Realism and Policy

By Michael F. Duggan

T223. Regret to inform you that Lieut. R.A. Leighton 7th Worcesters died of wounds December 23rd. Lord Kitchener sends his sympathy.
Colonel of Territorial Forces, Records, Warwick.

One hundred six years ago today (December 26, 1915), Lt. Roland Leighton, age 20, of the 7th Battalion, Worcestershire Regiment, was buried at the British military cemetery in Louvencourt, France. He had been shot while leaving a trench to inspect barbed wire in need of repair in front of the British positions on the moonlit night of December 22. Hit in the lower abdomen, Leighton died late the following day. He had been scheduled to go home for Christmas leave on December 24.

His fiance, Vera Brittain, would live until 1970 and would write Testament of Youth (along with 28 other books), one of the most important memoirs of the First World War. She would also lose her only sibling, Edward, and friends Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow—essentially all of her male circle of friends (Edward, Roland, and Victor were her “Three Musketeers”)—in the war. Edward, Roland, and Vera had all been accepted at Oxford, but she would go alone (she left Oxford to serve as a VAD nurse in France and Malta, but would return after the war).

In 2014 Testament of Youth was made into a feature film with Alicia Vikander (Laura Croft: Tomb Raider) and Kit Harington (Game of Thrones). Even with historical inaccuracies and omissions, it is a hard-hitting movie about human promise squandered in war. Brittain’s wartime diaries were published as Chronicle of Youth in 1981. Her correspondences were issued in 1998 as Letters from a Lost Generation.

Roland also had literary ambitions. On April 25, 1915, he wrote the poem Violets, which he showed to Vera while on leave that August. On the day he wrote the poem, he had enclosed violets in a letter to her. Nascent, but showing real potential, it rings of the Georgian Poets like Rupert Brooke, but gently anticipates Graves, Owen, and Sassoon.

Violets from Plug Street wood, Sweet, I send you oversea. (It is strange they should be blue, Blue, when his soaked blood was red, For they grew around his head: It is strange they should be blue.) Violets from Plug Street Wood, Think what they have meant to me— Life and hope and love and you. (And you did not see them grow, where his mangled body lay, Hiding horror from the day; Sweetest it was better so) Violets from oversea, To your dear, far, forgetting land, These I send in memory, Knowing you will understand

By Michael F. Duggan

In his World War II memoir, Doing Battle: the Making of a Skeptic, Paul Fussell observes:

“Wasn’t the ground war, for the United States, an unintended form of eugenics, clearing the population of the dumbest, the least skilled, the least promising of all American males?  Killed off in their tens of thousands, their disappearance from the pool of future fathers had the effect, welcomed or not, of improving the breed.  Their fate constituted an unintended but inescapable holocaust.”  

When I first read this stark observation, I didn’t want to believe it.  It seemed cynical, illiberal, a paragraph designed to grab the attention.  Wasn’t the U.S. fighting against an ideology that embraced eugenics (and “improving the breed” sounds like the language of Nazism or at least animal husbandry)?¹ 

I wrote it off as the bitter remembrance of a combat infantry officer who, like Robert Graves before him, disliked the men with whom he trained, “men whose company, in many cases, I would have run miles to avoid.”²  Any “war buffs” taken in by the élan and esprit de corps of Band of Brothers and other books about elite units, should read this book if they want to know what life was like for a 20-year-old officer in an ordinary leg infantry unit in the Vosges Mountains in 1944-45.  It is a wonderful tonic to balance out the uncritical solemnity that infuses myths of the “Good War” (they should also read Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed).  Although I never accepted Greatest Generation heliographies uncritically, Fussell’s point seemed to go too far.   

But leaving aside such promising individuals as George H.W. Bush, John and Joseph Kennedy, Jr., Lewis Nixon, Eugene Sledge, John Paul Stevens, Byron White, and Fussell himself—all of whom were from the educated middle and upper classes—I now think that he has a point: policy may consciously or unconsciously push unspoken trends and attitudes that are reprehensible when said aloud.  After all, the various U.S. wars in the Middle East provided convenient venues to test new weapons under real world conditions, but we would never say so.   

Today, an unspoken justification for some bad behavior and policy—the flouting of vaccines and vaccine mandates—is the view that a large majority of those who die are no longer of much importance to the community, economy, and the gene pool.  If anything, these people are a burden.  Like Fussell’s de facto eugenics of military service, this result may not be intended, but it is real, and some people don’t care enough to use personal responsibility to prevent thousands of deaths in what is now the deadliest single event in U.S. history.

People won’t tell you this, but beloved grandmothers, grandfathers, and the odd special needs child aside, most of those dying of COVID-19 are nameless, faceless numbers of the aged, infirm, and weak.  Don’t let some anti-vaxxer tell you that they are bravely advocating greater “freedom.”  What they are advocating is a vulgar, primitive understanding of natural selection for the purpose of social improvement, that is akin to the obtuse nineteenth-century construction of evolution as “survival of the fittest.”  Clearly they do not understand more nuanced parts of evolution, like group selection. 

About 75% of those dying of COVID-19 in the United States are over 65.  Those with mental disabilities are also at much greater risk of dying from the disease than the general population.  In the eyes of some anti-vaxxers (and in the hearts of those who whip them up), these are people would have died soon anyway or are otherwise costly to society.

