The Demand for Obedience, and Reverence for Authority: The Lifelong Flight from Responsibility and Judgment (I)

Introduction: A Valuable Opportunity

In one of those happy accidents occasionally encountered during the examination of complex issues over a period of years, a new article provides me a remarkable opportunity. The article offers a distilled example of certain analytic failures I've discussed a number of times. But that is only on the first and most superficial level of consideration.

Below the surface, the article reveals the operation of mechanisms of denial that I've also examined in the past. These mechanisms can be detected in the commentary offered by almost every contemporary writer, among well-known and prominent writers and also in the remarks of relatively obscure bloggers.

An extended analysis of these issues will allow me to trace the ways in which the mechanisms of denial work, and how they result in the more obvious analytic failures. In addition to reviewing some observations I've already made and showing, in connection with a new and unusually revealing example, how they operate, I will provide further (occasionally extensive) information I've long planned to write about.

The article to which I refer may represent a surprising choice to many people, even to some regular readers here. It's by Andrew Bacevich: "Non-Believer." Bacevich is commonly regarded as a strong critic of America's aggressively interventionist foreign policy. Not surprisingly, his new piece has already been widely linked by many of those who are "antiwar," usually with enthusiastic approval for his views. I myself have linked Bacevich's writing on several past occasions. While preparing these new posts of mine, and in reviewing some of Bacevich's earlier essays (including a few I hadn't read before), I realized that I was in error in praising Bacevich to the extent I did. But then, my own understanding of these issues has increased considerably in the last several years.

You can review for yourself the earlier posts in which I cited Bacevich. I was interested, and gratified, to see that even in the past I strongly criticized Bacevich for one particular error. In describing U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Bacevich wrote: "We deluded ourselves into thinking that we were defending freedom against totalitarianism. In fact, we had blundered into a civil war." I dealt with this egregious and immensely destructive error in some detail in the P.S. to an earlier entry. In part, I wrote:

I greatly respect Bacevich's work in general, but I must offer a corrective to his statement that, "we had blundered into a civil war." The United States "blundered" into precisely nothing, not in Vietnam and not anywhere else.

Although Bacevich comes at these issues from a very different perspective, and despite the fact that the totality of Bacevich's writing commands admiration and praise, while Irving Kristol deserves only severe condemnation, Bacevich's error comes far too close for comfort to that committed by Kristol for the worst of motives. Almost exactly four years ago, in August 2003, I discussed Kristol's "neoconservative manifesto," in an essay titled, "In Service of the New Fascism." In analyzing what is probably Kristol's very worst lie among many hideous lies, I wrote...

And here is the conclusion of that postscript of mine:

When we come upon a murderer covered with the blood of victims who never threatened him, we do not defend him by appealing to his "good intentions" or by claiming that "he meant well" -- at least, we do not if we seek to remain civilized.

In terms of its foreign policy of aggressive, ceaseless, violent interventionism, the United States has been a murderer of this kind on the world stage for over a century. And our ruling class continues to state repeatedly, in a manner demanding that we credit the assertions, that their infernal and bloody work is far from done.

The nature of this error -- what gives rise to it, and what it implies -- should have made me much warier of Bacevich in general. As we will see, this error, together with several related ones, has now been further revealed with a vengeance. And the issue of "good intentions" is especially prominent in Bacevich's new article.

In fact, the lie of "good intentions" is the first error in a list I made for myself of some of the major underlying errors contained in Bacevich's article. I will be returning to this list and discussing each element in detail. But it might be helpful if I set out this very short summary in advance.

In the analytic framework I'm employing, these are separate from other errors that can be detected on a more superficial level of analysis (see directly below for a discussion of those). These are the deeper mistakes, the ones that arise from patterns of thought that are driven into all of us very early in life. After each one, I've included a few passages from Bacevich's article that indicate the underlying error:

1. The lie of "good intentions" (that Bush was "a well-intentioned fool," that Obama "wants nothing more than to rid himself of his war [in Afghanistan]" -- indeed, the entire framework within which Bacevich evaluates both Bush and Obama, notably including the judgments he will not make)

2. Imagining psychological explanations and/or justifications in the absence of or contrary to available evidence (see the specifics for item 1 above, and all the other comments about Bush and Obama, e.g.: "Bush himself remained certain that his intentions were pure and the nation’s cause righteous"; Obama "would govern differently not only because he was smarter than his predecessor but because he responded to a different—and truer—inner compass"; that Afghanistan is a "cause in which [Obama] manifestly does not believe and yet refuses to forsake"; and so on)

3. Erroneously believing, and despite massive evidence that compels a very different conclusion, that one's own values are universally recognized and accepted, and therefore judging "fools," "incompetence," "failure" and the like by the wrong standard (again, that Bush is "a well-intentioned fool," and that the "hallmark" of the Bush administration was "[r]ecklessness compounded by profound incompetence"; the remarks about Obama noted above)

4. Being unable or refusing to grasp and identify profoundly destructive and even evil behavior for what it is. That is: being unable or refusing to name evil as evil.

I'll be adding to this list as we proceed through this discussion. There are more related errors, as well as a number of significant effects of these errors, some of which are especially awful. But I'll defer a more detailed list to later in this series.

The fourth item is the bedrock upon which Bacevich's article rests; this is the foundation for everything else, one which is constantly reinforced by the related errors (all of which will hopefully become clearer as I move through these essays). These issues announce themselves repeatedly throughout Bacevich's article. As I indicated, Bacevich's article is an almost perfect representation of how these mechanisms work and how each of them informs and strengthens the others. The ultimate source of all of them is identified in my title for this series: the demand for obedience and the reverence for authority that is instilled in us from the time we are very young children. For most people, these twin commandments result in a lifelong flight from truth, responsibility and judgment, both in their view of themselves and in their view of others.

Before I examine the underlying mechanisms in detail, I first want to discuss the comparatively superficial errors (and sometimes worse) in Bacevich's piece. Although these errors can be appreciated on their own, consistent correction of them requires that we understand their origins. This is a task very few people choose to undertake. Thus, the errors persist and appear to be unalterable.

The Numerous Errors on the First Level of Analysis

Given my own values, always starting with the sacred value of a single human life, I am compelled to begin with what I find to be the most profoundly offensive, even nauseating, error in Bacevich's remarks. You'll find it in this passage:

Bush’s Freedom Agenda ended in abject failure—no liberalizing tide has swept the Islamic world. The promised Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the evidence linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda never materialized. Implementing the heinous Bush Doctrine of preventive war in Iraq yielded an insurgency that sent millions fleeing to squalid refugee camps. As a direct result, thousands of American soldiers were killed and many thousands more maimed or otherwise deeply scarred.

In the last sentence, "many thousands more" refers only to more "American soldiers," the earlier referent. What about the devastation to Iraq itself and to Iraqis? Bacevich mentions "an insurgency that sent millions fleeing to squalid refugee camps." That is more than many people will acknowledge even today -- but it falls far short of what conscience and decency demand.

Given the overt, blatant criminality of the U.S.'s war of aggression, it is incumbent upon any commentator to first acknowledge the vast number of people murdered as the result of the U.S. invasion and occupation. The innocent and now dead victims of the U.S.'s criminal actions may credibly number in excess of one million people. In an article I wrote almost three years ago, I cited one study which concluded:

Given that from the 2005 census there are a total of 4,050,597 households this data suggests a total of 1,220,580 deaths since the invasion in 2003. Calculating the effect from the margin of error we believe that the range is a minimum of 733,158 to a maximum of 1,446,063.

In the same essay, "Let's Make It About You: Can We Stop the Slaughter Now?," I went on to observe:

In a country that remained civilized to any significant degree, this would be the primary subject of discussion, particularly when that country itself had caused such devastation for no legitimate reason whatsoever.

...

Since Americans' narcissism is so all-encompassing, and because the superior value of American lives and goals as compared to those of all other peoples is regarded as an axiom never to be questioned, let's put these horrors in terms that Americans might understand. Let's make it about you.

For ease of computation, we'll use approximate figures. Assume the U.S.'s war crimes have resulted in one million deaths. That is roughly 1/26 of the total Iraqi population. An equivalent number of American deaths would be 11.5 million people. 3,000 Americans were murdered on 9/11. In terms of casualties, 11.5 million deaths represent 3,800 9/11s -- or a 9/11 every day for ten and a half years.

