Victory
at Last!
In America’s Wars, Failure Is the New Success
By Tom Engelhardt
September
05, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
-
It was
bloody and brutal,
a true generational struggle, but give them
credit. In the end, they won when so many lost.
James Comey was axed. Sean Spicer went down in a
heap of ashes. Anthony Scaramucci crashed and
burned instantaneously. Reince Priebus hung on
for dear life but was finally canned. Seven
months in, Steve Bannon got the old heave-ho and
soon after, his minion, Sebastian Gorka, was
unceremoniously
shoved out the
White House door. In a
downpour of
potential conflicts of interest and scandal,
Carl Icahn bowed out. Gary Cohn has reportedly
been at the edge of
resignation.
And so it goes in the Trump administration.
Except for the generals. Think of them as the
last men standing. They did it. They took the
high ground in Washington and held it with
remarkable panache. Three of them: National
Security Advisor Lieutenant General H.R.
McMaster, Secretary of Defense and retired
Marine General John Mattis, and former head of
the Department of Homeland Security, now White
House Chief of Staff, retired Marine General
John Kelly stand alone, except for President
Trump’s own
family members,
at the pinnacle of power in Washington.
Those three generals from America’s losing wars
are now triumphant. One of them is the ultimate
gatekeeper when
it comes to who sees the president. All three
influence his
thoughts and speeches. They are the “civilians”
who control the military and American war
policy. They, and they alone, have made the
president go against his deepest urges, as he
admitted in his
address to the
nation on the war in Afghanistan. (“My original
instinct was to pull out and historically I like
following my instincts.”) They’ve convinced him
to
release the
military (and the CIA) from significant
oversight on how they pursue their wars across
the Greater Middle East, Africa, and now
the Philippines.
They even convinced him to surround their future
actions in a
penumbra of secrecy.
Their
wars, the ones that began almost 16 years ago
and just keep morphing and spreading (along with
a proliferating assortment of terror groups),
are now theirs alone to fight and... well, we’ll
get to that. But first let’s step back a moment
and think about what’s happened since January.
The
Winningest President and the Losingest Generals
The most surprising winner of our era and
possibly -- to put ourselves fully in the
Trumpian spirit -- of any era since the first
protozoan stalked the Earth entered the Oval
Office on January 20th and promptly surrounded
himself with a set of generals from America’s
failed wars of the post-9/11 era. In other
words, the man who repeatedly promised that in
his presidency Americans
would win to
the point of tedium -- “We’re going to win so
much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of
winning, you’re going to come to me and go
‘Please, please, we can’t win anymore’” --
promptly chose to elevate the losingest guys in
town. If reports are to be believed, he
evidently did this because of his military
school background, his longstanding crush on
General George Patton of World War II fame (or
at least the
movie version
of him), and despite having
actively avoided
military service himself in the Vietnam years,
his weak spot for four stars with tough monikers
like “Mad
Dog.”
During the election campaign, though a general
of his choice
led the chants
to “lock her up,” Trump himself was surprisingly
clear-eyed when it came to the nature of
American generalship in the twenty-first
century. As he
put it, “Under
the leadership of Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton the generals have been reduced to
rubble, reduced to a point where it is
embarrassing for our country.” On coming to
power, however, he reached into that rubble to
choose his guys. In the years before he ran, he
had been no less clear-eyed on the war he just
extended in Afghanistan. Of that conflict, he
typically tweeted
in 2013, “We have wasted an enormous amount of
blood and treasure in Afghanistan. Their
government has zero appreciation. Let's get
out!”
On the other hand, the careers of his three
chosen generals are inextricably linked to
America’s losing wars. Then-Colonel H.R.
McMaster gained his reputation in 2005 by
leading the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment into
the Iraqi city of Tal Afar and “liberating” it
from Sunni insurgents, while essentially
inaugurating the counterinsurgency tactics that
would become the heart and soul of General David
Petraeus’s 2007 “surge”
in Iraq.
Only one small problem: McMaster’s
much-publicized “victory,” like so many other
American military successes of this era, didn’t
last. A year later, Tal Afar was “awash in
sectarian violence,”
wrote Jon
Finer, a Washington Post reporter who
accompanied McMaster into that city. It would
be among the first Iraqi cities taken by Islamic
State militants in 2014 and has
only recently
been “liberated” (yet again) by the Iraqi
military in a U.S.-backed campaign that has left
it
only partially
in rubble, unlike so many other fully
rubblized cities
in the region. In the Obama years, McMaster
would be
the leader of a
task force in Afghanistan that “sought to root
out the rampant corruption that had taken hold”
in the American-backed government there, an
effort that would prove a
dismal failure.
