War in the 21st Century

In the George Orwell classic 1984, there is a state of perpetual war between the nations of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. The enemy in the conflict is ambiguous, it could be Eurasia one day, and Eastasia the next. The war has no borders and seems to be taking place everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It is also endless. There are daily news reports of battles and skirmishes but never reports of decisive victories. Meanwhile back at home the citizens are reminded that they are being protected by Big Brother who is constantly tracking their every movement and monitoring their mail and telephone communications. The protagonist, Winston Smith, is part of this system of governmental control; he works for the Ministry of Truth where his job is to rewrite past newspaper articles so that the historical record matches the current party line. He consigns inconvenient truths that do not fit the approved narrative to the “memory hole.”

Sound familiar? It could be a description of the new normal in 2014 where America and its NATO allies are engaged in an endless military struggle against Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria and elsewhere. Where the government records every telephone conversation, every fax, every email message, and can track our movements by means of personal digital devices called “smart phones.”  Satellites in space silently survey every corner of the globe and send signals back to secret control centers hidden deep underground beneath nondescript suburban buildings where CIA soldiers direct pilotless drones to rain death down on enemy targets by means of laser-guided missiles.

This state of perpetual war used is to justify psychological and physical control over their populations by keeping them fearful and hateful towards the enemy, while at the same time ensuring that the military-industrial complex and the national surveillance state can continue to siphon billions of dollars from the treasury every year in the name of national defense. In the meanwhile millions of citizens are unemployed, children lack adequate schools, roads and bridges are collapsing, and the provision of essential social services such as ensuring that families have enough to eat or are able to access basic health care are assigned to charities. The legislature is in a perpetual state of conflict between entrenched opposing ideologies with “liberals” insisting that the government grow bigger and “conservatives” insisting that it get smaller.  Polls show that the people are extremely unhappy with the government, but at every election the vote mostly the same politicians back into office. Many people soon become cynical about “politics” and retreat into private pleasures, consoling themselves with alcohol, drugs, gambling, and professional football. Those lucky few who manage to find decent jobs can also entertain themselves by going to strip malls and buying cheap consumer goods made in China.

George Orwell’s dystopian novel was first published in 1949, the same year I was born, only four years after the end of WWII, a war in which an estimated 50 million people died. This war lasted for six years, but it was really a continuation of the WWI which began in 1914 (a century ago), so one can say that the Great World War lasted for 41 years. The year I was born, 1949, also marked the beginning of the Cold War which lasted for another 40 years until 1989. During the Cold War, America and its allies fought an enemy called “communism,” which was not really an enemy so much as it was an ideology that was perceived as a threat to our capitalist economic system.  Since 2001 America has been fighting a “War on Terrorism,” which is not really an enemy so much as it is a set of tactics employed by angry, humiliated men who reject liberal values and lack access to sophisticated weapons.

So, even if one regards the twelve year period between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the fall of the Twin Towers in 2001 as a time of “peace” I have lived most all of my 65 years during “wartime.” My own parents, who were born in the 1910’s spent most of their lives during wartime. And it seems likely that my children and other members of the millennial generation, those of you born in the 1980’s and 1990s, will also spend most of your lives during “wartime.”

The historian Margaret McMillian whose work has focused on the causes and effects of WWI, has predicted that instead of WWIII, the 21st century “will be a series of low grade, very nasty wars that will go on and on without clear outcomes, doing dreadful things to civilians in their path.” (New York Times, September 7, 2014, SR 11). Political scientists such as Hedley Bull have been forecasting since the  late 1970s that the international system is evolving into a neo-Medieval pattern in which sovereign territorial nation states no longer possess a monopoly on violence, and political authority is exercised by a variety of violent non-state actors such as gangs, militias, warlords, and terrorist organizations.

