Posted by Andrew Bacevich
at 7:26am, March 21, 2017.
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U.S. Marines are, for the
first time, deploying to Syria (with more to come). There’s talk of an “enduring” U.S. military presence in Iraq, while
additional U.S. troops are being dispatched to neighboring Kuwait with an eye to the wars in
both Iraq and Syria. Yemen has been battered by a veritable blitz of drone strikes and other air
attacks. Afghanistan seems to be in line for an increase in American forces. The new
president has just restored to the CIA the power to use drones to strike more or less anywhere
on the “world battlefield,” recently a Pentagon prerogative, and is evidently easing restrictions on the Pentagon’s use of drones as
well. U.S. military commanders are slated to get more leeway to make
decisions locally and the very definition of what qualifies as a “battlefield”
looks like it’s about to change (which will mean even less attention to
“collateral damage” or civilian casualties). President Trump may soon designate various areas outside more or less official
American war zones -- since the U.S. Congress no longer declares war, they
can’t truly be official -- as “temporary areas of active hostility.” That will
grant U.S. commanders greater leeway in launching attacks on terror groups in
places like Somalia. In fact, this already seems to have happened in Yemen, according to the New York Times,
opening the way for a disastrous Special Operations Forces raid there that caused the death of a Navy SEAL and possibly nine Yemeni children (the youngest three months old), while
evidently accomplishing next to nothing.
In other words, in the early
months of the Trump era, U.S. wars and conflicts across the Greater Middle East
are being expanded and escalated. This isn’t exactly a new process, and
isn’t yet at the level of either the failed Iraqi Surge
of 2007 or the failed Afghan one of 2010. Still, you might think that the
almost instant failure of that Yemen raid would have rung a few familiar warning
bells in Washington when it comes to escalating America’s wars in the
region. If so, you would evidently be oh-so-wrong. The history of
the last 15 years tells us that in Washington such setbacks couldn’t matter
less. At the moment, the generals who have headed down these very paths before
are evidently recommending to an eager new president that it’s the height of
wisdom to head down them again.
As TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author of America’s War for the Greater Middle East, points out
today, this is now business as usual in militarized Washington in the
twenty-first century. It’s so much the law of the land that the Pentagon
has developed the perfect language for masking, perhaps to itself as much as
others, just how dismally familiar this process actually is. Tom
Prepare, Pursue, Prevail!
Onward and Upward with U.S.
Central Command
By way of explaining his eight
failed marriages, the American bandleader Artie Shaw once remarked, “I am an incurable optimist.” In reality,
Artie was an incurable narcissist. Utterly devoid of self-awareness, he never
looked back, only forward.
So, too, with the incurable
optimists who manage present-day American wars. What matters is not past
mistakes but future opportunities. This describes the view of General
Joseph Votel, current head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). Since its
creation in 1983, CENTCOM has emerged as the ne plus ultra of the Pentagon’s
several regional commands, the place where the action is always hot and
heavy. Votel is the latest in a long train of four-star generals to
preside over that action.
The title of this essay
(exclamation point included) captures in a single phrase the “strategic
approach” that Votel has devised for CENTCOM. That approach, according to
the command’s website, is “proactive in nature and endeavors to set in motion
tangible actions in a purposeful, consistent, and continuous manner.”
This strategic approach forms
but one element in General Votel’s multifaceted (if murky) “command narrative,” which he promulgated last year upon
taking the helm at CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, Florida. Other
components include a “culture,” a “vision,” a “mission,” and
“priorities.” CENTCOM’s culture emphasizes “persistent excellence,” as
the command “strives to understand and help others to comprehend, with
granularity and clarity, the complexities of our region.” The vision,
indistinguishable from the mission except perhaps for those possessing advanced
degrees in hermeneutics, seeks to provide “a more stable and prosperous region
with increasingly effective governance, improved security, and trans-regional
cooperation.” Toward that estimable end, CENTCOM’s priorities include
forging partnerships with other nations “based upon shared values,” “actively
counter[ing] the malign influence” of hostile regimes, and “degrading and
defeating violent extremist organizations and their networks.”
At present, CENTCOM is busily
implementing the several components of Votel’s command narrative across an
“area of responsibility” (AOR) consisting of 20 nations, among them Iran, Iraq,
Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. As the CENTCOM website puts it,
without batting a digital eyelash, that AOR “spans more than 4 million square
miles and is populated by more than 550 million people from 22 ethnic groups,
speaking 18 languages with hundreds of dialects and confessing multiple
religions which transect national borders.”
According
to the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms,
an AOR is the “geographical area associated with a combatant command within
which a geographic combatant commander has authority to plan and conduct
operations.” Yet this anodyne definition fails to capture the spirit of the
enterprise in which General Votel is engaged.
One imagines that there must
be another Department of Defense Dictionary, kept under lock-and-key in the
Pentagon, that dispenses with the bland language and penchant for deceptive
euphemisms. That dictionary would define an AOR as “a vast expanse within which
the United States seeks to impose order without exercising sovereignty.”
An AOR combines aspects of colony, protectorate, and contested imperial
frontier. In that sense, the term represents the latest incarnation of the
informal empire that American elites have pursued in various forms ever since
U.S. forces “liberated” Cuba in 1898.
