A look back at the Joe Biden of 2008

I'm quoting below a post I made on 04/30/2008, when Joe Biden was a Democratic Presidential candidate that year.

Biden was on Meet the Press Sunday for an hour with Tim Russert. ... He mentioned the need for better domestic precautions against terrorist attacks, which has been a standard Democratic talking point for years. But this disaster [a truck explosion in Oakland CA at the time] reminds me that it's a valid priority, even allowing for the inevitable hype and scamming around the still-hot topic of terrorism. This road collapse is likely to mess up the commute in a seriously bad way for months. All large cities and all states need to have workable plans in place that can be implemented quickly for dealing with these kinds of emergencies.

And if those preparations wind up being used for accidents and natural disasters more than for responses to terrorism, so what? The OxyContin crowd [Rush Limbaugh fans] won't like it. But bitching and moaning and slinging sleaze at the Democrats about everything is just what they do all the time anyway. ...

Biden talked a lot about the Iraq War and foreign policy issues. He had a couple of good things to say. But it was disappointing, on the whole. The best thing he said was a point I've been saying for a while that the Democrats should be making: that the October 2002 war resolution did not authorize the invasion of Iraq that Cheney and Bush launched in March of 2003. Chuck Hagel, the rightwing Nebraska Senator who passes for a "moderate" in today's authoritarian Republican Party, also makes the same point in an interview with Salon ("We cannot stay as an occupying force in the Middle East" 04/30/07):

I wasn't convinced [of WMD] or in any way connected Saddam Hussein with 9/11. Before we even had the vote I said that. Some get the resolution wrong. It wasn't a resolution to go to war ... Ultimately it was giving the president authority to use force if all the diplomatic efforts fail. If there was no other recourse it would allow the president to use force. I believed the president and others who said they would exhaust all diplomatic efforts. Which they did not. They told us they would and they did not. (my emphasis)

Neither Biden nor Hagel mentioned the other official goal of the war specified in that resolution besides dealing with the nonexistent WMDs, which was to deal with the nonexistent operational links between Saddam's regime and Al Qaida and as part of that to specifically to retaliate for Saddam's nonexistent role in the 9/11 attacks.

Biden did okay in terms of style responding to Russert's trademark gotcha questions asking about things he had said before that sound different than what he's saying now. But in terms of substance, Biden is still caught up in the fact that he foolishly took a hawkish position on the war up until last year, so he winds up dissembling to justify a dovish-sounding position now.

When I saw Tom Hayden speak in San Francisco last November, he stressed that politicians are especially good at double-talk, so the antiwar movement will have to keep the pressure on all of them to continue to pull the troops out. That is, once we start pulling troops out rather than sending more in. Biden's MTP interview Sunday reminded me of that.

I've written here before about how I'm concerned by the current Congressional pullout plan because it leaves a wide-open loophole to have troops to keep fighting "Al Qaida" in Iraq, which already seems to be leading the war fans to make Al Qaida sound like it has a huge role in the guerrilla war there. But during the current veto fight over the war, I'm content that the message most voters and people in other countries will get will be, "Bush is in favor of continuing the war, the Democrats want to end it."

But Biden on Sunday used the various qualifications in the Congressional plan to step on the general Democratic antiwar message. None of his comments on the Iraq War were particularly encouraging for war critics; he even managed to smother his observation that Bush's invasion in 2003 violated the Congressional war resolution with confusing talk about how it authorized Bush to go to war but not really stressing the conditional nature of that authorization.

He emphasized that the current Democratic position is not a deadline date for US withdrawal from Iraq, but a target that is "flexible". He is still justifying his vote for the war resolution in 2002. He's claiming that he was voting to give the President authority for war under certain conditions in order to avoid war. That is a disingenious argument. While I've said that it's important to recognize how Bush violated the war resolution, there was also no doubt at the time that the practical effect of passing that resolution was to give Bush effective permission to launch an invasion on his own say-so.

Biden also said that when the UN inspectors left in 1998, they were still saying Iraq had large quantities of material that could be weaponized as WMDs. Now, my entire staff of fact-checkers are still caught in the commute. [That was a joke, BTW!] But I'm pretty sure what they said was that there were certain amounts of materials not accounted for.

On a related whopper, I don't need the fact checkers to know he was repeating a falsehood when he said that Saddam kicked out the inspectors in 1998. The facts are worth remembering since this was one of several lies used to justify going to war and killing and wounding a lot of people including American soldiers for no good reason. Iraq blocked inspectors from their work in 1998 because they discovered that the UN team included members that were passing information to the CIA. The US government later admitted this was the case. Then Scott Ritter who was heading the inspection team at the time decided on his own to remove the inspectors. Yet here's Joe Biden the famous "realist" still repeating this false war-propaganda point.

The rest of Biden's interview also wasn't that encouraging. He sneered at "the French" for criticizing the effects of the economic sanctions on Iraq during the 1990s; in reality, a realistic look at those sanctions should be one of the most important "lessons of Iraq" to examine. He wants to send more American troops to Afghanistan and also to Darfur. I can't say I'm thrilled about either prospect - even if we could pretend that this current administration had the ability to manage either situation competently, which they certainly do not.