Marine General Mattis led Task Force 58 into
southern Afghanistan in the invasion of 2001,
establishing
the “first conventional U.S. military presence
in the country.” He repeated the act in Iraq in
2003, leading the 1st Marine Division in the
U.S. invasion of that country. He was involved
in the taking of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, in
2003; in the
fierce fighting
for and partial destruction of the city of
Fallujah in 2004; and, in that same year, the
bombing of what turned out to be a wedding
party, not insurgents, near the Syrian border.
(“How
many people go
to the middle of the desert... to hold a wedding
80 miles from the nearest civilization?” was his
response to the news.) In 2010, he was made head
of U.S. Central Command, overseeing the wars in
both Iraq and Afghanistan until 2013 when he
urged the Obama
administration to launch a “dead of night”
operation to take out an Iranian oil refinery or
power plant, his idea of an appropriate response
to Iran’s role in Iraq. His proposal was
rejected and he was “retired” from his command
five months early. In other words, he lost his
chance to set off yet another never-ending
American war in the Middle East. He is known for
his “Mattisisms” like this piece of
advice to U.S.
Marines in Iraq in 2003: “Be polite, be
professional, but have a plan to kill everybody
you meet.”
Retired Marine General John Kelly was assistant
division commander in Iraq under Mattis, who
personally promoted him
to brigadier general on the battlefield.
(Present head of the Joint Chiefs, General Joe
Dunford, was an officer in the same division at
the same time and all three reportedly remain
friends.) Though Kelly had a second tour of
duty in Iraq, he never fought in Afghanistan.
Tragically, however, one of his sons (who had
also fought in Fallujah in 2004)
died there
after stepping on an improvised explosive device
in 2010.
McMaster was among the earliest figures in the
Pentagon to begin speaking of the country’s
post-9/11 wars as “generational” (that is,
never-ending). In 2014, he
said,
“If
you think this war against our way of life
is over because some of the self-appointed
opinion-makers and chattering class grow
‘war weary,’ because they want to be out of
Iraq or Afghanistan, you are mistaken. This
enemy is dedicated to our destruction. He
will fight us for generations, and the
conflict will move through various phases as
it has since 9/11.”
In
short, you could hardly pick three men more
viscerally connected to the American way of war,
less capable of seriously reassessing what they
have lived through, or more fully identified
with the failures of the war on terror,
especially the conflicts in Iraq and
Afghanistan. When it comes to the “rubble” of
American generalship in these years, Mattis,
McMaster, and Kelly would certainly be at the
top of anyone’s list.
Think
of them, in fact, as the ultimate survivors of a
system that at its upper levels is not known,
even in the best of times, for promoting
original, outside-the-box thinkers. They are,
in other words, the ultimate four-star
conformists because that’s the character trait
you need to make it to generalship in the U.S.
military. (Original thinkers and critics never
seem to make it past the rank of colonel.)
And as their “new” Trump-era Afghan policy
indicates, when faced with their wars and what
to do about them, their answer is invariably
some version of
more of the
same (with the usual, by-now-predictable
results).
All Hail
the Generals!
Now, let’s take one more step back from the
situation at hand, lest you imagine that
President Trump’s acts, when it comes to those
generals, are unique to our time. Yes, two
retired generals and one still active in posts
previously (with the
rarest of
exceptions) reserved for civilians do represent
something new in American history. Still, this
Trumpian moment should be seen as the
culmination of, not a departure from, the
policies of the two previous administrations.
In these years, America’s generals have failed
everywhere except in one place, and that just
happens to be the only place that truly
matters. Call Afghanistan a “stalemate”
as often as you want, but almost 16 years after
the U.S. military loosed the power of “the
finest fighting force
the world has ever known” (aka “the
greatest force
for human liberation the world has ever known”),
the Taliban are
ascendant in
that benighted land and that’s the definition of
failure, no
matter how you tote things up. Those generals
have indeed been losers in that country, as they
and others have been in Iraq, Somalia, Yemen,
Libya, and someday undoubtedly Syria (no matter
what immediate victories they might chalk up).
In only one place did their generalship work
effectively; in only one place have they truly
succeeded; in only one place could they now
conceivably proclaim “victory at last!”
That
place is, of course, Washington, D.C., where
they are indeed the last men standing and, in
Trumpian terms, absolute winners.
