Washington’s War Fever

By Murray Polner

Before President Obama delivered his recent televised talk to the nation about ISIS, he assembled a group of Washington-based political junkies--foreign policy specialists and ex- government officials  -- probably not a dove among them-- to hear him ruminate about his decision about his decision to strike at ISIS.

The NY Times’ Peter Baker described the meeting  in which the president recalled the coming of the Iraq War, stimulated by war fever  in Washington. “It would have been fascinating,” he said, looking back at 2002 and 2003, “to see the momentum and how it builds.” Well, Cheney, the neocons and a genuflecting mass media surely helped.  According to Baker, Obama saw the same thing in his time, “a virtual fever rising in Washington, pressuring him to send the armed forces after the Sunni radicals who swept through Iraq and beheaded American journalists.”

Even so, he said he wouldn’t be rushed into any decision but instead would be cautious and deliberate, which it turned out, he wasn’t. But still, why did our reluctant and introspective president, nuanced and brainy, so unlike Bush the Second, decide to resume one war and expand yet another?

Was it because  a “virtual fever” is only heard  in our insular Imperial City and nowhere else in the country? Washington is overflowing with living room heroes whose kids go to college rather than into the military and who bear no responsibility for the appalling outcomes of the wars they urge on the nation and its presidents. It is a city replete with Think Tanks, dozens of whom, the Times recently revealed, are doing very well financially, taking money from foreign governments and writing “policy papers” and  whose advice is often taken too seriously by the city’s power people.  As the Times headline put it, “Foreign Powers Influence Think Tanks.”

Washington’s “virtual war fever” was assailed by an ordinary Times reader, Len DiSesa of Dover, NH, in a letter to the Times (I’ve never met him): “As a Vietnam veteran all I can say is, please—not again. Once more we go down that slippery slope where Americans are put in harm’s way to carry out a political objective….  Have we learned from our past mistakes?  Or are we doomed to repeat the history we are ignoring? Where are voices of the Vietnam veterans”? Sorry, Len, but the Vietnam War and invasion of Iraq are ancient history in today’s Washington.

So we’re back at war again, a so-called limited war, taking on ISIS, that savage, beheading crowd that we are informed by the war fever crowd threatens to attack our homeland.  President Obama, no fanatical warrior, has said over and over again that this limited  war may take three years to finish and he may have to hand the ISIS problem over to the next president while he goes off to write his memoirs and work for some prestigious law form or university.

“Mama, don’t raise your son to be a soldier” went the old tune. Well, maybe not (or maybe yes, if the draft is reinstated) but Obama, our introspective and reluctant warrior pledged over and again there will be no American combat troops involved. Woodrow Wilson and FDR also made that promise.  It depends on who you believe and whether our latest war opens a new can of Middle Eastern worms, with new groups of rebels or terrorists (take your pick) to fight, naturally, with no U.S. ground forces. General Martin Dempsey, no doubt with Pentagon vetting, isn’t so sure, telling a Senate committee “ I, of course, would go back to the president and make a recommendation that may include the use of U.S. ground forces.” If that happens, let’s hope that the VA scandal has been resolved and its hospitals are ready to handle the new wave of wounded troops. When a columnist at Obama’s gathering asked what he would do if bombing failed, the president would not speculate. How could he, given that bombing alone rarely defeats guerilla forces.

If Hunter S. Thompson were alive today rest assured  he would not have been invited to Obama’s get-together but the astute HST, while  no foreign policy expert, famously  and prophetically uttered after 9/11: We are AT War—with somebody—and we will stay AT War with that mysterious enemy for the rest of our lives.”

Meanwhile, to shore up the dispatch of more and more bombers over Iraq and Syria, Obama has also embraced the peculiar notion that he and most likely every other president after him can take the nation to war without asking Congress, the Constitution be damned. The very idea aroused Yale’s Bruce Ackerman in a heated Times Op Ed.  It “marks a decisive break in the American constitutional tradition. Nothing attempted by his predecessor George W. Bush, remotely compares in imperial hubris.” My favorite commentator Andrew J. Bacevich put it best: “Rudderless and without a compass, the American ship of state continues to drift, guns blazing.”

In any event,  ISIS or no ISIS, war remains a treasured American tradition.

Same old, Same old.

