Is America Addicted to War?

If you cared about a 235-year-old loved one who kept repeating disfunctional behaviors in situations that didn't justify the behavior, you'd probably ask them about it. Why do you keep doing that? Don't you see that you're in a pattern that's bad for you? Can't you stop yourself? What, What, What are you doing?



In Foreign Policy, Steven Walt asks Is America Addicted to War? It's a legitimate question, and Walt suggests that we are, in fact, addicted to war: we're not making good decisions, we keep doing things we know are going to end poorly, we're not learning from our mistakes.

Walt offers five reasons why Why America Keeps Fighting Foolish Wars-

• Because We can link
  The most obvious reason that the United States keeps doing these things is the fact that it has a remarkably powerful military, especially when facing a minor power like Libya. When you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you've got hundreds of planes, smart bombs, and cruise missiles, the whole world looks like a target set. It's hard to resist the temptation to "do something!"
  
  
• We Have No Serious Enemies link
  The end of the Cold War left the United States in a remarkably safe position. There are no great powers in the Western hemisphere; we have no "peer competitors" anywhere (though China may become one sooner if we keep squandering our power foolishly); and there is no country anywhere that could entertain the idea of attacking America without inviting its own destruction. We do face a vexing terrorism problem, but that danger is probably exaggerated, is partly a reaction to our tendency to meddle in other countries, and is best managed in other ways. It's really quite ironic: Because the American homeland is safe from serious external dangers (which is a good thing), Americans have the luxury of going abroad "in search of monsters to destroy" (not a good thing).
  
  
• It's the Establishment, Stupid link
  The foreign-policy establishment is hard-wired in favor of "doing something." Foreign-policy thinking in Washington is dominated either by neoconservatives (who openly proclaim the need to export "liberty" and never met a war they didn't like) or by "liberal interventionists" who are just as enthusiastic about using military power to solve problems, provided they can engineer some sort of multilateral cover.
  
  
• Congress has Left the Building link
  The authority to declare war is given to Congress, not the president, but that authority has been steadily usurped ever since World War II, and Congress has not seen fit to assert their role. Modern presidents of both parties clearly feel no constraints about ordering U.S. forces to attack other countries, or even to fully inform Congress as to what we might be doing in secret. The vaunted system of "checks and balances" supposedly enshrined in our Constitution simply doesn't operate anymore, which means that the use of America's military power has been left solely to the presidents and a handful of ambitious advisors.
  
  
• The All Volunteer Force link
  A third enabling factor behind our addiction to adventurism is the all-volunteer force. By limiting military service only to those individuals who volunteer to do it, public opposition to wars of choice is more easily contained. Could Bush or Obama have kept the Iraq and Afghanistan wars going if most young Americans had to register for a draft, and if the sons and daughters of Wall Street bankers were being sent in harm's way because they got an unlucky number in the draft? (more)

And I would add these factors:

• The military-industrial complex profits from war and funds politicians
  
• Demagogues, think tanks, and lobbyists profit from war
  
• War is a useful distraction
  

America needs a 12-step program.

The Habituation of Routinized War and the Return of the Draft

There are wars that Americans felt good about in that they were considered just and right. These appropriate wars where the wars that somebody else started, where they attacked us and we declared war against them. WW1, WW2: you can quibble about who knew what/when, and the extent to which we built the provocative scenario, but they were understood as responses to an attack. Americans willingly sacrificed their children and their treasure for those kinds of war.

During the second half of the 20th century, and particularly in the context of the Cold War, a tenet of American military policy was the "second strike" - the United States wouldn't make the initial attack (the first strike), but we would be completely ready for the second strike. Nobody talks about second-strike capability any more. Second Strike is so 1992.

The First-Strike Paradigm

These days we don't attack countries that attacked us first (because countries don't attack us; only small groups of fanatics attack us). We attack other countries because we want to; these are optional wars that we choose to make.

Proficiency at Starting Wars

Proficiency means that things get easier, and your performance improves, the more you do something. We've gotten very proficient at starting wars. Starting wars must be much easier than ending wars, because we've started several lately and we haven't ended any. The Dept. of Defense is in at least three wars right now; the CIA has got one going in Pakistan, too.

We don't declare war any more, or at least we don't do it by the book. We're bipartisan in this willful disregard of the Constitution. Being attacked is no longer a prerequisite for starting a war, and neither is Congressional declaration; we've become clever, we're into War 2.0, and we've developed new excuses justifications for starting a war. Don't fetishize the old ways.

Prophylactic War The opportunistic use of 9/11 as justification for extension of American hegemony moved America from second-strike to first-strike, justified by the dubious philosophies of preventive war or preemptive war

*

: we don't need to wait for mushroom clouds over American soil; bring it. The hubris of George w. Bush / Dick Cheney / Donald Rumsfeld / Paul Wolfowitz was that we could do this surgically, quickly, and with a downsized force.

Humanitarian War As President Obama remarked in his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize speech: “I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, as it was in the Balkans, or in other places that have been scarred by war. Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later. That’s why all responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace.”

The Daily Globe and Mail explains today's philosophy of humanitarian war:

This doctrine is known as the “responsibility to protect” (R2P or RtoP) and was endorsed by the United Nations in 2005. It mandates that the “international community” is morally obliged to defend people who are in danger of massive human-rights violations. R2P is the moral underpinning of the war in Libya, and it’s the reason why people have been so amazingly eager for us to rush into battle.

The hubris of Barrack Obama / Hillary Clinton / Samantha Power / Susan Rice was that we could do this surgically, quickly, and without boots on the ground. At the United Nations, RtoP is considered an achievement of Kofi Annan which is embraced by Ban Ki Moon.

