America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (58 page)

In Washington, one subject in particular remained off-limits: the overall progress and prospects of the U.S. military project in the Islamic world. Thirty-five years after Jimmy Carter had issued the Carter Doctrine, that project appeared further removed from completion than when it had begun. By almost any measure, the region was in greater disarray than it had been in 1980. Not only were American purposes unfulfilled, they were becoming increasingly difficult to define with any sort of specificity.

“It’s a generational problem,” General Dempsey told members of a Senate committee in July 2015.
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“It,” as Dempsey explained on another occasion, was the chaos caused by “loosely connected” groups that “run from Afghanistan across the Arabian Peninsula into Yemen to the Horn of Africa and into North and West Africa.” Whether or not civilian officials wanted to hear it or ordinary Americans were prepared to acknowledge it, the fact was that the United States by 2015 found itself mired in something much nastier than simply another Gulf War. The problem was bigger than Iraq and extended far beyond the bounds of the Gulf itself.

Worse still, the issues under dispute went beyond the merely political. It was not just about oil or territory or the perpetuation of some dynasty but about ideology (mostly ours) and religion (mostly theirs). Thwarting this network of groups, “most of which are local, some of which are regional, and some of which are global,” was going to entail “a very long contest,” Dempsey emphasized.
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How long? How much longer than it had already run? Wisely, the general did not hazard a guess. No one had a clue.

In 1948, George Kennan, State Department director of policy planning, noted that the United States then possessed “about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population.” The challenge facing U.S. policymakers, he believed, was “to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.”
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The overarching aim of American statecraft, in other words, was to sustain the uniquely favorable situation to which the United States had ascended by the end of World War II. It’s hard to imagine a statement of purpose more succinct, cogent, and to the point.

Judged by this standard, the stewards of U.S. foreign policy down to the present day have done more than passably well. Today, many decades later, Kennan’s position of disparity persists, somewhat diminished but still leaving Americans in a remarkably advantageous position. With less than 5 percent of the population, the United States still controls 25 percent of global net worth.
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Here is the ultimate emblem of American success, whether as nation or system or ideology. Wealth confers choice. It provides latitude to act or to refrain from acting.

To maintain American preeminence, Kennan and his colleagues devised a strategy that came to be called containment. The term was misleading. Stripped of its immediate Cold War context, a more accurate name was preponderance.
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That strategy sought not only to check any further expansion of Soviet power but also to overmatch and outlast the Soviet system. Demonstrating the superior allure of American-style freedom—precisely what I experienced driving my Mustang to Chicago back in the summer of 1969—exposed as hollow Soviet promises of utopia. But it did much more. Across much of the planet, whether for better or worse, the American way of life became the principal embodiment of freedom. What we had the world wanted, and we had more of it than anyone else. Here was American primacy made manifest. The arrangement was one that the American people found eminently satisfactory.

With an eye toward sustaining this position of disparity, the United States after World War II consciously chose to become the world’s leading military power. In a sharp break from past American practice, it created and maintained on a permanent footing large-scale, heavily armed forces designed for global power projection.

Notably, however, the principal function of these forces was not to wage war but to avert it. By demonstrating a capacity and readiness to fight, the U.S. military was reducing the likelihood of actually having to do so. “Peace Is Our Profession”—so proclaimed the Strategic Air Command, the Cold War–era nuclear strike force that stood ready at a moment’s notice to turn large cities into rubble while incinerating millions. Yet SAC’s motto was not some clumsy attempt at black humor. It was, or at least was meant to be, a serious statement of purpose.

As long as the Cold War lasted, this paradoxical logic enjoyed widespread acceptance. The advantages of husbanding military power were so apparent as to be self-evident. Here was the rationale routinely employed by representatives of the national security establishment and its affiliates. Calling for more (and better) ships, planes, missiles, and tanks, they did so in the name of keeping the peace. Accumulating weapons of mass destruction of ever greater lethality, they did so for the express purpose of ensuring that such weapons would see no further use.

In retrospect, we may regret the diversion of resources that might have gone to more productive purposes. We may lament the distortion of the American economy and the corruption of American politics stemming from the rise of what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. We may recall with horror the reckless miscalculations that brought the world to the brink of Armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even so, the basic approach to national security worked at least tolerably well. World War III didn’t happen. Over time, the Cold War’s two principal theaters, Western Europe and East Asia, stabilized and achieved a measure of prosperity. When the Cold War itself finally ended, it did so quietly and with American primacy intact, much as Kennan himself had prophesied in its very first days.

Along the way, of course, the United States made many egregious mistakes. The bungled Korean War proved needlessly expensive. The Vietnam misadventure, handiwork of several successive presidential administrations, ended in mortifying defeat. A raft of attempted coups, dirty tricks, and unsavory marriages of convenience made a mockery of Washington’s claims to stand for high ideals. The nuclear arms race heedlessly touched off by the United States created hazards that may yet end in unspeakable catastrophe.

Even so, things could have been much worse. Taking the period of the Cold War as a whole, U.S. military policies and American purposes roughly aligned. On balance, this congruence furthered rather than undermining the nation’s well-being. For the United States, freedom, abundance, and security went hand in hand.

