Required Reading

The New American Militarism

Andrew J. Bacevich

Thirty-plus years ago, I sat in somebody else’s suburban living room and heard Daniel Ellsberg say that we weren’t on the wrong side in Vietnam, we were the wrong side.  At the time I thought it was hyperbole, though I found a lot of the other things he said that night very persuasive.  Like “if every American who was against the war had been willing to lose his job to stop it, it would have been over long since.”

Now I have found myself reviewing a lot of what Ellsberg said then.  I just finished Andrew Bacevich’s book, The New American Militarism, and it puts a lot of things into a different light.  It was written in 2005, two years before the author’s own son was killed in action in Iraq.  Bacevich has been both professional soldier and academic, and now a Gold Star father.  This impressive life has resulted in several impressive books.

Bacevich is a historian, and he starts the story of American expansionist militarism where it pretty much began, with Woodrow Wilson, who got elected to keep us out of World War I and ended by dragging us into it (sound familiar?), and then into a peace that almost inevitably led to World War II, all to “make the world safe for democracy.”  (Bacevich neglects to mention that the kind of democracy Wilson had in mind had no place for citizens with darker skins than his own; among his other dubious achievements, Wilson re-segregated Washington DC.)

Bacevich goes on to describe the oscillating fortunes of American militarism through the 20^th century and into the 21^st.  After World War I, the military establishment shrank back almost to its 19^th-century size, as the Depression and the mistreatment of World War I veterans soured the public on foreign wars.  With the exception of more-or-less illegal leftist participation in the Spanish Civil War, that sourness lasted until Pearl Harbor, when the military sprang back with a vengeance.

Bacevich, like many revisionist historians on all sides, has taken to re-numbering the World Wars. After World War II came the Cold War, which he prefers to call World War III.  Its early years were both expansionist and beneficent.  It kept communism out of Western Europe with the cornucopia of the Marshall Plan and the shield of several hundred thousand American soldiers on bases all through the “free world.” (This was when, in keeping with this idealistic mindset, the War Department became the Defense Department.) In Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, it didn’t do so well.

Which brings us to Vietnam.  Back in 1962, when most Americans didn’t even know where Vietnam was, the upper reaches of the Kennedy administration were the scene of a great debate pitting deterrence/massive retaliation/nukes against counterinsurgency. (I was a distant witness of that debate, in the Stuart Hughes vs. Ted Kennedy senatorial campaign in Massachusetts.)  In Vietnam, the counterinsurgency buffs won out.  That was where the Ugly American came from—Burdick’s novel about the good-hearted American trying to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, and save Vietnam from the evil communists.  And of course, the counterinsurgency buffs failed, either because theirs was the wrong strategy, or because they lacked the courage of their convictions in implementing it.

Present-day analysts of that war like to find ways of blaming it for all our current problems, from all possible sides.  Did we lose because we were wrong to be there in the first place?  Or were we wrong to be there because in the end we lost?  The orthodox military historians consider the American defeat the result of political interference in the military’s business.  So, of course, did Rambo.  Bacevich points out that the original American ideal was civilian (i.e. political) control of the military.  The civilians (politicians) were to set forth the goals and the military would then supply the means.  But that relationship has always been an uneasy one, especially since Americans have a habit of electing military leaders to civilian political office, and furthermore don’t much like civilian politicians. After Vietnam, it broke down completely for a while. The American civilian public repudiated the military leaders who had organized the war and the grunts who had fought it.  (Bacevich doesn’t mention this, and may well not have known it, but for the first ten years after the Vietnam War ended, the only American civilians who gave a flaming damn for the welfare of Vietnam veterans were all in the peace movement.)

[Sidenote: I don’t mean to diminish the value of Bacevich’s work, especially since so far, this is the only book of his that I’ve read.  If I do him an injustice when I point out things he doesn’t mention in it, I apologize deeply, because in general this book knocks my socks off.]

The Cold War/WWIII ended with the disintegration of the Soviet Union.  It was popularly considered a victory for “our side.”  It might more accurately be viewed as the culmination of a potlatch, that fascinating institution of the Northwest Pacific Indians, in which a person or a group gains power, status, and dominance by winning a contest to see who can destroy or give away more of what he values most.

Afterward, the Vietnam debacle ultimately gave rise to the Powell Doctrine, enunciated first by one of the younger graduates of that school of hard knocks: we don’t enter a war except to protect America’s vital interests; the war must have concrete, achievable objectives; it must have the full support of the American people; it must have an exit strategy set up at the very beginning; and we must approach the task with “overwhelming force”—not merely sufficient, but preponderant.