By Murray Polner

Dick Cheney is my favorite political figure. Who else but our secretive, still influential uber-hawk who managed to obtain five draft exemptions and then  famously bragged to the Washington Post’s George C. Wilson, “I had other priorities in the ‘60s than military service” could have been so upfront and meant it? But gee, Dick, so did I and millions of others have “other priorities” but we still had to show up and learn to march, salute and do KP.

“Game Change,” that razor-sharp film (based on the Heinemann and Halperin book) about the McCain-Palin presidential race in 2008 is an even better Cheney story, apocryphal or not. Centering on Palin’s astonishing lack of knowledge, the film has McCain’s  dejected  inner circle sitting around trying to fathom what went wrong when Jamey Sheridan, the actor playing McCain speech writer Mark Salter, suddenly speaks up.

“You know what Dick Cheney said when we picked her?”

“What,” asks Woody Harrelson playing campaign boss Steve Schmidt.

“Said we made a reckless choice.”

Long, pregnant pause.

And then  “Salter” adds, “When you lose the moral high ground  to Dick Cheney you have to rethink your entire life.”

Beautiful!

But never underestimate Cheney. He’s a shrewd survivor. His vision of an America strong enough to police the world and take on all comers still commands extensive support. Tom  Engelhardt is his complete opposite. In his latest book Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars and a Global Security State in a Single-Power World, he writes that  Cheney and his friends and allies were convinced that Watergate and Vietnam had placed the president in “chains” and after 9/11 they set out to “take the gloves off.”  And then, “From this urge flowed the decision to launch a ‘Global War on Terror’—that is, to establish a ‘wartime’ with no possible end that would leave a commander-in-chief president in the White House till hell froze over.”

Engelhardt’s  estimable online TomDispatch is a valuable source for anyone desperate for alternatives to  America’s historic addiction to war. It publishes writers rarely read or viewed in mainstream media and, very much in  the  hallowed  tradition of  George Seldes’s “In Fact” and I.F. Stone’s weekly -- or for that matter, the contemporary libertarian Antiwar.com and the smart anti- neocon The American Conservative.  Reading TomDispatch and like-minded sites we  can visualize the infestation of our Capital City with its bought and sold politicians, predisposed think tanks--  many  subsidized by foreign governments according to the New York Times – and its multitude of  pundits and lobbyists, all doing quite well  financially, thank you,  engaged in what Engelhardt charmingly calls the “national and homeland security racket.”  It’s also what he puts down as the “Lockdown State,” where secret people run secret wars using secret  torture hideouts with secret  torture chambers.

But in the end, we cynics  need to say: Great stuff, Tom, far better than Cheney’s take,  but what do we do with all this information and criticism, a rough cross between Ron Paul and George McGovern? How do we change things?  Engelhardt offers several ideas but one in particular stands out as absurd as anything our ex-VP ever uttered. To Engelhardt.  the move to a volunteer army was a grave error since it detached the military from the rest of us, rendering  our military a sort of “foreign legion.” Vietnam’s disproportionately conscript army was “at the edge of rebellion,” he says, quoting one source, and was “voting with its feet against an imperial war.”  With the advent of the volunteer army, Engelhardt continues, a “1 percent version of American war was coming to fruition, “unchecked by a draft Army” [my italics]. A new book, The Invisible Soldiers by Anne Hagedorn, confirms the continual and growing use of private contractors – according to a 2013 Congressional Research study they comprised half the military in Iraq and Afghanistan and they’re a lot cheaper than a draft in the long run since they receive no lifetime medical care or pensions. What then?

When I first read those words – unchecked by a draft Army-- I thought he was kidding. I don’t know if Engelhardt ever served on active duty in a conscript army but he needs to explain how 20 year old draftees can “check” warmakers dead set on making war. A new draft, some on the left have argued, will help keep us out of war or at the least help close it down.  Too fast.

How so?  I assume Engelhardt and advocates of a draft mean by a return to passionate sixties-style marches, fiery demonstrations, aroused college students, and discontented voters. I have my doubts, but preventing or stopping wars certainly won’t come about by drafting a new generation of kids while the rest of us stay-at-homes hope they’ll rise against their masters once they put on a uniform. Yes, there was “fragging,”underground newspapers, discontent, and lots of dope smoked in Vietnam but millions of draftees and short term enlistees  had little to do with ending the war, which eventually came about  when powerful political and economic interests chose to call it quits. And while the draft was still on, Nixon called on “silent” Americans to speak up in defense of the war  and Americans voted overwhelmingly for him against McGovern, a genuine peace candidate.