Flouting masks and vaccines has nothing to do with courage, Jesus, manhood, patriotism, or “rights.”  It is all about callousness to the point of criminality.  The result has been a mostly preventable holocaust, a “thinning of the herd” by culling the weak from the herd through the sickness of those healthy enough to endure it.  How can this be anything but eugenics?  It certainly isn’t Christian.      

Although the number of their fatalities is not as great, we should remember that natural selection cuts both ways, and hospital wards and cemeteries are also filling up with younger anti-vaxxers as well as the old and infirm, about whom many couldn’t care less. How would they feel if people began writing off their lives as instances of self-inflicted natural selection that improved the gene pool?     

Notes

1. Paul Fussell, Doing Battle (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1996) 171-72.
2. Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, quoted by Fussell in Doing Battle, 77.

By Michael F. Duggan

We live in a time when 760,000 American deaths is considered to be an acceptable operating cost in dealing with a mostly preventable disease. That is almost 100,000 more than the total number of all United States combat deaths from all of our wars combined (look it up if you don’t believe me). It is now the deadliest episode of our history. Considering that there are three safe and highly effective free vaccines available on request, this number becomes especially baffling. And now with COVID-19 cases on the rise again in many states, we appear to be on the cusp of the fourth surge. Or is it the fifth? The question is whether the disease will go from pandemic to endemic and if it might have been eradicated.

Except for avoidable mistakes made during 2020, the problem does not appear to be at the Federal level; the vaccines were underwritten by the United States Government, and the current administration got 200 million vaccinations out in its first 100 days. The failure as it persists today is in the fabric of the nation, the uneven patchwork of jurisdictions that make up the United States. Anybody who believes in delegating power to the states ought to write a ground-up history on the COVID-19 crisis.

The United States is also a nation in which flirting with fascism and the use of violent imagery in political speech have become ubiquitous in parts of the electorate (history is watching their leaders and will remember their names). Some of these people embrace empirically disprovable delusions and some believe that they have a right to act violently on the basis of these fevered dreams and other irrational impulses.

Recently, hundreds of people attended an event at Dealey Plaza to welcome John F. Kennedy, Jr., back to the political fight (on top of the patent absurdity of such an expectation is the fact that John-John’s political view were nothing remotely like those of today’s conspiracy followers). It is unclear whether this kind of behavior is mass psychosis or, as others have suggested, something more like a propaganda-driven cult (as Justice Holmes reminds us, “[w]hen the ignorant are taught to doubt, they do not know what they might safely believe,” at which point they might fall for anything). Those on the extremity of the other side of the political spectrum are only marginally less extreme in some of their acts and prescriptions (e.g. the taking down of statutes of Grant and Lincoln). Taken together, the country is a pressurized bottle on a high gas flame. Throw in the five looming and mostly unaddressed crises of the environment—human overpopulation, carbon generation/climate change, deforestation/habitat destruction/loss of biodiversity, water issues, and the plastics crisis—and you get a fair idea of the lay of the land.

With many Americans hurting as the predictable result of the economic disruption of the pandemic, government spending is a necessity but also inflationary (the primary cause of inflation are the shortages caused by the back up in supply lines and networks around the world). The American Relief Plan Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the incredible, shrinking Build Back Better Act are all necessary for the general welfare. Even though the Infrastructure Act is a long term in scope, programs that flush the economy with ready cash can keep prices high, at least in the short term. There appears to be no immediate remedy for inflation, which is a global phenomenon.

The administration’s legislative agenda, the mass distribution of vaccines, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the creation of 500,000 new jobs are all notable accomplishments. And yet these achievements are not registering with many Americans. Some commentators have observed that inflation has hit the red states harder, which might explain the discontent among conservative independents. The administration has less than 12 months to get things moving again, to get the word out about its successes, and to tamp down the anger behind the divisions. If it doesn’t, then what? If Biden succeeds, he will be the president who turned things around. If not he will be a tragic figure of history, his agenda a noble effort to save a nation that did not meet him halfway.

I do not know what will be coming after the 2022 midterm elections and especially after 2024, but it might be unrecognizable relative to what we have come to know in this country. What happens if the losers in close political races do not concede defeat? What if voter suppression and other undemocratic measures allow political minorities to dominate? How will the U.S. military react if violence breaks out in parts of the country, or if extremest groups assert themselves with political violence? If you have a plausible claim to citizenship in a more rational, less volatile country, you might want to beat the rush and start the application process now.

By Michael F. Duggan

Shakespeare could have written the script, although parts of the final act are still unclear.  Call it The Tragedy of Colin Powell.

I am an admirer of Colin Powell.  I think of him as one of the most notable American leaders of the past half-century, but I see him as a tragic historical figure for what he might have been and for his legacy.  He was a good and possibly a great man and could have been the George Marshall of the early twenty-first century, if only… 

He certainly had qualities of greatness in him, and the Powell Doctrine (which could just as easily be called the Grant, Eisenhower, or MacArthur Doctrine), which combined with the latest technology, produced magnificent operational results in the Gulf War of 1990-91.¹  At the time, many of us saw Desert Storm as a masterstroke of measured realism, a police action to expel an invader and restore the territorial sovereignty of Kuwait.  More recently it has been called into question as a significant expansion of U.S. involvement in the Middle East.²  It was also a motivation for those who launched the September 11 attacks.