The First Gulf War was the model for this doctrine (and the opening salvo of what Bacevich calls World War IV.)   Indeed, the First Gulf War, in a few short months, completely rehabilitated the reputation of the American military and of American militarism.  It was short, cheap (in both casualties and finances—Bacevich doesn’t mention that one of the reasons everybody liked it was that we fought it mostly on other people’s money), popular (at home and abroad, which is how we managed to get other people to pay for it), and effective.  It was even preceded by a stirring and impressive congressional debate, probably the most serious public discussion of Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution in more than fifty years.

But it was the very opposite of the Wilsonian ideal.  The American army stopped well short of Baghdad and left Saddam Hussein in power.  The United States paid minimal honor to our promises to the Kurds and the Sunnis, who had relied on us when they rose up against Saddam; to protect them, we created a batch of no-fly zones, policed regularly from the air.  And the international community imposed economic sanctions on Iraq which reduced it from its previous highly-industrialized status to a part of the Third World. We changed Iraq, but not by democratizing it.

And it was followed by what Bacevich portrays as a perfect storm of neoconservative politics, newly-politicized evangelical religion, a newly-professionalized officer corps, and a “crusade theory of warfare.”  It was no longer enough to set limited military goals and accomplish them.  “Containment” was once again a dirty word.  The United States has been divinely chosen to rule and impose its values on the world.

We all know what happened next. First came 9/11.  Conspiracy wackos like to think it was the work of either the Elders of Zion or the CIA.  What matters is that, if Osama bin Laden hadn’t set up 9/11, the Bush government would have had to, to accomplish its own ends.  ( If the Reichstag fire had been caused by improper use of smoking materials, who would know the difference today?)

At first, Bush responded more or less appropriately, by dropping bombs on the region from which Al Quaeda had plotted the attack.  But then, he turned his glance back on Iraq.  And at first, even that seemed to follow the Powell doctrine.  The troops went straight to Baghdad, wiped out most of the Iraqi army, and floated the “Mission Accomplished” banner.

A peripheral note here on karma: during the First Gulf War, Saddam decided to pull the rest of the Arab world into the war on his side by dropping some bombs on Israel.  Israel, of course, was in no way a party to the war on either side.  The US had asked them to stay out, and they complied.  But Saddam figured, logically enough for an Arab politician, that bombing Israel for no reason whatever was an activity all the other Arab governments would want to get in on.  It didn’t work, partly because too many Arab governments worried that Saddam did not play nicely with others, and that his Arab “allies” might end up meeting the same fate as Kuwait.  But Saddam himself became the victim of precisely the same kind of maneuver from Bush several years later—Bush decided that, if he couldn’t count on overthrowing Osama bin Laden, he could at least reconstitute the old “coalition of the willing” by overthrowing their old adversary, who had in no way been a party to 9/11.  That didn’t work either, except on the UK and a few representatives of “the new Europe.” But one has to admire the symmetry of what happened to Saddam.

Bacevich ends with a sheaf of recommendations for amending our national life that include restoring the primacy of the legislative branch in warmaking decisions, restoring the ideal of the “citizen soldier” by attaching the promise of a free college education to national service, pulling US military bases out of those parts of the world long since capable of defending themselves, giving the State Department the budget and teeth to make realistic foreign policy, and setting realistic limits on the military budget.  It’s a breathtaking panorama, and in a recent book-signing at the bookstore down the block from my home, Bacevich seemed to acknowledge that the Obama administration was no closer to implementing it than Bush had been, not yet anyway.  Conventional wisdom calls Bacevich a paleoconservative.  He may in fact be preaching that old-time political religion established by the Framers.  One hopes that the new administration is paying serious attention to it.

CynThesis

1812 and All That

 

Every Labor Day, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra does its annual all-Tchaikovsky program at Ravinia, and I go with a bunch of friends to picnic on the lawn and hear the concert.  We did it again this year, and as usual it was delightful, and as usual it ended with the 1812 Overture, complete with 11 cannon from an Indiana Re-enactors’ group with cannon dating back to our War of 1812.  Of course, on July 4, the Grant Park Symphony does its concert downtown complete with fireworks and ending in the 1812, complete with somebody else’s cannon.  And just about everyplace else in the country, on summer holidays, somebody somewhere is doing the 1812 complete with fireworks and cannon.  Which this year led me to thinking about cannon, and fireworks, and gunpowder, and festivals, and music.

 

As I understand it, the Chinese invented gunpowder, and for the first few centuries afterward, used it for fireworks.  The point of fireworks in Chinese culture is to drive away evil spirits.  Noise-making for that purpose is common in many cultures. It is supposed to be the origin of breaking the glass at Jewish weddings, for instance.  And there seems to be a tendency to do this especially on festive occasions, presumably because evil spirits like to hang around when people are having a good time, to spoil the party. 

