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> Home » Top Stories »
> An Anti-War Movement of One
> By Philip Gold, Seattle Weekly
> September 20, 2002
>
> "Our national myth showed us that we were good, our technology made us strong,
> and our bureaucracy gave us standard operating procedures. It was not a
> winning combination."
>
>
> So judged a wise historian, Loren Baritz, about how we wandered, open-eyed and
> fuzzy-minded, into Vietnam. Twenty years ago, when I first read his
> still-undiscovered masterpiece, "Backfire," I cringed. So this is how we do
> things. This is us. It's going to happen again.
>
>
> It's happening again. And of late, I've taken to constituting myself as an
> anti-war movement of one -- a man of impeccable conservative credentials and
> long experience in the national-security field, a grumpy old Marine, who has
> grown infuriated with and appalled by both the conservative embrace of
> disaster and the enormity of the smallness of what passes for the anti-war
> movement today.
>
>
> Yes, technology makes us strong, possessed of a military such as the world has
> never seen. But the myths now come to us less out of our own wishes and
> experiences than courtesy of an ugly cabal, half-Pentagon, half-media.
>
>
> The Pentagon half: It's not so much el jefe, Secretary of Defense Donald
> Rumsfeld (a good man and an excellent "SECDEF"), as some of the little jefitos
> running around. You want names? Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and
> the denizens of the Defense Policy Board, an unpaid in-house think tank headed
> by Reaganite retread Richard Perle, a.k.a. "The Prince of Darkness," a moniker
> he earned in the 1980s for his love of confrontation for the sake of
> confrontation and of all things nuclear.
>
>
> The media half? Again, not just the Big Guys, the Foxes (I like O'Reilly) and
> the MSNBCs (Nachman's cool). It's also a couple slick policy rags more notable
> for their influence than their circulation. The Weekly Standard and its allied
> P.R. machine, the Project for the New American Century, come to mind -- the
> Bill Kristols, et al.
>
>
> Who are these people? Generically, they've been called "American Gaullists,"
> after France's 20th-century all-purpose savior, Charles "France Without
> Greatness Isn't France" de Gaulle. But greatness without grace isn't
> greatness. The current D.C. version: America Without Greatness Isn't America.
> Let's go thump somebody. It'll be quick and easy and cheap and great, great
> fun and anyway, as a recent New American Century fax addressed to "opinion
> leaders" assures us, Baghdad won't be like Mogadishu because this time we have
> "the will to win."
>
>
> Le Grand Charles, who knew from wars both world and colonial, would have
> scorned anything so stupid and so glib. These men aren't Gaullists. They're
> Prussians, a new aristocracy of aggression that combines 19th-century Prussian
> pigheadedness with a most un-Prussian inability to read a map or a ledger
> book, and a near total lack of military -- let alone combat -- experience. Ask
> these people to show you their wounds, and they'll probably wave a Washington
> Post editorial at you.
>
>
> As for procedures -- the procedures pertaining to going to war -- the
> administration's strategy (or lack thereof) can only be described as bizarre.
> OK, so maybe they're practicing psychological warfare, or even their own brand
> of taqiya, an Arabic word connoting the right and duty of believers to lie to
> infidels. (Why not? The Islamic world seems to have adopted a Jewish
> communications strategy known as kvetching.) But when a president of the
> United States tells us that -- not to worry -- if he decides to go to war,
> he'll definitely ask the Congress for "support," and -- again, not to worry --
> he'll "explain it" to the American people and we'll "understand," it's enough
> to make you join the anti-war movement.
>
>
> What anti-war movement? When you look at what passes for "resistance"
> nowadays, you cringe in embarrassment that this is what's left of the left.
> Pompous. Arrogant. Self-righteous. Self-referent. Impotence chic at its
> finest. Punch up www.notinourname. net and read their "pledge of resistance."
> Or imagine my feelings -- I almost said, "Feel my pain" -- when I did a local
> church panel recently. A man in the audience asked if America would die like
> Rome, Nazi Germany, and the British Empire. One panelist agreed that, yes,
> America will die. The audience applauded.
