America's Might

Just a brief thought about American military might. I can't recall if I've written this recently, so forgive me for repeating myself...

The non-Styx Claim: I've read many people claim that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have emboldened our enemies because it demonstrates that the US is not all-powerful and that sustained guerrilla warfare will undermine the American resolve. The conclusion of these pundits is that the wars have weakened the culture of intimidation that the U.S. needs to maintain in order to scare the world into loving us. Or something like that.

The Styx Response: OK, here's the deal. We need to make a distinction between the way that idiots think and the way that our enemies/allies think. Idiots will believe propaganda, myths, and won't read newspapers. Generally speaking, idiots aren't powerful and don't run countries - this is especially true for autocracies whose leadership are often cruel, canny mobsters. Alas, it's possible that democracies can elect idiots - and this happened to us back in 2004 with Bush (because, it bears repeating, Bush lost the election in 2000, although because he got very close some could say that it matters - and, sadly, this *is* something I repeat over and over and never ask forgiveness despite my polite request at the beginning of this post).

So, yeah, GWBush and his ilk were idiots and did not actually pay attention to the real facts (e.g. they believed there were no difference between Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq). And this had real consequences. But generally this is not true and it's wise to behave as if the other countries of the world are led by people who endeavor to know real facts and to plan consequences accordingly. And, I'd posit, the more powerful the country, the more likely the leaders are to know the true facts.

OK, that's my ground-rule to analyzing the above claim about the current two wars.

My conclusion is that the wise, fact-loving countries still fear the United States' might, possibly at the same level they did before these two wars. Why?

(1) We still have enormous numbers of nuclear weapons and as such can destroy every country in the world. This is not the Styx getting all jingo on you and posturing for the mirror, this is part of how the other nations see us. We can destroy them all - many of them without a serious counter-strike.

(2) While #1 is known and cited, the next point is the same one but for conventional forces. I claimed here that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were botched, but I misspoke: the war part of those wars went well, it's the recovery and reconstruction that was botched. This is a big difference, especially if you are an enemy of the U.S. We had the power then, and have the power now, to utterly and unilaterally destroy a foreign government. If we as a nation weren't so moral as to be concerned with rebuilding, if all we wanted to do was destroy another nation, then our wars were successes!

Please remember that: from the standpoint of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, they are no longer in power. And that matters a lot for our enemies. You can ask why we haven't done that more often (e.g. to Cuba, since the fall of the Soviet Union) and I assume it's to maintain the general ability of US military supremacy (which I define, in part, as our ability to act unilaterally).

So the botchedness is from the position of 'nation building' not fear and destruction - which is the whole argument of the above idiots.

(3) While we are definitely hurting because of the two wars - all war is expensive - we haven't raised taxes nor called a draft. As such, from our enemies standpoint, we are running the wars rather easily. Unlike Vietnam, Korea, and especially WWII, these two wars have had comparatively little impact on everyday American lives. Yeah, you know that already, but just apply it logically to the above question: if we know it, other countries know it (because the knowledge is freely available). And even though our economy is in the dumps now, and while I think extricating from Iraq will help alleviate the dumpitude, the one didn't directly cause the other.

(4) Related to point #3 is that just as we are not sacrificing too much to run these wars, our enemies know that if we wanted to we could thus gear up to fight even more wars. Granted, most experts claim that we are at our military's limit right now. The Iraq surge before and the new Afghanistan surge have stretched us to the utmost. But that's within our volunteer-army sacrifice-less guidelines of no draft and no tax. I'm not denying the enormous sacrifices of our military - including the hapless sods who joined the guard many years ago and were thrust by Bush-Cheney into unagreed commitments and stop-loss madness. All true.

But the country hasn't sacrificed for the two wars because Bush-Cheney were trying to steal them. They didn't want us to question how and why the wars were being fought. We were sold lies about Iraq and 9/11, and since we didn't have to pay up front, Congress and the GOP were able to ignore the consequences. This is why the wars are so hated now: because the lies have been exposed.

But were we to face a true existential threat then that would change. So, quiz, based on what I've said above: if the American people were convinced that the only way to stop Iran from becoming a rogue nuclear state hell-bent on destroying America with nukes, then would we be able to fight that third war?

First of all, I need to deal with the cynics who would say: the American people won't believe the threat because of the lies of Cheney and Iraq.
The Styx says: if the threat were credibly stated, and if it were real, then our government would be able to prove the claim without the smoke and mirrors Bush needed to employ to dupe Congress/the Press. So for the purpose of this quiz, the threat is credible and believed.

So the idiots would say: we cannot fight a third war because we're stretched thin!

The Styx would say: of course we could fight a third war. We fought World War II in three major theaters (1. Europe (North Africa to Italy to France), 2. Pacific (Australia to Indonesia to Philippines to Japan), 3. India-China-Burma). We did so because of a draft and rationing at home. And we can do so again if existentially threatened.

Last point: many wags try to compare the current U.S. position/empire to the Romans or the UK. I'd refute the comparisons with two facts: the US is both an isolated island 'empire' (like UK) but with a huge land-size and natural resources. We run contiguously from coast-to-coast. Our borders are with a wussy frozen North and a chaotic developing nation to the South. Running an empire from England was always a stretch because they lacked the internal national resources to conduct their wars; the same for Rome, except they had major border issues as well. We don't. More anon if needed.

To review/conclude: our allies know that we're still the strongest around. Our enemies, because they're run (usually) by intelligent fact-loving despots who want to maintain a hold on their seized wealth, also know that. Our paramount strength has not been undermined by our two wars because (a) we still have the most nukes, (b) we have shown we can act unilaterally and while we may botch nation building we're awesome at government destruction, (c) we're running our wars without a draft or raised taxes, and (d) if we wanted to tax and draft, we'd be even more destructive.