Yet the Cold War’s happy outcome (at least from an American point of view) came with a distinct downside for the U.S. national security apparatus. Among other things, it rendered the paradox underlying postwar U.S. military policy—energetically preparing for global war in order to prevent it—obsolete. In doing so, it brought the armed services and their various clients face to face with a crisis of the first order. With the likelihood of World War III subsiding to somewhere between remote and infinitesimal—with the overarching purpose for which the postwar U.S. military establishment had been created thereby fulfilled—what exactly did that establishment and all of its ancillary agencies, institutes, collaborators, and profit-making auxiliaries exist to do?

The Pentagon wasted no time in providing an answer to that question. Rather than keeping the peace, it declared, the key to perpetuating Kennan’s position of disparity was to “shape” the global order.
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now became the military’s primary job. Back in 1992, the Defense Planning Guidance drafted under the aegis of Paul Wolfowitz had spelled out this argument in detail. Pointing proudly to the “new international environment” that had already “been shaped by the victory” over Saddam Hussein the year before, that document provided a blueprint explaining how American power could “shape the future.”
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The sledgehammer was to become a sculptor’s chisel.

The Greater Middle East was to serve—indeed, was even then already serving—as the chosen arena for honing military power into a utensil that would maintain America’s privileged position and, not so incidentally, provide a continuing rationale for the entire apparatus of national security. That region’s predominantly Muslim population thereby became the subjects of experiments ranging from the nominally benign—peacekeeping, peacemaking, and humanitarian intervention—to the nakedly coercive. Beginning in 1980, U.S. forces ventured into the Greater Middle East to reassure, warn, intimidate, suppress, pacify, rescue, liberate, eliminate, transform, and overawe. They bombed, raided, invaded, occupied, and worked through proxies of various stripes. In 1992 Wolfowitz had expressed the earnest hope of American might addressing the “sources of regional instability in ways that promote international law, limit international violence, and encourage the spread of democratic government and open economic systems.” The results actually produced over the course of several decades of trying have never come even remotely close to satisfying such expectations.

The events that first drew the United States military into the Greater Middle East and that seemed so extraordinary at the time—the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan—turned out to be mere harbingers. Subsequent upheavals have swept through the region in waves: revolutions and counterrevolutions, episodes of terror and counterterror, grotesque barbarism and vast suffering. Through it all, a succession of American leaders—Republican and Democratic, conservative and liberal, calculating and naïve—has persisted in the belief that the determined exercise of U.S. military power will somehow put things right. None have seen their hopes fulfilled.

To reflect on this longest of American wars is to confront two questions. First, why has the world’s mightiest military achieved so little even while itself absorbing very considerable losses and inflicting even greater damage on the subjects of America’s supposed beneficence? Second, why in the face of such unsatisfactory outcomes has the United States refused to chart a different course? In short, why can’t we win? And since we haven’t won, why can’t we get out?

With regard to the first question, one explanation stands out above all others. In stark contrast to the Cold War, American purposes and U.S. military policy in the Islamic world have never aligned. Rather than keeping threats to U.S. interests at bay, a penchant for military activism, initially circumspect but becoming increasingly uninhibited over time, has helped to foster new threats. Time and again, from the 1980s to the present, U.S. military power, unleashed rather than held in abeyance, has met outright failure, produced results other than those intended, or proved to be largely irrelevant. The Greater Middle East remains defiantly resistant to shaping.

Not for want of American effort, of course. Like the armies of World War I desperately searching for ways to break the deadlock on the Western Front, U.S. forces operating in various theaters across the Islamic world have field-tested all manner of novelties, hoping thereby to gain a decisive edge. In World War I that meant tanks and poison gas, rolling barrages and stormtrooper tactics. In America’s War for the Greater Middle East, it’s been the RMA and COIN, PGMs and UAVs, not to mention such passing fancies as “overwhelming force,” “shock and awe,” and “air occupation.” Yet the introduction of some new battlefield technique does not necessarily signify progress. Too often, it merely offers an excuse to ignore the very absence of progress.

In World War I, the supreme importance assigned to the Western Front made the stalemate there visible to all. The geography of America’s War for the Greater Middle East has been more variable. Always there is the Persian Gulf, of course, but at intervals Central Asia, the Levant, the Maghreb, the Horn of Africa, and even the Balkans have vied for attention. More recently still, West Africa has emerged as an active theater. These periodic changes of venue do not mean that the United States is closing in on its goal, however. Opening up some new front (or reopening an old one) testifies to the reality that U.S. forces in 2016 find themselves caught in a predicament no less perplexing than the one that ensnared the armies of Germany, France, and Great Britain a century ago. Take whatever definition of purpose you want; after more than three decades of trying, for U.S. forces the mission remains unfinished. Indeed, “unfinished” hardly begins to describe the situation; mission accomplishment is nowhere in sight. Put simply, we’re stuck.

So why can’t we get out? Why in this instance doesn’t the ostensibly superior power of the United States confer choice? How can it be that even today, large segments of the policy elite entertain fantasies of salvaging victory if only a smart president will make the requisite smart moves?