Powell embodied the American Dream and is our patron saint of success by merit. The son of Jamaican parents in the South Bronx, he rode an ROTC scholarship all the way to the Halls of Power. My father, a West Pointer, went through the Army Infantry School with him at Fort Benning. He once observed that even then “everybody knew the sky was the limit for that guy.”

My view of Powell is not set in stone, but I would like to see him as a sensible, moderate realist, soldier-statesman, the “Reluctant Warrior” with two purple hearts whose legacy was forever tarnished by lesser men.  Was his failure in the run up to the Iraq a casualty of the zeal and manipulation of others, the collateral damage of an undeclared war?  Was it an honest mistake?  In my opinion, Powell’s “Pottery Barn” warning of “you break it, you own it” is a better indication of his realism and gives a fairer idea of his doubts surrounding the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

I see Powell as a tragic figure for two closely-related reasons, but my overall opinion of him is still in flux.  I would hate to think that he was just an attractive, if slick, political operator, like Obama, whose modus operandi was often to split the difference with the stronger voices in the room.  I think he had more integrity and insight than that, but again, I don’t know. Something gnaws at me—something doesn’t seem quiet right about his performance at the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003.   

The preponderance of evidence from his long career suggests that he was a realist at heart.  But there is also Colin Powell the charming public speaker who played down differences between himself and former bosses and colleagues.³  When it comes to the Iraq War, being in favor of a diplomatic solution and then being the decisive factor in selling it to the world is a difficult position to explain.  And yet we must reconcile this division between Powell and Realist and Powell the Apologist, the reconciler of irreconcilable positions.  

I was against the invasion and occupation of Iraq from before the start and was not swayed by Powell’s testimony at the United Nations.  I saw it as phony—the antithesis of Adlai Stevenson’s performance at the U.N. that help prevent a war in 1962.  I sided with Kennan and Scowcroft (and Scott Ritter) and saw no evidence that justified an invasion.⁴  Some friends of mine did, if briefly, question their opposition to the invasion because of their faith in Powell.  And Powell’s advocacy gave others in the media and elsewhere the cover to embrace a catastrophic policy.  To me it looked like a cynical stunt exploiting Powell’s nearly universal popularity to sell an unjustified war.  As Powell’s Chief of Staff, Larry Wilkerson, observes:

“That’s how bad I felt about the presentation, which I thought was hokey, circumstantial crap.  And then I realized that, you know, Colin Powell had given it.  He had Mother Teresa poll ratings.  That’s the reason it was so effective, because Colin Powell gave it.  When Colin Powell held up that little thing and said, not in a post-9/11 world… people believed him.  They wouldn’t have believed Dick Cheney.  They wouldn’t have believed George Bush.  They wouldn’t have believed Condi Rice… But they believed Colin Powell.”⁵

Wilkerson believed, not that the evidence presented was necessarily wrong, but that it was circumstantial—inconclusive—and could lead to different interpretations.  It was not a basis for going to war.⁶

Giving Powell the benefit of the doubt, I believe that he is tragic for two reasons:  

1. The fact that he was used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq is disturbing.  My reading, and that of other historians, is that during the Bush II administration, he was knuckled-under and outmaneuvered by two of the most brutal and shrewd bureaucratic infighters in U.S. history, Cheney and Rumsfeld.⁷  He was a former soldier who might have felt that he had to follow the orders of the administration in which he served.  And because he was the first African-American secretary, he likely felt that he could not resign in protest, a la William Jennings Bryan.⁸  Both of these things made his actions inevitable at the time.  It was a no-win situation, and he knew it.  And once done, it was final, it led to a failed policy, it could not be undone, and he would always be remembered for it.  Thus a tragic historical figure.
2. A former infantry combat officer who served in Vietnam, Powell was an innovator of an outlook that specifically sought to avoid the kind of war he was used to legitimize. Thus his role as a cabinet member produced results that were diametrically opposed to what he likely saw as his historical importance and in some ways his life’s mission as a military planner and soldier. 

What about the argument that the circumstantial evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was suggestive and that a majority of people inside government believed that Hussein had such weapons?  Here I don’t know what to believe.  Larry Wilkerson notes that Powell was dubious about the existence of WMD well before the speech at the U.N.⁹  The public line is that Powell preferred a diplomatic solution to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, but when one was not forthcoming, and with sufficient reason to believe Hussein could have WMD, he willingly got onboard the military option.  Hmm.  If this is the case, then the performance at the U.N. denotes a colossal failure of judgment by a noteworthy man.  

In literature, the tragic hero is one who is better than most people—one who pushes the limits of human potential—but who is flawed and therefore sympathetic.  Perhaps Powell is a new kind of tragic hero: a person who is better than the prevailing currents of his or her times.  Thus he fails, not because of his own flaws, but those of his milieu and his inability to change them (and a moderate realist in a time of ideologues is bound to be either a nonstarter or else a tragic figure with or without a tragic flaw).  It was not his flaw, but rather a hopelessly flawed administration that failed him.  He was a rational island in a sea of delusion and was inundated by the rising tide of an ill-considered war footing.  At least that it what I would like to think.  

Of course the other possibility also exists: that he made a horrible mistake by making an all-too common assumption about the illusory casus belli of the Iraq War.  Here the great historical observer would have seen through the clutter, noise, and distractions.  At the very least, he would have acted more cautiously given the questionable nature of the evidence.  Failure to do these things would seem to rob him of the title of being a great man, making him even more tragic but also more human, reduced in stature. 