He said correctly that Medicare is more of a financial problem than Social Security. But he said more than once, clearly including Social Security, that he wants to "put it all on the table" in looking at solutions. "You have to," he said. No, we don't have to put Social Security "on the table". And the Republicans' phase-out schemes ("privitization") should be permanently off that famous metaphorical table.

Biden also supported the so-called "partial-birth abortion" ban. He said he was alarmed by the Supreme Court's apparent positioning in a case unsuccessfully challenging that law seems to be setting the stage to overturn Roe v. Wade. But defending the right to choose on abortions clearly does not seem to be the higest priority for Biden.

After Biden's gab-fest with Russert, I watched Chris Matthews' 30-minute Sunday show, where Matthews and various pundits kicked around fogettable comments about the Presidential candidates. Clarence Paige, generally one of the more sensible among the Big Pundits, made the remarkable observation that the 2008 election will be the "first big election since 9/11".

Say what? Let's see, there was the 2002 election that handed the Senate back to Republican control, insuring that virtually no Congressional oversight of the Executive Branch would occur during the next four years. There was that little Presidential election in 2004 that retained Dear Leader Bush as President. Last year the Congressional elections turned both Houses of Congress back to the Democrats in a striking protest against the disaster known as the Iraq War.

I can only wonder what counts as a "big election" in the world of our Wise Pundits.

The other great fraud of the Iraq War (or, the Forever War, Iraqi front)

Paul Pillar reminds us of the missionary claim that the US would spread liberal democracy to Iraq and the Middle East that was an additional propaganda claim of the Cheney-Bush Administration, though the false claim of Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" was the more immediate justification for their disastrous invasion of Iraq. An invasion that was authorized not only by Republican ghouls like Dick Cheney but by leading Democratic Senators including John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, though the latter is trying to rewrite that part of his story to sound less ominous during the Democratic primaries.

Pillar writes:

Remember how the George W. Bush administration sold its offensive war in Iraq, begun seventeen years ago? It wasn’t just about weapons of mass destruction and mythical alliances with terrorist groups. The war was also supposed to bring the blessings of freedom and democracy to the people of Iraq, who would be grateful to the United States for overthrowing their dictator. The war was to be not just a pursuit of American objectives in opposition to Iraqi ones but an altruistic action for the benefit of Iraqis. [my emphasis]

He argues that the current US occupation of Iraq is a problems for the US in a variety of ways, including:

Iraqi nationalism is the most effective check on Iranian influence on Iraq - if only the United States does not mess up this dynamic with actions that turn that nationalist sentiment against itself. The Bush administration messed up with its invasion in 2003, and the Trump administration has messed up with its lethal attacks on Iraqi militias and its assassination of Qassem Soleimani and a senior Iraqi security figure. [my emphasis]

Juan Cole, whose commentary on Iraq has consistently been better than what the US government claims over the last 15 years, warns (Challenge to Trump: Muqtada al-Sadr & Iraqi Shiite leaders Call for a Million-Man March against US Military Occupation Informed Comment 01/15/2020):

The Trump administration, the US corporate media, and even some Democratic candidates have almost completely ignored the Iraqi parliamentary vote on January 5 obliging the prime minister to take the necessary steps to expel US troops. In last night’s debates, Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar said that they would keep troops in Iraq, as though it were their decision. Secretary of state Mike Pompeo dismissed the Iraqi parliamentary vote as “advisory.” It was not. It laid an unambiguous obligation on the Iraqi executive. The measure, which was asked for by the prime minister, passed by a firm majority of 170 (165 votes were needed for a majority). It is true that the Sunnis and Kurds boycotted the vote, but Mitch McConnell passes measures every day without any Democrats signing on.

It isn’t actually plausible for the US to remain in the absence of Iraqi government approval ... [my emphasis]

He also notes the risks of the US insisting on maintaining occupation troops in Iraq against the will of the Iraqis and the Iraqi government:

The Trump administration clearly does not want to leave, but if Shiite hostility to US troops continues at this level, it might as well. The US forces cannot train Iraqi troops who hate them and might frag them. And they can’t go out fighting ISIL alongside Iraqi troops for the same reason. They have no mission there as I speak, and seem mainly to be involved in hunkering down to defend themselves. That’s not a posture that can continue forever. And there is a danger that if Trump continues with this stubbornness, at some point the Shiite militias will attack the US personnel. Trump will blame Iran, and we’ll be on the cusp of war again. [my emphasis]

But he also observes that there is some Iraqi popular support for troops remaining: "Iraqi Sunnis are opposed to the US leaving, because they fear it might enable ISIL to return, and because they want the US to counterbalance strong Iranian influence in Baghdad. "

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”

Whataboutism doesn't tell us a lot about the fact that a US war with Iran is a really BAD policy

Wars and lesser international conflicts offer plenty of opportunities for whataboutism, i.e., yeah, what Country X did was bad but just look at what Country Z did!

Which is why listing grievances and competing atrocity stories are insufficient to understanding the causes of a war or the prospects for peace. And the progress made in international law over the last couple of centuries mis a recognition that "whatever you can get away with" is not the highest principle in international affairs, despite the fact that it all too often works out that way in practice.