To say that a military officer
presiding over an AOR plans and conducts operations is a bit like saying that
Jeff Bezos sells books. It’s a small truth that evades a larger
one. To command CENTCOM is to function as a proconsul, to inhabit as a
co-equal the rarified realm of kings, presidents, and prime ministers. CENTCOM
commanders shape the future of their AOR -- or at least fancy that they do.
Sustaining expectations of
shaping the future requires a suitably accommodating version of the past.
For CENTCOM, history is a record of events selected and arranged to demonstrate
progress. By testifying to the achievements of previous CENTCOM
commanders, history thereby validates Votel’s own efforts to carry on their
work. Not for nothing, therefore, does the command’s website include this
highly sanitized account of its recent past:
“In the wake of 9-11, the
international community found Saddam Hussein's continued lack of cooperation
with United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolutions regarding weapons of
mass destruction unacceptable. Hussein's continued recalcitrance led the UNSC
to authorize the use of force by a U.S.-led coalition. Operation Iraqi Freedom
began 19 March 2003.
“Following the defeat of both the Taliban regime in Afghanistan (9 November 2001) and Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq (8 April 2003), CENTCOM has continued to provide security to the new freely-elected governments in those countries, conducting counterinsurgency operations and assisting host nation security forces to provide for their own defense.”
Setbacks, disappointments,
miscalculations, humiliations: you won’t hear about them from CENTCOM.
Like Broadway’s Annie, down at headquarters in Tampa they’re “just thinkin'
about tomorrow,” which “clears away the cobwebs, and the sorrow, till there's
none!”
(Give the Vietnam War the CENTCOM treatment and you would
end up with something like this: “Responding to unprovoked North Vietnamese
attacks and acting at the behest of the international community, a U.S.-led
coalition arrived to provide security to the freely-elected South Vietnamese
government, conducting counterinsurgency operations and assisting host nation
security forces to provide for their own defense.”)
In fact, the U.N. Security
Council did not authorize the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Indeed, efforts by
George W. Bush’s administration to secure such an authorization failed
abysmally, collapsing in a welter of half-truths and outright falsehoods.
What much of the international community found unacceptable, more so even than
Saddam’s obstreperousness, was Bush’s insistence that he was going to have his
war regardless of what others might think. As for celebrating the “defeat”
of the Taliban and of Saddam, that’s the equivalent of declaring “game over”
when the whistle sounds ending the first quarter of a football game.
More to the point, to claim
that, in the years since, CENTCOM “has continued to provide security to the new
freely-elected governments” of Afghanistan and Iraq whitewashes history in ways
that would cause the most shameless purveyor of alt-facts on Fox News to
blush. The incontestable truth is that Afghans and Iraqis have not known
security since U.S. forces, under the direction of General Votel’s various
predecessors, arrived on the scene. Rather than providing security,
CENTCOM has undermined it.
CENTCOM Headquarters (Where
It’s Always Groundhog Day)
Even so, as the current
steward of CENTCOM’s culture, vision, mission, strategic approach, and
priorities, General Votel remains undaunted. In his view, everything that
happened prior to his assuming ownership of the CENTCOM AOR is
irrelevant. What matters is what will happen from now on -- in Washington-speak,
“going forward.” As with Artie Shaw, serial disappointments leave intact
the conviction that persistence will ultimately produce a happy ending.
Earlier this month, Votel
provided a progress report to the Senate Armed Services Committee and outlined
his expectations for future success. In a city that now competes for the
title of Comedy Central, few paid serious attention to what the CENTCOM
commander had to say. Yet his presentation was, in its own way,
emblematic of how, in the Age of Trump, U.S. national security policy has
become fully divorced from reality.
General Votel began by
inventorying the various “drivers of instability” afflicting his AOR.
That list, unsurprisingly enough, turned out to be a long one, including ethnic
and sectarian divisions, economic underdevelopment, an absence of opportunity
for young people “susceptible to unrest [and] radical ideologies,” civil wars,
humanitarian crises, large refugee populations, and “competition among outside
actors, including Russia and China, seeking to promote their interests and
supplant U.S. influence in the region.” Not qualifying for mention as
destabilizing factors, however, were the presence and activities of U.S.
military forces, their footprint dwarfing that of Russia and China.
Indeed, the balance of Votel’s
64-page written statement argued, in effect, that U.S. military activities are
the key to fixing all that ails the CENTCOM AOR. After making a brief but
obligatory bow to the fact that “a solely military response is not sufficient” to
address the region’s problems, he proceeded to describe at length the military
response (and only the military response) that will do just that.
Unfortunately for General
Votel, length does not necessarily correlate with substance. Once upon a
time, American military professionals prized brevity and directness in their
writing. Not so the present generation of generals who are given to
logorrhea. Consider just this bit of cliché-ridden drivel -- I could
quote vast passages of it -- that Votel inflicted on members of the United
States Senate. “In a region beset by myriad challenges,” he reported,
“we must always be on the
look-out for opportunities to seize the initiative to support our objectives
and goals. Pursuing opportunities means that we are proactive -- we don’t wait
for problems to be presented; we look for ways to get ahead of them. It also
means that we have to become comfortable with transparency and flat
communications -- our ability to understand our AOR better than anyone else
gives us the advantage of knowing where opportunities exist. Pursuing
opportunities also means we have to take risk -- by delegating authority and
responsibility to the right level, by trusting our partners, and being willing
to trust our best instincts in order to move faster than our adversaries.”
