Falcon of Peace (Page 2)

This essay originally appeared on TomDispatch

Taking Options Off the Table

Now much of Washington and the media have indeed reached a consensus that the Bush administration's use of force was a disaster of the first order. As a result, they have generally concluded that, in Iraq, we must be especially careful not to stop applying it too quickly lest we destabilize what's left of that country and, in Afghanistan, that achieving "stability" calls for the deployment of significantly more forces which, of course, will use significantly more force.

In Iraq, where President Obama is indeed talking about a withdrawal that would remove all US forces by the end of 2011, we also know, thanks to Thomas Ricks's latest book The Gamble, that America's top generals, including Centcom commander Petraeus and General Odierno, the top commander in Iraq, believe we'll still be fighting in that country in 2015. In the meantime, the general who commands U.S. forces in Afghanistan, David McKiernan, is already talking about years more of fighting at surge levels--and suggesting that yet more U.S. troops will be needed. ("I think... that this is not a temporary force uplift, that it's going to need to be sustained for some period of time. I can't give you an exact number of--the year that it would be. But I've said I'm trying to look out for the next three to four or five years.")

In the meantime, the Obama administration is hoping to find some extra help by calling together a regional conference of interested countries, possibly including Iran, and by using the military to negotiate with and peel off "moderate" Taliban backers, while it sends in at least 17,000 more troops. This is what passes for new foreign policy thinking in Washington.

In the meantime, the Afghan chain of command has been further militarized. It now stretches from retired Marine General Jim Jones, the new national security advisor, through Centcom commander Petraeus and Afghan commander McKiernan to a soon-to-retire Army general, Karl Eikenberry, who reportedly will be appointed US ambassador in Kabul. Meanwhile, in southern Afghanistan, as well as along the Pakistani border, peace and stabilization will involve the further application of force with results that shouldn't surprise us.

To summarize: They can be wrong a hundred times and when they are, they get to try every cockamamie scheme and call it anything they want. We don't even have names for whatever peace strategies might be used. And while Iran is, however grudgingly, however imperially, being invited to the Afghan table, antiwar activists and critics, no matter how on the mark they might have been, remain the equivalent of an American Hamas.

On the other hand, if you've been a "hawk" and a pundit, or one of those retired generals who talked us, however ineptly, through our latest wars (like the TV financial analysts who, in mid-meltdown, were still calling on us to buy more stocks and assuring us of the solidity of AIG and Citigroup), you can't be wrong often enough to be asked to leave the table at which the Great Game is played.

Oh, and with this in mind, a small tip for prospective "doves" within the Obama administration: Be careful not to be too on the mark in your analysis or, at least, too loud about proclaiming it. On this subject, history is a suicide bomber and it's coming for you. After all, the worst thing in any administration is to be a dove and be right.

As David Halberstam memorably wrote in his history of the Vietnam War, The Best and the Brightest, of hawkish future Secretary of State Dean Rusk, "So [he] was once again promoted (the best people, who had correctly predicted the fall of China, would see their careers destroyed, but Dean Rusk, who had failed to predict the Chinese entry into the Korean War, would see his career accelerate.) There had to be a moral for him here: if you are wrong on the hawkish side of an event you are all right; if you are accurate on the dovish side you are in trouble."

Leaving the Comfort Zone

Let's be clear here. In our world, any application of imperial force is part of the problem, not part of the solution. It doesn't work. We can't afford it. It's not in "the national interest." The last seven years have made this abundantly clear for those who care to look.

Let's be clear on this, too: If we keep sending military people in to solve our problems, they will, not surprisingly, turn to military solutions. Whatever lip service they offer to diplomacy and other possible paths, they will, in the end, prefer force by whatever label. It's what they know. However uncomfortable its results, it's still their comfort zone.

That's why the American president is commander-in-chief--exactly so that military men aren't left to "solve" our problems for us.

Let's be clear on this as well: Nobody knows what antiwar solutions would make sense, no less succeed, since so little effort or money or time or experimentation has gone into them, but we know a lot about what force can't do in our world.

Wouldn't it make sense to put a small percentage of the long-term effort and money that the Pentagon now profligately invests in force and the means to deliver it into strategies for peace, and into the de-escalation of the use of force as a solution (and of the global imperial mission that goes with it)? Shouldn't somebody consider, for instance, whether the principle found in so many individual martial arts--that defense, and even striking reserves of power, can be found not in meeting force with blunt force, but in giving way before force--might apply to more collective situations? Don't such groups as the Taliban and Al Qaeda feed off of, thrive and recruit off of, military action against them as well as the human destruction and the attention that goes with it?

Isn't it time for us to begin to take force off that "table" on which, officials in Washington always insist, lie "all options," but especially smash-mouth ones? Isn't it time to suggest that there can be no national interest when it comes to military action in Iraq or Afghanistan, only an imperial interest? Isn't it time to suggest that, as bad as things are, as little as we know how to do anything else, simply fighting on in Iraq or Afghanistan until 2015 or 2020, as our economic system collapses around our ears, can't be a solution to anything?

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