Let me repeat that: a 9/11 every day for ten and a half years.

Perhaps you think these casualty figures are highly inflated. Fine. Cut them in half. That's a 9/11 every day for a little over five years.

Every day.

Do you begin to understand now? Add to this the refugee crisis, which has displaced about four million Iraqis -- which would be 45 million Americans. Add to that the fact that all forms of civil society have been completely destroyed: you have electricity for a few hours a day at most; employment and food are close to impossible to find for many people; there is nothing approaching a normally functioning school system, or legal system, or any of the other aspects of life that Americans take for granted, assuming they could never be destroyed. How well do you think American society would be functioning if a 9/11 occurred every day for five years -- or ten years?

And neither you nor anyone you know can shop for food, go to work, or do anything else at all without fearing you will be murdered -- or that you will be kidnapped and tortured in ways that may cause you to wish for death.

I offer this extended excerpt from the earlier article to emphasize the extent of the denial involved. Bacevich mentions the refugee crisis, but nowhere does he mention the vast number of people murdered as the result of the U.S.'s actions. That the U.S. "sent millions fleeing to squalid refugee camps" is certainly an unforgivable horror -- but it is only the beginning of a lengthy list of horrors, and not the worst of them. Yet Bacevich is regarded as a serious, committed critic of U.S. foreign policy.

Consider that, throughout Bacevich's article, he will criticize particular leaders and certain policies, but all his criticisms are narrowly circumscribed (Bush is "a well-intentioned fool," Obama doesn't actually want to direct the American Empire on its trajectory of death and destruction, etc.). The leaders don't mean for death, chaos and destruction to result from their actions. They intend for only good to result, but they fail because of stupidity or "incompetence," or because they feel constrained by factors beyond their control. Bacevich will not entertain the possibility that the fault lies within the leaders themselves or in the nature of the system itself. And note how eagerly and with what determination over a lengthy period of years these leaders sought to exercise ultimate power and control within that system. To borrow from myself and part of what I wrote about Irving Kristol's reprehensible efforts to destroy the very concepts of responsibility and judgment in the realm of U.S. foreign policy: it's not as if power was mysteriously foisted upon either Bush or Obama while they were happily minding their own business elsewhere. Both men were notably focused and intent upon achieving ultimate power over a long period of time; given the policies of both, we can say, with full justification, they were viciously intent upon attaining and wielding ultimate power.

To mention almost none of this, however briefly, is denial and resistance on a vast scale. Later in this series, I'll return to the factors that lead to these mechanisms, as well as a consideration of why they are usually impossible to dislodge.

We should also appreciate that Bacevich's typically American narcissism with regard to Iraq -- I underscore again the horrifying varieties of destruction in Iraq that Bacevich does not mention -- is repeated in his criticism of the Afghanistan war. Bacevich's focus is solely upon "young soldiers and their families left to bear the consequences" -- that is, young American soldiers and their families, which Bacevich repeats in his final line: "the commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause in which he manifestly does not believe..."

I well understand that this makes me crazy and extreme, but may I be so bold as to mention the ongoing destruction of Afghanistan caused by the United States -- destruction which is as sure and systematic as the destruction of Iraq -- and the mounting toll of dead and grievously injured Afghans? This brings me to another of Bacevich's errors, still restricting ourselves to the superficial level of analysis.

Bacevich follows his description of what he and many others expected of Obama -- "He would govern differently not only because he was smarter than his predecessor but because he responded to a different—and truer—inner compass" (I'll address this stupefying earlier error shortly) -- with this:

Events have demolished such expectations. Today, when they look at Washington, Americans see a cool, dispassionate, calculating president whose administration lacks a moral core. For prosecution exhibit number one, we need look no further than the meandering course of Obama’s war, its casualties and costs mounting without discernible purpose.

If you wish to identify "prosecution exhibit number one," the Afghanistan war, as horrifying as it is, is a curious choice. A singularly awful fact about Obama and his administration has emerged and been reinforced numerous times in the last several months. If any fact is of primary and fundamental importance, it is this one, for it subsumes all the others. This is how I recently described it:

Item: Obama and his administration claim the "right" to murder anyone in the world, wherever he or she may be, for whatever reason they choose -- or for no reason at all. Obama and his administration recognize no upper limit to the number of people they can murder in this manner: they can murder as many people as they wish. And they claim there is nothing at all that may impede their exercise of this "right."

This is the game entire. Understand this: once Obama and his administration have claimed this, there is nothing left to argue about. They can murder you -- and they can murder anyone else at all. What in the name of anything you hold holy remains to be "debated" once a vile, damnable "right" of this kind has been claimed?

This is a war crime [under the Nuremberg Principles]: "murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave-labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory..."

It is also a crime against humanity: "Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhuman acts done against any civilian population..."

Under Principle VII, all those who are complicit in these crimes are also guilty.

Since the Obama administration claims the "right" to murder anyone in the world and that there is nothing at all that may constrain that "right," murdering every Afghan, or every Iranian, or every American who disagrees is, in logic and in fact, in the nature of a postscript. "We can murder anyone at all, and as many people as we decide is advisable or necessary. And we never need to explain our reasons to anyone." The evil has been committed. It is complete. The rest is multiplication.

And even this is not the end of the comparatively superficial errors. Next, we will turn to an examination of Obama and his policies, and of Afghanistan in particular. Many people continue to profess astonishment at the U.S. presence in that country ("Why, oh why, are we in Afghanistan?"), thereby confessing a suffocating ignorance and lack of understanding of U.S. foreign policy over many decades, and this despite an unending stream of public pronouncements as to U.S. aims, as well as a stunning inability to appreciate what is starkly obvious.

Or, rather, what would be starkly obvious -- if it were not for the denial and resistance. Bacevich, like most others, insists that the "casualties and costs" of the Afghanistan war are "mounting without discernible purpose." "Without discernible purpose"? This is absolutely, unequivocally, comprehensively wrong.

I'll explain why next time. And the explanation I have in mind is probably not what some of you may be thinking.

The "Isolationist" Smear, and the Lie of "Good Intentions" Once Again

Just the other day, I discussed in some detail how the advocates of our current foreign policy have been busily channeling Woodrow Wilson, whose disastrous war to spread "democracy" and whose "ideals" inevitably led to a series of worldwide disasters. In an excellent op-ed piece in the LA Times, Andrew Bacevich (author of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War) addresses some of these same points.

Bacevich begins by noting that Bush's State of the Union address "bulged with ominous references to ostensibly resurgent isolationists" who would have America retreat within its own borders, and abandon "an assaulted world to fend for itself." He then points out entirely correctly that using "isolationism" in this manner is nothing more than a smear designed to forestall all debate:

But who exactly are these isolationists eager to pull up the drawbridges? What party do they control? What influential journals of opinion do they publish? Who are their leaders? Which foundations bankroll this isolationist cause?

The president provided no such details, and for good reason: They do not exist. Indeed, in present-day American politics, isolationism does not exist. It is a fiction, a fabrication and a smear imported from another era.

Isolationism survives in contemporary American political discourse because it retains utility as a cheap device employed to impose discipline. Think of it as akin to red-baiting — conjuring up bogus fears to enforce conformity in the realm of foreign policy. In that regard, the beleaguered Bush, his standing in public opinion polls tumbling, is by no means the first president to sound the alarm about supposed isolationists subverting American statecraft.

This is a critical point that far too many people do not appreciate. Throwing the term "isolationism" around in the manner Bush and many hawks do has one purpose above all: to intimidate all those who seriously challenge Bush's foreign policy, and hopefully to shut them up. As Bacevich points out, there is no one of any importance proposing "isolationism" in the manner Bush would have us believe.

And the truth reveals the smear to be still worse: even someone with views like mine -- someone who opposes the aggressively interventionist foreign policy the U.S. has followed for over a century -- does not endorse "isolationism." I am in favor of genuine free trade with all countries (which I emphasize is vastly different from the kind of "free trade" favored by Bush and his cronies, which only works to the advantage of those corporations and individuals with powerful connections to the neofascist corporate statism which the U.S. embodies today) and open immigration. How in the world can that be construed as "isolationism"? It can't, except in the minds of the propagandists eager to shut down all debate and all questioning directed at them and their failures, which become more tragically obvious by the day.

