Military Affairs and Joint Vision 2010 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) 02/16/1999)

It led further – by the conscious decision of the Cheney-Bush Administration with the explicit support of leading Democratic Senators including Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry – to the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, whose very deadly consequences are still playing out in 2020. The Iraq War also dramatically increased the regional power of Iran by removing the balancing power of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led Iraq. And, of course, at the time Bacevich’s book appeared in January 2020, the US was on the verge of war with Iran.

Bacevich traces the broad path of US wars and assertions of military dominance through the Clinton Administration and its interventions in the Balkan Wars:

In the ceaselessly updated chronicle of the American military experience, the Bosnia and Kosovo campaigns - Operation Deliberate Force, lasting just three weeks in the late summer of 1995, and Operation Allied Force, spread across seventy-eight days in the spring of 1999-have long since been crowded out. Both featured what military theorists were then calling "precision bombing." In both cases, American air forces operated at high altitudes and faced negligible resistance, with U.S. losses all but nonexistent.

... during Clinton's eight-year tenure as commander in chief, these were the only victories the U.S. military was able to claim. As such, at least for a time, they shaped American expectations regarding the use of force. Here, it seemed, was evidence that the United States had solved the riddle of making armed might politically purposeful. [The military idea of] Full-Spectrum Dominance was no longer a theory. Bosnia and Kosovo made it fact.

While stressing this feature of the Clinton Administration that continued the hubristic direction of Emerald City, he makes it clear that the Bush-Cheney Administration took a qualitative (and bad) next step:

The central theme of Bill Clinton's tenure in office had been globalization. The central theme of George W. Bush's tenure became war, which some in his administration conceived as a sort of complement to globalization - another approach to bringing the world into conformity with American preferences. While Clinton had dabbled in war, the events of September 11 prompted Bush to embrace it wholeheartedly. Wars that still today follow their meandering course ultimately consumed his presidency.

The name devised to justify those conflicts-the Global War on Terrorism - amounted to an exercise in misdirection. … As an explanation for U.S. policy after 9/11, terrorism comes nowhere near to being adequate. Indeed, much like the shelling of Fort Sumter in 1861 or the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898, the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon served less as a proximate cause for war than as a catalyst. [my emphasis]

And he describes the various arrogant assumptions that flourished in the Bush-Cheney foreign policy that “went altogether off the rails”, a task which Bacevich was diligently performing in real time during that Presidency in his published work and public appearances:

The Bush Eschatology struck me even then as vainglorious, if not altogether blasphemous. Yet by no means did it signify a fundamental change in the trajectory of post-Cold War American statecraft. On the contrary, it reaffirmed in the strongest possible terms the premises underlying those policies. [my emphasis]

Noting that he himself voted twice for Obama as President, he carefully points out what he sees as Obama’s positive accomplishment. But Obama did not break from the four elements that Bacevich identifies as characterizing the Emerald City era, despite the symbolically transformative nature of the election of the first African-American President.

Obama “saved globalized neoliberalism”, he writes, but did not substantively transform it. “Sadly, the mendacity and malfeasance that had paved the way for the Great Recession went essentially unpunished.” Through policies like his escalation in the Afghanistan War, the failure to fully extricate American troops from Iraq, his extensive use of drone attacks, and the 2011 intervention in Libya, Obama modified but did not fundamentally alter the kind of militarized global dominance approach of the post-1989 era.

He has a particular criticism of this moment in the Libya intervention when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked about the torture-murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi by rebels:

On March 19, Western air attacks on the Gaddafi regime commenced. By October, the regime had collapsed and Gaddafi himself was dead. On national TV, a laughing Clinton bragged, "We came, we saw, he died."

Yet liquidating Gaddafi no more settled the matter than the fall of Baghdad ended the Iraq War. His ouster merely paved the way for a years-long civil war. As Libya descended into anarchy, the United States largely washed its hands of further responsibility. Years later, Clinton was still insisting that the intervention she had done so much to promote exemplified "smart power at its best," the apparent measure of merit being not the results achieved but the dearth of U.S. combat casualties.