In
Washington, their generalship has been anything
but rubble. It’s always been another kind of
more -- more of whatever they wanted, from money
to surges to ever-greater power and authority.
In Washington, they’ve been the winners ever
since President George W. Bush launched his
Global War on Terror.
What they couldn’t do in Baghdad, Kabul,
Tripoli, or anywhere else across the Greater
Middle East and Africa, they’ve done
impressively in our nation’s capital. In years
when they unsuccessfully brought the full power
of the greatest arsenal on the planet to bear on
enemies whose weaponry cost the
price of a pizza,
they continued to
rake in
billions of dollars in Washington. In fact, it’s
reasonable to argue that the losing conflicts in
the war on terror were necessary prerequisites
for the winning budgetary battles in that city.
Those never-ending conflicts -- and a more
generalized (no pun intended) fear of (Islamic)
terrorism heavily promoted by the national
security state -- have driven funding success to
staggering levels in the nation’s capital,
perhaps the single issue on which Repubicans and
Democrats have seen eye to eye in this period.
In this
context, Donald Trump’s decision to surround
himself with “his” generals has simply brought
this reality more fully into focus. He’s made
it clear why the term “deep state,” often used
by critics of American war and national security
policies, inadequately describes the situation
in Washington in this century. That term brings
up images of a hidden state-within-a-state that
controls the rest of the government in some
conspiratorial fashion. The reality in
Washington today is nothing like that. Despite
both its trove of secrets and its desire to cast
a shadow of secrecy over government operations,
the national security state hasn’t exactly been
lurking in the shadows in these years.
In Washington, whatever the Constitution may say
about civilian control of the military, the
generals -- at least at present -- control the
civilians and the deep state has become the
all-too-visible state. In this context, one
thing is clear, whether you’re talking about the
country’s
panoply of
“intelligence” agencies or the Pentagon, failure
is the new success.
And for all of this, one thing continues to be
essential: those “generational struggles” in
distant lands. If you want to see how this
works in a nutshell, consider a single line from
a
recent piece on
the Afghan War by New York Times
reporter Rod Nordland. “Even before the
president’s [Afghan] speech, the American
military and Afghan leaders were laying
long-term plans,” Nordland points out and, in
that context, adds in passing, “The American
military has a $6.5-billion plan to make the
Afghan air force self-sufficient and end its
overreliance on American air power by 2023.”
Think for a moment about just that relatively
modest part (a mere $6.5 billion!) of the U.S.
military’s
latest plans
for a more-of-the-same future in Afghanistan.
As a start, we’re already talking about six more
years of a war that began in October 2001, was
essentially an extension of a
previous conflict
fought there from 1979 to 1989, and is already
the
longest war in
American history. In other words, the idea of a
“generational
struggle” there
is anything but an exaggeration.
Recall as well that, in January 2008, U.S.
Brigadier General Jay Lindell, then-commander of
the Combined Air Power Transition Force in
Afghanistan, was
projecting an
eight-year U.S. plan
that would leave the Afghan air force fully
staffed, supplied, trained, and
“self-sufficient” by 2015. (In 2015, Rod
Nordland would check out that air force and
find it in a
“woeful state” of near ruin.)
So in 2023, if that full $6.5 billion is indeed
invested in -- perhaps the more fitting phrase
might be squandered on -- the Afghan air force,
one thing is a given: it will not be
“self-sufficient.” After all, 16 years later
with not $6.5 billion but more than
$65 billion
appropriated by Congress and spent on the
training of the Afghan security forces, they are
now taking
terrible casualties,
experiencing horrendous desertion rates,
filled with
“ghost” personnel, and anything but
self-sufficient. Why imagine something
different for that country’s air force $6.5
billion and six years later?
In
America’s war on terror, such things should be
considered tales foretold, even as the losing
generals of those losing wars strut their stuff
in Washington. Elsewhere on the planet, the U.S.
military’s plans for 2020, 2023, and beyond will
undoubtedly be yet more landmarks on a highway
to failure. Only in Washington do such plans
invariably work out. Only in Washington does
more of the same turn out to be the ultimate
formula for success. Our losing wars, it seems,
are a necessary backdrop for the ultimate
winning war in our nation’s capital. So all hail
America’s generals, mission accomplished!
Tom
Engelhardt is a co-founder of the
American Empire Project
and the author of The United States of Fear
as well as a history of the Cold War,
The End of Victory Culture.
He is a fellow of the
Nation Institute
and runs
TomDispatch.com.
His latest book is
Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
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Copyright 2017 Tom Engelhardt