President Obama announced he’s exploring new ways to scale up the battle against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. “We will prevail.” Those were the words of President Obama on Tuesday.
Nearly a decade ago, in December 2006, President George W. Bush said those same three words in another address on the fight in Iraq.
“We will prevail.” That was George W. Bush in 2006. His father, President George H.W. Bush, used the same phrase 25 years ago, January 1991, when he announced the U.S. had begun attacking Iraq to begin what became known as the Persian Gulf War.
“We will prevail,” three words said by three presidents, all addressing U.S. wars in Iraq dating back a quarter-century. The seemingly never-ending U.S. war in the Middle East is the subject of a new book by retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich titled America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History. In the book, Bacevich argues the Untied States has been involved in gigantic failed war with the Middle East since the 1980s that continues today with no end in sight.
Andrew Bacevich is professor emeritus of international relations and history at Boston University, also author of several other books, including Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War. His son was killed in action in Iraq in 2007.
“We will prevail”—George H.W. Bush. “We will prevail”—his son, George W. Bush. “We will prevail”—President Obama. Have we prevailed in any way?
Colonel Andrew Bacevich talking:
we haven’t. And I have to say, those are exquisitely chosen clips, because they really do illustrate what’s the point of my book. And that is that we have been engaged militarily in the Greater Middle East, large parts of the Islamic world, for going on four decades. We’ve engaged in innumerable interventions—large, small, brief, protracted—and we have yet to come anywhere close to achieving our aims. Whether we define our aims as restoring stability or promoting democracy or reducing the prevalence of anti-Americanism, it’s not happening. And arguably, our military efforts are actually making things worse.
before 1980, virtually no American soldier had ever been killed in any kind of military action in that part of the world. And since 1980, very few have been killed who were not in that part of the world. This shift that occurred, from the Middle East being largely an area of influence or control by the European colonial powers to the United States exercising such a huge role.
we Americans have forgotten, but prior to the beginning of the Cold War, the United States was not a great military power. We raised forces from time to time to deal with some particular issue, but it was in the wake of the Cold War that we, as a nation, decided on a permanent basis to maintain a large military establishment. For the first several decades of that Cold War, the United States had two priorities. We were willing to fight for Western Europe. We were willing to fight—did fight—in East Asia. We were not willing to fight for the Middle East. That changes in 1980, specifically a particular moment in January of 1980, when President Jimmy Carter, in his State of the Union address, promulgates what’s known as the Carter Doctrine.
Jimmy Carter, January 23rd, 1980, delivering the State of the Union address, “Let our position be absolutely clear. An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
one of the things to appreciate, I think, is that Carter himself had no understanding of the implications that would flow from that statement. What happens, on an immediate basis, is that the national security bureaucracy now redefines its priorities and begins to orient itself toward the possibility of armed intervention by U.S. forces in the region. And over the course of the next 10 years, that process begins: Reagan sending peacekeepers into Lebanon, the initial jousting with Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, support for Saddam Hussein, of all people, in what I refer to as the first Gulf War—that’s the Gulf War of 1980 to ’88, pitting Iraq against Iran, with the United States coming to the aid of Iraq. So, Carter starts the process of militarizing U.S. policy, which, over time, deepens, becomes more frequent, becomes more ambitious and becomes more costly, bringing us to where we are today in 2016, where we continue to hear these speeches by presidents who insisting—insisting that we will prevail, when obviously we have not.
the war for the Greater Middle East did begin as a war for oil. I mean , the proximate trigger of Carter’s speech was the Iranian revolution, which had produced a second oil shock of the 1970s, combined with the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, which in Washington raised fears that—I mean, they were bizarre notions, but raised fears that the Soviets were going to march across Iran and attack Saudi Arabia. So, at a time when we were increasingly dependent upon foreign oil, to include oil from the Persian Gulf, yes, we decided to fight for the region.
But I argue that there really was much more at stake than simply access to oil, that in the context of the times, the war for the Greater Middle East really becomes an effort to refute the notion that the United States is a country that has to take—to accept limits, to affirm the claim of American exceptionalism, of our uniqueness, of our special status in history and in the world at large.
