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CounterPunch
November
26, 2002
Another Century of War?
by GABRIEL KOLKO
Editors Note: Gabriel Kolko is one of our favorite writers
and the foremost historian of modern warfare. Here at CounterPunch
we are honored to publish this excerpt from his vitally important
new book Another
Century of War?.
AC / JSC
A foreign policy that is both immoral and unsuccessful
is not simply stupid, it is increasingly dangerous to those who
practice or favor it. That is the predicament that the United
States now confronts.
Communism no longer exists, American
military power has never been greater, but the U.S. has never
been so insecure and its people more vulnerable. After fifty
years of interventions in the affairs of dozens of nations on
every continent, interventions that varied from training police
and armies to supplying them with lethal equipment and advisers
to teach them how to use it, after two major wars involving its
own manpower for years, America's sustained, intense, and costly
efforts have only culminated in greater risks to itself. There
is more instability and violence in the world than ever, and
now it has finally reached its own shores--and its political
leaders have declared it will continue. By any criterion, above
all the security of its own citizens, the U.S.' international
policies, whether military or political, have produced consummate
failures. It is neither realistic nor ethical. It is a shambles
of confusions and contradictions, pious, superficial morality
combined with cynical adventurism, all of which has undermined,
not strengthened, the safety of the American people and left
a world more dangerous than ever.
It is not accurate, nor is it consolation,
to argue as many do that without an activist foreign policy and
military policy the present world situation could have been worse
or that communism would have triumphed in many more places. Many
of the CIA's analysts always perceived the Soviet Union's actions
as essentially defensive, and that it was ready to grasp opportunities
that posed no obvious dangers to it but unwilling to  take great risks. As Marxists they believed
that history was predestined to favor them, and that adventurism
was unnecessary--"infantile," to use Lenin's description.
But communism was a reflection rather than the cause of the severe
disorder in international affairs that produced two incredibly
destructive world wars, a result of deeper and older problems,
and those who led the USSR gradually ceased to have the conviction
essential to perpetuate the original Leninist beliefs and systemic
legacies. As a ruling system, it has disappeared in Europe and
virtually disintegrated in Asia, peacefully and by its own leaders'
volition--and not by force of American arms.
The fear of communism which justified
vast military expenses and mobilized NATO and America's allies
is now gone, but the qualitative importance of this fundamental
transformation has not led to any equivalent or appropriate changes
in Washington's perceptions, much less spending. It can no longer
define its enemies clearly, where they live or how they will
behave, and it is unwilling to confront the analytic problems
that the immense changes in world affairs since 1989 have created.
The U.S.' most symbolic sites--Wall Street and the Pentagon--have
been devastatingly attacked, and it is now plain, as the government
itself has predicted for several years, that the country itself
is highly vulnerable. Bin Laden's network replaced "rogue
states" for a time, but essentially American strategy continues
to flounder: it prepared for nuclear and mechanized war in Europe
but fought only in Asia, where it was stalemated and lost two
major conflicts. It encouraged and funded wars by Iraq against
Iran and against the Soviets in Afghanistan only to have to fight
the very people it once believed were merely its proxies. It
has confronted innumerable surprises in Latin America and Africa--to
mention but a few of its policy failures--and it has precious
little control in both those continents. The U.S.' ambitions
in the century that is just beginning far exceed its military,
political, and moral resources for attaining them, and if it
does not acknowledge the limits of its power--which it should
have done much earlier--it will continue to embark on quixotic
adventures in every corner of the worldand experience more terrorism
on its own shores.
The U.S. has more military equipment
than ever, and since 1950 Pentagon spending has become one of
the traditional and indispensable foundations of American prosperity.
There is no indication whatsoever that it will decline. But there
are no technological quick-fixes to political problems. Solutions
are political, which requires another mentality and a great deal
more wisdom, including a readiness to make compromises and, above
all, stay out of the affairs of nations, or they will not succeed.
Worse yet, its reliance on weapons and force has exacerbated
or created far more problems for the U.S. than it has solved.
After September 11 there can be no doubt that arms have not brought
security to America. It is not only to the world's interest that
the America adapt to the realities of the twenty-first century.
What is new is that it is now, more than ever, to the interest
of the American people themselves. It is imperative that the
U.S. also acknowledge the very limits of its power--limits that
are inherent in its own military illusions and in the very nature
of a world that is far too big and complex for any country to
even dream of managing.
Mankind cannot endure another century
of war, because future wars will be far more destructive, to
civilians as well as soldiers.