... I also found her premature and unseemly victory dance regarding Libya indicative of someone possessed of a dangerously deficient understanding of war. [my emphasis]

Part 1: From Boone City to the Emerald City

Part 2: The Emerald City Presidencies

Part 3: Bacevich’s political perspective

Part 4: The way forward – and what to do about the “deplorables”

Remember the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine?

The Pentagon during the 1980s and 1990s the Pentagon was very attached to what was first known as the Weinberger Doctrine, later more commonly called the Powell Doctrine. It was Reagan's Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger that enunciated the canonical version in a speech to the national Press Club of 11/28/1984, The Uses of Military Force.

It was a set of guidelines for the using the military in combat:

(1) First, the United States should not commit forces to combat overseas unless the particular engagement or occasion is deemed vital to our national interest or that of our allies. That emphatically does not mean that we should declare beforehand, as we did with Korea in 1950, that a particular area is outside our strategic perimeter.

(2) Second, if we decide it is necessary to put combat troops into a given situation, we should do so wholeheartedly, and with the clear intention of winning. If we are unwilling to commit the forces or resources necessary to achieve our objectives, we should not commit them at all. Of course if the particular situation requires only limited force to win our objectives, then we should not hesitate to commit forces sized accordingly. When Hitler broke treaties and remilitarized the Rhineland, small combat forces then could perhaps have prevented the holocaust of World War II.

(3) Third, if we do decide to commit forces to combat overseas, we should have clearly defined political and military objectives. And we should know precisely how our forces can accomplish those clearly defined objectives. And we should have and send the forces needed to do just that. As Clausewitz wrote, "no one starts a war -- or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so -- without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war, and how he intends to conduct it."

War may be different today than in Clausewitz's time, but the need for well-defined objectives and a consistent strategy is still essential. If we determine that a combat mission has become necessary for our vital national interests, then we must send forces capable to do the job -- and not assign a combat mission to a force configured for peacekeeping.

(4) Fourth, the relationship between our objectives and the forces we have committed -- their size, composition and disposition -- must be continually reassessed and adjusted if necessary. Conditions and objectives invariably change during the course of a conflict. When they do change, then so must our combat requirements. We must continuously keep as a beacon light before us the basic questions: "is this conflict in our national interest?" "Does our national interest require us to fight, to use force of arms?" If the answers are "yes", then we must win. If the answers are "no," then we should not be in combat.

(5) Fifth, before the U.S. commits combat forces abroad, there must be some reasonable assurance we will have the support of the American people and their elected representatives in Congress. This support cannot be achieved unless we are candid in making clear the threats we face; the support cannot be sustained without continuing and close consultation. We cannot fight a battle with the Congress at home while asking our troops to win a war overseas or, as in the case of Vietnam, in effect asking our troops not to win, but just to be there.

(6) Finally, the commitment of U.S. forces to combat should be a last resort. [my emphasis]

Sadly, that final point seems quaint today, where the military has become a far more prominent tool of regular US foreign policy than it was in 1984. Even though it should be a commonplace that the use of force should be a last resort.

These days, we get articles like this from 2017, All The Countries Worldwide With A U.S. Military Presence [Infographic] Forbes 03/28/2017:

After China (2.2 million) and India (1.4 million), the United States boasts the largest number of active-duty troops of any military worldwide, 1.3 million in total. What sets the U.S. apart from those nations, however, is its unparalleled global military presence. Earlier this year, it was reported that U.S. special operations forces deployed to at least 138 nations in 2016, equating to about 70 percent of the world.

Unsurprisingly, the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force and Coastguard have an even more impressive global footprint. According to data from the Defense Manpower Data Center, the U.S military has 200,000 active-service members deployed in at least 170 countries worldwide. These range from a single military attaché to the Marine Corps personnel providing security at American embassies.

And like this one from last year: Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston, US at war in 7 countries — including Niger ... Defense One 03/15/2018.