It’s a sixties  fantasy that our bellicose hawks can be intimidated  by shanghaiing a new generation of our young into the military rather than countering them by working very hard educating, organizing, voting, building constant pressure and offering serious, realistic antiwar alternatives. Lib-left dreamers to the contrary, if you give our homefront warriors a million or more draftees a year a chance to show the world who’s still boss, they surely will, Remember Madeleine Albright’s gem when she challenged Colin Powell, advocate of more limited military interventions: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

All a draft can ever do is whet the appetite of those always ready to reach for their guns. The truth is we had a draft before Korea and Vietnam and we know how much that accomplished to prevent or shorten those wars, where 100,000 GIs, so many of them draftees, were killed while so many others were damaged in body and mind.

Cheney preferred working the sidelines but he recently reminded his fellow Republicans that the true path to victory in the GWOT is to keep strengthening the military and battling the [alleged] growth of American isolationism at home. That’s  our policy and will  be even after we choose a new president in 2016 who, you can bet, will end up following the same old, same old, track, pretty close to Cheney’s hallucination I wouldn’t want to hand the next man or woman in the White House a million or so draftees to play around with.

Putin, Putin, Putin, Putin & More Putin

By Murray Polner

I rarely agree with Henry Kissinger, our latter day Metternich, but his recent Washington Post Op Ed was on the mark: Western “demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.” He suggested instead that the U.S. goal should be to find a way for the two Ukraines to work together, not favoring the domination of one side or the other. “We should seek reconciliation, not the domination oif a faction.”  Bravo, Henry K.

Like lots of people I’ve been trying to figure out Vladimir Putin, our latest foreign devil. I doubt if many of our born-gain Russian experts could pass a simple test evaluating and explaining the possible impact of Russia’s history—imperial and communist—on Russia’s present direction under Putin? How many instant experts know enough about Russia’s past to write a comprehensive essay about say, Mikhail Bakunin, Dora Kaplan, Alexander Herzen, Nicholas I, General Vlasov, Nestor Makhno, Anton Denikin, Vera Figner, Alexander Kerensky, Serge Witte, Baron Wrangel,  A.K. Kolchak, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the Dekabristi, or even U.S. General William Graves?

My guess is that few can. Who cares about Russian  history anyway? Instead, our media chatter is about a revived economic, military and political cordon sanitaire or encirclement of the Moscow fiends.  Meanwhile, the Crimean coup is viewed superficially here as an attack on “freedom” and self-determination, at times evoking an image of the Nazi’s 1938 Anschluss of Austria.

Comments about Putin have been almost universally hostile --he worked for the KGB, ignoring that Bush I ran the CIA.  A more reasonable comment came from Fiona Hill, who once worked in the Bush II administration and co-wrote Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. “He’s not delusional,” she wisely concluded, “but he inhabits a Russia of the past, a version of the past that he has created. His present is defined by it and there is no coherent vision of the future.”

Like most world leaders today.

“What is Putin thinking?” asked  Shaun Walker, the UK Guardian’s Moscow-based reporter. He’s been writing about Russia’s deep--seated sense of injustice and supposed unfair treatment by the West because of “ an unwillingness to take Russia’s interests into account.” Putin went out of his way in his St. George’s Hall speech a few months ago to deride Americans pretensions “in their exclusivity and exceptionalism that they can decide the destinies of the world and that only

they can ever be right.” Walker has described the thinking of Russia’s elite and presumably Putin: “This ideology envisions Russia’s emergence as a conservative world power in direct opposition to the geopolitical hegemony and liberal values of the West --- a hint of a traditional Romanov-like restoration?