Bacevich then addresses the actual questions -- the issues that demand a genuinely serious debate, which is precisely what the propagandists will do anything to avoid:

The problem is that scaremongering about nonexistent isolationists preempts a much-needed debate over the principles that ought to inform our behavior as a world power. Call that debate George Washington versus Woodrow Wilson.

After 9/11, Bush the born-again Christian became a born-again Wilsonian, embracing the American mission of spreading liberty around the world. In his State of the Union address, the president affirmed his commitment to that mission, vowing that his administration will "act boldly in freedom's cause" and "seek the end of tyranny in our world."

The Wilsonian project derives from two convictions: that history has an identifiable direction and purpose, and that providence calls upon Americans to fulfill that purpose, which is the triumph of liberty. On Tuesday, the president reaffirmed his adherence to those convictions, declaring, "we accept the call of history to deliver the oppressed."

Responding to these calls from above, Wilsonians tend to neglect mundane details about feasibility. Wilson had no patience with the idea of limits, and neither do his disciples. Thus Bush asserts that there is nothing a righteous America acting in pursuit of a righteous cause cannot accomplish. One will search Bush's speech in vain for any doubts regarding American omnipotence.

It was Bush channeling Wilson that landed us in Iraq. Even today, many Americans agree with the president's view of the U.S. invasion as an act of liberation, although many others view the war as patently misguided and morally unjustifiable. What can hardly be denied is that it has exacted enormous, unsustainable costs.

Thus you can see how Bush's "Wilsonian project," with its tragically misguided notion that "history has an identifiable direction and purpose, and that providence calls upon Americans to fulfill that purpose," corresponds exactly with Chris Hedges' description of the "mythic reality" of war that has taken over our national discourse, and which I recently excerpted:

By turning history into myth we transform random events into a chain of events directed by a will greater than our own, one that is determined and preordained. We are elevated above the multitude. We march toward nobility. And no society is immune.

As I noted in a followup post about "The Price of Empire" and as Hedges also emphasizes, this mythic view of history permits Bush and his supporters to ignore all questions of "feasibility" as Bacevich notes, as well as all the particular, human costs of their calamitous policies. And I repeat my warning from that followup entry: if you still give Bush credit for his "good intentions" and insist that he "meant well," you allow the illusion to continue. In this manner, you permit the myth to persist.

Even if we were to set aside the blatant contradiction contained in the policy itself, there is no evidence in history -- no evidence anywhere -- to support the idea that "democracy" can be successfully imposed by military force. (I have often referred in past discussions of this point to a wonderful Ken Jowitt article, which explains why Japan and Germany after World War II are not counterexamples on this point. Both those countries were significantly different from any nation in the Middle East in ways that make their experience completely inapplicable to current events.) There is nothing "good" or "idealistic" about invading a country that was no threat to us, and then occupying it for endless years. There is nothing "good" or "idealistic" about pursuing a policy that leads to the deaths of thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis, and that injures countless additional tens of thousands of people. And there is nothing "good" or "idealistic" about a policy that serves only to empower Iran and to destabilize the Middle East and the world even further.

Until a sufficient number of people are prepared to jettison entirely the extraordinarily dangerous notion of "good intentions" as a camouflage for policies that spread disaster in every direction, the myth will endure. And none of us will be safe.

Insipid, Pretentious, Poorly Written, Incoherent, Meretricious, Wrongheaded and Fraudulent

My, my. Dear me. Who on earth could deserve such criticism? Peter Beinart, that's who:

The Good Fight began life as an essay that appeared in The New Republic when Beinart edited that magazine. According to press reports, he received a handsome $600,000 advance to expand his essay into a book. The result can only be called a major disappointment: The Good Fight is insipid, pretentious and poorly written. At points it verges on incoherence. As history, it is meretricious. As policy prescription, it is wrongheaded. Beinart has perpetrated his fraud twice over.

I haven't read Beinart's book, but I did read his TNR article, which offered the same thesis. And since these broadsides come from a man whose writing and analysis I greatly respect, I'm perfectly prepared to consider his criticisms entirely valid for the moment.

That is the concluding paragraph from Andrew Bacevich's review of the Beinart book. Bacevich is the author of a genuinely excellent and valuable work, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War. It is a terrible thing, to witness an amateur poseur, notably ignorant and dishonest in his arguments, subject to thorough examination by one who is a genuine expert in his field and deeply knowledgeable about history and foreign policy. It puts one in mind of Greek tragedy, and the piteous howls of anguish emitted by the horrified members of the audience. Well, it would have that effect if I did not hold Beinart in such very low esteem and view his policy prescriptions as so profoundly dangerous.

I will give Beinart credit for one thing: he understands the importance of the story we choose to tell, and the manner in which we tell it. This is a theme I return to repeatedly. The problem with Beinart, of course, is that his story is flatly wrong. Bacevich provides many examples of Beinart's convenient omissions, and the various ways in which he distorts history to serve his particular purposes. Narratives possess enormous potential for good when they are based on truth and facts. When they are founded on fantasy and our preferred, but fictitious, vision of ourselves, they become nothing more than propaganda -- and all such propaganda leads to only one result: destruction, of ourselves and of large parts of the world, as we see again today.

On the importance of narrative, note the opening of Bacevich's review:

When it comes to foreign policy, the fundamental divide in American politics today is not between left and right but between those who subscribe to the myth of the "American Century" and those who do not. Peter Beinart is a true believer. In his eyes America's purpose today remains precisely what it has always been: to confront and destroy the enemies of freedom at home and abroad. In The Good Fight, he summons liberals to recover their crusading spirit and to "put anti-totalitarianism at the center of their hopes for a better country and a better world." Liberalism must become once again what it was in its heyday: "a fighting faith."

A fighting faith requires "a narrative of national greatness."

God save us from the true believers and the "narrative of national greatness" -- the combination that landed us directly in the catastrophe of Iraq.

You should read the review in its entirety, but this is one passage that I found especially interesting and entertaining:

To legitimate this fraud and to wrap anti-totalitarian liberalism in a mantle of moral superiority, Beinart shanghais Reinhold Niebuhr and subjects the great Protestant theologian to ritual abuse. In essence, he uses Niebuhr much as Jerry Falwell uses Jesus Christ, and just as shamelessly: citing him as an unimpeachable authority and claiming his endorsement, thereby pre-empting any further discussion.

To establish his Niebuhrean credentials, Beinart sprinkles The Good Fight with references to "guilt," "moral fallibility" and "limits." Yet whereas the real Niebuhr's message was a cautionary one, Beinart-channeling-Niebuhr emits portentous exhortations. Like a third-rate stump speech, the results don't necessarily parse, but they do manage to sound awfully important. Thus Beinart lets it be known that "only when America recognizes that it is not inherently good can it become great." Then there's this chin stroker: "America must shed its moral innocence to act meaningfully in the world." Or better still: "America's challenge lies not in recognizing our moral superiority, but in demonstrating it."

The real Niebuhr worried less about Americans demonstrating their moral superiority than about whether they would forgo temptations of moral irresponsibility. But then, the real Niebuhr did not conceive of history as a narrative of national greatness. Rather than bend the past to suit a particular agenda, liberal or otherwise, he viewed it as beyond our understanding and fraught with paradox. "The whole drama of history," he wrote, "is enacted in a frame of meaning too large for human comprehension or management."

No such humility constrains Beinart. He not only comprehends history but insists with all the fervor of William Kristol that the United States has the capacity and duty to manage it. After all, when the first phase of the American Century ended in 1989, it rendered a definitive verdict: "The core reality was that the United States had vanquished its chief ideological competitor and military rival, leaving it in a position of astonishing strength." Victory in the cold war imposed obligations; Americans were called upon to use that strength to carry on the work of liberating humankind. Today, when in Beinart's estimate "U.S. military and economic influence knows few bounds," he believes it is incumbent upon policy-makers to redouble American efforts to spread the blessings of freedom and equality across the Muslim world.