The Dangers
of Mindless Action
Nations have differing interests and
ways of perceiving them. The U.S. itself was belligerently unilateralist
in the period before the September 11 and changed briefly only
to meet the grave emergency that event imposed upon it. It has
created "coalitions" which are ephemeral and transient
marriages of convenience, essentially discarded NATO as the pillar
of its European policy, and managed only to show that the United
States is a fickle, unreliable partner. It is obviously quixotic
if not dangerous to talk of coalitions when nations are unstable
and perhaps even their rulers are in flux. It has already probably
destabilized Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in the brief process of
making war in Afghanistan, and in years to come it will confront
the consequences of having done so in these far more important
countries.
But the world is more violent and wracked
by war and insecure than ever, and many American officials now
nostalgically admit that the international system was far more
predictable and safer when the USSR existed, precisely because,
in the last analysis, it acted prudently. This assurance is largely
misplaced, since many of the greatest problems that the world
confronted after 1945 were quite independent of communism and
they persist even today, but it is also true that Moscow discouraged
potentially dangerous confrontations to the extent that it could
do so. The CIA told the government to expect the Soviets to behave
cautiously in the last analysis, but its estimates were often
ignored or disputed by military services--especially the Air
Force--that wanted to justify more spending.
Indeed, the CIA and other official agencies
gave successive presidents ample and accurate warnings of the
risks they faced in Vietnam and elsewhere, and they ignored much
of them. Whatever rationality is built into the foreign affairs
apparatus simply has had little or no impact in guiding policy
makers since 1950. There was far less clarity among those who
guided American foreign policy than there could have been, and
those in charge were oblivious of either the consequences or
even the goals of their actions. For them action itself was the
name of the game, and the world has paid for it. This essentially
paranoid mentality failed to anticipate the collapse of the USSR
and is still operational because high budgets cannot be justified
without dismal political prognostications, fear, and mysteries.
Such thinking is unable to go beyond simplistic explanations
or to comprehend causes or understand historical processes and
social dynamics of countless nations. Now there is a paranoid
view of Islam; the focus is off China temporarily but it is the
same vision.
There is, in a word, far less understanding
at the top than successive leaders have claimed, and domestic
politics and short-term factors play a much greater role than
they will ever admit. The world and now the American people cannot
afford U.S. foreign policy's opportunistic and ad hoc character,
its wavering between the immoral and amoral in practice but which
official speech writers portray as rational and principled. In
reality, it has neither coherence nor useful principles but often
responds to one failure and crisis after another--and these are
usually of its own making. Even given its unrealistic ambitions,
it has lost control of its priorities, which all nations must
have. We can never forget that the two men who the U.S. has most
demonized over the past two decades, Saddam Hussein and Osama
bin Laden, both collaborated for years with the U.S.; Washington
believed their causes were identical and put vast sums at their
disposal. There is no greater proof of confusion and ineptness
on America's part, and rather than leading the world in a better
direction it has usually inflicted incalculable harm wherever
it has intervened. Its leaders have been addicted to intervening
for its own sake, to save the nation's "credibility,"
preventing an alleged vacuum of power, or its self-appointed
role as the enforcer of regional or global order (which it usually
equates with the freedom of American businessmen to make money).
The U.S. has refused to accept a much more modest and far less
ambitious definition of its national interests, one that is also
realistic.
All of its policies in the Middle East
have been contradictory and counterproductive. The U.S.' support
for Israel is the single most important but scarcely the only
cause of the September 11 trauma and the potentially fundamental
political destabilization, ranging from the Persian Gulf to South
Asia, that its intervention in Afghanistan has triggered. But
it has repeatedly seen its most ambitious diplomatic and military
efforts produce disasters instead. Its strategy of "triangulating"
China and the Soviet Union, essentially to achieve a victory
in Vietnam, backfired and accelerated its calamitous loss there.
Then there is Guatemala in 1953, Chile in 1973, Angola in 1975,
and countless other places where its habitual penchant for activism
and intervention produced acute disorders, deaths, and only perpetuated
and usually aggravated many nations' difficulties.
There are many serious questions in the
world that must be solved if there is to be much greater stability
and peace: poverty, illiteracy, human rights, and the like. It
was a convenient simplification for the Bush Administration to
blame al-Qaeda and "terrorism" for the world's insecurities
and to pretend that resolving this challenge would lay to rest
many, if not all the others, everywhere. It will not. Moreover,
America's military power is irrelevant for meeting virtually
all of these issues, much less terrorism, and it was sheer opportunism
for Washington to convey the impression that this was the major
issue the U.S. now confronts. It is not. There are still countless
unresolved problems in Latin America, Africa, and Asia that it
is incapable of answering because it is wedded to approaches
and institutions that have failed until now and will continue
to do so in the future. There is no substitute for political
and economic strategies that solve these real challenges rather
than worry about what American businessmen and bankers think
is to their interest. But since 1946 no administration has thought
and acted this way, and instead they have relied on military
power to intervene countless times in various places to preserve
status quos that perpetuate those economic and social conditions
that lead to violence and terrorism.