Graham Fuller reminds us of the superficiality of the Trump Administration justification for the assassination/target killing of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani (U.S. Foreign Policy by Assassination Responsible Statecraft 01/04/2020):

The trembling puffery and outrage on the part of most politicians and commentators in the US that “Soleimani was responsible for the deaths of any number of American soldiers in Iraq” reflects either childish naivete or massive self-delusion about what the nature of war is all about. Iran knew it was in the US neocon cross-hairs when the US invaded Iraq in 2003; the standing joke in the US then was that war with Iraq is fine, but “real men go to war with Iran.”

The Cheney-Bush Administration had named Iran as one of the three members of David Frum's Axis of Evil along with Iraq and North Korea. The threat of war against Iran were obvious. And the US' close ally Israel, to whom both parties' leaders continually declare to be an invaluable ally, has periodically ever since then threatening to bomb facilities in Iran that Israel claims it is using for nuclear arms development.

The US had fully supported Saddam Hussein’s vicious war against Iran throughout the 1980s. It was not surprising then that Iran aided the massive uprising of Iraqi Sunni and Shi’a forces to resist the US military invasion and occupation of Iraq - a presence that lacked any legal standing. Naturally Iran provided advice and weapons to Iraqi guerrillas to facilitate killing the soldiers of the American occupation, that’s what war is. [my emphasis]

It's also important to remember that during and after the long Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) and thereafter until 2003, the Sunni-led Iraq of Saddam Hussein and the Shia government of Iran balanced each other military and political power and therefore limited the potential ambitions of both countries that might be of concern to the US, NATO, or their other neighbors.

But Iraq is also a majority Shia country. So it was clear to most everyone paying attention that removing Saddam's Sunni government with a promise for democratic elections would produce a Shia-dominated government which was likely to have better relations to Iran than Saddam did. And that's what happened. What also happened was a civil war between Shia and Sunni groups with the Kurds a third group of belligerents.

This has never meant that Iraqis Shias were more loyal to Iran than to their own country. Iraqi Shias fought in the Iraqi army in the long war against Iran. They didn't act like some giant Fifth Column of Iran. But there was never any good reason to think that the post-Saddam Iraqi government would be other than close to Iran. Nor that there would be military cooperation between Iran and the Iraqi government as well as between Iran and secular Shia militias in Iraq.

The US has supported any number of guerrilla forces around the world to fight against enemies and regimes we don’t like, starting with military aid, training, intelligence, joint missions, etc., as we have seen most recently in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. There is precious little ground for US moral outrage in all of this - unless one simply assumes, as the US usually does - that America by definition represents the “moral cause,” the “good guys,” and has a god-given right to intervene anywhere and everywhere in the name of freedom, democracy or human rights or to protect whatever it is. [my emphasis]

This does not mean that the US has no good and practical reasons for opposing Iranian policies, as on terrorism. The US certainly has an interest in nuclear nonproliferation in Iran. Which is why it was a great thing that the US and various other countries had come to agreement with Iran in 2015 on an effective arms control regime with extensive international inspections. Donald Trump cancelled that treaty in May 2018 and then opposed severe sanctions of Iran, who had been abiding by the treaty. And only after the Soleimani assassination a few days ago did Iran finally announce it would no longer abide by the treaty.

Whether Qasem Soleimani was a Bad Man or not is really beside the point of whether its either justified or any kind of a practical good idea for the US to have a war with Iran. It's a terrible idea. Fred Kaplan pessimistically concluded immediately after the assassination, "The United States is now at war with Iran." And he does not think that is a good idea. (Trump Just Declared War on Iran Slate 01/03/2020)

War with Iran would be a really bad thing

As he proved many times over during the Iraq War, Juan Cole is far more reliable in commenting on affairs in Iraq and Iran than US government officials who speak officially in support of a war policy. He posts about Trump, Troll-in-Chief, wags the Impeachment Dog by Going to War with Iran 01/03/2019:

The madman in the White House has been sulking and raging for weeks about his impeachment proceedings, tweeting manically on some days more than 100 times. With the release by JustSecurity.org of unredacted emails on the Ukraine scandal showing that Trump personally (and illegally) withheld congressionally mandated military aid to an ally, the Republican defense of the president is collapsing. Some GOP senators such as Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski seem to be weakening on calling witnesses and subpoenaing records for the Senate trial, and the Democrats only need four Republican senators to ensure a proper proceeding, which would certainly put Trump’s presidency in peril.

It is extremely suspicious that Trump has abruptly begun trafficking in the sanguinary merchandise of all-out war just at this moment when his throne is on the brink of toppling.

As Cole and every other expert and most laypeople actually paying attention knew when the Iraq War started, taking out Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq would drastically tilt the balance of power in that region toward Iran. Now we're here:

Now, by murdering Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Jerusalem (Qods) Brigade of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, Trump has brought the United States to the brink of war with Iran. Mind you, Iran’s leadership is too shrewd to rush to the battlements at this moment, and will be prepared to play the long game. My guess is that they will encourage their allies among Iraqi Shiites to get up a massive protest at the US embassy and at bases housing US troops. 