To balance Beinart's platitudes and his narrative of world transformation by military might, Bacevich discusses Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow:

A longtime foreign correspondent with the New York Times, Kinzer does not provide a lot that's new. Relying on secondary sources, Overthrow recycles and repackages material that will be familiar to the historically literate. But by collecting these stories in a single volume, Kinzer performs a useful service. Overthrow makes it abundantly clear that far from being some innovation devised in the aftermath of 9/11, "regime change" has long been a mainstay of American statecraft.

...

Kinzer is especially good at tallying up what he calls the "terrible unintended consequences" that frequently ensue when the United States overthrows a government that has fallen out of Washington's favor. Bush's removal of Saddam Hussein is by no means the first such enterprise to produce something other than the tidy outcome envisioned by its architects. ...

Most instructive of all, however, are the ironic consequences stemming from America's success in ousting the Soviets from Afghanistan. In retrospect, the results of regime change there serve as a sort of cosmic affirmation of Niebuhr's entire worldview. Of Afghanistan in the years following the Soviet withdrawal, truly it can be said, as Niebuhr wrote, "The paths of progress … proved to be more devious and unpredictable than the putative managers of history could understand."

Those, like Peter Beinart, who are gung-ho to wage their war against jihadist terror dare not contemplate present-day Afghanistan too deeply. Their depiction of the war as a contest that pits freedom against totalitarianism becomes plausible only if they ignore the actual history giving rise to the conflict. Much of that history occurred in the period enshrined as the American Century, but precious little of it had anything to do with promoting freedom. As experienced by Muslims, the American Century was marked by imperialism and intervention, manipulation and betrayal, Israel and oil. It goes without saying that in Beinart's account none of these matters qualify as relevant.

As I say, the entire review is well worth your time, and you're likely to learn quite a bit that may be new to you.

And it's entirely delicious.

No One Is So Sure as the Man Who Knows Too Little

Andrew Bacevich writes about "Vietnam's Real Lessons":

Finding the debacle of the Vietnam War a rationale for sustaining the U.S. military presence in Iraq requires considerable imagination. If nothing else, President Bush’s speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars earlier this week revealed a hitherto unsuspected capacity for creativity. Yet as an exercise in historical analysis, his remarks proved to be self-serving and selective.

For years, the Bush administration has rejected all comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam. Now the president cites Vietnam to bolster his insistence on "seeing the Iraqis through as they build their democracy." To do otherwise, he says, will invite a recurrence of the events that followed the fall of Saigon, when "millions of innocent citizens" were murdered, imprisoned or forced to flee.

...

As the balance of the president’s VFW address makes clear, Bush remains oblivious to the history that actually matters.

Here are a few of the lessons that he overlooks.

In unconventional wars, body counts don’t really count. ...

[Bush's] speech had him sounding like President Lyndon Johnson, bragging that, in each month since January, U.S. troops in Iraq have "killed or captured an average of more than 1,500 Al Qaeda terrorists and other extremists." If Bush thinks that by racking up big body counts the so-called surge will reverse the course of the war, he is deceiving himself. The real question is not how many bad guys we are killing, but how many our continued presence in Iraq is creating.

There’s no substitute for legitimacy. ...

As a lens for strategic analysis, ideology distorts rather than clarifies. From Dwight D. Eisenhower through Richard M. Nixon, a parade of presidents convinced themselves that defending South Vietnam qualified as a vital U.S. interest. For the free world, a communist takeover of that country would imply an unacceptable defeat.

Yet when South Vietnam did fall, the strategic effect proved to be limited. The falling dominoes never did pose a threat to our shores for one simple reason: The communists of North Vietnam were less interested in promoting world revolution than in unifying their country under socialist rule. We deluded ourselves into thinking that we were defending freedom against totalitarianism. In fact, we had blundered into a civil war. [That last sentence contains a notably dangerous error; see the P.S. below.]

With regard to Iraq, Bush persists in making an analogous error. In his remarks to the VFW, the president described Iraq as an "ideological struggle." Our adversary there aims to crush "freedom, tolerance and dissent," he said, thereby "imposing this ideology across a vital region of the world." If we don’t fight them "there," we will surely have to fight them "here."

...

[T]o imagine that Bin Laden and others of his ilk have the capability to control the Middle East, restoring the so-called Caliphate, is absurd, as silly as the vaunted domino theory of the 1950s and 1960s.

...

Sometimes people can manage their own affairs.

In an essay I wrote in February of last year, "Folly Marches On -- and Seeking a New Direction," I offered the following excerpt from Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly. Bush's invocation of the Vietnam debacle, which is perfect only in the sense that he made the comparison for all those reasons that are supremely wrong, compels me to offer Tuchman's observations once more:

Like Kennedy, Johnson believed that to lose South Vietnam would be to lose the White House. It would mean a destructive debate, he was later to say, that would "shatter my Presidency, kill my Administration, and damage our democracy." The loss of China, he said, which had led to the rise of Joe McCarthy, was "chickenshit compared with what might happen if we lost Vietnam." Robert Kennedy would be out in front telling everyone that "I was a coward, an unmanly man, a man without a spine." Worse, as soon as United States weakness was perceived by Moscow and Peking, they would move to "expand their control over the vacuum of power we would leave behind us ... and so would begin World War III." He was as sure of this "as nearly as anyone can be certain of anything." No one is so sure of his premises as the man who knows too little.

The purpose of the war was not gain or national defense. It would have been a simpler matter had it been either, for it is easier to finish a war by conquest of territory or by destruction of the enemy's forces and resources than it is to establish a principle by superior force and call it victory. America's purpose was to demonstrate her intent and her capacity to stop Communism in a framework of preserving an artificially created, inadequately motivated and not very viable state. The nature of the society we were upholding was an inherent flaw in the case, and despite all efforts at "nation-building," it did not essentially change.

In the illusion of omnipotence, American policy-makers took it for granted that on a given aim, especially in Asia, American will could be made to prevail. This assumption came from the can-do character of a self-created nation and from the sense of competence and superpower derived from World War II. If this was "arrogance of power," in Senator Fulbright's phrase, it was not so much the fatal hubris and over-extension that defeated Athens and Napoleon, and in the 20th century Germany and Japan, as it was failure to understand that problems and conflicts exist among other peoples that are not soluble by the application of American force or American techniques or even American goodwill. "Nation-building" was the most presumptuous of the illusions. Settlers of the North American continent had built a nation from Plymouth Rock to Valley Forge to the fulfilled frontier, yet failed to learn from their success that elsewhere, too, only the inhabitants can make the process work.

Wooden-headedness, the "Don't-confuse-me-with-the-facts" habit, is a universal folly never more conspicuous than at upper levels of Washington with respect to Vietnam. Its grossest fault was underestimation of North Vietnam's commitment to its goal. Enemy motivation was a missing element in American calculations, and Washington could therefore ignore all the evidence of nationalist fervor and of the passion for independence which as early as 1945 Hanoi had declared "no human force can any longer restrain." Washington could ignore General Leclerc's prediction that conquest would take half a million men and "Even then it could not be done." It could ignore the demonstration of elan and capacity that won victory over a French army with modern weapons at Dien Bien Phu, and all the continuing evidence thereafter.

American refusal to take the enemy's grim will and capacity into account has been explained by those responsible on the ground of ignorance of Vietnam's history, traditions and national character: there were "no experts available," in the words of one high-ranking official. But the longevity of Vietnamese resistance to foreign rule could have been learned from any history book on Indochina. Attentive consultation with French administrators whose official lives had been spent in Vietnam would have made up for the lack of American expertise. Even superficial American acquaintance with the area, when it began to supply reports, provided creditable information. Not ignorance, but refusal to credit the evidence and, more fundamentally, refusal to grant stature and fixed purpose to a "fourth-rate" Asiatic country were the determining factors, much as in the case of the British attitude toward the American colonies. The irony of history is inexorable.

...

Mental standstill or stagnation--the maintenance intact by rulers and policy-makers of the ideas they started with--is fertile ground for folly. ...

In its first stage, mental standstill fixes the principles and boundaries governing a political problem. In the second stage, when dissonances and failing function begin to appear, the initial principles rigidify. This is the period when, if wisdom were operative, re-examination and re-thinking and a change of course are possible, but they are rare as rubies in a backyard. Rigidifying leads to increase of investment and the need to protect egos; policy founded upon error multiplies, never retreats. The greater the investment and the more involved in it the sponsor's ego, the more unacceptable is disengagement. In the third stage, pursuit of failure enlarges the damages until it causes the fall of Troy, the defection from the Papacy, the loss of a trans-Atlantic empire, the classic humiliation in Vietnam.

