The confluence of the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the taking down of the Berlin Wall, Obama’s ongoing deliberations on whether or not to escalate in Afghanistan and Remembrance Day, with the passing of the last of the Great War veterans, has made for an unusually rich reflection on the value and/or futility or war.
The responses to the 11th November commemoration were telling with realists like Stephen Walt opining ‘as Juan Cole notes on his own blog today, the best way to honor our veterans is to make sure they aren’t asked to fight and die to no good purpose‘ and Bryan Appleyard representing the sentimentalists, weeping ‘continuously and uncontrollably’.
Of course some people think war is a thoroughly good thing, a necessary thing even, the most recent neoconservative missive on the subject prompting a tart response from Yglesias:
The world would be a better place if people looking for cheap thrills would stick to the black metal scene or maybe take up extreme sports rather than foreign policy punditry. But the point is that it’s extremely dangerous to take advice from people with this mindset—they’re not even trying to enhance the country’s security, they’re trying to embroil the country in wars.
It is easy to sneer at the neocons but I really don’t think they would be nearly as influential if they wasn’t a large receptive audience for their views. People may not articulate them so crudely; they may not realise it; but we do have a remarkable appetite for war, as the following well-known table of military expenditure charts makes clear.
| Rank | Country | Spending ($ b.) | World Share (%) |
| — | World Total | 1464.0 | 100 |
| 1 |  United States |
607.0 | 41.5 |
| 2 |  China |
84.9a | 5.8a |
| 3 |  France |
65.7 | 4.5 |
| 4 |  United Kingdom |
65.3 | 4.5 |
| 5 |  Russian Federation |
58.6a | 4.0a |
| 6 |  Germany |
46.8 | 3.2 |
| 7 |  Japan |
46.3 | 3.2 |
| 8 |  Italy |
40.6 | 2.8 |
| 9 |  Saudi Arabia |
38.2 | 2.6 |
| 10 |  India |
30.0 | 2.1 |
The NATO countries plus Japan account for 59.7% of world military expenditure. This can’t but reflect the values of the citizens of these post-industrial countries, especially as many of them have crumbling infrastructure badly in need of investment (Kristof today has a good article on the surreal quality of this debate).
To take but one example of the typical intelligent, independent voice consider Appleyard’s own recent missive on the subject.
From where I’m sitting, I don’t think it’s possible, honest or meaningful to have an opinion about Afghanistan. It’s not going well, our people are dying in a dubious cause and the Karzai government is corrupt; on the other hand, it sounds like a good idea to kill Taliban and withdrawal would be a regional catastrophe.
I find it interesting that Bryan doesn’t think it is ‘honest or meaningful’ to express an opinion. I can only say that I am starting to see a remarkable surge of scepticism from informed analysts on the futility of the Afghan campaign, whether considering the Afghanistan, Pakistan or Al Qaeda dimensions (see my earlier post, and Juan Cole on Pakistan). Ritter sums it up best:
Thus the solution itself becomes the problem, thereby creating a never-ending circular conflict which has the United States expending more and more resources to resolve a situation that has nothing to do with the reality on the ground in Afghanistan, and everything to do with crafting a politically viable salve for what is in essence a massive self-inflicted wound. It is the proverbial dog chasing after its own tail, a frustrating experience made even more so by the fact that any massive commitment of troops brings with it the fatal attachment of national pride, individual hubris and, worst of all, the scourge of domestic American politics, so that by the time this dog bites its tail, it will be so blinded by artificialities that rather than recognize its mistake, it will instead proceed to consume itself. In the case of Afghanistan, our consumption will be measured in the lives of American servicemen and women, national treasure, national honor, and, of course the lives of countless Afghan dead and wounded.
When I pointed this out I was either told that it was true that there could be no informed opinion on the matter or it produced a vehement defence of staying the course; when this didn’t stand up, later, we had mushroom clouds billowing over our cities. That we are the only ones to have put mushroom clouds over other people’s cities perhaps makes us somewhat paranoid; in any case it seems to be the favourite tool for justifying war (that and avoiding ‘appeasement’ of the latest ‘Hitler’) no doubt because the introduction of a nuclear dimension ends all rational discourse, demanding the projection of the great great cleansing solution to all our problems.
But the neoconservatives are much less interesting than the centrists, as by taking the three-monkeys stance they become the real facilitators of the war party. Indeed Appleyard concluded from the Sun’s recent mauling of Gordon Brown that it ‘does prove my own point about the ability of the media to make any war other than the most explicitly defensive almost impossible to conduct.’
But there are some who think we shouldn’t be conducting any wars that aren’t explicitly defensive, it being enshrined in the Nuremberg Principles. Indeed Robert Fisk’s passion on this point in a recent discussion was every bit as fierce as Ritter’s prose in his recent podcast (in discussion with Dame Ann Leslie and Martin Bell).
Being of this view myself, with the chatter about Obama moving towards a 30,000 troop reinforcement of the Afghan garrison, it is heartening to hear of the latest intervention of ambassador Karl Eikenberry in the debate, insisting that the Karzai government isn’t the reliable partner needed for McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy. As Juan Cole reports this may reflect an interesting dynamic inside Obama’s war council:
Eikenberry is a China specialist who can not only speak but interpret Chinese, who has a Stanford MA in international affairs, and who served two tours in Afghanistan under Bush. His appointment as ambassador in Kabul had been a surprise, since the generals are not usually sent in as diplomats, and the US military was already well represented in US government counsels on Afghanistan. But now it appears that Obama cleverly put Eikenberry in as chief diplomat precisely because he is worldly and experienced in the country, and in a position to second-guess the Washington war hawks who always think that a victory is around the corner with just a few more troops.
Obama is said to have rejected all the plans so far presented to him, insofar as none leads to a foreseeable end-game.
2 Comments
An indispensable aide to understanding the is passion is “The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War” by Andrew Bacevich. Bacevich is a former career Army officer and now a professor at Boston University. As he points out, we are now spending 20-plus more (adjusted for inflation) on defense than we did at the height of the Cold War, when we had a real enemy who could do us serious harm.
Thing is: it’s not for “defense” in any real sense — it’s about policing the borders of an imperium. Bacevich isn’t a man of the Left, he’s a conservative Catholic whose own son was killed in Iraq. (He criticized that exercise in empire before his terrible loss.)
Yes indeed Roberto-I will look out for it. Every which way you look at this it is folly. Even if your motivation is to maximise our ability to dominate other nations this is folly. The ideological left and right both reject the goal of even trying to dominate other nations of course and I agree with their critique. I am also comfortable with intelligent realists like Stephen Walt that argue that every nation will try to maximise its interests, including ourselves, and that to try and fight this is to bend things out of shape and invite more trouble and disaster in the long run. My approach to the realists is to say fine, but we must all see that our enlightened self-interest lies co-operative frameworks that avoid zero-sum games and encourage states to pursue enlightened self-interest. (Scott Horton’s recent discussion with John V. Walsh of China’s preference for trade over military development was striking in emphasising the folly of militarism, I thought.)
My problem is with the belligerent noeconservatives and liberal hawks and their great army enablers, the incredibly lazy thinking you find even–and maybe especially–in the intelligentsia.
The bottom line is that you can’t afford to be lazy about these matters. It requires constant self-examination. My angle is less the pathology of the loonies than how our pervasive habits of thought enable their agenda.