America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (59 page)

To understand the persistence of such illusions requires appreciating several assumptions that promote in Washington a deeply pernicious collective naiveté. Seldom explicitly articulated, these assumptions pervade the U.S. national security establishment.

The first assumption posits that those responsible for formulating U.S. policy in the Greater Middle East—not only elected and appointed officials but also the military officers assigned to senior posts—are able to discern the historical forces at work in the region. Indeed, discernment is theirs as a direct consequence of ascending to high office. Position implies enlightenment, along with adherence to a suitably correct worldview.

The worldview to which individuals rotating through the upper reaches of the national security apparatus subscribe derives from a shared historical narrative. Indeed, their fealty to that narrative, which they routinely affirm by reciting various clichés and platitudes, forms a precondition of their employment.

This narrative recounts the story of the twentieth century as Americans have chosen to remember it. It centers on an epic competition between rival versions of modernity—liberalism vs. fascism vs. communism—and ends in vindication for “our” side. Ultimately, the right side of history had prevailed. Presidents and cabinet secretaries, generals and admirals see no reason why that narrative should not apply to a different locale and extend into the distant future. In other words, they are blind to the possibility that in the Greater Middle East substantially different historical forces just might be at work.

A second assumption takes it for granted that as the sole global superpower the United States possesses not only the wisdom but also the wherewithal to control or direct such forces. In the twentieth century “our” side won because American industry and ingenuity produced not only superior military might but also a superior way of life based on consumption and choice—so at least Americans have been thoroughly conditioned to believe. The United States manufactured a version of freedom that its principal adversaries were hard pressed to match. In Europe and in the parts of Asia that Washington cared about, the competition between glitzy and drab, autonomy and conformity, self-indulgence and self-denial proved to be not much of a contest. That this formula might not work quite so easily in an environment where glitz, autonomy, and self-indulgence may constitute provocations raises the possibility that freedom may not be universal—that it can take alternative forms. Few American policymakers and even fewer senior military officers are able to countenance such a possibility.

A third assumption asserts that U.S. military power offers the most expeditious means of ensuring that universal freedom prevails—that the armed might of the United States, made manifest in the presence of airplanes, warships, and fighting troops, serves as an irreplaceable facilitator or catalyst in moving history toward its foreordained destination. True, not every problem lends itself to a simple and straightforward “military solution.” But no problem of any consequence is likely to yield a tolerable solution absent some application of U.S. military power, whether direct or indirect. That the commitment of American armed might could actually backfire and make matters worse is a proposition that few authorities in Washington are willing to entertain.

A final assumption counts on the inevitability of America’s purposes ultimately winning acceptance, even in the Islamic world. The subjects of U.S. benefactions will then obligingly submit to Washington’s requirements and warmly embrace American norms. If not today, then surely tomorrow, the United States will receive the plaudits and be granted the honors that liberators rightly deserve. Near-term disappointments can be discounted given the certainty that better outcomes lie just ahead.

None of these assumptions has any empirical basis. Each of the four drips with hubris. Taken together, they sustain the absence of self-awareness that has become an American signature. Worse, they constitute a nearly insurmountable barrier to serious critical analysis. Yet the prevalence of these assumptions goes far toward explaining this key failing in the U.S. military effort: the absence of a consistent understanding of what the United States is fighting for and whom it is fighting against.

When Jimmy Carter initiated America’s War for the Greater Middle East, this had not been a problem. Then the mission seemed clear: Ensure U.S. access to Persian Gulf oil. The enemy had a name and an address. Indeed, President Carter identified two mutually antagonistic adversaries—Iran in the throes of revolution and an increasingly sclerotic Soviet Union, its own revolution a fading memory. Washington perceived each as posing a looming threat to the Persian Gulf. But if the Gulf’s apparent vulnerability offered a proximate rationale for militarizing U.S. policy in the Islamic world, that preliminary assessment soon enough gave way to something more expansive.

This was hardly an unprecedented occurrence. Back in April 1898, the Spanish-American War began as a crusade to liberate Cuba. When in the ensuing months the United States occupied and annexed Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, that crusade had pretty clearly morphed into something else. So too with America’s War for the Greater Middle East. It began as a project centered on protecting Persian Gulf oil. Yet by the time Ronald Reagan sent Marines into Beirut and secret emissaries to Tehran while picking fights with Colonel Gaddafi, U.S. purposes were clearly changing—even if those purposes remained murky to Reagan himself.

Already in the 1980s, in other words, clarity regarding the nature of the mission and the identity of the enemy was evaporating. By fits and starts, America’s War for the Greater Middle East was expanding. Increasing its scope undermined its strategic coherence, however, with purposefulness of effort inversely related to the number of countries in which U.S. forces were operating. More meant less. As for “shaping,” that remained a mirage, a figment of overheated imaginations back in Washington.

To mask this loss of definition (and perhaps their own confusion), successive presidents framed the overarching problem in generic terms, referring to adversaries as militants, terrorists, warlords, rogue states, or, most recently, “violent extremist organizations.”
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Alternatively, they followed Reagan’s example in focusing their ire on specific bad actors. By implication, removing the likes of Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, Slobodan Milo
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evi
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, Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi held the key to putting things right. Today all but one of these unsavory figures have passed from the scene, their departure bringing the United States not one whit closer to a definitive outcome. And although American air strikes or commandos may one day bag the sole remaining survivor—ISIS leader al-Baghdadi—no reason exists to expect his elimination to have a decisive effect.
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Today the problems besetting the Greater Middle East are substantially greater than they were when substantial numbers of U.S. forces first began venturing into the region. We may argue over the underlying sources of those problems and about how to allocate culpability. Multiple factors are involved, among them pervasive underdevelopment, a dearth of enlightened local leadership, the poisonous legacy of European imperialism, complications stemming from the founding of Israel, deep historical divisions within Islam itself, and the challenge of reconciling faith with modernity in a region where religion pervades every aspect of daily life. But there is no arguing that U.S. efforts to alleviate the dysfunction so much in evidence have failed abysmally.

