Tough Truths Are Desperately Needed About
America’s Lost Wars
By William Astore
June 30, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" - - "Tom
Dispatch"
Americans may already be lying themselves out of
what little remains of their democracy.
The big lie uniting and motivating today’s
Republicans is, of course, that Donald Trump, not
Joe Biden, won the 2020 presidential election.
Other big lies in our recent past include the notion
that climate change is nothing but a Chinese hoax,
that Russia was responsible for Hillary Clinton’s
electoral defeat in 2016, and that the invasion of
Iraq in 2003 was necessary because that country’s
leader, Saddam Hussein, had something to do with the
9/11 attacks (he didn’t!) and possessed weapons of
mass destruction that could be used against the
United States, a “slam
dunk” truth, according to then-CIA Director
George Tenet (it wasn’t!).
Those and other lies, large and small, along with
systemic corruption in Washington are precisely why
so many Americans have been driven to despair.
Small wonder that, in 2016, those “deplorables”
reached out in desperation to a figure who wasn’t a
product of Washington’s mendacious Beltway culture.
Desperate times engender desperate acts, including
anointing a
failed casino owner and consummate con man as
America’s MAGA-cap-wearing savior. As the 45th
president, Donald Trump set a
record for lies that will likely remain
unmatchable in its “greatness” — or so we must hope
anyway.
Sadly, Americans have become remarkably tolerant
of comfortable lies, generally preferring them to
uncomfortable truths. Nowhere can this be seen more
clearly than in the military realm that I’ve
inhabited most of my life. The first casualty of
war, so it’s said, is truth, and since this country
has remained perennially at war, we continue to
eternally torture the truth as well.
When it comes to war, here are just a few of our
all-American falsehoods: that this country is slow
to anger because we prefer peace, even if wars are
often necessary, which is also why peace-loving
America must have the
world’s “finest” and by far the
most expensive military on the planet; that just
such a military is also a unique force for freedom
on Planet Earth; that it fights selflessly “to
liberate the oppressed” (a Special Forces motto)
but never to advance imperial or otherwise selfish
ambitions.
For a superpower that loves to flex its military
muscles, such lies are essentially par for the
course. Think of them, in fact, as
government-issue (GI) lies. As a historian
looking to the future, what worries me more are two
truly insidious lies that, in the early 1930s, led
to the collapse of a fledgling democracy in Weimar
Germany, lies that in their own way helped to
facilitate the Holocaust and that, under the right
(that is, wrong) circumstances, could become ours as
well. What were those two lies?
Germany’s Tragic Lies After World War I
During World War I, the German military attempted
to defeat the combined forces of Britain, France,
Russia, and later the United States, among other
powers, while simultaneously being “shackled to a
corpse,” as one German general described his
country’s main ally, the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
By the middle of 1916, the German Second Reich led
by Kaiser Wilhelm II had, in essence, become a
military dictatorship devoted to total victory at
any cost.
Two years later, that same military had been
driven to exhaustion by its commanders. When it was
on the verge of collapse, its generals washed their
hands of responsibility and allowed the politicians
to sue for peace. But even before the guns fell
silent on November 11, 1918, certain reactionary
elements within the country were already rehearsing
two big and related lies that would facilitate the
rise of a demagogue and the onset of an even more
disastrous world war.
The first big lie was that the German military,
then considered the world’s finest (sound
familiar?), emerged from World War I undefeated in
the field, its troops a band of heroes covered in
glory. That lie was tenable because Germany itself
had not been invaded in World War I; the worst
fighting took place in France, Belgium, and Russia.
It was also tenable because its military leaders had
lied to the people about the progress being made
toward “victory.” (This should again sound familiar
to contemporary American ears.) So, when those
senior leaders finally threw in the towel in late
1918, it came as a shock to most Germans, who’d been
fed a steady diet of “progress,” while news of
serious setbacks on the Western Front was
suppressed.
The second big lie followed from the first. For
if one accepted the “undefeated in the field” myth,
as so many Germans did, then who was responsible for
the defeat of the world’s finest military? Not
Germany’s generals, of course. Indeed, in 1919, led
by Field Marshal
Paul von Hindenburg, those same generals would
maliciously claim that disloyal elements on the home
front — an enemy within — had conspired to betray
the country’s heroic troops. Thus was born the “stab-in-the-back”
myth that placed the blame on traitors from within,
while ever so conveniently displacing it from the
Kaiser and his generals.