They will be aided in this task of mobilizing Iraqis by the simultaneous US assassination of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy head of the Popular Mobilization Forces. Al-Muhandis is a senior military figure in the Iraqi armed forces, not just a civilian militia figure. Moreover, the Kata’ib Hizbullah that he headed is part of a strong political bloc, al-Fath, which has 48 members in parliament and forms a key coalition partner for the current, caretaker prime minister, Adil Abdulmahdi. Parliament won’t easily be able to let this outrage pass. [emphasis in original]

Nick Serpe writes (Stopping the War This Time Dissent 01/03/2020):

But if the recent past is any indication, there are some things we should be prepared for regarding elite discourse in the United States. Media figures and politicians who supported the Iraq War will come out with sympathetic readings of the killing of Qassim Suleimani. They’ll point to the many years of conflict between the United States and Iran since the revolution in 1979. They’ll give credence to Defense Department statements about how this attack was necessary to prevent worse violence. They’ll call for us to line up behind patriotic symbols if and when Iran retaliates.

Here is Trita Parsi's take on the current situation, Iran Expert Trita Parsi: We may already be at war with Iran The Hill 01/03/2020

From 01/06/2008: George McGovern on impeaching Cheney and Bush

I'm re-upping this post from 12 years ago (slightly edited for clarity):

Former South Dakota Senator and 1972 Democratic Presidential candidate George McGovern has an op-ed in the Washington Post today on impeachment, Why I Believe Bush Must Go 01/06/08. I'm pleased to see that he gives a reasonable description of the current partisan atmosphere:

Of course, there seems to be little bipartisan support for impeachment. The political scene is marked by narrow and sometimes superficial partisanship, especially among Republicans, and a lack of courage and statesmanship on the part of too many Democratic politicians. So the chances of a bipartisan impeachment and conviction are not promising. (my emphasis)

And the following is straightforwardly true:

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly "high crimes and misdemeanors," to use the constitutional standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team's assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged -- perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion -- by far the highest in our national history.

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in violation of international law. This reckless disregard for life and property, as well as constitutional law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners, including systematic torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

McGovern also has an appropriate description of the Bush Gulag, calling it a "shocking perversion".

And he doesn't forget about the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, which Cheney, Bush and Karl Rove decided to embrace as ethnic cleansing by natural disaster:

In addition to the shocking breakdown of presidential legal and moral responsibility, there is the scandalous neglect and mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. The veteran CNN commentator Jack Cafferty condenses it to a sentence: "I have never ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans." Any impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to act. Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land. It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray. This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot. (my emphasis)

McGovern, a bomber pilot in the Second World War, hasn't forgotten that patriotism is about more than listening to Rush Limbaugh and cheering about killin' foreigners. It also involves commitment to the notion that Andrew Jackson defined as a democratic nation that respects the Constitution.

McGovern, whose wife Eleanor just recently past away, ends on a poignant note:

I believe we have a chance to heal the wounds the nation has suffered in the opening decade of the 21st century. This recovery may take a generation and will depend on the election of a series of rational presidents and Congresses. At age 85, I won't be around to witness the completion of the difficult rebuilding of our sorely damaged country, but I'd like to hold on long enough to see the healing begin.

There has never been a day in my adult life when I would not have sacrificed that life to save the United States from genuine danger, such as the ones we faced when I served as a bomber pilot in World War II. We must be a great nation because from time to time, we make gigantic blunders, but so far, we have survived and recovered.

We could all aspire to be as lucid, engaged and committed to the public good when we become octogenarians as George McGovern is.

NATO expansion and the Iraq War: two turning points for US foreign policy

Jeremi Suri has some observations about a couple of important turning points in Amrican foreign policy in recent decades in The Long Rise and Sudden Fall of American Diplomacy Foreign Policy 04/17/2019. Suri is commenting on a book by a former ambassdor to Jordan and foreign policy official, William Burns, currently president of the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Burns thought the Clinton Administration's decision to expand NATO was poorly conceived and inadequately thought out:

The militarization of U.S. diplomacy began, according to Burns’s account, when President Bill Clinton pushed for rapid NATO expansion into the former Soviet bloc, despite prior U.S. commitments to the contrary (as confirmed by Burns in his memoir) and strong Russian objections. Although Clinton offered strong personal support to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, he failed to address the growing sense of insecurity and grievance within Russia. It appeared that the United States was muscling into Russian geopolitical space, brandishing guns and dollars. Washington offered little to assure concerned Russians, other than continued aid to a drunk, pro-American figure in the Kremlin.

The former Soviet bloc states had good reason to seek NATO membership, but the United States needed to do more to accommodate Russian fears. Diplomacy of this kind received little attention among Clinton’s impatient advisors. Burns, then the U.S. minister-counselor for political affairs in Russia, recounts: “Sitting at the embassy in Moscow in the mid-1990s, it seemed to me that NATO expansion was premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst ... It was wishful thinking, however, to believe that we could open the door to NATO membership without incurring some lasting cost with a Russia coping with its own historic insecurities.”

It's too late to put that genie back in the bottle. But the post-1989 US foreign policy was strong on arrogance and short on realistic views of Russia.

And he cites Burns' view of the foreign policy disaster known as the Iraq War.