Ultimately, to be considered a great figure, you must get the biggest (and last) things right.  Your career must been seen as ascending.  Churchill had the Dardanelles, and if he had died in 1925 or 1930, he would have been regarded as a failure.  But he also had the Blitz, D-Day, and V-E Day.  Powell had the Gulf War and a speech that sold the Iraq War to the world—a war that resulted in the deaths of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people and in essence handed Iraq to Iran (to be fair, the war would have happened with or without Powell’s speech).  I suspect that we may never know whether his error was imposed on him (or if an exaggerated version of the evidence was sold to him), was the result of his own misjudgment, or some combination of the two.

The question then is the degree to which the contributions of an otherwise impressive career will counterbalance his failure as Secretary of State in peddling the invasion of Iraq.  It is difficult to assess this at this early point.  But from what I know of him, I hope that historians and our people will be kind to the memory of a noteworthy public servant and will remember him more for his Doctrine than a one-off dog-and-pony show at the U.N.

Notes

1. The Powell doctrine may be seen as a military analog to the realism of Kennan and Scowcroft.  Its eight point checklist: 1). Is a vital national security interest threatened? 2). Do we have a clear attainable objective? 3). Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed? 4). Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted? 5). Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?  6).  Have the consequences of our action been fully considered? 7). Is the action supported by the American people? 8). Do we have genuine broad international support. See https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/the-powell-doctrines-wisdom-must-live-on/
2. See Andrew Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East (New York: Random House, 2016), 133-134.  
3. See Juan Williams’, The History Makers interview “An Evening with Colin Powell,” April 2006.
4. See Brent Scowcroft, “Don’t Attack Saddam,” The Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2002 and Albert Eisele’s interview “George Kennan Speaks Out,” The Hill, September 26, 2002.
5. Larry Wilkerson, War is not about Truth, Justice, and the American Way (New York: Real News Books, 2015), 107.
6. Larry Wilkerson, War is not about Truth, Justice, and the American Way, 111.
7. See Bartholomew Sparrow, The Strategist, Brent Scowcroft and the Call of National Security (New York: Public Affairs, 2015), 531-532.
8. Larry Wilkerson sees Powell’s decision not to resign in more personal terms observing “[i]t’s not his character t quit.  It’s his character to keep going, and to keep trying to change things.  It’s is character to keep cleaning the dog poop off the carpet in the Oval Office.” Wilkerson continues, saying that, although he wrote a letter of resignation immediately after the speech, he stayed with Powell out of loyalty and because he saw his boss as the only plausible counterbalance to Cheney and Rumsfeld in the Bush II White House. Larry Wilkerson, 109-110.
9. Larry Wilkerson, War is not about Truth, Justice, and the American Way, 109.

Michael F. Duggan

This week we have all seen or heard the tributes to those lost in the September 11 attacks. Many of them deal with questions of how the attacks changed us or how we feel about them. This is entirely appropriate, especially in light of United States policies since the attacks. Still, I wish more of them dealt with questions about why we were attacked.

There are also questions of proportionality. Do we focus on the September 11 attacks because they were inflicted by a human foe? Was it their dramatic nature or the fact that two of the world’s tallest buildings were completely obliterated? Why are these lives more notable than those lost to COVID-19?

In terms lives lost, the September 11 attacks were roughly on the scale of the Pearl Harbor attack with 2,977 and 2,403 deaths. COVID-19, on the other hand, has exacted a considerably higher number of American lives than all of World War II (to date there have been about 660,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States compared to 291,577 U.S. combat deaths and 405,399 deaths from all causes during the Second World War). On January 12 of this year, the United States lost 4,327 of its citizens to COVID-19 in a single day—1,350 more than the losses of September 11, 2001—and during the week of the Capitol riot, we lost an average of about 3,300 people per day. Now, with the Delta variant, we are still experiencing about 1,500 deaths every day, or a little more than a September 11-scale attack every two days.

By Michael F. Duggan

A dark thought: what if we have it all backward? What if the Earth’s is the fevered patient struggling to breathe and we are the pathogen, and COVID-19 is the immune response? This view does not sit well with our humanitarian impulses, but that does not mean that it is not true.

By Michael F. Duggan

“What set the Afghanistan war apart was not that it was the longest war in U.S. History but that it was more quickly forgotten than any other conflict in which the United States had ever participated.  As if by agreement, the American people and their government erased the Afghanistan experience from memory even before the bloodletting had ended.”

-Andrew Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East, 2016

The metaphors for it are clichés: blood in the water, a feeding frenzy.  Those participating in it are variously sharks and vultures or else armchair generals and Monday morning quarterbacks.  When politicians of both parties and reporters of all stripes pile on en masse, it is because they sense vulnerability in a president and his policy.  And there is nothing more insufferable than the sanctimony and superiority of people, many of whom could not have cared less about Afghanistan for the past twenty years, suddenly becoming exasperated over an inevitable ending.

Where have they been up to now?  I am no expert on Afghanistan—I have never been there and I do not speak Dari or Pashto—and yet it was clear to me that the United States and its allies began losing when the mission shifted from payback for the September 11 attacks to nation building.  In military terms, its fate was sealed when U.S. strategy moved from counterterrorism to counterinsurgency (COIN).  To put it bluntly, it was lost when the U.S. put its commitment and money into the hands of warlords and corrupt middlemen.  To Afghans, Americans are infidels and invaders, occupiers and outsiders, and nothing—no “hearts and minds” campaign—will ever change these perceptions.  A majority of Afghans would never accept the rule of such people or those who cooperate with them.  Why were these rather obvious facts not reported by the same corporate media journalists who are now so conspicuously aghast?  