To address this sort of situation, there are two broad ways of employing military power. The first is to wait things out—insulating yourself from the problem’s worst effects while promoting a nonviolent solution from within. This requires patience and comes with no guarantee of ultimate success. With all the usual caveats attached, this is the approach the United States took during the Cold War.

The second approach is more direct. It aims to eliminate the problem through sustained, relentless military action. This entails less patience but incurs greater near-term costs. After a certain amount of shillyshallying, it was this head-on approach that the Union adopted during the Civil War.

In the War for the Greater Middle East, the United States chose neither to contain nor to crush, instead charting a course midway in between. In effect, it chose aggravation. With politicians and generals too quick to declare victory and with the American public too quick to throw their hands up when faced with adversity, U.S. forces rarely stayed long enough to finish the job. Instead of intimidating, U.S. military efforts have annoyed, incited, and generally communicated a lack of both competence and determination.

In the ultimate irony, somewhere in the interval between Operation Eagle Claw and Operation Inherent Resolve, the circumstances that had made the Persian Gulf worth fighting for in the first place ceased to pertain. If today the American way of life still depends, for better or for worse, on having access to plentiful reserves of oil and natural gas, then the Western Hemisphere, not the Persian Gulf, deserves top billing in the Pentagon’s hierarchy of strategic priorities. Defending Canada and Venezuela should take precedence over defending Saudi Arabia and Iraq. To put it another way, the United States would be better served to secure its own neighborhood rather than vainly attempting to police the Greater Middle East—and it would likely enjoy greater success, to boot.

Even so, shorn of its initial rationale, the War for the Greater Middle East continues. The line in the sand that Carter drew along Iran’s Zagros Mountains now stretches from Central Asia through the Middle East and across the width of Africa. That the ongoing enterprise may someday end—that U.S. troops will finally depart—appears so unlikely as to make the prospect unworthy of discussion. Like the war on drugs or the war on poverty, the War for the Greater Middle East has become a permanent fixture in American life and is accepted as such.

Among the factors contributing to the lack of any serious challenge to the war’s perpetuation, four stand out. One is the absence of an antiwar or anti-interventionist political party worthy of the name. The ongoing war has long since acquired a perfidious seal of bipartisan approval, with both Republicans and Democrats alike implicated. As such, the two major parties are equally disinclined to probe too deeply into the origins, conduct, or prospects of a failing and probably irredeemable military endeavor. Within the U.S. Congress, regardless of which party holds the upper hand, partisan considerations and electoral calculations consistently override concern for either U.S. interests or the actual well-being of Americans in uniform—hence the striking absence of any congressional curiosity about what the U.S. military has managed to achieve over the past three-plus decades in the Greater Middle East.

A second reason, directly related to the first, is that politicians aspiring to high office, especially those contemplating a bid for the presidency, find it more expedient to “support the troops” (and therefore the war) than to question the war’s efficacy or to propose alternative approaches to satisfying U.S. objectives in the Islamic world. Apart perhaps from free beer and barbeque, nothing beats patriotic bombast when it comes to turning out voters. To the extent that the quadrennial contest to choose a chief executive serves as an opportunity for stock taking, candidates in every election since 1980 have assiduously avoided anything like a serious debate of U.S. military policy among Muslim nations. A particular campaign that goes awry like Somalia or Iraq or Libya may attract passing attention, but never the context in which that campaign was undertaken. We can be certain that the election of 2016 will be no different. The War for the Greater Middle East awaits its Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern.

A third reason, of course, is that some individuals and institutions actually benefit from an armed conflict that drags on and on. Those benefits are immediate and tangible. They come in the form of profits, jobs, and campaign contributions. For the military-industrial complex and its beneficiaries, perpetual war is not necessarily bad news. The alacrity with which the national security apparatus “discovered” the Greater Middle East just as the Cold War was ending does not qualify as coincidental.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is this: Thus far, at least, Americans themselves appear oblivious to what is occurring. Policymakers have successfully insulated the public from the war’s negative effects. Reliance on a professional military places the burden of service and sacrifice onto a very small percentage of citizens and lets everyone else off the hook. The resort to deficit spending to underwrite the war’s costs sloughs off onto future generations the onus of paying the bills.

It’s not that Americans today actively support the war in the same sense that their grandparents supported World War II. It’s that they see no particular reason to attend one way or another to the war’s progress or likely outcome. In a fundamental sense, the war is not their concern.

Americans do care, of course, about some things. Promoting the spread of democracy, protecting human rights, curbing global warming, guaranteeing the safety and well-being of Israel: In very substantial numbers, Americans want their country committed to all of these. But they support such worthy causes because they take it as a given that U.S. policy will perpetuate the position of disparity that they consider their due. As in Kennan’s day, so also in our own, ensuring that Americans enjoy their rightful quota (which is to say, more than their fair share) of freedom, abundance, and security comes first. Everything else figures as an afterthought.

But here’s the rub. In the twenty-first century, the prerequisites of freedom, abundance, and security are changing. Geopolitically, Asia is eclipsing in importance all other regions apart perhaps from North America itself. The emerging problem set—coping with the effects of climate change, for example—is global and will require a global response. Whether Americans are able to preserve the privileged position to which they are accustomed will depend on how well and how quickly the United States adapts the existing “pattern of relationships” to fit these fresh circumstances.