The United States isolated itself, antagonized allies and adversaries, and diverted its resources to a lengthy military occupation that further destabilized the region. The winner of the war was Iran, which saw a regional rival defeated and found new influence in Iraq. The United States was a clear loser, as the “war in Iraq sucked the oxygen out of the administration’s foreign policy agenda.” Mired in Iraq, facing opposition around the globe, Washington found its diplomatic leverage diminished in almost every region. Burns recounts how Russian President Vladimir Putin took advantage of this situation by throwing his weight around in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Southeastern Europe. The United States had cornered itself.   [my emphasis]

Sometimes commentators refer to the Iraq War as an unforced error. Unforeced disaster would be more appropriate.

Most damaging, the United States never recovered the diplomatic capital lost in Iraq. Burns recounts many skilled U.S. efforts to contain Russia and denuclearize Libya and Iran, but from military intervention to drone warfare Washington consistently “overrelied on American hard power to achieve policy aims and ambitions.” Even critics of the Iraq War presumed the United States had underused or misused military power; they did not address the diplomatic deficit. U.S. leaders failed to educate the public about the importance of forging compromise abroad, and they frequently encouraged more skepticism toward diplomacy. This was most evident during the Barack Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran, when members of Congress worked to undermine sensitive negotiations while they were still in process, calling recklessly for military intervention instead.  [my emphasis]

One of the poor assumptions behind the war on terror in the context of which the Cheney-Bush Administration justified the Iraq War was to conceive of terrorism as a problem of state-sponsored terrorism. Paul Pilar notes that this bad assumption has been unfortunately persistent (The Pensacola Shooting and the Misconceiving of Terrorism Responsible Statecraft 12/09/2019):

State sponsorship of terrorism has dropped significantly over the past three decades. At least that is true of governments either directly perpetrating or instigating terrorist operations. A persistent problem of states and terrorism involves the less direct malevolent effects of what certain states do, and Saudi Arabia is Exhibit A in that problem. It is no accident that fifteen of the nineteen men who carried out the mother of all of international terrorist attacks — 9/11 — were Saudis. ...

The Trump administration has put the latest attack, and terrorism in general, in the framework of its policy toward the Middle East, which rigidly takes sides in regional rivalries and is built around unrelenting hostility toward Iran. ...

The oft-repeated mantra about Iran being the “number one state sponsor of terrorism” is an anachronism. It was applicable in years past, when fifty U.S. diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran and in subsequent years when the Iranian regime conducted serial assassinations of exiled dissidents. That behavior stopped years ago. ... Iran has been heavily involved, especially in Iraq, in combating the most ominous terrorist movement of recent years - Islamic State - and has been the victim of major Islamic State attacks within Iran. [my emphasis]

Stanley Sloan and the state of NATO

The "crisis in transatlantic relations" is something that has been part of NATO politics pretty much since the day it was created.

This book was published in 2004 - complete with a blurb at the top from Status Quo Joe Biden himself!

In September 2004, the Wilson Center held a conference on the topic The Crisis in Transatlantic Relations.

The differences over the Iraq War didn't stop the expansion of NATO to include Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004, followed by Albania and Croatia in 2009 and Montenegro in 2017.

Trump's election to the Presidency has brought a new chapter in the Crisis in Transatlantic Relations. The latest episode made the news again this weekend when Stanley Sloan, a US expert on NATO, was vetoed by the State Department as a speaker at a scheduled NATO conference in Denmark, which as a result was cancelled by the Danish Atlantic Council, which was sponsoring the event. This kind of State Department intervention to veto a speaker with thoroughly Establishment credentials is unusual, as Mariel Padilla reports (NATO Conference Is Canceled After U.S. Ambassador Barred a Trump Critic New York Times 12/08/2019):

Mr. Sloan, a visiting scholar at Middlebury College in Vermont, a fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, planned to speak about the future of trans-Atlantic relations.

One day before he was set to leave for Copenhagen, Mr. Sloan was informed that the United States Embassy in Copenhagen had vetoed his participation because of his previous criticisms of President Trump, Mr. Sloan said on Facebook on Saturday.

Carla Sands, the United States ambassador to Denmark, did not want Mr. Sloan to participate, and the Danish Atlantic Council “had no other option” than to revoke his invitation to speak, Lars Bangert Struwe, the secretary general of the council, said in a statement.

Mr. Sloan said the decision had left him “stunned and concerned about our country.”

Sloan has been tweeting about the incident.

It is here for your viewing: https://t.co/S2eiZ9ruH0 https://t.co/ZwTAkcmlut

— Stanley R. Sloan - Defense of the West (@srs2_) December 8, 2019

The page he links contains further links to his work, including his notes for the speech that he couldn't deliver because Dear Leader Baby Trump doesn't want to hear people criticizing his bumbling, fumbling, laughingstock of a foreign policy, Crisis in transatlantic relations: what future will we choose? The speech itself is largely boilerplate Atlanticist assumptions and is thoroughly conventional. He states his perspective as follows:

• I support liberal democracy as the best, albeit not perfect, political system for our countries.
• My outlook on how to defend the West is influenced as much by this ideological bias as it is by the need for governments to defend against physical threats.
• Finally, in my years of working on transatlantic relations I’ve analyzed and written about many “crises.”
• It’s my judgment that the crisis currently facing the West is the most dangerous of any seen in the past seven decades.