Persistence in error is the problem. Practitioners of government continue down the wrong road as if in thrall to some Merlin with magic power to direct their steps. There are Merlins in early literature to explain human aberration, but freedom of choice does exist--unless we accept the Freudian unconscious as the new Merlin. Rulers will justify a bad or wrong decision on the ground, as a historian and partisan wrote of John F. Kennedy, that "He had no choice," but no matter how equal two alternatives may appear, there is always freedom of choice to change or desist from a counter-productive course if the policy-maker has the moral courage to exercise it. He is not a fated creature blown by the whims of Homeric gods. Yet to recognize error, to cut losses, to alter course, is the most repugnant option in government.

For a chief of state, admitting error is almost out of the question. The American misfortune in the Vietnam period was to have had Presidents who lacked the self-confidence for the grand withdrawal. We come back again to Burke: "Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom, and a great Empire and little minds go ill together." The test comes in recognizing when persistence in error has become self-damaging. A prince, says Machiavelli, ought always to be a great asker and a patient hearer of truth about those things of which he has inquired, and he should be angry if he finds that anyone has scruples about telling him the truth. What government needs is great askers.

Refusal to draw inference from negative signs, which under the rubric "wooden-headedness" has played so large a part in these pages, was recognized in the most pessimistic work of modern times, George Orwell's 1984, as what the author called "Crimestop." "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments...and of being bored and repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."

In the earlier essay, I went on to write:

This makes clear beyond dispute the nature and persistence of the problem -- and the repeated refusal of political leaders to learn the obvious lesson. And today, it is literally as if none of this had ever happened, and as if no one with the ability to influence our nation's direction has benefitted in the smallest degree from our tragic past errors -- and so we do it all again.

For our political leaders, in terms of the methodology they bring to bear on questions of foreign policy, it is as if the United States is a country without a history. In this respect, they are like the most dangerous of nihilist revolutionaries: they believe they can make the entire world anew, writing on a blank slate. But when you completely disregard the realities of history and culture, when you set aside facts and the complexities of men and the societies they create, you will achieve only what such revolutionaries have always achieved: destruction. Tragically for all of us, and for the world, they have failed to learn that lesson as well.

As I am documenting in "Dominion Over the World," and as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have made absolutely clear in their recent statements about foreign policy, the bipartisan consensus in favor of the United States' global hegemonic role remains in full force and effect. Our governing class is still fully convinced that the United States is and should be the sole "indispensable" nation, that the entire world is properly our domain, and that it is our "right" to intervene wherever and whenever we choose after intoning the magical phrase, magical because it is purposely meaningless and can be twisted to suit any and every circumstance, "a vital U.S. interest." (I made this same argument from a somewhat different vantage point in, "Battling the Ghosts of Vietnam.")

In terms of the lessons the members of our governing class ought to have learned from the neverending series of wars that has continued since the end of the charnel house of World War II, it is as if Vietnam and all the other interventions never happened. It is still as if Iraq itself hasn't happened, and every critical fact about Iraq remains invisible to them. Our ignorance is, indeed, sacred to those who direct our nation's course. Nothing -- and no pile of rotting corpses, no matter how high -- will be allowed to threaten it.

All the death and all the destruction...for nothing. Absolutely nothing. It is not that our governing class knows merely too little. With regard to the most basic lessons they ought to have grasped after all the carnage they unleashed, they know nothing. Thus, we are guaranteed to do it yet again -- against Iran, or Syria, or North Korea, or China, or some nation yet to be designated as the enemy of the moment, an enemy that threatens a "vital national interest" in a way that supposedly cannot be tolerated.

It is tragic beyond measure. It is absurd in a manner that cannot be described. It is eternally unforgivable.

P.S. I greatly respect Bacevich's work in general, but I must offer a corrective to his statement that, "we had blundered into a civil war." The United States "blundered" into precisely nothing, not in Vietnam and not anywhere else.

Although Bacevich comes at these issues from a very different perspective, and despite the fact that the totality of Bacevich's writing commands admiration and praise, while Irving Kristol deserves only severe condemnation, Bacevich's error comes far too close for comfort to that committed by Kristol for the worst of motives. Almost exactly four years ago, in August 2003, I discussed Kristol's "neoconservative manifesto," in an essay titled, "In Service of the New Fascism." In analyzing what is probably Kristol's very worst lie among many hideous lies, I wrote:

The lie contained at the heart of this paragraph is probably the worst and most shameful in the entire article (and the article contains a number of stupendous lies, so this is no mean achievement). To term our involvement in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Kosovo conflict, the Afghan War, and the Iraq War "bad luck" is an intellectual crime for which capital punishment would be too good, and too swift. In this context, "bad luck" has only one possible meaning: that we had no choice but to become involved in these conflicts, that the conflicts were "forced" on us against our will, and that we were merely passive observers in world affairs who became embroiled in one conflict after another, in an unceasing train of war, altogether against our better judgment.

This is a vicious and reprehensible rewriting of history. If I thought Kristol were capable of experiencing the emotion, I would say he ought to be ashamed of himself. Every single one of those wars was one that the United States deliberately and intentionally chose to become involved in after a long period of deliberation. I will be offering some excerpts from Barbara Tuchman's masterful history of the Vietnam War (in her book, The March of Folly) in the near future -- but I would have thought everyone knew that our involvement in Vietnam was the result of an intentional and very deliberate process of decision-making over a very long period of time. It was utterly mistaken and based on what ought to have been obviously dubious premises at almost every single step, but it was hardly a course of action foisted on us when we were simply minding our own business. And the same is true with regard to every other war in Kristol's list.

When we come upon a murderer covered with the blood of victims who never threatened him, we do not defend him by appealing to his "good intentions" or by claiming that "he meant well" -- at least, we do not if we seek to remain civilized.

In terms of its foreign policy of aggressive, ceaseless, violent interventionism, the United States has been a murderer of this kind on the world stage for over a century. And our ruling class continues to state repeatedly, in a manner demanding that we credit the assertions, that their infernal and bloody work is far from done.

How the Foreign Policy Consensus Protects Itself

Andrew Bacevich, author of the enormously valuable The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, writes about the Iraq Study Group and its purposes:

Even as Washington waits with bated breath for the Iraq Study Group (ISG) to release its findings, the rest of us should see this gambit for what it is: an attempt to deflect attention from the larger questions raised by America's failure in Iraq and to shore up the authority of the foreign policy establishment that steered the United States into this quagmire. This ostentatiously bipartisan panel of Wise Men (and one woman) can't really be searching for truth. It is engaged in damage control.

Their purpose is twofold: first, to minimize Iraq's impact on the prevailing foreign policy consensus with its vast ambitions and penchant for armed intervention abroad; and second, to quell any inclination of ordinary citizens to intrude into matters from which they have long been excluded. The ISG is antidemocratic. Its implicit message to Americans is this: We'll handle things - now go back to holiday shopping.

The group's composition gives the game away. Chaired by James Baker, the famed political operative and former secretary of state, and Lee Hamilton, former congressman and fixture on various blue-ribbon commissions, it contains no one who could be even remotely described as entertaining unorthodox opinions or maverick tendencies.

Instead, it consists of Beltway luminaries such as retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and lobbyist Vernon Jordan. No member is now an elected official. Neither do its ranks include any Iraq war veterans, family members of soldiers killed in Iraq, or anyone identified with the antiwar movement. None possesses specialized knowledge of Islam or the Middle East.

Charging this crowd with assessing the Iraq war is like convening a committee of Roman Catholic bishops to investigate the church's clergy sex-abuse scandal. Even without explicit instructions, the group's members know which questions not to ask and which remedies not to advance. Sadly, the average Catholic's traditional deference to the church hierarchy finds its counterpart in the average American's deference to "experts" when it comes to foreign policy. The ISG exemplifies the result: a befuddled, but essentially passive-electorate looks for guidance to a small group of unelected insiders reflecting a narrow range of views and operating largely behind closed doors.

...

