“Democracy can yield the peace we all want.”
How much does peace does Mister Bush really want? Not a whole hell of a lot, by the look of things.
Under the fold: make war, not love…
My ePluribus Media Journal article “Wars and Empires” discusses how, since the early 20th century, America’s wars have brought increasingly counter-productive results. World War I, the “war to end all wars,” laid the groundwork for World War II. The “good war” led to the decades long Cold War and the “third world” proxy wars that accompanied it. We fought North Korea to a tie more than 50 years ago. Today, we’re at a loss as to how to curb its nuclear weapons program. And the Swift Boat controversy in the 2004 presidential election clearly illustrated that the country still suffers trauma from the Vietnam experience.
Our invasion of Iraq has created an insurgency/civil war/Hobbesian nightmare in that country. Despite having troops in countries that surround it, we supposedly face “no greater challenge” than Iran.
The “spread of democracy” throughout the Middle East turned the terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah into legitimate political parties, which has now led Israel to launch a full-blown war against Palestine and Lebanon.
Though America’s military is unsurpassed in combat capability, it is proving unsuited to achieving our national aims. This unpleasant reality has damaged our ability to conduct foreign diplomacy, and the cost of the military and conduct of armed conflict has become a profound burden on our economy.
Wherefore War?
We can only draw so many lessons from spinning alternative histories. There’s a pretty good argument that says we should have stayed out of World War I and let the Europeans slug it out among themselves until none of them could possibly have recovered enough to fight a second world war. Some think our participation in World War II was unavoidable, but that Roosevelt should have listened to Churchill and cut Stalin out of eastern Europe. Some say we had to defend South Korea, but MacArthur blew things when he pushed too far up the Peninsula. Many still make the case that we would have won in Vietnam if we’d only stayed another eight months to a year and blah, blah, blah.
Some critics of the present Iraq War think the decision to invade was a sound one, and everything would have been hunky dory if only the boobs in charge of the war hadn’t dropped the ball after the fall of Baghdad. Peter W. Galbraith, author of the book The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End, writes “With regard to Iraq, President Bush and his top advisors have consistently substituted wishful thinking for analysis and hope for strategy.”
While I agree in spirit with Galbraiths’ sentiments, I vehemently oppose the overall conclusions that he and other war critics draw. The “wishful thinking” wasn’t so much the delusion that we would be “greeted as liberators” and that centuries of animosity among Sunnis, Shias and Kurds would melt away like a snowman on a Baghdad sidewalk. The cognizant dissonance in the neoconservative philosophy was (and still is) that a hegemonic United States could impose a secure, America-centric world order at the point of a gun.
Perhaps the most dissonant aspect of the neoconservative vision was its policy of “preemptive deterrence.” The phrase itself is a model illustration of semantic internal fallacy. You can’t stop something by starting it.
And you can’t claim you know what a potential enemy intends through strategic intelligence because, as the Iraq debacle showed, you can’t rely on strategic intelligence, and you can’t rely on lack of strategic intelligence to act on worst case assumptions (although, as Sy Hersh points out in The New Yorker, that’s precisely what contingency military plans for Iran are based on).
If you wait for adversaries to act on you assumptions of their intentions and capabilities, you’re not preempting. You’re reacting. What’s more, if you react in a way that’s out of proportion to your adversaries’ actions, you’re overreacting.
Which brings us to a proper description of the policy the Bush administration has followed since it shoe horned its way into office: preemptive overreacting.
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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.
The Next World Order series.
prowar blogging voice, but I am a military deterrent voice and nothing more. My husband has seventeen years in the Army as a pilot and he is a good one, and he’s pretty darned good at mission planning and staying alive and keeping civilians alive. His standards and what he expects out of himself weigh heavily on him every day he is in uniform. Some of his words in a letter from Iraq halfway through the first year went kind of like this. “I hate this. We are accomplishing nothing here except training a brand new class of terrorist that challenges our capabilities a little more every day and probes for our weak points.”
I hate to tell you, but bombs dropped by the American military aren’t as smart as they’re made out to be.