Sure, we saw David Muir go to Afghanistan a couple of years ago in pompadour and a tight black tee shirt and uncritically report the official line about the looming “endgame” there.  We saw courageous network careerists inserting themselves into stories with impressively dangerous backdrops while reporting conventionalist clichés and showing little actual understanding of the nation or its history.  But where was the coverage of how the Taliban had been increasingly dominating the countryside for years?  Where was the broader context of the Afghanistan war in relation to the India-Pakistan struggle for Kashmir?  Where were the stories of Pakistani support for the Taliban, the sanctuaries in Pakistan and its permeable 1,616-mile long border with Afghanistan?  Where were the stories of Afghan warlords taking American aid?  The American people had long forgotten about Afghanistan because the American media had mostly forgotten it and knew precious little about it from the start.

There is a lot of talk these days about “how this could have been done in a more orderly way,” but what are these controlled and regulated roads not taken?  How do you pull forces out of a nation whose government has already fled and whose army has laid down its arms?  Two of the more vexing narratives making the rounds are those of David Axelrod and Chuck Todd.  Axelrod observes that Biden’s zeal to pull out of Afghanistan got too far ahead of the program that he had already pushed back months beyond the original deadline in May.  Presumably Mr. Alexrod would have preferred a more drawn-out collapse and the protracted fighting that would have gone along with it.  Todd is baffled over why the U.S. withdrew most of its ground forces before its diplomatic staff and civilians.  I suppose that he would have preferred U.S. forces to engage in a fighting retreat once it became obvious that we were leaving , and this with no in-country diplomats to talk to the other side.

David Brooks recently made an ex post facto “light at the end of the the tunnel”/”we were turning a corner” argument worthy of Lyndon Johnson or Walt Rostow. The idea is that because al-Qaeda and the Taliban had a 13% favorable rating among Muslims in eleven nations suveyed by the Pew Research Center eight years ago (and because of related numbers on the decline of Islamist terrorism and the unpopularity of fundamentalist rule), it is possible that a modern, liberalizing Afghanistan was in the offing if “we” had only stuck it out a little while longer.¹ “I thought we”—presumably the 1% of Americans who actually do the fighting these days and which do not include David Brooks—”had achieved some level of stability, and we could manage the problem.” Pretty to think so. Mr. Brooks would do well to ask why the Taliban was winning the war outside of the cities in the years after this 2013 poll was taken. Rebel forces without popular support don’t win insurgencies against powerful occupiers and their domestic allies. A more relevant statistic would be the percentage of rural Afghans who approve of, or are willing to play ball with the Taliban.

To be frank, I had little use for pre-presidential Joe Biden.  I thought he was just another cynical and unprincipled politician—a middle-of-the-pack mediocrity that seemed to embody so much of what was wrong with his party for the past half-century.  As president however, I like his ambitious domestic programs, his focus on the pandemic, and his declarative tone.  As far as I can tell, he is the first president since John Kennedy to constructively buck his military advisors over a major policy decision.  Having the guts to do that by itself should garner kudos and historical notice.  He promised to get the United States out of Afghanistan and he did that.  What the nation needs now is presidential leadership to tell the truth about a war that was lost many years ago and not a mea culpa that would be cynicially exploited by others for political gain.  Being right he needs to tough it out and to be the leader that he appears to be.

The fact that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has been ugly is a responsibility that should fall on the shoulders of those who began this mostly forgotten war, those who enabled it for almost two decades, those who escalated the conflict, and those who lied or kept silent about the failure of policy there.  It is also the responsibility of so many talking heads who had forgotten the war (or never really cared about it) and who are now so indignant.  Perhaps next time the U.S. will opt for a more orderly kind of chaos, whatever that means. Or better yet, perhaps the United States will not get involved in unnecessary wars of choice in the first place.

Note

1. See the PBS News Hour, August 27, 2021. See also David Brooks, “This is how Theocracy Shrivels,” August 27, 2021, The New York Times. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2013/09/10/muslim-publics-share-concerns-about-extremist-groups/

By Michael F. Duggan

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” -Albert Einstein                    

I’ve seen this play before.  We all have.  We saw it play out in Saigon in 1975 and we saw the Soviet production in Afghanistan a generation ago.  It has run its course in Afghanistan so many times that it has become reminiscent of Nietzsche’s cosmological theory of eternal recurrence, the idea that history repeats itself forever.  It is a tragic rerun of an inability to learn historical lessons and to apply them to policy.

The details vary greatly, but we all know the plot: after a long, indecisive, asymmetrical conflict, the occupying power tires and decides to leave the fight.  It starts to withdraw its troops.  The opposition goes on the offensive—fills the void as it opens—and provinces and cities fall more quickly than expected.  Caught off guard, the major power announces the withdrawn of diplomatic personnel.  The country falls to the enemy causing a refugee crisis.   

If you watched the news in recent weeks you might have seen an uneasy correspondent reporting on the mounting Taliban victories—the capture of twelve provincial capitals and other cities.  We have seen the maps and the increasing percentage of the nation under Taliban control.  The collapse is occurring faster than expected (but presumably it was expected).  With the fall of Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second largest city, the sense of urgency has turned to panic. 