The ISG will provide cover for the Bush administration to shift course in Iraq. It will pave the way for the Democratic Congress to endorse that shift in a great show of bipartisanship. But it will hold no one responsible.

Above all, it will leave intact the assumptions, arrangements, and institutions that gave rise to Iraq in the first place. In doing so, it will ensure that the formulation of foreign policy remains the preserve of political mahatmas like Baker and Hamilton, with the American people left to pick up the tab.

In this way, the ISG will make possible - even likely - a repetition of some disaster akin to Iraq at a future date.

All of this is absolutely correct in my view, but at least two critical issues deserve some amplification.

The first issue, one whose importance cannot be overestimated, is the American public's willingness -- indeed, I would argue its eagerness -- to defer to alleged "experts" in the foreign policy field. As I have done several times before, I must turn to Barbara Tuchman's masterful work, The March of Folly, for the explanation of what is wrong with this view:

Acquiescence in Executive war, [Fulbright] wrote, comes from the belief that the government possesses secret information that gives it special insight in determining policy. Not only was this questionable, but major policy decisions turn "not upon available facts but upon judgment," with which policy-makers are no better endowed than the intelligent citizen. Congress and citizens can judge "whether the massive deployment and destruction of their men and wealth seem to serve the overall interests as a nation."

...

The belief that government knows best was voiced just at this time by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who said on resumption of the bombing, "We ought to all support the President. He is the man who has all the information and knowledge of what we are up against." This is a comforting assumption that relieves people from taking a stand. It is usually invalid, especially in foreign affairs. "Foreign policy decisions," concluded Gunnar Myrdal after two decades of study, "are in general much more influenced by irrational motives" than are domestic ones.

I have argued this point many times over the last couple of years, and I remain utterly astonished at how resistant to this incontestable truth most people remain. The resistance can be seen even in the writings of many people who are deeply critical of our invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The source of that resistance is easy enough to understand, even though the failure to acknowledge this truth is gravely and dangerously wrong. We prefer to believe that our leaders act rationally, and that they know what they are doing. Tragically, as the overwhelming debacle of Iraq has again demonstrated, neither of these propositions corresponds to the facts. In the earlier essay, I explained this as follows:

It may indeed be comforting to think that decisions of war and peace are made on the basis of facts, cold, clear logic, and "secret information" (information that is accurate, I hasten to add) -- but history, including our most recent history, does not support that view. We might think that is the correct method that should be utilized in pondering the fates of many thousands of soldiers and innocent civilians -- and indeed, it is the right procedure, if leaders were amenable to being directed solely by facts and what is in their nations' best long-term interests. But if leaders were ultimately moved by such factors, World War I would not have witnessed years of endless slaughter, it would not have lasted as long as it did, and it might not have begun at all. And if our own political and military leaders focused on those factors that ought to serve as their lodestar to the exclusion of all else, we would not have had the nightmare of Vietnam then -- or the nightmare of Iraq now.

Yet the majority of people find the idea that our leaders are capable of acting in wildly irrational and destructive ways too terrifying to contemplate seriously, much less to accept. They prefer to seek relief for their anxiety in the factually indefensible notion that our leaders have understandable and largely plausible reasons for their decisions, even though history proves the contrary time and again, and even when those decisions lead to an incalculable number of deaths and immeasurable destruction. The full truth is just too frightening. While I understand and am sympathetic to that fear, we should not allow it to overcome our judgment, which should be informed by and based upon the historical record.

This brings me to the second issue, which represents the major specific means by which people attempt to allay their fears: their belief that "the government possesses secret information that gives it special insight in determining policy." The way in which this view is most commonly expressed is to say that foreign policy decisions are based on intelligence unknown to the rest of us. If a decision to go to war turns out to have been wrong in retrospect, this view holds that it is because the intelligence was wrong or mispresented.

This is mistaken in two crucial but separate ways, and it is vital to understand both. The first error is the belief that decisions of war and peace are based on intelligence at all. To excerpt myself still one more time, because of the importance of this point:

Once again, I put the major point in bold letters all by itself:

Intelligence is completely irrelevant to major policy decisions. Such decisions are matters of judgment, and knowledgeable, ordinary citizens are just as capable of making these determinations as political leaders allegedly in possession of "secret information." Such "secret information" is almost always wrong -- and major decisions, including those pertaining to war and peace, are made entirely apart from such information in any case.

The second you start arguing about intelligence, you've given the game away once again. This is a game the government and the proponents of war will always win. By now, we all surely know that if they want the intelligence to show that Country X is a "grave" and "growing" threat, they will find it or manufacture it. So once you're debating what the intelligence shows or fails to show, the debate is over. The war will inevitably begin.

...

To repeat: the decision to go to war is one of policy, and the intelligence -- whatever it is alleged to show -- is irrelevant. Don't argue in terms of intelligence at all. If you do, you'll lose. The administration knows that; many of its opponents still haven't figured it out, even now.

Here is a brief excerpt from Gabriel Kolko's The Age of War: The United States Confronts the World, on the same issue -- and note how Kolko's argument parallels that offered by Bacevich:

But collective illusions have characterized the leaders of most nations since time immemorial. They have substituted their desires, ambitions, and interests for accurate estimates of what may occur from their actions. At best, intelligence organizations gather data of tactical rather than strategic utility. An infrastructure of ambitious people exists to reinforce the leaders' preconceptions, in part because they too are socialized to believe what often proves to be illusion. But bearers of bad tidings are, by and large, unwelcome and prevented from reaching the higher ranks of most political orders. It is extremely difficult for nations to behave rationally, which means accepting the limits of their power, and what is called intelligence has to confront the institutional biases and inhibitions of each social system. Thus deductive, symbolic reactions become much more likely, notwithstanding the immense risks of their being wrong. The US war in Iraq and the geopolitical folly of its larger strategy in the Persian Gulf is but one recent example of it.

It is all too rare that states overcome illusions, and the United States is no more an exception than Germany, Italy, England, or France before it. The function of intelligence anywhere is far less to encourage rational behavior--although sometimes that occurs--than to justify a nation's illusions, and it is the false expectations that conventional wisdom encourages that make wars more likely, a pattern that has only increased since the early twentieth century. By and large, US, Soviet, and British strategic intelligence since 1945 has been inaccurate and often misleading, and although it accumulated pieces of information that were useful, the leaders of these nations failed to grasp the inherent dangers of their overall policies. When accurate, such intelligence has been ignored most of the time if there were overriding preconceptions or bureaucratic reasons for doing so.

This is the second common error concerning intelligence, which is the failure to understand its actual uses. As Kolko discusses, intelligence in fact is utilized "to justify a nation's illusions" -- or, in Bacevich's terms, to protect and ensure the continuation of "the prevailing foreign policy consensus with its vast ambitions and penchant for armed intervention abroad."

Intelligence is misused is still another way. Although the Establishment tries to convince the public that its preparations for war came after the relevant intelligence assessments, this reverses the actual order of events. The decision to go to war comes first, and the intelligence that provides supposed justification for the imminent devastation and death comes second. This is, once again, a truth which is far too uncomfortable for most people to acknowledge. As I summarized this issue once before:

To put the point another way: of course the administration "cooked" the intelligence. The intelligence was the propaganda justification for the war, used to sell it to the American public and to the world, which is almost always how intelligence it used (I'm tempted to simply say "always," which is probably the truth) -- and the intelligence was used to justify a decision that had already been made, entirely apart from the intelligence.

I go through this exercise still one additional time because, as Bacevich points out, "the ISG will make possible - even likely - a repetition of some disaster akin to Iraq at a future date." The most likely candidate for a near-term, even more catastrophic identical error is, of course, Iran. The terms in which virtually everyone discusses the possible threat that Iran might represent reveal that none of this framework has been altered to any significant degree. I regret to note that this judgment applies to far too many liberal and progressive bloggers, as well as to the foreign policy establishment.

That basic framework is entirely false. It led to the disastrous U.S. involvement in World War I, to the debacle of Vietnam, and to the catastrophe of Iraq. It has already led to almost a century of worldwide devastation -- and it threatens to lead to still another century of death and chaos reaching around the globe. If the framework is not rejected at its foundation, the scale of devastation and death may finally overwhelm our ability to grasp and comprehend it at all.