>
>
> And that's why I've come to be an anti-war movement of one, talking to anyone
> who will listen, not about how evil or how good we are, but about the world as
> it is and the vortex we're approaching.
>
>
> On Sept. 10, 2001, the Beltway couldn't decide whether the defense budget
> should be $310 billion or $312 billion. The Weekly Standard crowd was
> demanding Rumsfeld's resignation for refusal to spend more money faster.
> Today, annual defense and homeland-security expenditures have swooshed past
> $400 billion. At this rate, we will spend more on defense in this decade than
> we did directly on all of World War II. So where's the world war?
>
>
> All around us. Today, depending on how you count, there are between 60 and 100
> international, transnational, civil, and regional armed conflicts under way.
> The world is at war. And we're getting ready for combat around the world.
> Since Sept. 11, we've been building foreign bases in central Asia, the Persian
> Gulf, and down the east coast of Africa. The Pentagon speaks of being there
> for "the long haul." We're concluding training and other agreements with
> dozens of countries and groups (note well: groups), and generally mucking
> about with a fervor not seen since the 1950s era of "Pactomania."
>
>
> Alas, then as now and try as we might, we have few reliable or democratic
> allies. We have maybe half a dozen friends: Britain, Canada, Australia, Israel
> (sometimes), Turkey (a better friend to us than we've been to them), and, soon
> enough, Russia. Beyond that, we have relationships and hookups in
> ever-proliferating quantity and ever more complex and questionable quality.
>
>
> So what's this new struggle, these hundred conflicts already melding into yet
> another world war, about? Put simply: Maybe half the countries on this planet
> -- and many of the poorest and most volatile -- have borders that don't make
> sense politically, militarily, ethnically, culturally, economically, or
> ecologically. Before the Soviet collapse, borders were considered sacrosanct,
> virtually immutable, the sine qua non of national sovereignty. Now sovereignty
> is breaking down and busting up all over, and borders grow ever more
> unavailing and unreal. No amount of Western-style "nation building" can hold
> together nations that never should have been nations in the first place and
> shouldn't be now. And no amount of American muscle can police a world destined
> for a century of conflict over resources, religions, identities, and whatever
> else people care to massacre each other about.
>
>
> Throughout the Cold War, we failed at Third World nation building, failures we
> could elide courtesy of local thugs and kleptocrats. During a decade that
> historians may someday call "The Wasted '90s," we blew it in Haiti, Somalia,
> and, to some extent, in the Balkans.
>
>
> We're getting our first hard lesson in Afghanistan, whose continued existence
> as a collection of feuding tribes and warlords isn't worth the bones of an
> Arkansas grenadier. If we go into Iraq, if we get our "regime change" and then
> try to build them a country, the lesson will be harsher still. And as we fail,
> the chaos -- and our involvement and implication in that chaos -- will spread.
> It will spread through the Islamic world. It will spread through Africa. And
> the consequences and the violence will not be confined to those unhappy lands.
> Not to mention the fact that, from the jihadist point of view -- they who
> recognize no legitimate borders save those of the Umma, the Islamic world
> under their brand of Islamic law -- destabilization is exactly the opportunity
> they want.
>
>
> So what's Iraq about? In the end, it's not about that nasty man or the nasty
> things he's collecting. It's about what the policy wonks call
> "destabilization." It's about taking the next step into a regional and a
> global chaos that could wreck this planet.
>
>
> So what do we do when the government's careening toward disaster, the anti-war
> movement's comatose, and the media keep us on perpetual spin? For starters, we
> dare to risk unilateral rationality. Which tells us that we've yet to begin to
> develop an effective strategy for coping with terrorism and weapons of mass
> destruction, let alone the imminent fracturing of dozens of nations.
>
>
> Iraq?
>
>
> Not now.
>
> Philip Gold served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Marine Corps before
> joining the faculty of Georgetown University in 1982. Since 1992, he has
> served as a senior fellow at Seattle's Discovery Institute, specializing in
> national security. His latest book, Against All Terrors: The People's Next
> Defense, is available online at www.discovery.org.
>
> « Home « Top Stories
>
>
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