But, of course, I can understand the psychological need to believe that “he’s pretty darned good at … keeping civilians alive.”.
I’m sorry to dump on you Tracy, nothing personal but I’m becoming more and more allergic to utterances about American goodnessTM (fine print:if something bad happens anyway it certainly isn’t our intention).
I know people who do but he isn’t one of them. He’s a helicopter pilot and he managed to kill nobody when he served in Iraq, but he had soldier’s he was flying escort for killed on the ground under him. All soldiers are not heartless cold blooded killers who obey illegal orders and rape and torture and murder. Many soldiers are in Iraq because their buddies are in Iraq and are in danger and God knows the rest of you have surely abandoned them, all they have now are each other. If you are so worried about all of this why are here shooting your mouth off and not protesting? Why don’t you go to jail instead of insisting that the soldiers go to jail? My husband refused to obey the illegal order to shoot looters when he was there and guess what happened, so did all of the other pilots then at Al Asad. He’s an old pilot, he knows the Geneva Convention and he knows UCMJ and he isn’t afraid to question things. What do you question other than him. I already know the answers though……..it’s easy to go after the soldiers because most of them are broken now. It’s easy to kick a dog! You are a bully
I’m not going after anyone, Period. I’m not qualified to do that. For me going to jail, well I suppose you could call Bush and have him rendering me somewhere. But his guys have to come pick me up first. I’m living in Haninge, Stockholm Sweden if you want directions.
What I do find naauseating is the denial. That is not an exclusive military feature.
More often now when I hear or read pieces in which you essentially glorify yourselves (yeah, I know, you grew up drinking all those phrases like “American democracy is unique among nations” and some such drivel) I ask myself: “What planet are you living on?”
somewhere? Really? What denial is it that I have? Every person is responsible for their own actions, nothing more and nothing less. My husband has been fully responsible for his. What planet are you living on? The planet of collective punishment?
who I could call to render you, but he doesn’t take my calls.
You write, High 5, “But, of course, I can understand the psychological need to believe that “he’s pretty darned good at … keeping civilians alive.”.
It is SO much more to it than this, High 5. It isn’t just some emotional coping mechanizm family members grasp onto to save thier own sanity..nor is it simply a defense mechanism that allows soldies to follow orders, knowing full well that doing so may take onnocent lives. It is simply not that simple by a long shot.
Try to understand this: there is a culture in the among soldiers who have taken the oath to defend this country and their fellow soldiers. Without that culture in place, there could be no operational military, because it is built on loyalty, first and foremost to those fighting beside you or to those you command. This is an experience NONE of us can claim to know, unless we have been in combat, knowing each breath could be our last, ot that it could be the last one the brother or sister standing next to you if you don’t watch thier back.
When we ask our military people to “just say no” to following orders, we’d better understand exactly what we are asking of them. We’re not just asking to stand down from illegal war orders, or from a bad war. We are asking them to volunrarily abandon their brothers and sisters too.
To most soldiers I have ever known, this is the equlvalent of asking you or me..to walk away from our blood family, to abandon them in the midst of a war where they could be killed any moment, because it isn’t a “just war.”
Could you do this? I don’t think I could. I think I’d stay right where I was, and do everything in my power to keep them from getting killed..no matter whose fault the was was,or whether it should be fought or not..and they are being shot at RIGHT NOW, DAMMIT!
I understand Tracys anger. She lives with and loves a man who has clearly struggled will all sides of this, and she knows she might lose him to this war that she also hates as much as you and I do. I hope she can find adequate outlet for it..in ways that truly help her.
You ended with this: “I’m sorry to dump on you Tracy, nothing personal but I’m becoming more and more allergic to utterances about American goodnessTM (fine print:if something bad happens anyway it certainly isn’t our intention).
Then please don’t dump it on a military wife and the soldier about to head back into the thick of it to do what he can to protect his fellow soldiers as much as he possibly can. Because it IS personal, high5..terribly, painfully personal.