NATO has never been overly disturbed by incidents of member states departing from liberal democracy, e.g., the military government in Greece 1967-1974, various military governments in Turkey and Tayyip Erdoğan's authoritarian Islamist government today, Viktor Orbán's authoritarian regime in Hungary.

Since NATO is an alliance focused on Europe, he takes a Eurocentric view:

Of course, “the West” is more than the transatlantic alliance

When the term is defined broadly, it certainly includes Eastern democracies such as Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

Ultimately, however, the members of NATO and the European Union represent the heart of what we call “the West.’

We could quibble with how he uses "the West" as a normative standard, i.e., Japan is part of "the West" but Russia isn't? But it's not the kind of thing that would raise anyone's eyebrows on Morning Joe.

Sloan makes the sensible point that miltiary budgets are always a matter of political decisions, "so the transatlantic alliance will be perpetually plagued by a 'burdensharing' problem."

He does make an explicit if general criticism of the Trump Administration:

Meanwhile, the American guarantee of European security has, under President Trump, become very uncertain. Mutual trust among leaders of alliance nations is at an all-time low.

The [recent NATO] London meeting did little to reassure us.

And, the threat from Russia has become even more intrusive.

Russia’s Putin is getting a helping hand from our president as well as from radical right populist politicians here in Europe.

He sketches out his (also thoroughly conventional) view of challenges from Russia, China, and international terrorism.

Sloan's description of what he sees as the possibility of a "radical negative change" in NATO sounds like a lazy recitation of decades-old Cold War talk, with Moscow as the mastermind of a European Communist movement replaced by Moscow as the mastermind of a European fascist movement. Actually, Putin's government seems far more interested in encouraging political chaos where it can rather than promoting some ideology encouraging Putin-style governments in other countries.

And what would such a presentation be without an invocation of "Munich"? He describes in his "radical negative change" scenario:

In this hypothetical scenario, Trump continues the process of abandoning US international leadership and decides to remove all US forces from Europe.

Trump tweets that he and Vladimir Putin have agreed that such a move would promote peace and security in Europe.

In response, European allies discuss creating strong, integrated European defense structures to replace the transatlantic NATO one.

But they find it too challenging politically and financially.

Even the overwhelming cost estimate projected in 2019 by the IISS for the EU members to create a defense system as capable as that of NATO turns out to be overly optimistic.

Several member countries suggest that the EU should follow the US lead and sign a peaceful relations accord with Russia, in which both sides pledge to take no aggressive actions against the other.

Even though some commentators immediately label this “the 21st century Munich,” most European governments decide they have little choice.

In addition, this move toward accommodation with Russia strengthens illiberal pro-Moscow parties throughout Europe.

That leads to the election of several national administrations that lean toward fascist forms of governance and away from liberal democracy. [my emphasis]

Not a particularly creative formulation. But, as John Kenneth Galbraith observed, the "comfort of convenient belief" can be very attractive in itself. (The Culture of Contentment, 1992) But it often renders its adherents incapable of recognizing important changes and developments not included int he conventional wisdom.

Galbraith also reminds us of the consequences of the kind of threat inflation previously associated with Western views the USSR and justified by the Munich Analogy:

The natural focus of concern was the Soviet Union and its once seemingly stalwart satellites in Eastern Europe. Fear of the not inconsiderable competence of the Soviets in military technology and production provided the main pillar of support for American military spending. However, the alarm was geographically comprehensive. It supported expenditure and military action against such improbable threats as those from Angola, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Laos, Cambodia and, massively, tragically and at great cost, from Vietnam. From being considered a source of fear and concern, only Communist China was, from the early 1970s on, exempt. Turning against the Soviet Union and forgiven for its earlier role in Korea and Vietnam, it became an honorary bastion of democracy and free enterprise, which, later repressive actions notwithstanding, it rather substantially remains.

Which is also a reminder of the risk of threat inflation in relation to today's Russia. And that's a big issue for NATO, an alliance that has expanded greatly in the last three decades but has nevertheless been an alliance in search of a mission since the fall of the USSR in 1992.

The comfortable conventional view of China that Galbraith described there has now been replaced by China as a pressing threat.

US and NATO foreign policy would be well served by a couple of changes: (1) a more pragmatic and realistic view of threats, which also means one not deferential to profit goals of the armaments industries; and, (2) burying the Munich Analogy, which main consequence has long been to encourage a dangerous habit threat inflation.

Another look at Russia and Trump

I thought I would use the Twitter thread below from Democratic starategist Simon Rosenberg as a way to comment on it.

First, my general attitude toward the Russia-Trump scandal since 2016 has been that it's important, it should be thoroughly investigated, and the US election process needs to be secured against foreign hacking and domestic gerrymandering and voter suppression. I've also thought and still think that the general , and Democratic approach to approaching the scandal has been a very unfortunate mixture of melodrama, retro-cold-War posturing, and timidity in actually confronting Trump. You don't have to be a political junkie to notice that accusing the President of being a foreign agent and/or subject to Russian blackmail - the latter being almost certain - along with massive corruption and then stedfastly refuse to impeach him is an incredibly mixed message. And a sign of real weakness.