 

Guns and fireworks also get used to salute VIPs and mark important occasions, including funerals.  Probably that goes back to the driving-evil-spirits-away thing too. 

 

But then the Chinese, and the rest of us, discovered, probably as a result of some terrible fireworks accident (this sounds like something Charles Lamb might dream up) that gunpowder could also kill people.  And that was the end of the pyrotechnic Eden.  Gunpowder became a weapon.

 

Gunpowder became a major component of war.  And of military music.  “And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air…” and all that.  The sound-and-light show became a killing machine.

 

And worked its way back into festive occasions by way of military music.  What would it take, these days, to keep evil spirits away?  Or, looking at it the other way, what kind of evil spirits have we generated, that require literal megatons to get rid of?

 

CynThesis

CODE-SWITCHING

When I was doing graduate work in sociology, I took a course on “deviance.”  I did a paper for the course, on conscientious objection.  It’s a fascinating subject, about which I could go on for a long time, but won’t.  I chose the subject in the first place because the notion that having a conscience could be “deviant” struck me as marvelously ironic.  (The upshot of the paper was that the CO application process was a triumph of organic over mechanical solidarity [as Durkheim would put it.] )  What really mattered about that paper was that it changed the course of my life, because I wrote it a year or so before the 1965 increase in American troop strength in Vietnam.  I chanced to mention it to a friend of mine, and the next thing I knew, lots of people were asking for a copy.  That made me nervous, because by this time it was full of probably outdated information.  So when I saw a posting from AFSC about a free course to become a draft counselor, I signed on right away.

 

I spent the next ten years working in the area of Selective Service and military law, and eventually went to law school. As an attorney, I’m still doing military and veterans’ benefits law, and have done Selective Service stuff when the issue arose.  That involves all kinds of legal issues, but it still occasionally raises questions of conscientious objection, and that’s still a fascinating process. 

 

The body of statute and case law that set out the CO requirements for draft exemption or military discharge (or exemption from the “bearing arms” oath for new US citizens) clearly started out with the “historic peace churches”—Quakers, Mennonites, and Brethren—in mind.  Those requirements have evolved to encompass other Christians, non-Christians, non-church members, agnostics, atheists, and ultimately people with no official religion at all.  But the law remains clear that a mere “personal moral code” or a set of “political beliefs” won’t qualify. 

 

And most young people these days—even the regular church-goers—are theological illiterates.  (Among the splendid exceptions are the Jehovah’s Witnesses, whom I have occasionally represented.)  All they have, most of the time, is a personal moral code, or a set of political beliefs.  What I do is more the job of an English teacher or an editor (both jobs I have held in addition to practicing law) than an attorney.  I work the client through the “Four Questions” that are the basis of the CO application:

 

1. What do you believe, and how does it prevent you from being willing to participate in all wars? (Note: not just some wars—that would be too easy.  CO applicants go through endless grilling about whether they would have fought against Hitler, but nobody has to justify being unwilling to fight for Hitler.)
2. Where’d you get these weird ideas? (Note: the military presumes that it is normal and natural to be willing to kill a total stranger when ordered to do so by another total stranger. Any deviation from this norm has to be explained.)
3. What have you done to put your beliefs into action?
4. Who can vouch for your sincerity?

 

This process requires a lot more introspection than most young Americans are used to.  Also a lot more writing.  (At the outset, I tell them it’s the equivalent of a long term paper, in expenditure of time and energy.) Once it’s all down on paper, the translation process begins.  Writing one’s congresscritter about the war in Iraq is rarely just a statement about that war; it is usually a statement about war in general in the context of the only war the kid knows about.  World War II? What was that? I know there was some kind of war in the 1940s, but I forget who was in it or who won.  Same with going to demonstrations and marches.  Working at a soup kitchen is a statement about the essential value of all human life, even the most miserable.  Running a school recycling center is a statement about the value of the earth and its resources, which war destroys big time. 

 

None of this is fake. I don’t do fakes, nor do my clients, so far as I know.  It’s just a matter of putting the very individual and personal—which won’t get recognized as conscientious objection by the official deciders–into a broader context that the client has only started to think about when confronted with a human-shaped target and told to “kill, kill!!!” 

 

This process is a species of what elementary school teachers call “code-switching”—expressing the same ideas in different ways depending on context, audience, and purpose. When greeting your buddy, you can high-five him and say “yo!”  When you meet the Dalai Lama, on the other hand, you do not break out singing “Hello, Dalai!” 