The 1.5 Political Parties

In a blog post today, EBM points out that there's not a significant difference between America's "1.5 political parties", and she's quite right. Consider the similarities between the wars of our last two Presidencies:

U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Neb) writes,
"So why did we invade Iraq? I believe it was the triumph of the so-called

neo-con

ideology, as well as Bush administration arrogance and incompetence that took America into this war of choice. . . . They obviously made a convincing case to a president with very limited national security and foreign policy experience. . . "

Take Hagel's statement, change the names, and see if it's still valid:
"So why did we invade Libya? I believe it was the triumph of the so-called

neo-lib

ideology, as well as Obama administration arrogance and incompetence that took America into this war of choice. . . . They obviously made a convincing case to a president with very limited national security and foreign policy experience. . . "

Routinized War

Mickey Kaus writes,

In a true empire – in this case, the empire of UN approved human rights enforcement – war never really ends. Always someone to protect somewhere. Imagine living in imperial Britain in the mid-19th century. There would almost always be a war or police action – actual shooting and killing – going on.

For a true empire to work – even, or perhaps especially, a humanitarian empire – war has to be routinized. You’ve got two wars going already? No need to change the president’s schedule to start a third war. Tour Latin America. Talk about your NCAA brackets. Don’t give a big speech – I mean, you don’t call a press conference every time the police run a sobriety checkpoint, do you?

Habituation

We have become habituated to a state of continual warfare, our corporations have adjusted to the money stream, and our institutions have realigned their objectives and budgets to ensure their continuation for the foreseeable future. Habituation turns a goat-roping exercise into the new normal.

The military-industrial complex is motivated to encourage this habituation. What makes habituation more effective?

Two factors that can influence habituation include the interstimulus interval (ISI), or the amount of time between each successive presentation of the stimulus, and the stimulus duration, or the length of time the stimulus is presented. Shorter ISIs and longer durations increase habituation; longer ISIs and shorter durations decrease habituation.

We can expect more undeclared wars, occurring with shorter intervals and of increasing duration. Just saying.

How old is an American kid who remembers peace?

A sixteen-year-old probably remembers when the United States was at peace. In a few more years, that cohort will be nineteen years old. Then the draft-age kids will be 18, their country will have been at war since they were born, and it'll be just like the Oceania vs Eurasia vs Eastasia War.

I thought Charles Rangel was grandstanding when he called for compulsory conscription, but I see now that the Korean War infantryman

*

was exactly right. You ask a kid about the draft these days, and they're going to reply, "NBA or NFL?"

Mickey Kaus says the same thing in his post:

It helps achieve routinization if wars can be conducted by a distinct cast of professionals whom we hire to do the job, as opposed to ordinary citizens who are drafted. That way when soldiers start dying … well, that’s the business they have chosen, right?

And they’re largely drawn from a distinct geographic region, the South. Mothers don’t have to worry that their sons will sent to fight against their will, as happened in Vietnam – and if they’re Northern mothers in well-off suburbs they may not even know anyone who has a family member at risk.

Reintroduction of the Draft

What are the dynamics that might reverse this trend?

• Significant loss of American military personnel
• reintroduction of cumpulsory conscription
• Overextension and economic collapse (oops)
• an unforeseeable event that provides entry for a new political movement
• development of a domestic antiwar movement

If not a full reintroduction of the draft, we could at least restore the Draft Lottery. Let enough mothers know that their sons have low draft numbers, and all of a sudden war won't be routine anymore.

And yes, my children are eligible or about to become eligibile for the draft.

Football, Fracking, Folly: stupid things we keep doing.

Three stories in the overall category, "why do we do such stupid things?"

Football and Brain Injuries

The brain of the late Cincinnati receiver Chris Henry contained so many signs of chronic disease... that it shows a football player can sustain life-altering head trauma without ever being diagnosed with a concussion.

Dr. Bennet Omalu: "I'm not calling for the eradication of football; no, I'm asking for full disclosure to the players. Like the surgeon general considers smoking to be dangerous to your health, repeated impacts of the brain are dangerous to your health and will affect you later in life. Period. The players need to know this.

"I think it's an epidemic. It's beneath the radar. We simply didn't identify it [early and properly].

"The NFL wants us to believe that documented concussions are the issue. I've always believed that it's not about documented concussions. It's about repeated impacts to the head ... sub-concussions," Dr. Omalu said. "The issue is repeated impact, repeated blows to the head."

Encouraging children to play football is so reckless that it makes soccer and the World Cup seem rational.

What a fracking mess

Today's Vanity Fair presents an account of fracking operations in Damascus, PA and Dimock, PA in order to exploit the natural gas found in the Marcellus Shale. Both towns are in the Delaware River basin watershed.

The story tells about one family whose (post-fracking) well-water eroded their plates in the dishwasher, made their children dizzy after they took showers, and eventually could be set on fire as it came out of the faucet.

Folly: Losing Afghanistan

Today's Economist (reg. req'd) talks about our failure in Afganistan. Although we're ostensibly fighting the Taliban and al Queda, the corrupt Karzai government has announced plans to seek a diplomatic rapprochement with them. Karzai is also manuevering with Pakistan to cement his Pashtun tribe's power.

Even Henry Kissinger (the godfather of American Realpolitik) says that what we're doing and saying is a formula for failure. I'm all for killing bad guys over there, but I'm not convinced that we're not creating more bad guys than we're killing.

I really, really, really hate to quote John Kerry, but his rhetoric fits this situation perfectly. How do you ask somebody to be the last man to die for a mistake? How can we tell a grieving parent that the loss was justified, when the Afghan president and congress are both cutting deals with the purported enemy?