Also, for in-depth and fact-based analysis of the whole Trump-Russia issue, see Marcy Wheeler's Emptywheel. Also, David Cay Johnston of DCReport.org has also been reporting on Trump for a long time.

While we wait to learn more from the IC whistleblower, re-upping my recent thread reviewing all the ways Trump has aligned US foreign policy with Putin in recent months. It is alarming, and worthy of its own inquiry. https://t.co/peZNFKItlo

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) September 19, 2019

After speaking to Putin, Trump dramatically changed his Administration's position on Venezuela, saying he and Putin "feel the same way" on the country. https://t.co/a3VZY1CASm

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) September 12, 2019

Getting the US military out of Afghanistan is a good idea for the United States. A more responsible leader than Trump would probably have arranged some agreement with Russia connected to it. As far as we know, Trump didn't. It may be what Russia wants. Or maybe not. The US policy of Forever War is damaging the US more than helping us. I'm not sure Russia would see any great advantage in the US stopping this portio of it. Starting in 1980, the US decided it would be a good idea to keep a war going in Afghanistan to weaken Russia. And it did. So, we should worry that Russia is going to invade Afghanistan again and spead itself even thinner, thereby reducing the already low likelihood of Russian military aggression against NATO members even further?

Here we already see the problem in the Democratic temptation to talk about foreign policy in a neo-Cold-War binary framework. It's ridiculous to assume that if Russia favors it, it must be bad for the US. Foreign policy is all about countries defining and pursuing their interests, managing conflicts with other countries, coordinating complementary priorities. Nor are countries always right in what they think is good for them and bad for others. The Cheney-Bush Administration and a majority of the US Congress in 2003 thought invading Iraq would be good for the US, good for Iraq, and bad for Iran. Wrong, on all counts.

Trump's regime-change policy in Venezuela has been a spectacular mess, motivated by American desires to control Venezuelan oil reserves. (That may be a clichee, but anyone who thinks that's not the overriding consideration on US policy there is way off base, to put it mildly.) Backing away from the current policy pursuing an international arrangement to hold new elections in Venezuela and normalize relations would be a good thing for the US, if not necessary for fossil fuel corporations. Pursuing the previous regime-change policy makes Venezuela even more dependent on its foreign allies, not least of them being Russia. Trump's regime-change policy is good for the US and Venezuela in the same way the Iraq War was for the US and the Middle East.

Trump's main goal at the recent G7 meeting, of all things, seemed to be about getting Putin back in and legitimizing his global aggression. https://t.co/kNKGJjRVVs

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) September 12, 2019

Rosenberg is right about Brexit. It causes problems for NATO and the EU, which is in line with Putin's goal of weakening European unity. My impression is that Putin doesn't have any particular ideological commitments beyond preserving his own oligarchic-authoritarian rule. But right now it's the rightwing nationalists in Europe that are having the most success in weakening European unity in a way favorable to Putin's goals. It's also a more radical version of the previous US policy under the Clinton, Bush, and Obama governments to encourage European unity but prevent the EU becoming unified and strong enough to be a "peer competitor" to the US in world affairs.

Trump's blundering diplomacy around the G7 meeting also worked to Putin's interest in at least marginally distracting from international objections to the annexation of Crimea. How useful the G7 meetings in themselves are is another question. More to the point here would be how useful Russia thinks they are.

And now, by softening his position on Iran, he appears to be choosing his buddy Vlad over his former buddies MBS and Bibi. https://t.co/nmN3KIgHae

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) September 12, 2019

His back of the hand to Ukraine a few weeks ago was also seen as another huge gift to Russia. https://t.co/7b6yc8hM5T

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) September 12, 2019

War with Iran is an even worse idea than invading Iraq was. The US pulling out of the nuclear agreement with Iran was a bad idea. Imposing new, wide-reaching sanctions on Iran even though Iran had stuck to the terms of the agreement was a bad idea.

None of this excludes the possibility that Russia may have influenced Trump's decision-making, such as it is, in some inappropriate or illegal way. But here again, a binary assumption that whatever Russia wants is bad and therefore the US should do the opposite would be nuts.

The Ukraine situation is complicated. I have little idea of what we can expect the situation in Crimea to look like in 10 or 20 years. But because it is complicated, having an erratic, uninformed, bad negotiator like Trump calling the shots on the American side right now can't be the best thing. But neither is unnecessarily feeding the military conflict with arms sales.

That Trump and #MoscowMitch have blocked common sense efforts to make it harder for Russia to once again interfere in our elections is of course another remarkable gift to Putin. https://t.co/hecqwIwIuL

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) September 12, 2019

Yeah, the Republicans are covering for Trump on the Mueller report on related matters. And McConnell is blocking election security measures because he is fine with Putin's government helping the Republican campaign even in illegal ways. But it's also because much of the election security measures required to block foreign interference would also block domestic Republican voter supression and other voting mischief. And that is such a central feature of Republcians strategy nationally that I would think it outweighs any hopes for Russian help in McConnell's and other Republicans' minds.

12/New developments, thread update.