In 2014 these predictions are reality. In Nigeria last April Boko Haram kidnapped 250 schoolgirls because they object to secular education. Social media around the world quickly reacted with hashtags of horror, but six months later nobody has rescued them. In Guatemala and Honduras gangs extort and threaten honest citizens who are so afraid they send their children unaccompanied across the US border in hopes of saving them. In Libya rival militias fight over control of Tripoli’s international airport, and Egypt and the U.A.E. send in planes to bomb the ones they don’t like. Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine rebel against a new government in Kiev that leans west, and shoots down an international commercial jetliner with a Russian missile system killing everyone aboard. Russia annexes Crimea and sends its troops across the border to aid the Russian separatists. In Afghanistan thirteen years of NATO military involvement have not eliminated the Taliban. The election that was supposed to set the stage for NATO withdrawal ended up as a fiasco with the charges of rampant voter fraud and election rigging, In Syria, a four year civil war has so far killed 200,000 people, and created 3 million refugees and 6 million IDPs. Israel decides it is time to punish and degrade Hamas in Gaza, so it launches a fifty day assault killing an estimated 2,000 people most of whom are civilians. And finally, for now, over the summer ISIS surged into Northern Iraq and has declared a Islamic Caliphate complete with beheading of infidels whose remains are mounted on crucifixes as a warning to those who would prefer not to convert to their brand of radical Islam.

President Obama was elected in part because he campaigned on a pledge to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He followed through on his promise to pull US combat forces out of Iraq, but, sobered by the rapid advance and brutality of ISIS, is now is contemplating returning US forces to the region to combat ISIS. His mind focused by the grisly executions of two American journalists, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is making the case for more war.

In a speech to the nation on September 10^th 2014, on the eve of the 13^th anniversary of the September 11^th attacks, he offered three reasons, or causus belli, for this renewed war in the Middle East. First, he claimed that “ISIL poses a threat to the people of Iraq and Syria, and the broader Middle East - including American citizens, personnel and facilities.” Second, he said that “these terrorists could pose a growing threat beyond that region - including to the United States.” The third justification was to protect civilians who are being threatened with ethnic cleansing and genocide.

His strategy to degrade and ultimately defeat ISIS involves four points: (1) stepping up airstrikes against ISIL in Iraq and if necessary Syria; (2) increasing intelligence sharing, coordination and support with the Iraqi army and the Kurdish pesh merga mobilizing to counter ISIS in northern and western Iraq and eastern Syria; (3) the US “will redouble our efforts to cut off its funding; improve our intelligence; strengthen our defenses; counter its warped ideology; and stem the flow of foreign fighters into - and out of - the Middle East”. (4) the US will  “continue providing humanitarian assistance to innocent civilians who have been displaced by this terrorist organization,” including Sunni and Shia Muslims who are at grave risk, as well as tens of thousands of Christians and other religious minorities who have been targets of ethnic cleansing and genocide carried out by ISIL.

Of these objectives, the only one that I wholeheartedly support is the last, continuing the military intervention for humanitarian protection purposes. The United Nations Human Rights Council has condemned the abuses committed by ISIL against civilians in northern Iraq in the strongest terms, and has called the brutal persecution of Christian, Yezidi, Turkmen, Shabak, Kaka’e, Sabaeans, and Shia on the basis of their ethnic and religious identities as crimes against humanity. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have produced reports that label these crimes as “ethnic cleansing.” And a group of genocide scholars, including myself, have written a letter to the UN Security Council calling these crimes “genocide.” Whichever category of mass atrocity crimes one employs, the acts are clear violations of international criminal law. In my view, people who are threatened with genocide, ethnic cleansing, or crimes against humanity have a right to be rescued by the international community. 