The New Yorker’s editor David Remnick covered Russia and wrote a fine book about his experiences. He concluded that the move against Crimea “demands condemnation.” But a shrewder comment came from  an unlikely source, comedian-commentator Bill Maher, who asked why, given that 58% of Crimeans are Russians happy to rejoin Moscow. Remnick’s reasoning  included his outrage that  Ukraine, a “sovereign state” was violated—though so too were all the sovereign nations attacked throughout our history–  Mexico in 1846, Spain in 1898, Haiti, Nicaragua, pre-WWI Mexico, Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua again, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Korea, North Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, drone-drenched-Pakistan, et.al., et.al.

Meanwhile, our hawks are at it again, never having absorbed the lessons of defeat in Vietnam, Iraq or in today’s unwinnable obsession with the volatile, alien, unmanageable Middle East.

Hillary, hardly a dove,  has compared Vladimir to Adolf and politicians like Biden tells Estonians that Article 5 of NATO mandates that, if attacked, the U.S. as  charter member will be required to spring to its defense. Some American political figures even love tossing around empty threats like “all options are on the table,” whatever that means. Maybe nuclear, chemical and biological warfare? No-one asks and no-one dares bother to explain to the American people that there are no more major American military alternatives left in Eastern Europe or anywhere else.

 “The U.S. has treated Russia like a loser since the end of the Cold War,” wrote our former ambassador to Moscow, the non- conforming and insightful Jack Matlock, Jr. in the Washington Post. When NATO , which operates under the watchful eyes of the Pentagon, moved closer to Russian borders, Putin objected, interpreting the move as amounting to encirclement.  Matlock reminded his readers that, like him or not, Putin worked with the U.S. when it invaded Afghanistan and also abandoned Russian bases in Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam and in Cuba.  In return, NATO reached into the Balkans and the Baltics and involved itself in the “orange revolutions” of Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan and hinted that its doors were open to former SSRs. With little or no historical knowledge, and oblivious to the risks, American heirs of the Monroe Doctrine refused to concede that a nuclear- armed Russia would be hypersensitive to foreign - dominated military alliances approaching or actually on their doorstep.

Some historians of Russian history are trying to understand, even if our domestic hawks always equate “understand” with “Munich.”  Diplomatic historian Sheldon Stern’s “Putin Didn’t Seize Crimea Because Obama is ‘Weak,’ ” tells us that “It would be surprising if Putin did not intervene in the Crimea after [Ukrainian PM] Yanukovych’s overthrow  threatened  Russia’s access to its warm water base in Sebastopol and its dominant political influence in Kiev. Only in the ahistorical world of pundit-land chatter would Putin be restrained by who happened to be president of the United States—as demonstrated by Russia’s actions in 1948, 1956, 1962 and 2008.” He cites historian Daniel Larison, a blogger for the paleo, anti-neocon The American Conservative: “Russia behaved the way that it has because it already thought that western interference in Ukraine was too great.”

Mark Sternberg just edited the eighth edition of Nicholas Riasanovsky’s definitive A History of Russia and is now writing a history of the 1917 Russian Revolution. In “Putin’s Russia is Far More Complicated Than a Mere Autocracy,” he drew attention to a serious misinterpretation drawn from Churchill's famous Westminster College speech in 1946 when he warned the West about its former WWII ally.

“Winston Churchill famously called Russia ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’—a phrase that makes me cringe when it shows up in contemporary journalism…Part of the problem is that we forget Churchill’s point: “Russian national interest” [my italics]

Another pundit I don’t always agree with is the smart and genuine conservative (unlike the loonies on the far right) Ross Douthit of the NY Times. After the hysteria about Crimea,  Douthit’s advice was for the U.S. was to take it slow, very slow. It was Bismarck who once said that Europe’s 19^th Century wars were a lesson that they “weren’t worth the bones of a Pomeranian Grenadier” – the same advice that should have been applied to the brainless invasion of Iraq and its many victims. Douthit sensibly added: “Even the most bellicose U.S. politicians aren’t ready to say that South Ossetia or Simferopol is worth the bones of a single American marine”—not even Joe Biden’s NATO member Estonia. 

What we don’t need is a tit-for-tat contest before someone decides to create another unexpected shoot-the Austrian-Archduke incident.  So here's  Douthit’s and my main point about Putin and Ukraine: “When illusions are shattered, it’s easy to become reckless, easy to hand-wring and retrench. What we need is realism: to use the power we have, without pretending to powers we lack.”

It’s as far as we dare to go to go in the nuclear age of Obama and his successors.