Whatever its original intention, America's
commitment of time and effort is essentially open-ended wherever
it intervenes. It may last a short time, and often does, but
complications can cause it to spend far more resources and time
than it originally anticipated, causing it in the name of its
"credibility" or some other doctrines the government's
publicists concoct, to get into situations which are disastrous
and which in the end produce defeats for which the U.S. is much
worse off. Vietnam is the leading example of this. Should it
confront the forty or even more nations that now have terrorist
networks then it will in one manner or another intervene everywhere,
but especially Africa and the Middle East, and such commitments
will be open-ended and unpredictable in terms of the time and
effort each requires.
This lack of control leads America's
leaders to a lack of coherence and a loss of priorities, because
when wars begin their eventual consequences and outcome can never
be predicted. This was true long before the U.S. became the preeminent
global power and it is still the case. Events over the past year
have confirmed that destabilization and friends becoming enemies--and
via versa--are the rule in warfare and grand geopolitics, and
to be expected. America's interventions since 1947 have usually
not succeeded by the criteria it originally defined, and its
security at the beginning of the twenty-first century is much
more imperiled than it was fifty years ago.
The U.S. has more determined and probably
more numerous enemies today than ever, and many of those who
hate it are ready and able to inflict death and destruction on
its shores. Its interventions often triumphed in the purely military
sense, which is all the Pentagon worries about, but they have
been political failures in all too many cases and led to yet
more interventions. Its virtually instinctive activist mentality
has led it to leap into situations where it often had no interests,
much less durable solutions, and where it has repeatedly created
disasters and enduring enmities. America has power without wisdom,
and cannot recognize the limits of arms despite its repeated
experiences. The result has been folly, and hatred, which is
a recipe for disasters. September 11 confirmed that. The war
has come home.
The United States can no longer afford
procrastination or to commit more errors, much less pursue the
ad hoc, immoral opportunism, confusion, and loss of priorities
that has guided Washington for a half-century. It cannot throw
money at the Pentagon as if more weapons solve rather than aggravate
political problems. It has been adrift for decades and refused
to admit that its interventions have failed to resolve--and usually
exacerbated-- most, if not all, of the challenges Washington
justified for almost fifty years to send men, machines, or money
and equipment to every corner of the world. Its readiness to
pursue activist military and foreign policies has, if anything,
intensified most of the world's problems by encouraging--and
giving the essential material means--to tyrants and officers
who satisfy America's definitions of its own interests. They
comprise those who resist essential social and economic changes
and those whose adventurism had much better be discouraged. We
see today in the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan how such ambitions
have failed, probably catastrophically, but on a smaller scale
there are countless other places where U.S. intervention has
left festering problems that are returning to haunt and endanger
it.
But by purely non-ideological, rational
criteria U.S. foreign policies have failed even if they have
made the world more prosperous for its own businessmen and investors
and their local cronies. The American people now paying the price
in lives lost and permanent insecurity--and they will have to
accept the turbulent existence that the president after September
11 promised.
At the present juncture of history, wars
are at least as likely as any time over the past century. The
end of Soviet hegemony in East Europe and Moscow's restraining
influence elsewhere is only one factor, albeit of great importance.
The proliferation of nuclear technology and other means of mass
destruction have made large parts of the world much more dangerous,
but highly destructive local wars with conventional weapons in
Africa, the Balkans, Middle East, and elsewhere have only multiplied
since the 1960s. Europe, especially Germany, and Japan are far
stronger and more independent than at any time since 1945, and
China's burgeoning economy has given it a vastly more important
role in Asia.
The world is more complex and dangerous
than during the Cold War, and the decentralization of military
and political power, and the obduracy of the United States' ambitions
to guide the destinies of a virtually unlimited number of nations
is a highly inflammable mixture of factors. The U.S. has become
what Establishment pillar Samuel P. Huntington aptly calls the
only "rogue superpower," full of dual standards and
hypocrisy in its pretensions to be "the indispensable nation,"
as he quotes Madeleine K. Albright, committed to advancing "universal
values"--as another State Department official he cites put
it. 1 America repeatedly has sought to impose those values and
policies that conform to its definitions and interests on nations
and international organizations. This has led it, on the one
hand, to lofty proclamations and, on the other, to protecting
American corporate interests, buttressing tyrants, selling or
giving arms to nations that have rebellious populations or grievances
against neighboring states, and unilaterally bullying its allies
as well as weaker enemies. September 11 proves it is no longer
immune to the destructive consequences of these designs. It must
change fundamentally or pay a frightful, ever-mounting price.