The dismay of the reporters is reflective of a mindset of delusion, avoidance, and a lack of real understanding.  It is cognitive dissonance forced by harsh, undeniable evidence.  They still do not realize that the war in Afghanistan was lost the day the United States mission shifted from payback for the September 11 attacks to long term nation building (and to be fair, the U.S. military accomplished its initial mission many years ago).  Like all tragedies, the outcome has been inevitable from the start.  The Taliban’s offensive may be ahead of schedule, but nobody should be surprised by the results.

Name an outside invader that “won” a war in Afghanistan.  The educated reader may point to the Arab invasions of the Middle Ages, and they would be right in that they succeeded in bringing Islam to the region.  Other local powers like the Persians might have had some marginal influence. But in general, the primary historical lesson of Afghanistan is that a powerful invader can only win in the short term and will be ground down over time.  Eventual defeat is inevitable and the less local the power is, the less likely the possibility of any success. 

The Greeks under Alexander won in the short term, but there are no Greeks there today (some Greek troops participated in Operation Enduring Freedom under the auspices of NATO).  The same can be said of the Mongols—the greatest imperial juggernauts in history.  They won in the short term but lost over the long run (is it a coincidence that they also lost in Vietnam and near Syria at Ain Jalut?).  The British fought three wars there.  It was the chessboard of the British-Russian Great Game of the nineteenth-century. And of course there was the Soviet war of 1979-1989.  

What was the U.S. trying to do in Afghanistan?  One hears a lot of talk about democracy, liberalism, and women’s rights even though there is no tradition of these things there.  These are the products of modern Western sensibilities, they are not the values of the Hindu Kush.  The countryside is dominated by fundamentalist Islam and the social structure is clannish and local and not universalist.  It is a non-reformed theocracy. Therefore it should have been clear to anybody with even a cursory understanding of history that a modern, liberalized Afghanistan was a pipe dream.  To echo a line from the Louise Bryant character in the movie Reds: Women’s rights in Afghanistan?  When? Just after Christmas?    

All of this should have been obvious from the start.  And yet another generation of the best and brightest had no such understanding and not only got the United States into a war there, but kept it engaged for twenty years.  As a result, a failed policy has once again had to run its course like an illness long after failure was apparent.  Once again the United States will lose an undeclared war in a region it made no real effort to understand.  Once again, the U.S. did not apply relevant historical lessons. Once again the U.S. will abandon allies once failure has become too obvious even for the true believers to deny.  Once again there will be a desperate refugee crisis and some of those who helped the American cause will seek refuge in the United States.  Once again ideology has proven to be a catastrophic basis for policy, and the blame for current events lies not in those pulling U.S. fores out of Afghanistan, but rather those who put them there and kept them there for nearly two decades. It is certainly not the fault of the U.S. service members who served and sacrificed there. They were given an impossible task.  

What are the lessons of the U.S. adventure in Afghanistan?  The first is that democracy and a system of rights necessarily exist within a cultural-historical frame and are not fungible.  They must emerge from inside a nation.  The second lesson is to never get involved in an insurgency where the insurgents have popular support and moral legitimacy with the locals (it is a good rule to avoid insurgencies altogether if there is no vital interest at stake).  The vast majority of the world’s problems are not amenable to military solutions.  It is also wise to avoid imperialist endeavors like nation building (for a fuller list of realist lessons, see the March 20, 2021 posting on this blog titled “Realism: a Distillation”). The fact is that, although it may be repugnant to Western values, the Taliban has more organic legitimacy in Afghanistan than any system imposed by outsiders.  We may not like what they stand for, but it is clearly their country.   

Questions remain: why didn’t Americans seem to care that their nation is about to lose another war for so long?  Why are they not more upset about the trillion or more dollars and the thousands of lives spent there (and where did the money go?)?  I suspect that the answer to these questions is that too small a percentage of Americans actually fight our wars these days—that there is too little shared sacrifice—for most of them to care if other people’s children die killing people who don’t look like them while spending their own children’s inheritance.  If this is true, it obviously does not speak well of us.

Why did a U.S.-trained army melt away before what now seems to be an inexorable foe (we shouldn’t be to hard on the Afghanistan army; if the most powerful military in the world could not decisively defeat the Taliban over a period of 20 years, what chance did they have?)?  

Although no good options remain for the United States in Afghanistan—and having no good options is the defining characteristic of a failed policy; the only thing worse than leaving this way would be to stay—it still has responsibilities there. The United States must use its Air Mobility Command to provide safe passage for those in Afghanistan who mortgaged their future on U.S. success and who may be treated as collaborators by the new regime. The only option at this point would be to get our local allies out of the country. We should not be thinking of possible outcomes in terms of V-E Day or V-J Day, but rather of Dunkirk, Operation Frequent Wind, and Operation Eagle Pull.

Americans embrace the solemnity of Veterans Day. We are moved by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. But many Americans have a profound apathy when it comes to policy decisions that put our fighting men and women in harm’s way.  It is the Great Disconnect. As with the Vietnam War, many of the advocates and boosters of the U.S. post-2001 Afghanistan policy remain politically unscathed or have thrived while opponents of the war were marginalized.  How long can a nation whose people care so little about costly, ill-conceived policies and which rewards policy makers who have been so tragically wrong survive?  How long can a nation that rewards wrongheadedness and failure last? Will anybody be held accountable for this historical failure? Curiously, many American liberals have been quiet about their nation’s wars of choice.  Indeed many politicians and policy-makers considered to be progressives have been among the greatest hawks and interventionists over the past two decades.