In third-tier business
schools, bromides of this sort might pass for “best practices.” But my
guess is that George C. Marshall or Dwight D. Eisenhower would award the author
of that paragraph an F and return him to staff college for further instruction.
Frothy verbiage aside, what
exactly does General Votel propose? The answer -- for those with
sufficient patience to wade through the entire 64 pages -- reduces to this:
persist. In concrete terms, that means keeping on killing and enabling
our “allies” to do the same until the other side is finally exhausted and gives
up. In other words, it’s the movie Groundhog Day transposed from
Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to Tampa and then to Afghanistan, Iraq, and other
countries where the bodies continue to pile up.
True, the document Votel
presented to Congress is superficially comprehensive, with sections touting
everything from “Building Partner Capacity” (“we must be forward-leaning and
empower our partners to meet internal security challenges”) to creating a
“Global Engagement Center” (“The best way to defeat an idea is to present a
better, more appealing idea”). Strip away the fluff, however, and what’s
left is nothing more than a call to keep doing what CENTCOM has been doing for
years now.
To see what all this really
means, practically speaking, just check out CENTCOM press releases for the week
of March 5th through 10th. The titles alone suffice to describe a
situation where every day is like the one that preceded it:
As the good nuns used to tell
me back in parochial school, actions speak louder than words. What the
CENTCOM commander says matters less than what CENTCOM forces do. What
they are doing is waging an endless war of attrition.
Ludendorff Would Have Approved
“Punch a hole and let the rest
follow.”
During the First World War,
that aphorism, attributed to General Erich Ludendorff, captured the essence of
the German army’s understanding of strategy, rooted in the conviction that
violence perpetrated on a sufficient scale over a sufficient period of time
will ultimately render a politically purposeless war purposeful. The
formula didn’t work for Germany in Ludendorff’s day and yielded even more disastrous
results when Hitler revived it two decades later.
Of course, U.S. military
commanders today don’t make crude references to punching holes. They
employ language that suggests discrimination, deliberation, precision, and
control as the qualities that define the American way of war. They steer
clear of using terms like attrition. Yet differences in vocabulary
notwithstanding, the U.S. military’s present-day MO bears a considerable
resemblance to the approach that Ludendorff took fully a century ago. And
for the last decade and a half, U.S. forces operating in the CENTCOM AOR have
been no more successful than were German forces on the Western Front in
achieving the purposes that ostensibly made war necessary.
To divert attention from this
disturbing fact, General Votel offers Congress and by extension the American
people a 64-page piece of propaganda. Whether he himself is deluded or
dishonest is difficult to say, just as it remains difficult to say whether General
William Westmoreland was
deluded or dishonest when he assured Congress in November 1967 that victory in
Vietnam was in sight. “With 1968,” Westmoreland promised, “a new phase is
now starting. We have reached an important point when the end begins now
to come into view.”
Westmoreland was dead wrong,
as the enemy’s 1968 Tet Offensive soon demonstrated. That a comparable
disaster, no doubt different in form, will expose Votel’s own
light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel assessment as equally fraudulent is a possibility,
even if one to which American political and military leaders appear to be
oblivious. This much is certain: in the CENTCOM AOR the end is not even
remotely in view.
What are we to make of this
charade of proconsuls parading through Washington to render false or misleading
reports on the status of the American empire’s outer precincts?
Perhaps the time has come to
look elsewhere for advice and counsel. Whether generals like Votel are
deluded or dishonest is ultimately beside the point. More relevant is the
fact that the views they express -- and that inexplicably continue to carry
weight in Washington -- are essentially of no value. So many years later,
no reason exists to believe that they know what they are doing.
To reground U.S. national security
policy in something that approximates reality would require listening to new
voices, offering views long deemed heretical.
Let me nonetheless offer you an example:
“Fifteen years after launching
a worldwide effort to defeat and destroy terrorist organizations, the United
States finds itself locked in a pathologically recursive loop; we fight to
prevent attacks and defend our values, only to incite further violence against
ourselves and allies while destabilizing already chaotic regions..."
That is not the judgment of
some lefty from Cambridge or San Francisco, but of Major John Q. Bolton, a
veteran of both the Iraq and Afghan Wars. Within that brief passage is
more wisdom than in all of General Votel’s 64 pages of blather.
I submit that Bolton’s grasp
of our predicament is infinitely superior to Votel’s. The contrast
between the two is striking. The officer who wears no stars dares to say
what is true; the officer wearing four stars obfuscates. If the
four-stars abandon obfuscation for truth, then and only then will they deserve
our respectful attention. In the meantime, it’s like looking to Artie
Shaw for marriage counseling.
Andrew J. Bacevich, a TomDispatch regular, is the author most recently of America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History.
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