However, concerning the president’s broader strategy to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIL, I have some serious doubts and misgivings. While ISIL is certainly a threat to the people of Iraq and Syria, the extent to which it threatens other countries in the region, such as Jordan, Turkey, and Israel has been over-stated. Moreover, there is no evidence that it intends to nor has the capability to carry out terrorist attacks against the USA or Europe. In fact, it seems more likely that mounting US airstrikes against ISIL will make it more rather than less likely that they will contemplate retaliation of this kind. There is no credible evidence that ISIL is planning an attack on the American homeland. Even if it does decide to send some of its fighters who are American or EU citizens to carry out terrorists attacks it is possible to stop them and prevent them from succeeding without going to war against ISIL. Why have we spent billions of dollars on Homeland Security (in additional to national defense, the NSA surveillance programs, the CIA, and other intelligence services) if not to detect and neutralize just such threats? In fact, given the ideology and past behavior of this group, it seems that directing more American airstrikes against them in Iraq and Syria will tend to increase rather than decrease the likelihood that they will decide to try to retaliate against American civilians by dispatching jihadis to travel to Western Europe and North America to carry out terrorist attacks.

The task of pushing ISIL back out of the parts of Iraq it has captured will be formidable, particularly given the fact that it has the support of many of the Sunni tribes in those cities and towns who are more fearful of the Shia militias and the Iraqi Army than they are of ISIL. At least in the case of Iraq, the US has the consent of the government to intervene militarily, and at least one solid ally in the Kurdish Peshmerga forces, so it might be possible to recapture the parts of Iraq that ISIL is now occupying. But the prospects for defeating ISIL in their strongholds in Syria are much dimmer. I have grave doubts about how feasible it is to train and equip the Free Syrian Army to stand up to ISIL in Syria. For the past several years the Obama administration has thought it was a “fantasy” that this fractured and undisciplined force could topple the Assad regime. Why is it now credible to believe that it can fight effectively against both Assad and ISIL?

Many commentators have argued that only way to end the sectarian civil wars in the region is through political negotiations that recognize the legitimate grievances of the Sunni populations of Syria and Iraq. It is not possible to eliminate the threat of Islamic extremism by killing extremists. Unless one addresses the underlying grievances that lead people to support and join extremist groups, we are just playing “whack-a-mole,” or worse, “whack-a-hornet’s-nest.” One cannot resolve grievances born of humiliation and dispossession by killing those who claim to be fighting for those harbor these feelings. Unless we learn this lesson I fear that we will continue to live during wartime.

Morton Winston

Reflections of the End of the Iraq War

The US war in Iraq is now officially over. It will go down in history as the greatest US foreign policy fiasco since the Vietnam War. In my lifetime I witnessed two lengthy and illegal wars of choice that the US blundered into. Both the Vietnam and the Iraq wars ended in ignominy and disaster, both for the US and for the countries that we went to war to "save".

Along with millions of other Americans, mainly on the political left, I opposed these wars. But the people who thought like me were ignored, vilified, called unpatriotic, and our concerns about the immorality and folly of these conflicts were discounted. On the other hand, those who ordered our young men and women into unnecessary combat were lionized and were never punished for their crimes, war crimes, in particular, the crime of aggression. In neither case were the main objectives for going to war accomplished. We failed miserably in both cases and these failures were bought at great cost in terms of treasure and lives. 

The goal of the Vietnam war was to stop this country from becoming a socialist state and preventing a "domino effect" leading other Southeast Asian nations to fall into the Communist column. By the end of this stupid war, 58,000 Americans and an estimated 1.5 million Vietnamese died. The conflict set up the conditions for a genocide in neighboring Cambodia in which another 1.7 million Cambodians died. In the end, the People's Socialist Republic of Vietnam won the war, but like its traditional enemy and neighbor to the north, the People's Republic of China, it is now a socialist state in name only. Vietnam is "open for business" and is in no way a threat to global capitalism. The irony is that this probably would have happened anyway and the war that was fought to prevent Vietnam from going communist merely delayed the transition of that nation to a market economy. Had the US done nothing instead of waging a stupid costly war, we probably would have ended up with the same result, a Vietnam that is hospitable to US businesses.