See the true nature of the lies, name them for what they are, and refuse to accept any of them. In this manner and only in this manner, at tragically long last, peace might finally have a genuine chance.


Because of the critical nature of these interconnected errors, let me offer these links to some previous essays on this specific topic:

Trapped in the Wrong Paradigm: Three Handy Rules (See Rule 2, in particular.)

The Paradigm that Will Not Die

Undying Myths, and Sullivan's Lies on the Path of Penance

Walking into the Iran Trap: A Decision of Policy -- and the Intelligence Won't Matter

The Irrelevance of Intelligence Again, and Collective Illusions

And Still One More Time: Stop Helping the Warmongers

Same Ball Game, Different Field

I have only a few observations about this completely predictable story in our major state print outlet: "Treasury's Plan Would Give Fed Wide New Power." Wide new power for the government? Say what?? I appreciate that you are entirely stunned.

I first note a priceless comment over at Calculated Risk (I told you that you should be reading that blog), and please note that Calculated Risk's entry offers an earlier headline for the same NYT story -- "Treasury Dept. Seeks New U.S. Power to Keep Markets Stable." The comment:

Achtung! Achtung! writes:

"Duh markets vill remain schtable und dey vill like it! Ve wil send die SCHVAT teams into duh wery korners uf duh industrie und ve vill prevail!"

Mel Brooks has come unto his kingdom. Accept it, deal with it, celebrate it if you wish.

Next, I would like you to consider this. We have all become painfully aware that after the criminal, monumental catastrophe of Iraq, many luminaries have offered us their plans and suggestions as to how we should ensure we never repeat the same error. Of course, these luminaries are all the same exact people who urged, cajoled, intimidated, lied, and bamboozled the United States into Iraq in the first place. Fox, hen house, etc.

I've written about this in many essays. One is especially relevant here: "How the Foreign Policy Consensus Protects Itself." In that piece, I excerpted an article by Andrew Bacevich, who wrote in part:

Even as Washington waits with bated breath for the Iraq Study Group (ISG) to release its findings, the rest of us should see this gambit for what it is: an attempt to deflect attention from the larger questions raised by America's failure in Iraq and to shore up the authority of the foreign policy establishment that steered the United States into this quagmire. This ostentatiously bipartisan panel of Wise Men (and one woman) can't really be searching for truth. It is engaged in damage control.

Their purpose is twofold: first, to minimize Iraq's impact on the prevailing foreign policy consensus with its vast ambitions and penchant for armed intervention abroad; and second, to quell any inclination of ordinary citizens to intrude into matters from which they have long been excluded. The ISG is antidemocratic. Its implicit message to Americans is this: We'll handle things - now go back to holiday shopping.

Change the terminology as required, shift the focus from foreign to domestic intervention, recognize that the same elites that created this crisis are now instructing us all as to how it should be fixed, and you're home free.

And rather than tax your brain trying to untangle the nightmarish details of all the new regulatory schemes now being proposed, many of which will doubtless be enacted and create a host of new problems (which may not explode for a decade or two, but explode they will in time), I suggest the following questions which may get you to the truth of what is happening much faster: As is true in the realm of foreign policy, how are the ruling elites (here, the economic-financial-regulatory elites) trying to protect themselves? How are they attempting to maintain their preexisting fundamental view of how economic activity should be organized and controlled? And: How are they making certain that "ordinary citizens" continue to have no voice at all in those matters that most affect their own lives?

Answer those questions, and I think you will have a much more accurate idea of what is going on. As Bacevich notes: "The [Iraq Study Group] exemplifies the result: a befuddled, but essentially passive-electorate looks for guidance to a small group of unelected insiders reflecting a narrow range of views and operating largely behind closed doors." And as we all now know or certainly should know, the elites' self-appointed "experts" are almost universally wrong.

There. I may have saved you from ten or fifteen excruciating migraines. You're entirely welcome.

Is This Fucking Afghanistan?!?!

A note for all the cheery, optimistic, dumbass types, who are always all like, "Oh, we're so much more advanced today than people were in the past. We're refined and fucking civilized, man!" And at some point, they say something like, "It's not like we burn people at the stake anymore!"

Oops. Burning people alive on national teevee. Fuck yeah, AMERICA!!!!

I'm like really stupid, so these really stupid questions occur to me. There was absolutely no way to take this suspect alive eventually? They couldn't wait him out? I guess maybe they had other important stuff to do -- the kid's high school play, a book club meeting, maybe a department barbecue (har dee har har). And since they're not absolutely sure it's Dorner who was burned alive ... well, um, does that mean maybe they burned someone else alive? Did they determine that no one else was in the cabin? Does anyone care?

Guess that's just collateral damage, huh? Like this:

At least 10 civilians, mostly women and children, have been killed in a Nato air strike in Kunar province in Afghanistan, local officials say.

If you got shot or killed, you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was totally your fault, motherfucker!

For example, what the hell did these women think they were doing?

The two women who were mistakenly shot by LAPD officers searching for triple murder suspect Christopher Dorner Thursday said they had no warning beforehand, the victims' lawyer told CBS Los Angeles.

Attorney Glen Jonas said Maggie Carranza, 47, and her mother, 71-year-old Emma Hernandez, were delivering Los Angeles Times newspapers around 5:15 a.m. in Torrance when the officers opened fire on their vehicle.

Jonas said, "There was no warning. There were no orders. No commands. Just gunshots." ...

"Tragically, we believe this was a case of mistaken identity by the officers," said Beck.

Jonas finds that hard to believe.

"The vehicle is a different color. The license plate doesn't match. There's nothing there for you to start shooting people. And even if they had the person in question... Mr. Dorner...you still have to give them an opportunity to get out. You can't just start administering street justice," said Jonas.

Hey, Mr. Jonas, psst! They burn people alive! Street justice would be a step up.

And this dude -- going surfing?? How fucking irresponsible is that?

David Perdue was on his way to sneak in some surfing before work Thursday morning when police flagged him down. They asked who he was and where he was headed, then sent him on his way.

Seconds later, Perdue's attorney said, a Torrance police cruiser slammed into his pickup and officers opened fire; none of the bullets struck Perdue.

His pickup, police later explained, matched the description of the one belonging to Christopher Jordan Dorner — the ex-cop who has evaded authorities after allegedly killing three and wounding two more. But the pickups were different makes and colors. And Perdue looks nothing like Dorner: He's several inches shorter and about a hundred pounds lighter. And Perdue is white; Dorner is black.

"I don't want to use the word buffoonery but it really is unbridled police lawlessness," said Robert Sheahen, Perdue's attorney. "These people need training and they need restraint."

This reminds me of similar glorious episodes from America's recent past:

In September 2007, an Iraqi in a car ventured too close to a US patrol in Baghdad. The soldiers honked their horns; when that didn't cause the car to turn away, one of the gunners fired a warning shot. The bullet - intended to harmlessly hit the pavement - instead hit a bystander.

Andrew Bacevich, a military historian and retired US army colonel, wrote in 2006 that "such mistakes have occurred routinely, with moral and political consequences that have been too long ignored." That assessment is borne out by the leaked reports, which describe almost 14,000 "escalation of force" incidents – the army's euphemism for often-violent altercations that occurred at checkpoints and near patrols.

About 680 civilians were killed in these incidents between 2004 and 2010, with more than 2,000 wounded. ...

In several incidents – none of them fatal – soldiers fired warning shots at deaf and nearly-blind men who could not see or hear their verbal warnings. Several mentally ill men were killed: In February 2005, for example, US soldiers shot a man in Mahmoudiya when he ran too close to an approaching convoy. They only later learned that he was mentally ill and often begged for food in the area near the convoy's route. ...

At least a half-dozen incidents involved Iraqi men transporting their pregnant wives or family members to hospitals.

But hell, man, all that was like totally the Iraqis' fault. The wunnerful US of A was over here, minding its own goddamn business, and Iraq made us go to war with it! Iraq was there, dude! THIS WILL NOT STAND. Just like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Libya blahblahblah are THERE.

They gotta stop that. Stop being there! Don't make America bring the genocide again!