September 18th, 2001, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld holding a Pentagon briefing said, “We have a choice: either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or to change the way that they live. And we have—we chose the latter. We intend to put them on the defensive, to disrupt terrorist networks and remove their sanctuaries and their support systems. This requires a distinctly different approach from any war that we have fought before.”
that is a wonderful clip. I think that is, in a sense, the most important, the most telling, the most instructive quote from a U.S. government official to understand the path that we have followed. prior to 9/11, I don’t believe that presidents and policymakers actually had a clear understanding of what they wanted to do in the Greater Middle East. They somehow assumed that the presence of U.S. forces or introduction of U.S. forces would have some kind of a positive effect. It’s after 9/11 that Rumsfeld, and those around him—the president, Cheney, Wolfowitz—embarked upon this massively ambitious strategy to change the way they live. You’ll notice that he really doesn’t specify who “they” are. I think, by implication, “they” are large numbers of inhabitants of the Islamic world. We’re going to change the way they live, to make them live the way we live, with the expectation that therefore they will no longer pose a threat. Informing that ambition, of course, is an estimate of American military capacity that assumes that we cannot be defeated, or, more to the point, that we can—that we can and will prevail militarily. That’s the thinking that, of course, then informs the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.
I think one of the things that strikes me about this, trying to understand and describe the larger military enterprise, is the extent to which, that once it began, it was kind of on autopilot. And even today, there appear to be, in official circles, remarkably few people who are willing to just pose that kind of basic question. Why are the people that we call our friends—why do they qualify as our friends? Why are security commitments, that may at one time in the past—the security commitment to Saudi Arabia may at one time in the past have made sense, at least from the point of view of national interest—do they make sense today? And if they don’t, if we’re not dependent upon oil from the Persian Gulf—and we’re not—then why isn’t it permissible at least to revisit and re-examine policy assumptions that simply are no longer valid? But there’s such an absence of creativity and imagination in the national security apparatus, such a determination to keep on doing what we did last year and the year before, that that, too, I think, is quite troubling.
Human Rights Watch is reiterating its call for the United States to stop selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, after the group said it found evidence the Saudi-led coalition used U.S.-supplied bombs in the deadly airstrikes on a crowded market in Yemen last month. The strikes killed at least 97 civilians, including 25 children.
Afghan officials saying at least 17 civilians killed in U.S. drone strikes in Afghanistan on Wednesday—first strike reportedly hitting a truck of a local elder going to resolve a land dispute, killing the elder and 11 others; the second drone reportedly striking and killing two people going to collect the bodies; and a third strike reportedly killing three men who went to see what happened.
President Obama expanded drone war. There’s no question about it. I mean, and it has to be one of the most disappointing parts of his legacy, I think. You know, the president—we elected the president because he said that he was going to end the Iraq War responsibly. Sadly, he also said that he was going to escalate the Afghanistan War. He did that, without any particular success. My assessment of the president is that he understands that invading and occupying countries in the Islamic world basically doesn’t work, and so he is—he is refraining from trying to repeat that mistake. Alas, he has now turned to other methods of employing American military power, with missile-firing UAVs one very good example. And there is little evidence that those alternatives are all that much more effective, albeit, at least from a U.S. point of view—a U.S. point of view only—they aren’t as costly.
For some reason, I mean—I’m with Clausewitz: War is the continuation of politics by other means. War makes sense only if you are able to achieve your political purposes at some reasonable cost. And we have been fighting a war in the Greater Middle East without achieving, in any conclusive sense, any positive political outcomes. And yet the tendency is to evaluate our conduct there in operational military concerns, of winning fights as opposed to accomplishing political objectives. And that’s yet another problem.
Fight against ISIS is a military battle that probably must be waged; it’s just not by our military. I mean, this is—in my count, this is the fourth Gulf War in which we have been involved—supporting Saddam Hussein in the first, kicking Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in the second, overthrowing Saddam Hussein in the third, and then occupying that country for eight years, hoping that when we departed in 2011, Iraq could stand by itself. That hasn’t happened, and so we’re back in it again, with the proximate adversary, ISIS. Yes, ISIS needs to be destroyed. One of the lessons, it seems to me, of America’s War for the Greater Middle East is that American power, American military power, doesn’t fix the problem, tends to worsen the problem. So the responsibility for the destruction of ISIS should fall on the shoulders of those who are most threatened by ISIS. That happens to be the countries in the region. Were they to recognize that they have a common interest in destroying ISIS, they could in fact do so. But our insistence that somehow it’s our responsibility, that American leadership, so-called, needs to be the decisive element, simply lets them off the hook.
the American people don’t pay much attention to how the troops are being used. And because they’re not paying attention, the troops have been subjected to abuse. That is to say, they’ve been sent to fight wars that are unnecessary. The wars have been mismanaged. The wars go on far longer than they ought to. And we respond by letting people in uniform be the first to board airplanes. And I think, frankly, that that is disgraceful and that it actually ought to be one of the things that gets discussed in a presidential campaign, but tends not to, sadly.
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Andrew Bacevich
historian and author of the new book, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History. He is professor emeritus of international relations and history at Boston University.
— source democracynow.org