In the case of Iraq the Bush administration invaded this country in order to rid it of weapons of mass destruction (which did not exist) which it was feared might fall into the hands of terrorists groups such as Al Qaeda (which had no ties with the Iraqi government). The real underlying motive for this war was to surround and contain Iran by establishing a set of permanent US military bases on Iraqi soil and securing their vast oil reserves for exploitation by US and British companies such as Exxon and BP. The Bush-Cheney cabal thought we needed more US military bases in the region to guard "our oil", particularly after Saudi Arabia dis-invited us because of concerns raised by Osama bin Laden (among others) about having infidel soldiers stationed on holy land.

But in the end none of these objectives were achieved. The new Shiite-led Iraqi government has stronger ties to Iran that the Sunni-led regime of Saddam Hussein ever did or would have had. This government has also decided that there will be no permanent US military bases on Iraqi soil and has dis-invited us from maintaining any military presence in their country. They did this mainly because of the US insistence that our soldiers be immune from Iraqi law. The US will not allow other countries punish its citizens for war crimes, such as occurred in Haditha in 2005 and Nisour Square in 2007, and we do not punish them either. American insistence on impunity is the reason why American troops are now leaving Iraq.

Meanwhile, the oil fields are still not producing up to their potential and the leases for future production have been sold off to China, Malaysia, Russia and other countries that opposed the US-led war in the first place. It is true that some oil leases have been sold to US and British companies, but who would suggest that this "benefit" was worth the price paid in lives and treasure. If the costs of this war, estimated at over 1 trillion dollars, were factored into the price of gasoline at the pump when we fill up our SUVs, we Americans would appreciate the real cost of our dependence on oil.

Some will point out that we did succeed in toppling Saddam's murderous regime and killing both him and his odious sons. One must, however, wonder whether this would not have happened in due course anyway without US and British meddling. The Arab spring revolutions that took the region by storm in 2011 swept away murderous authoritarian dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Other middle eastern family dictatorships, such as the Assad regime in Syria, are now under siege from their own people. Historical counterfactuals are impossible to prove, but isn't it hard to believe that had the US not invaded Iraq in 2003 and toppled Saddam, the Iraqi people themselves would not have risen up against him by 2011?  The irony in this case is that it might well have been the case that the Iraqi's themselves would have won their freedom from an oppressive dictator had we not decided to do the job for them.

Iraq is now "democratic", but the US is now far weaker, militarily, politically, economically, and morally, than it was before this war was launched. We Americans are victims of self-inflicted wounds.

China and other nations often accuse the US of improperly meddling in other countries' internal affairs. This criticism is correct as it concerns America's record of waging foolish wars of choice by invading other nations to save them from some threat, real or imagined. Political leaders in the United States need to think long and hard about these lessons of history before launching more such foolish wars. 

But curbing US military adventurism is not at all the same thing as arguing for US isolationism. The US must remain engaged in international affairs, but can do far more than it does currently to reshape the world to suit its interests and its values by dramatically increasing its humanitarian and development assistance, budget priorities that have been beggared by the gargantuan cost of maintaining our military dominance. We need to dramatically reduce the size of our bloated and wasteful military establishment. When people talk about shrinking the size of government to "starve the beast" I tend to agree with them if by the "beast" one means the Pentagon and the military industrial complex -- to this is one of the branches of government that does need to be starved and shrunken down to size.

But the question is, as it always has been, not whether our government is "too big" or "too small", but whether it is a good government. Like the overwhelming majority of Americans, I do not think our government has been all that good in either its foreign or domestic policies. To say this is not to be unpatriotic -- it is merely stating a truth that is obvious to all unbiased observers. This is why I always laugh to myself when people talk about exporting democracy to other nations. If our system of government is so great why are Congress's approval ratings so low?

The people in this country who think like me have been saying these things for more than fifty years. I have thought this way since I was twelve, in 1961. I am now 62 and have not changed my mind. Indeed the events of history I have witnessed in my lifetime have only strengthened my conviction and my willingness to speak my mind. Perhaps now, at the end of yet another stupid, immoral, and wasteful US military adventure, more people in this country will begin to listen and take action.  No more (stupid) wars.