Trump backs off military confrontation with Putin-aligned Iran, softens US position even though the Saudis "pay cash." Backing away fr military engagement consistent w/recent alignment of US interests w/Russia. https://t.co/DBc4RCSBE3

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) September 18, 2019

Saudi Arabia is a very troublesome ally, though Trump obviously likes them. But the apparent assumption backing off military aggression against Iran is evidence of a Russian plot is a gigantic assumption.

And it doesn't quite make sense. Iran does have good relations with Russia, and I assume that Kremlin policymakers don't want to US to invade Iran. But would a disastrous US war in Iran weaken Russia's overall geostratigic position? Like the way our invasion of Iraq weakened Iran's position? (NOT!)

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.

Nuclear 2019

Ploughshares President Joe Cirincione writes about how The Biggest Nuclear Threats of 2018 Will Follow Us into the New Year DefenseOne 12/29/2018. And are on track to get worse.

He opens with this:

The New Nuclear Arms Race is the clear winner as the greatest global nuclear threat of 2018. Each of the nine nuclear-armed states is building new weapons and the United States, instead of strengthening the global nuclear safety net, is actively shredding it.

In March, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced five new nuclear weapons he said Russia was building in response to the U.S. decision to abrogate the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. All are designed to circumvent defenses. Russia has also deployed a small number of ground-based cruise missiles whose range exceed that permitted by the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty that President Ronald Reagan negotiated. In October, President Donald Trump said he would pull out of this arms elimination pact, despite the objections of NATO allies.

Destruction of the INF Treaty is likely a prelude to allowing the New START treaty to die. This pact, negotiated by President Barack Obama, limits long-range strategic forces. If both go, it will be the first time since 1972 that U.S. and Russian nuclear forces have been completely unconstrained.

“The untimely death of these two agreements would add fuel to a new arms race and further undermine stability and predictability between Washington and Moscow,” warned former National Security Council senior director Jon Wolfsthal. [my emphasis]

In the narrow sense, any one country could view it in their national interest to modernize and expand their own nuclear arsenal. But that only works if all the other nuclear powers do not do so. In practice, it leads to further nuclear arms competition and increases the risks of nuclear war for all parties involved.

The prospect for a country newly acquiring nuclear weapons is somewhat different. Nuclear nonproliferation has been based on the idea that non-nuclear powers would not acquire such weapons. And, in return, the existing nuclear powers would not only show restraint but move forward with overall disarmament. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was first signed 50 years ago, in 2018.

But here, the two main nuclear powers, the US and Russia, have behaved irresponsibly. Iraq gave up their programs to develop nuclear weawpons and other "weapons of mass destruction," i.e., biological and chemical. Afterward, the US with its "coaliton of the willing" invaded Iraq in 2003 and overthrew the Saddam Hussein government that made those decisions and Saddam himself was captured and executed. And Iraq was thrown into a civil war and longterm instability.

Muammar Gaddafi's government in Libya also agreed to give up their "WMD" programs in 2003. The Cheney-Bush Administration kept the agreement confidential until after the invasion of Iraq so they could use the announcement for propaganda purposes to claim their toughness toward Iraq intimidated other countries into backing off WMD programs. The Obama Administration in 2011 along with France and Britain intervened militarily in Libya to overthrow Gaddafi's government. Gaddafi himself was anally raped with a bayonet and murdered by a mob.

The Soviet Union had nuclear weapons stationed not only in Russia but in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. All three of the latter agreed to give up the nukes stationed there, which had become their own sovereign territory once they became institution. Mariana Budjeryn reports in Ukraine and the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Wilson Center 10/15/2018:

A successor of the former Soviet Union, Ukraine acceded to the NPT as a non-nuclear weapons state in December 1994. This meant not only relinquishing the right to develop nuclear weapons in the future, but also physically dismantling and removing the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal that Ukraine had inherited from the Soviet Union: 1,240 nuclear warheads arming 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) including their extensive launch control infrastructure, 700 nuclear cruise missiles arming 44 strategic bombers, and nearly 3,000 tactical nuclear weapons, including artillery shells, gravity bombs, and mines.

While Ukraine lacked key elements of a fully-fledged nuclear weapons program, and Moscow retained operational control over the ICBMs in Ukrainian territory, recent research reveals that, due to the inherited defense industry and technological expertise, Ukraine had a much greater capacity to establish independent control over these weapons systems than has been previously assumed.

Ukraine’s ultimate decision to forgo nuclear weapons and join the NPT was a great boost for the nonproliferation regime ... [my emphasis]

And, of course, in 2014 Russia sent troops into Ukraine to establish two separate enclaves on Ukraineian territory, Donetsk and Luhansk, and annexed the Ukrainian territory of the Crimea in blatant violation of international law.

The lesson for all countries in the world is pretty straightforward. If you have nuclear weapons, it gives you a powerful deterrent from being invaded by powers like the US or the Soviet Union. If you give them up, neither the US nor Russia will refrain from invading your country.

This is bad, bad policy for both the US and Russia. And for the rest of the world, too.

Nuclear arms control is in the interest of the whole world. And the United States and Russia have a majority of the world's nuclear weapons. Those two countries have to work together to reduce this menace to themselves and the world. And that is the case even when they are adversaries in many other ways. It's a serious responsibility for both countries and for all political parties in both countries.