The government in Kabul may hold out for a while with the help of U.S. air support and drone strikes, a shrinking island in a Taliban sea.*  The situation is reminiscent of that in Vietnam in the months before the communist victory and Nixon’s promises to reintroduce B-52 strikes if the North invaded the South.  But as every infantryman knows, you cannot win a war with air power alone.  And so we must accept that we have lost another war. This is what comes of nation building.

We all know the plot, the course of events now playing out in Afghanistan.  The only question is whether or not American involvement will end with a photo of helicopters plucking people from a rooftop.

*This article was written before the fall of the Afghan government.

Book Review

By Michael F. Duggan

Patrick Cockburn, War in the Age of Trump, the Defeat of ISIS, the Fall of the Kurds, the Conflict with Iran (Verso, London, New York). 311 pages. $29.95

From the first paragraph it is clear why Patrick Cockburn is widely regarded to be the greatest correspondent covering the Middle East.  His on-the-ground fluency with the details, the groups and players and their relative interests is superlative as is his grasp of the big picture.  When reading Cockburn, you become self-conscious of just how little you know about what is really going on there.  It also underscores just how bad the coverage of the region is by the corporate media.

Cockburn [KOH-burn] comes from a family of celebrated Anglo-Irish aristocrats that included Sir George Cockburn, the British admiral who was created Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath for burning Washington D.C. in August 1814.  His father was the communist journalist, novelist, and Spanish Civil War correspondent, Claude Cockburn.  His brothers are the late gonzo mainstay of the left and editor of CounterPunch, Alexander Cockburn (A Colossal Wreck), and Harper’s Magazine editor, Andrew Cockburn.  His niece is the actress, Olivia Wilde. 

He is the author of nine books and is the recipient of the Martha Gelhorn Prize, the James Cameron Prize, the Orwell Prize, and too many other awards to list here.  

The book is a collection of essays—a dispatches—from the Middle East from 2016 to 2019.  It covers the war in Syria, the sieges of Mosul and Raqqa, the Turkish offensive against the Kurdish enclave of Afrin, the worsening relations between the United States and Iran, the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, the abandoning of the Kurds by the United States, “the rise and fall of the de facto Kurdish sates in Iraq and Syria and the final elimination of the self-declared ISIS caliphate, which culminated in death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.” Cockburn also shows how local players are proxies for great powers. He destroys the illusion that the impulsive and erratic polices of the 45th President of the United States in the region—ostensibly flowing from a revitalized “America first” sense of isolationism—were less problematic than those of previous American leaders.  Although each of the book’s ten parts begins with an introduction, each dispatch is a standalone piece grouped by events and the reader jumps into each without additional preparatory context.  The writer assumes the reader to have some fluency with the events he describes.  It is not a book for beginners.

As a friend of mine observed, where the late Robert Fisk was “hot” in his dispatches from the region, Cockburn is cool, analytical, detached.  His writing comes off as neutral—like Hemingway, in a sense—painting a detailed picture by describing events in detail and letting the reader come to his conclusions that are anything but neutral in siding with the truth.  On his approach, he writes:

“As in a previous volume, I look at events from two angles.  One is contemporary description using writings and diaries I produced at the time; the other is retrospective explanation and analysis from the perspective of today.  Both have their advantages: it is important to know how events looked like when they were still happening, but also to see retrospectively ‘how things panned out’ and what was their true significance.”   

On the difficulties of covering wars, he writes:

“War reporting is easy to do but difficult to do well.  It faces many of the difficulties of peacetime reporting, but in a more acute—thought more revealing—form.  No one taking part in an armed conflict has an incentive to tell the whole truth and every reason to say only what benefits their side.  This is true of all journalism, but in times of military conflict, the propaganda effort is at its most intense and is aided by the chaos of war, which hobbles anybody searching for the truth about what is really happening.”

The book covers a lot of ground in detail, but for me a powerful overarching theme is that America’s post-September 11 wars of choice have been especially pernicious in that, after years of death and destruction in already unstable regions, they eventually create no-win choices between cutting one’s losses in defeat or else delaying defeat with continuing losses.  From a policy perspective, the only thing worse than abandoning allies in the never-ending wars of the Middle East, is staying.  The problem is that when the U.S. pulls out of a fight (whether it is in Iraq, the abandonment of the Syrian Kurds, and now the withdrawal from Afghanistan), it necessarily means leaving allies who risked everything.  The result is that the United States has garnered a reputation for being a bad friend.  As Cockburn observes, there is a “saying spreading across the Middle East” that goes: “[n]ever go into a well with an American rope.”  

The book also underscores the apocalyptic dangers of intervening in regions with long histories (and equally long historical memory) and enormous sectarian ethnic and religious complexities at the urging of planners with little or no intimate understanding of the region, simplistic goals, and eschatological ideologies, like neo-conservatism.

As my friend, David Isenbergh observes, a failed policy is one where eventually no good options remain.  Under this criterion, the U.S. withdrawals from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, and the abandoning of the Kurds are paragon examples of policy failure.  In exposing the “no good options” situation of how post-2001 U.S, policies in the region devolved during 2016-19, Cockburn frames the dilemma for those of us who opposed these wars from the start: since withdrawal is a lesser of evils, how do you minimize the leaving of allies in the field, a tidal wave issue now mounting as the U.S. pulls out of Afghanistan.  If there is a point that those favoring withdrawal from the endless wars (e.g. Andrew Bacevich and the Quincy Institute) and Cockburn could agree on, it is not to get into these wars to begin with.