Who, then, were Germany’s backstabbers? The
usual suspects were rounded up: mainly socialists,
Marxists, anti-militarists, pacifists, and war
profiteers of a certain sort (but not weapons makers
like the Krupp Family). Soon enough, Germany’s Jews
would be fingered as well by gutter-inhabitants like
Adolf Hitler, since they had allegedly shirked their
duty to serve in the ranks. This was yet another
easy-to-disprove lie, but all too many Germans,
desperate for scapegoats and undoubtedly bigoted as
well, proved eager to believe such lies.
Those two big and insidious falsehoods led to an
almost total lack of accountability in Weimar
Germany for militarists like Hindenburg and General
Erich Ludendorff who were significantly responsible
for the country’s defeat. Such lies fed the anger
and fattened the grievances of the German people,
creating fertile ground for yet more grievous lies.
In a climate of fear driven by the massive economic
dislocation brought on by the Great Depression of
1929, a previously fringe figure found his voice and
his audience. Those two big lies served to empower
Hitler and, not surprisingly, he began promoting
both a military revival and calls for revenge
against the backstabbing “November criminals” who
had allegedly betrayed Germany. Hitler’s lies were
readily embraced in part because they fell on
well-prepared ears.
Of course, a mature democracy like America could
never produce a leader remotely like a Hitler or a
militaristic empire bent on world domination.
Right?
America may indeed never produce its own Hitler,
a demagogue who might indeed be described as a very
unstable genius, and by “genius” I mean his uncanny
ability to tap into and exploit the darker passions
of his people and his age. Yet the United States in
2021 certainly does have power-hungry,
less-than-stable “geniuses” of its own — as all
countries do in all times. Men without principles
or limits, willing to repeat big lie after big lie
until they gain absolute power. Someone like former
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo or Senator Tom Cotton
perhaps? Or perhaps an updated version of retired
Lt. General Michael Flynn, Donald Trump’s fleeting
national security advisor, who only recently
expressed support for a military coup to
overthrow the government. Or perhaps, in 2024, Trump
himself.
America’s Own Big Lies
Of course, Germany in the aftermath of World War
I is hardly a perfect analog for the United States
in the aftermath of two decades of its disastrous
but distant war on terror. And history is, at best,
suggestive rather than duplicative. Yet we study it
in part because the past provides insight into
potential futures. Personalities and events change,
but human nature remains much the same, which is why
military officers still read the work of Athenian
general and historian Thucydides with profit,
despite the fact that his wars ended more than two
millennia ago.
So, let’s return to the two big lies that, in
retrospect, were fatal to Weimar Germany’s
democracy. How might they apply to the U.S. today?
Since 9/11, our military has prosecuted two big wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as numerous smaller
conflicts in places like Libya, Syria, and Somalia.
That same military has lost both of those big wars,
while creating or exacerbating ongoing
humanitarian crises and disasters in the
“smaller” ones across the Greater Middle East and
Africa.
Yet, in the American “homeland” (as it came to be
known after the 9/11 attacks), it’s remarkable how
seldom anyone notes how badly that same military has
bungled all those wars. Indeed, it’s generally
celebrated in most of the country and certainly in
Washington as the
finest military force in the world, perhaps even
in world history. Its budget
continues to rise as if in response to victories
everywhere and therefore deserving of the lion’s
share of taxpayer dollars. Its retired generals and
admirals are celebrated and rewarded with
healthy pensions and even healthier pay and
benefits if they so choose (and many do) to speed
through
the revolving door that links them to highly
profitable war corporations like Boeing, Lockheed
Martin, and Raytheon.
In essence, Americans have been sold on the idea
that “their” military has been undefeated in the
field, or, if “defeated” in the sense of suffering
setbacks, not responsible for them. But if
America’s troops are the best of us and their losing
commanders generally good enough to be eternally
rewarded, who is to blame for America’s
loss in Iraq? In Afghanistan? Not them, obviously,
not if you believe polling results which show that
Americans have more “confidence” in the military
than most other U.S. institutions (though those
figures, still high, have been
dropping recently).
If responsibility for defeat is not to be
assigned either to the troops or their military
commanders, and if we Americans most certainly can’t
imagine that an enemy like the Taliban is capable of
defeating our mighty forces, who is to blame? An
enemy within! Someone in the homeland who’s stabbing
America’s
noble heroes in the back. But, if so, who
exactly?