Dump it on those responsible for this goddamn war in the first place because th4ey sure didn’t . They are jsut plain people like you and me, doing the best they know how to cope with the awful realities in which they find themselves now. Eealities that those who have had not personal experience with military life in times of war can possibly understand fully.
You know, I don’t think many people could handle the combination of the strife that this war is causing in some military marriages (One spouse is stuck doing a job in a war that neither one of them agrees with, and you can’t just write up your resignation letter and quit), especially with the added bonus of being called things like a pro-war American exceptionalist. And then there’s the fear of losing someone you love and count on to this mess…and in Tracy’s case, she has 2 children, one of whom is disabled, that need both parents. (And yes, there are many other parents and children who are being victimized by this war on both sides.)
I don’t know anyone posting on this website who thinks we should be in Iraq, even if we all have slightly varying personal takes on why. Tracy happens to be married to someone in the military, but she is against the war; she went to Crawford to stand with Cindy Sheehan and marched in DC as well. Why is she getting the brunt of people’s anger with the actions of BushCo? And how can people blame her for standing up for her husband, of all people?
Sometimes I think people on both sides of this debate should take a minute and imagine themselves in the other person’s position before they hit post.
Just my $0.02, for all that it’s worth.
I’ve never read you to be a pro war blogging voice, Tracy, far from it. I’ve read your work as a very valuable voice from a reliable perspective that most often matched my own views, as a military family member from another war.
It was only lately that I drew back from you, as I felt the overflow of your anger hitting me and others here that I respect a lot, who have also admired and supported you.
I find your anger totally understandable, given your situation, but not something I could just stand by and “take” wordlessly either, when it showed no signs of abating (there for awhile.)
But do I understand the anger itself, at knowing someone you love is willing to sacrifice thier very lives for every one of us, and to have others oppopse thier mission? You bet I do.
I know how big the anger can get, how much pressure it builds up inside, (along with very valid terror of loosing that loved one). I know that sometimes it just spills out and does, all over whatever possible and visible target there is,( because we can’t find any single responsible persons throat to put our hands around and strangle to death.) I did the same thing, Tracy..many times. In fact, I alienated a lot of people I really needed badly, who truly wanted to be there for me.
Because back then, I had no “trusted others” who WERE able TO handle my huge anger. No one wantd to listen to it..or even know about it..because there was nothing they could really do to fix it. Or else they’d take it personally, or otherwise were unable to stand me when I was like that, and when I honely couln’t control the anger very well at all.
And I could NOT help being that angry, and boiling over at times. It was humanely impossible, under the very real pressure of being the big sister of a brother I loved with all my heart, who was over there fighting a terrble, horrendous war I HATED with every atom in me.
I hope you have some people in your face to face life who understand and are strong and wise enough to let you have a safe place to free-vent in the “boil-over” times ,Tracy.
I know there are many here who are willing to be that for you..including me. Email scribe40@aol.com. I will send you my cell phone number if you want it, so as to give you yet another safe outlet for free form, uncensored, vomit-it-up-and-out-venting..24/7. It can’t hurt me because I know it. I know I cannot fix it or make it go away for you, so I won’t try. I will listen and I will understand it must get out from inside you, period.
Hang tough, sister. You are not alone.
Catnip says so.
Thank you for this. It is getting tough right now, just like Vietnam……it is a sad thing to happen. There aren’t really any face to face people out there right now. Mostly people don’t know what to do and that is when blaming starts and action ends. Thank you for your words of support 🙂
>>There aren’t really any face to face people out there right now<<
In the first two years of this war I was living in a small town where several military familys had husbands and sons over there. I knew the postmaster, who was an old vet, and he told me how hard it was on some of these young wives, so we set up a mutual support group that met weekly, and had a phone tree available 24/7.
It was the same there..so hard for anyone not involved to understand fully, but they sure did understand each other very well. It was and still is a major source of mutual empowerment for them, and has seen three families thorugh the loss of thier loved ones, from what I hear since I left there.
Is there nothing like that where you are, Tracy, where you could interact with others sharing the same tough path right, now who can be present for each other?
Perhaps in time. My hope is that they come home before we need too much of that.