Like I said, I'm totally stupid, but I think the lesson goes something like this: If you threaten the State itself or interfere with its plans, and especially if you threaten one of the State's armed, militarized branches, the State will go to war, including here at home. I don't mean "go to war" metaphorically. I mean the State will go to war. So I think we know what the response will be if/when there is widespread domestic unrest, when the economy further falls apart, for example. Entire neighborhoods cordoned off, whole blocks incinerated, checkpoints everywhere, people shot for any reason, or for no reason. Oh, yeah: no more fourth amendment for you, either (via). Well, it's not like you were doing anything with it. If you haven't done anything wrong, you don't have anything to hide, etc., etc., etc. And just to be safe, you don't want to be there. Yeah, where you are right now. Don't be there. And don't move. Haha. Gotcha!

Just as the fish rots from the head, the horrors start with the president. Why should Obama be the only one to have a Murder Program? It's only right that every police department should have its own Murder Program. Especially in war time.

What we're now seeing is further proof of an argument I've made for the last several years. It can be stated very briefly:

In addition to pursuing its goal of global hegemony, the United States government uses foreign countries as a lethal laboratory in which to practice the techniques it intends to use domestically, at home within U.S. borders.

Welcome to Afghanistan.

This is just the beginning.

Our Genocidal National Narcissism: We Are the Very, Very "Bad Guys"

Patrick Cockburn:

The cautious words of the Baker-Hamilton report stand in sharp contrast to the savagery and terror that dominate everyday life in Baghdad. Many of the terrible disasters it fears may occur in future are in fact already happening. It states that there is a risk of "a slide towards chaos", but with almost 4,000 Iraqis being killed every month, the chaos is already here.

"Ethnic cleansing could escalate," the report warns but, in reality, it does not have to for Iraq to fragment into three hostile homelands for Sunni, Shia and Kurds. Baghdad and central Iraq has already broken up into heavily armed and hostile Sunni and Shia townships.

Some 170 individuals spoke to the Iraqi Study Group, including Tony Blair, President George Bush, Iraqi leaders and numerous ambassadors and senior officials. But the conclusions of the report at times give the alarming impression that Republicans and Democrats on the panel never really understood Iraqi politics.

The report says: "The United States should work closely with Iraq's leaders to support the achievement of specific objectives - or milestones - on national reconciliation, security and governance." The problem here is that Iraq has already fallen apart as a political entity. Supposedly national institutions such as the police, army and government ministries have been divided up between Shia, Sunni and Kurds.

...

Myths systematically promulgated by US civil and military spokesmen at a thousand press briefings in Baghdad and Washington are quietly dumped by Mr Baker and his group. Again and again, the spokesmen emphasised the role of foreign fighters in the war in Iraq but the report cites US military officials as saying that al-Qa'ida in Iraq is responsible for only a small portion of the violence. It says there are only 1,300 foreign fighters in the country. It notes that the Mehdi Army of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr numbers at least 60,000 men.

There is a further blind spot in the report. The US is in part responsible for the weakness of the Iraqi government. It never wanted an Iraqi administration dominated by the Shia parties with possible sympathies with the regime in Tehran. Such an outcome was a political nightmare for Washington. The US helped create a political system in which each community can paralyse united action. It has also tried to split the Shia alliance which won the most votes in the two elections in 2005.

On that last point, that the U.S. itself "is in part responsible for the weakness of the Iraqi government," see this earlier post, "A Genuine Mission Impossible," which excerpts another Cockburn column.

And with regard to the issue that the members of the Iraq Study Group "never really understood Iraqi politics," I wrote the following only two months ago (and this essay also relied on Cockburn's enormously valuable reporting):

From the Philippines, through Vietnam, through Central America, through numerous other interventions (acknowledged and covert), through Iraq -- it's the same theme, repeated with endless variations. We never learn -- and we pride ourselves on the fact that we are not obliged to learn. We are unique and "exceptional." Everyone wants what only we have. It is our "right" to bring the rest of the world into line with our goals and desires, using military force as required.

And then we wonder why chaos, destruction and death follow in our wake.

I obviously have a very high opinion of Cockburn's writing and his invaluable perceptiveness. So it is with considerable surprise that I must disagree with the concluding paragraph of his latest piece:

In terms of domestic Iraqi politics, the most positive aspect of the report is that it exposes the hollowness of claims by the White House and Downing Street that victory in Iraq is still feasible and it is all a matter of staying the course.

I wish it were true that these "claims" (aka "lies") were "exposed" -- but it is not. I recently discussed the ultimate purpose of the Iraq Study Group's work and recommendations, which is primarily to protect the foreign policy status quo -- a status quo that encompasses both Republicans and Democrats. I will have considerably more on that soon. And I quoted Andrew Bacevich on this very point:

[The ISG's members'] purpose is twofold: first, to minimize Iraq's impact on the prevailing foreign policy consensus with its vast ambitions and penchant for armed intervention abroad; and second, to quell any inclination of ordinary citizens to intrude into matters from which they have long been excluded. The ISG is antidemocratic. Its implicit message to Americans is this: We'll handle things - now go back to holiday shopping.

In fact, all the ISG recommends is that we "stay the course" -- and the newly-empowered Washington Democrats have already made it clear they will do absolutely nothing to change our direction in any manner that actually might affect events. In the near future, I will offer further thoughts on that as well.

The most critical element of the status quo that remains unchallenged is our alleged "idealism," the notion that we act out of the best of motives and that we "meant well." Most Americans refuse to seriously consider the idea that Iraq represented no serious threat to us whatsoever, and that our leaders knew it. If you doubt that point at all, I recommend you read this wonderfully argued Jacob Hornberger column: "They Lied About the Reasons for Going to War." You should read the entire article; here are Hornberger's concluding paragraphs:

Defenders of the war might argue, "By relying on faulty intelligence, the president and vice president just made an honest mistake, and therefore, U.S. officials are not morally responsible for the massive death and destruction in Iraq." But that’s just not true: even if the WMD intelligence reports had been faulty, the circumstantial evidence overwhelmingly establishes that President Bush and Vice President Cheney and their associates were being dishonest with respect to the real reason they were sending the nation into war against Iraq. As Vice President Cheney pointed out, even if the president and vice president had known that the intelligence reports were false, they would have ordered an invasion anyway.

Is the WMD lie important? Yes, because it led an untold number of Americans to support a war and an occupation that have unleashed forces that have resulted in the deaths and maiming of hundreds of thousands, on both sides. Thus, while it is entirely possible that Bush and Cheney would have invaded Iraq anyway if the American people had known the truth about why they were invading, at least the war and occupation would not have received the moral sanction of a deceived people.

What this means is very simple, and the only possible conclusion is utterly damning: by invading and occupying Iraq, we engaged in a completely unjustified war of aggression. Our presence in Iraq constitutes nothing less than an unforgivable war crime. Critics of our viciously immoral war bemoan American casualties -- and those casualties are indeed tragic. But even most of those critics almost never mention the hundreds of thousands of dead and injured Iraqis -- or the fact that we have destroyed an entire nation beyond any hope of recovery in the foreseeable future. This narcissism is displayed almost as much by liberal and progressive bloggers as it is by the mindlessly robotic Bush and America defenders.

I freely admit that I find this national narcissism disgusting and sickening to an extent that far surpasses my ability to express it fully and accurately. It is absolutely nauseating. Underlying this narcissism, and an inextricable part of it, is a repellent streak of murderous racism in our national makeup -- and that, too, I will be writing about at greater length in the near future.

For the moment, I offer this prediction: five years from now, toward the end of the year 2011, there will still be approximately 50,000 American troops in Iraq. It will not matter in the least if a Democrat is elected President in 2008. The foreign policy consensus to which our governing elites subscribe knows no party lines: it is a Western and an American perspective.

That perspective is factually false, and it is morally detestable. And very, very few Americans even dare to question it.

AND: Still more on these topics, here.

(I apologize for my intermittent writing at present. But times are exceptionally difficult for me personally at the moment. Two good friends are very seriously ill. One friend has just been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, and her husband has been hospitalized for over a week with a worsening heart condition, and he will soon probably have to go into a hospice. I'm trying to help out to whatever extent I can, which unfortunately is not a great deal. But this is turning out to be a very grim "holiday" season here. Nonetheless, there is a great deal I plan and want to write about, so I will do the best I can. Given the circumstances, posting will be unavoidably sporadic for the time being.)