Although the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine could rightly be read in part as a counsel of restraint, it had multiple meanings in the Pentagon's worldview. It also served as a way to avoid the defeat the US military suffered in the Vietnam War, an excuse for that humiliating loss, and an alibi for such losses in the future. It also functioned as a justification to keep US forces configured toward preparation for conventional warfare. US forces set up to fight the Soviet Red Army in Europe or the Korean Peninsula turned out to be not nearly so effective in a guerilla war in Vietnam.

Dominic Tierney in the Spring 2018 issue of the US Army War College's Parameters journal revisits the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine in the context of "nation-building", i.e., the construction of a new government after overthrowing the previous one, in Illusions of Victory: Avoiding Nation-Building From Nixon to Trump (p. 20-31 in the linked PDF document).

The problem is that in either the case of conquering a country and removing its government as in Afghanistan and Iraq, or in a civil war like in Vietnam, Syria, or Libya, the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine requires either (1) not engaging in the conflict or (2) conducting the conflict in a way that makes standing up a pro-American replacement government exceptionally difficult.

The military's preferred posture is to be given a free hand in conducting conventional operations to defeat an enemy conventional force and then let someone else take the responsibility and blame for cleaning up the mess afterward. Or, as in Libya after NATO's 2011 intervention, just leave a failed state behind with protracted civil war. Tierney writes, "Nation-building missions are consistently less popular with the public than interstate wars. Indeed, the term nationbuilding is a highly pejorative phrase in the United States." Conventional battlefield victories hyped by "embedded" media with failures and civilian casualties only later coming to light is more to our generals' liking.

The Persian Gulf War of 1991 fit into the parameters of the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine. Because, as Tierney observes, "only conventional interstate wars, such as the Persian Gulf War (1991), would dependably qualify." And Saddam Hussein's Soviet-trained army was configured to fight the kind of conventional war for which the US military was prepared.

An additional doctrine was added in the 1990s. "In 1996, [Clinton's National Security Adviser Tony] Lake described an 'exit strategy doctrine,' where the United States should only send troops abroad if it knows 'how and when we’re going to get them out'.” Which, as experience since then as described by Tierney has amply shown, is near-impossible in a serious conflict. Even withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan after over 17 years' war is politically controversial today.

The Winberger-Powell Doctrine also played a significant role in connection with another ingrained assumption of policymakers, including the neocon architects of the Iraq War, which is the notion that terrorism is primarily state-sponsored terrorism. In Afghanistan, that meant initial US operations were directed at removing the Taliban government rather than trying to engage as quickly as possible with Al Qaeda's forces in the country. And that assumption undergirded the false contention that Saddam Hussein was sponsoring Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups. (Of course, there was also the non-existent weapons of mass destruction, the sugar vial of horror, the plywood drones of death, etc.)

Tierney's warning about the problems of the current set of military assumptions is a double-edged sward:

Collectively, the doctrines encouraged the dangerous illusion that nation-building can somehow be avoided and, therefore, significant preparation is unnecessary. Since the Vietnam War, nation-building has been a ubiquitous experience for the US military — Panama in 1989, Iraq I (northern Iraq) in 1991, Somalia in 1992, Haiti in 1994, Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq II (post-Saddam) in 2003, and Iraq III (resisting the Islamic State) in 2014 — because the character of global warfare changed from interstate war to civil war.

He notes that the "quandary" involved with involvement in so many wars while trying to avoid post-conflict reconstruction "is perennial" and "also intractable." Which is another way of saying that the US approach to wars often borders on the frivolous. And too often crosses the line into full-blown blundering foolishness.

He describes with evident irony the "heroic" pretension and arrogance with the Cheney-Bush-Rumsfeld version of this grim cycle. "Underpinning this policy was the heroic assumption that when US troops march away from the smoking ruins, local and international actors will somehow cooperate to produce a political order compatible with American interests - and the day after will be preferable to the day before." And he expands on the point, "Missions can end up resembling what Gideon Rose called 'moon landings,' where the United States transports troops to a distant location, and then aims to bring them home safely, without regard for what is left behind."

Trump's version of American First isolationism isn't providing any solutions to these dilemmas. And is creating additonal ones.