 

The process can go both ways, as Obama has demonstrated in his Sojourner speech two years ago (never mind that James Dobson for some reason has brought it up two years later to question Obama’s theology.)  If you are going to bring your religious beliefs to bear on political issues (other than a CO application, I guess) among people who do not share those beliefs, you need to speak the language of your audience.  This is partly for symbolic purposes—we are conducting an election in a democracy composed of people who hold lots of different beliefs, and whose constitution prohibits establishment of religion as such or of any particular religion.  A candidate or advocate who does not respect that prohibition is telling at least some of that audience, “You don’t belong. You don’t count.” Which is the last thing you want to tell a voter, any voter.

 

But a lot of those voters may not even catch the in-groupness of standard evangelical Christian language, because they don’t know anybody who doesn’t speak it. (Whoever discovered water, it probably wasn’t a fish.)  I have long since lost count of the very nice, very earnest Christians who ask me, in utter perplexity, “You mean Jews don’t believe in Jesus?”  And telling them that their language is not the lingua franca of common discourse in their own country can amount to telling them “you don’t belong. You don’t count.”  It can carry its own political costs.

 

Nonetheless, I think American politicians who are running for president rather than, say, Pope or Caliph or Bishop, have to presume that their audience includes non-Christians and non-religious people who still have a right to vote, and to know where their candidates stand.  In short, translating values based in a particular religion into universally comprehensible values is not only effective politics in a pluralistic polity, but a way of honoring the founders of that polity and the universal values they were trying to establish.

 

Jane Grey

 

 

RACISM MADE HIM STRONG; WE’LL MAKE HIM AN AMPUTEE

And, speaking of the impact of military service on minority communities, Professor Cindy Williams, who teaches political science at MIT, and keeps careful track of military recruitment trends, says the Army is having trouble maintaining the quality of its recruits, and that they are having particular difficulty getting “high quality” [recruiter-speak for high school graduates] African-American recruits, largely because of parental  lack of support for young people in that community joining the military.  Given the large proportion of African-Americans in single-parent families, that should probably be translated as lack of support among Black mothers for turning their kids—especially the ones who manage to graduate from high school–into cannon fodder.   Getting an African-American boy through high school is not an easy task these days, and one can understand why a mother who has accomplished it would be reluctant to send her son off to get blown to bits on some Middle Eastern highway or byway.  Recruiters are saying that, while signing up a young person used to require 14 hours of sweet-talking the young person and 4 hours of sweet-talking his parents, the ratio is now reversed.  The kids may like the idea of military service, but the parents are getting really skeptical. 

 

Red Emma

A KIND WORD FOR McCAIN

This is not to be taken as an endorsement, but John McCain says he is opposed to reinstating the military draft for anything short of World War III, because the Vietnam War draft weighed most heavily on lower-income Americans. Good for him!

Rep. Charles Rangel has been calling for a draft at least once a year ever since we dropped it in the early 1970s, always on the basis that it distributes the burdens of military service more equitably, and forces a war-making government to be more accountable to the voters whose children are being drafted. On this one, McCain has it right and Rangel has it wrong.

The one draft exemption nobody would dream of getting rid of, and the one that has accounted for the majority of the people who got out of the draft (roughly half of everybody, ever since World War I) is the medical exemption. Not unreasonably, the Army does not want to function as a rehab hospital, so its own regulations (AR 40-501) exempt people from service whose medical problems would make them more trouble than they are worth as cannon fodder. The catch is that the draft physical has never been more than a cursory glance, involving counting extremities and asking a bunch of abstruse questions, often too rapidly to be understood or properly answered. Anybody whose medical issues are more complicated than such an exam would reveal has to get documentation from a private physician to present to the examiners.

And that means having a private physician. So the increasing proportion of inner-city and rural youth, whose medical documentation consists of having an emergency room doctor take three minutes out of his already crammed schedule to scrawl “Sick—no work” across a prescription pad, are not going to get medical exemptions from the draft. If they are lucky, the Army will discharge them after they get to Basic Training, when their disabilities become apparent. Most of them aren’t that lucky.

In addition, as we know from the experience of other countries with “universal” military service, such as Israel and the former USSR, the children of wealthy and well-connected families will almost always get drafted into the most prestigious and comfortable branches of service, while the offspring of civilian peons will almost inevitably become military peons.

Obama hasn’t taken any position on a reinstatement of the draft, so far as I know. It makes more sense, of course, to promise to end the war, rather than plan to get more troops into it, so he may not feel obliged to make any statement on the subject. But let’s hope he pays attention to the real history of conscription if he does.

Red Emma