That price is a function both of its foreign policies and the
spread and intensity of weapons of mass destruction. There are
a sufficient number of people, quite independent of states, who
are ready to use the latter.
All factors considered--the breakup of
Yugoslavia, events in Africa and the Middle East, to name but
a few--wars, both civil or between states, remain the principal
(but scarcely the only) challenge facing much of humanity in
the twenty-first century. The numerous ecological disasters affecting
all dimensions of the environment are equally insidious, because
of their relentless but gradual development and the unwillingness
of the crucial nations--above all the United States--to adopt
measures essential for reversing its damage. In many vital regards,
the challenges facing humanity have never been so complex and
threatening, and there is not the slightest reason for complacency
or optimism as a result of the end of the Cold War.
It is an essential precondition of stemming,
much less reversing, the accumulated deterioration of world affairs
that the U.S. end its self-appointed global mission of regulating
all problems, wherever, whenever, or however it wishes to do
so. There are countless ethical and other reasons to cease meddling
everywhere. It has no more right or capacity to do so than any
state over the past century, whatever they called themselves.
But September 11 confirmed, if any was needed, that it has failed
abysmally to bring peace and security to the world but instead
has managed to be increasingly hated, placing itself in profound
and mortal danger. But an additional reason for ending its role
as a rogue superpower and promiscuous, cynical interventionism
is pragmatic: it has been spectacularly unsuccessful even on
its own terms, it is squandering vast economic resources, and
it now places the physical security of Americans on their own
soil in danger. Paramount are the obligations that politicians
have to their own citizens, and to cease the damage the U.S.
causes abroad is also to fulfill their responsibilities to their
own people. Neither the American population nor its political
leaders are likely to agree to such far-reaching changes in foreign
policy, and there is not the slightest sign at this point that
voters will call them to account, but more events of the order
of the September 11 calamity or the anthrax scare may produce
a learning process--and eventual changes.
Communism and fascism were products of
the grave errors in the international order and affairs of states
that the First World War created, and the Soviet system disintegrated
after sixty years because it was the aberrant consequence of
a destructive and abnormal war. But radicalized, suicidal Islamists
are, to a great extent, the outcome of a half-century of America's
interference in the Middle East and Muslim world, and its repeated
grave errors, however different the context or times, have produced
their own abnormal, negative reactions. It is under these conditions
and with these threats that our century has begun. There are
yet other crises incubating. Above all, the destructive potential
of weaponry has increased exponentially and many more people
and nations have access to it, and even what would once have
been considered small foreign policy problems now have potentially
far greater consequences. It all augers very badly.
There will be serious problems throughout
much of the world even if the U.S. abstains from interference
and tailors its actions to fit this troubled reality. Internecine
civil conflicts will continue, as well as wars between states
armed with a growing variety of much more destructive weapons
supplied by outside powers, of which the U.S. remains, by far,
the leader. Many of them have independent roots, but the arguments
for America staying out of them should be dictated by both principles
and experiences.
But the way America's leaders are running
the nation's foreign policy is not creating peace or security
at home or stability abroad. The reverse is the case: its interventions
have been counterproductive. Everyone--Americans and those people
who are the objects of their efforts--would be far better off
if the U.S. did nothing, closed its bases overseas and withdrew
its fleets everywhere, and allowed the rest of world to find
its own way without American weapons and troops. Communism is
dead, and Europe and Japan are powerful and can take care of
their own affairs as they think best. There is every reason for
the U.S. to adapt to these facts, but to continue as it has over
the past half-century is to admit it has the vainglorious but
irrational ambition to run the world.
It cannot. It has failed in the past
and it will fail in this century, and attempting to do so will
inflict wars and turmoil on many nations as well as on its own
people.
Gabriel Kolko
is the leading historian of modern warfare. He is the author
of the classic Century
of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914 and
Another
Century of War?.
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November 23,
2002
Susan Davis
Now About
That Big Stick
Caoimhe Butterly
I Was
Shot While Escorting Jenin's School Children
Kurt Nimmo
Bush &
the Canadians
Chris Floyd
Rough Beast
Slouching
Francis Boyle
On Behalf
of Iraq's 4.5 Million Children
Dave Marsh
Spirit
in the Light
Behzad Yaghmaian
The Rebirth
of Student Protest in Iran
Mark Hand
Dr. Alterman,
I Presume
Ralph Nader
Back Alley
Loan Sharks
Elaine Cassel
The Shameful
Treatment of John Malvo
Adam Engel
& Ian Harvey
Poets'
Basement
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