First pic from here, second from here, third pic from the Wiki.

Obituary: General William E. Odom, 75

I found out from Yglesias that William E. Odom, 75; Military Adviser to 2 Administrations died over the weekend. I came across Odom from an interview he gave in February 2007 which I blogged about here. Odom was a highly respected military analyst who set about to destroy the Bush administration - and general GOP - concepts about war, and specifically about Iraq and Iran. Read the interview and you will realize that we just lost a great American.

Pic from here.

Princeton and the Military

This is a nice New Republic article by Prof. Tony Grafton (whom I knew from school but he would have no reason to know me - and I'm quite impressed that his son went into the service, whoa) about Princeton's relationship to military service. It's yet another reason I love my alma mater - it was good to be an Orthodox Jew there, they were decent towards Israel and they were good patriots. Yay Princeton.

PRINCETON DIARIST
Military Academy
by Anthony Grafton
Post date: 01.23.07, Issue date: 01.29.07

A few weeks ago, Andrew Delbanco wrote eloquently in The New Republic about the strange silence of his university in this time of war ("War College," December 11, 2006). Most people don't think of Columbia University as an island of stillness and detachment. In Morningside Heights, as in Israel, any four people usually have eight opinions and express them with articulate fury. Yet Columbia holds its peace about Iraq--and, according to Delbanco, shows few traces of its active participation in America's other wars.

Princeton University, where I work, does feel like an island, "rising," as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1927, "a green Phoenix, out of the ugliest country in the world"--an idyllic haven, quiet and Gothic. At its best, it resembles the ideal college Lionel Trilling longed for, where students and faculty can ignore the present and study something serious and lasting, such as Linear B. At its worst, it's a bubble--which is how the students often describe it.

Yet Princeton has always played its part in America's wars. The Battle of Princeton left cannonball scars in the stone walls of Nassau Hall. In its entrance corridor, marble tablets record the names of Princetonians who have died in America's wars (equal numbers, famously, died for the North and South). Bronze stars outside the windows identify the onetime residences of those who died in the twentieth century. We have a ROTC unit--a very good one. Our students have joined, and continue to join, the military. The 2005 salutatorian, a gifted and modest historian, did so. The Alumni Weekly carries articles not only about General Petraeus, who took his doctorate here some years ago, but also about undergraduate alumni who have flown fighter planes over Afghanistan and fought throughout Iraq.

Talk to support staff and secretaries, custodians and craftsmen, and you hear at once of loved ones in the military. Despite the stereotypes, the war touches professors as well. One colleague's son, an infantry officer in the Marines, was badly wounded in Iraq. Another, who joined the Army as an infantryman, came back uninjured from a long period in the Sunni Triangle, where he saw--a lot. My son joined the Marines when he graduated from college in 2002. He's a helicopter pilot, and, until now, he has served in Asia. But his friends from the Basic School have gone everywhere, including Falluja and Ramadi. Some of them are dead.

So what's our duty, as professors, in this time of war? What should we say and do? We can vote for and support politicians who opposed it, as I have, if we think it's a debacle. But now, and in the future, we will have soldiers and officers in the field--strange fields where they engage in asymmetrical warfare with populations they don't know. Sometimes this will be the right thing to do. Can we help our soldiers do their job--and explain that job to their civilian bosses?

Those of us who have never served in the military usually don't know a lot about it. In 1975, when I arrived at Princeton, many older members of the faculty had served in World War II or the Korean war. Nowadays, by contrast, few members of the faculty have military experience--and those who do are likely to be Canadians or Israelis. Of course, some scholars study the military, past and present, but the base of direct knowledge that most of us have is not very deep--compared with what we know about, say, the federal government.

I have tried to remedy my ignorance in the professor's age-old ways: reading and asking questions of knowledgeable colleagues, including a former Army officer and an Israeli former student. Whenever I can, I talk to my son and his friends. I have learned a little. I know, now, that when politicians speak of war as something that can be clean and simple, that won't demand terrible actions of those who fight and terrible suffering from civilians, they lie. But I'm still very ignorant, and most of my fellow professors know even less than I do. We who teach young men and women need to know more about what we ask some of them to do on our behalf and what it takes to do their jobs.

It wouldn't hurt to ask how they and their commanders have done better than the university at some tasks that really matter for the United States. My son has taken a lot of orders from people of color--every color. The colonel who commanded the group with which he initially trained wore a size-24 flight suit when he met her, since she was pregnant with her third child. I can't be the only old white male professor who would like to see universities look more like the military, in these respects, than they do now.

But I also suspect that the military needs us--especially those of us who work not in policy studies or international relations but in the humanities and soft social sciences. I don't mean that we should become amateur pundits. One lesson of the last few years, surely, is that we should ignore pundits and listen to people who know what they're talking about.

Well, we humanists know a few important things. We know that language is more powerful than any other weapon and that you can't change the ideas of someone you can't talk to. We know that local history and lived culture shape men and women in ways that no amount of violence can change. We know that many of our policies have not, in recent years, given foreigners good reasons for associating the United States with enlightenment and liberty. We need to make these things clear to those who fight and die in our name and to the civilian authorities who send them into battle. We won't achieve that by pulling up the hems of our garments and refusing to have anything to do with them.

Recent stories suggest that important people in the military have grasped some of these points. It's time, and past time, to start more conversations: time for each of these institutions, and its inhabitants, to learn more about the other. Above all, it's time to find factual, substantive ways of talking about what the military can and can't do and about how it could be more effective and less destructive when it must wage war. Here in Princeton's bubble, where America's wars are never all that far away, it seems possible that we could do this.

Anthony Grafton is a contributing editor at The New Republic.

Backpost finished 2009-11-29. Don't know why, again, I had to wait so long to put up a basically finished post.