Cockburn is a writer of the first order, but this is not an easy book for the causal reader.  It is so laden with important details that it requires the reader’s full attention.  There is no index and so it is hard to skim (other than to judge from the titles and events of the book’s ten sections).  None of these observations are meant to be a negative criticism, only a cautionary notice of the book’s seriousness. 

Although War in the Age of Trump is a little over 300 pages, its specifics and in-depth regional intimacy make it slow going; to be honest, I am still reading it, taking it on one dispatch at a time.  Anyone who wants to really know the recent history of the Middle East must take Cockburn into consideration.  They must read him, but first they must work their way up to the level of this book. I only hope that I am almost there.

Warner Brothers, 2014. 159 minutes

Movie Review

By Michael F. Duggan

“Was it possible that at every gathering, concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in here, up North, back East, wherever, some dark crews had been busy all along reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?  ‘Gee,’ he thought, ‘I don’t know.’”
-Sortilege (narrator)

“Sometimes it’s just about doing the right thing.”
-Lt. Detective Christian “Big Foot” Bjornson  

How is it possible that this film lost money at the box office?

In college I was assigned either The Crying of Lot 49 or Gravity’s Rainbow, but I don’t think I read either.  Friends who did read Thomas Pynchon either stood in awe of him as a Napoleonic figure of contemporary literature (even Gore Vidal seemed to walk a little softly around him in his reviews), or else saw his work as lacking coherence and believed that his V was inferior to, say, Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch.

I recently watched the movie version of his out-of-character 2009 novel, Inherent Vice, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, and am still trying to sort it all out.  It is a mystery that takes place in Southern California in 1970 when the dream of the 1960s is devolving into gonzo, sleaze, and paranoia (think Hunter S. Thompson, the LAPD, outlaw bikers, Nixon’s FBI, Altamont, the Manson family, etc.).

The story revolves around doper Gordita (real life Manhattan) Beach psychiatrist and private detective, Larry “Doc” Sportello, played sympathetically and with wonderful deadpan by Joaquin Phoenix.  It combines a good, if tongue-in-cheek—frequently silly—feel for Southern California during the final days of the Age of Aquarius with a parody nod/tribute to older noir detective novels/films (complete with a hippie girl astrologer as narrator).  With this sleeper’s impressive star power it is baffling that it went mostly unnoticed.  A hair’s breadth under two-and-a-half hours, it feels a little long, and yet I can’t think of what I would have cut or tightened-up.  Like a Kubrick film, it creates a world in itself with its own feel.  It has a judiciously-selected soundtrack, the cinematography is superb, and although mysteries are not my usual fare, I liked it a lot.

Supposedly the lead was offered to Robert Downey Jr., and watching it, one can only imagine (to the point of distraction) what he could have done with the part.  That said, and although Downey may be a genius at playing brilliant-but-flawed characters, I like him least when he plays straight-up California.  It might have worked magnificently, but I am glad Phoenix got the part and it is hard to imagine Downey playing it better. 

Other impressive performances are delivered by Josh Brolin as hard-ass police detective, Christian F. “Big Foot” Bjornsen, Katherine Waterston as careless hippie chick and Sportello’s ex, Shasta Fay Hepworth, Owen Wilson as wayward surf music sax legend, former heroin addict, and reluctant government snitch, Coy Harlingen, Martin Short as a cartoonish dentist working as a transparent front for a drug cartel, and a constellation of memorable minor roles (including Jena Malone, Maya Rudolph, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio del Toro, and Boardwalk Empire veteran, Michael K. Williams).

The plot is too involved to go over (one of the film’s few shortcoming along with its considerable running time).  Suffice it to say that it involves the disappearance of a billionaire land developer Michael “Mickie” Wolfmann, a Southeast Asian drug cartel, and the mysterious reappearance of a lost love.  The three trailers are cut to make it seem like at least two different films.¹

Unless you intend to watch it two or three times and keep an elaborate flowchart of characters and organizations, don’t rack your brain trying to follow all of the twists and turns of the main plot, the strands of characters and leads weaving in an out of the story.  Just let it flow over you with a general awareness of the action.  In the end, the film works as a morality tale disguised as an overly intricate period farce.  What Catch 22 is to WWII, Inherent Vice is to California of 1970.  And like Heller’s novel, this story—ostensibly a mystery with a convoluted plot—is much simpler and more profound than it appears at face value.

Alfred Kazin observes that Catch 22 is a depiction of the corruption of war, an accretion of absurdity and farce around a small core of stark existential terror—of the horror of violent death in war.²  Don’t let the comedic wallows in the Southern Cal drug and sex cultures of a half-century ago—the caricatures of dopers, crew-cut LAPD thugs, FBI suits, outlaw bikers with swastika facial tattoos, and adorable hippie women-children—fool you.  The film, in my opinion, and in spite of its trappings (and without giving away too much of the ending), is about simple decency and what “nag(s) at you in the middle of the night,” the possibility of redemption in a dark Manichaean world, and a lost love redeemed.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZfs22E7JmI&t=63s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fURVDOgwL60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTRMkQzFYHI
2. Recounted by Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 34-35.