Senior leaders in the U.S. military are
already complaining that Joe Biden’s troop
withdrawal from Afghanistan may yet sow the seeds of
defeat in that country (as if nearly 20 years of
waging a disastrous war there had somehow set the
stage for success). Republicans, as is their
custom, have their knives out, too. They seem to be
preparing to stab Democrats for being weak on
defense and appeasers of “dictators” like the
leaders of
Iran and
China.
And if you’re thinking about a future “enemy
within” narrative, don’t forget the recent letter
signed by 124 of our retired generals and
admirals who seek to blame the decline of democracy
in this country not on Trump and his lackeys, but on
the spread of progressivism, socialism, even
Marxism. That they might bear the slightest
responsibility for the situation America finds
itself in today would never occur to that
company-sized gaggle of losers posing as
self-appointed prophets.
But the truth is far harsher than those flag-rank
opportunists are prepared to admit. Incessant war,
insidious militarism, and our failure to face it all
should be considered the real enemies within. And
those “enemies” are helping to kill democracy in
America, as
James Madison,
Dwight D. Eisenhower, and
Martin Luther King, Jr., among others, warned us
about decades, even centuries, ago.
Here’s the simple truth of it: America’s wars
since 9/11 were never this country’s to win. They
were pointless conflicts of opportunity, profiting
the Pentagon (and its ever-rising budget). They were
tainted by a need for vengeance and badly mismanaged
by some of the same flag-rank officers who signed
that letter. Honest self-reflection would require a
serious course correction within that military and
most certainly a wholesale rejection of militarism
and military adventurism. And this is undoubtedly
why so many in the
military-industrial-congressional complex prefer
the comfort of big lies.
We’ve seen versions of this before. Ronald
Reagan reinterpreted a criminal war in Southeast
Asia as “a
noble cause.” George H.W. Bush referred to a
rational and reasoned reluctance to fight needless
overseas wars as “the Vietnam syndrome,” claiming
the U.S. had finally “kicked
it” with its ephemeral victory over Saddam
Hussein in the Desert Storm campaign of 1991. The
Rambo myth in popular culture reinforced the
notion that American warriors had won the war in
Vietnam, only to be stabbed in the back by
duplicitous politicians and antiwar protestors who
also
spit on the returning troops. (They
didn’t.) Together such myths worked to shelter
the U.S. military from radical reforms, ensuring an
ongoing business-as-usual attitude at the Pentagon
until, after 9/11, its true “mission
(un)accomplished” years arrived.
Tough Truths Are the Antidote to Big
Lies
Americans need a day of reckoning that shows no
sign of coming. After all, we’re talking about a
Congress that
can’t even agree to form a joint commission to
investigate the January 6th storming of the Capitol.
Still, a guy can dream, can’t he? My own dream
would involve the formation of a truth commission to
hold senior leaders, military and civilian,
accountable not only for their lies about America’s
many wars but for the decisions to launch them and
the pathetic performances that followed, as they did
their unprincipled best to absolve themselves of
responsibility.
Allow me to dream as well about what such an
exercise in truth-telling and true accountability
would involve:
- Bipartisan Congressional investigations into
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including
sworn testimony by presidents Bush, Obama, and
Trump, as well as vice presidents Cheney, Biden,
and Pence, and those failed former commanding
generals of ours.
- Bipartisan Congressional investigations into
the military’s endless lies about progress in
its wars, coupled with war crimes inquiries as
needed.
- Major reductions in military spending by
Congress to curb present and future military
adventurism.
- An end to military adulation, a rejection of
militarism, and a recommitment to democracy and
truth-telling.
- No future wars overseas without a
Congressional declaration of the same, followed
by mandatory conscription that would begin with
the sons and daughters of members of Congress.
Through big lies and its allegiance to them, the
United States today may be following a path already
violently trod by Weimar Germany in the 1920s and
early 1930s. Celebrating the military despite its
defeats is a recipe for perpetual war and perpetual
dishonesty. Equating democratic forces within
America with divisiveness and sedition is a recipe
not only for unrest but for a potentially harsher,
far more violent future.
Here history teaches a disturbing lesson. What
finally forced most Germans to face harsh truths, to
reject militarism and megalomaniacal dreams of world
empire, was catastrophic defeat in World War II.
What, if anything, will force Americans to face
similar harsh truths? Humanity can’t afford yet
another world war, not one in which a president has
the power to unleash a thousand holocausts via an
eternally “modernized”
nuclear arsenal.
Just remember: Big lies do have consequences.
William
Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF)
and professor of history, is a TomDispatch regular and
a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN),
an organization of critical veteran military and
national security professionals. His personal blog
is Bracing
Views.
Copyright 2021 William
J. Astore
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