{"id":3848,"date":"2015-06-29T10:09:56","date_gmt":"2015-06-29T16:09:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/?p=3848"},"modified":"2015-06-29T10:09:56","modified_gmt":"2015-06-29T16:09:56","slug":"americas-got-war-poverty-drugs-afghanistan-iraq-terror-or-how-to-make-war-on-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/americas-got-war-poverty-drugs-afghanistan-iraq-terror-or-how-to-make-war-on-everything\/","title":{"rendered":"America\u2019s Got War: Poverty, Drugs, Afghanistan, Iraq, Terror, or How to Make War on Everything"},"content":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0William J. Astore<\/a>, Tom Dispatch
\nclick here for original article<\/a><\/p>\n

War on drugs<\/a>.\u00a0War on poverty<\/a>. War in Afghanistan. War in Iraq.\u00a0War on terror<\/a>. The biggest mistake in American policy, foreign and domestic, is looking at everything as war. When a war mentality takes over, it chooses the weapons and tactics for you.\u00a0 It limits the terms of debate before you even begin. It answers questions before they\u2019re even asked.<\/p>\n

When you define something as war, it dictates the use of the military (or militarized police forces, prisons, and other forms of coercion) as the primary instruments of policy.\u00a0 Violence becomes the means of decision, total victory the goal.\u00a0 Anyone who suggests otherwise is labeled a dreamer, an appeaser, or even a traitor.<\/p>\n

War, in short, is the great simplifier — and it may even work when you\u2019re fighting existential military threats (as in World War II).\u00a0 But it doesn\u2019t work when you define every problem as an existential one and then make war on complex societal problems (crime, poverty, drugs) or ideas and religious beliefs (radical Islam).<\/p>\n

America\u2019s Omnipresent War Ethos<\/strong><\/p>\n

Consider the Afghan War — not the one in the 1980s when Washington funneled money and arms to the fundamentalist Mujahideen to inflict on the Soviet Union a Vietnam-style quagmire, but the more recent phase that began soon after 9\/11.\u00a0 Keep in mind that what launched it were those attacks by 19 hijackers (15 of whom were Saudi nationals) representing a modest-sized organization lacking the slightest resemblance to a nation, state, or government.\u00a0 There was as well, of course, the fundamentalist Taliban movement that then controlled much of Afghanistan.\u00a0 It had emerged from the rubble of our previous war there and had provided support and sanctuary, though somewhat grudgingly, to Osama bin Laden.<\/p>\n

With images of those collapsing towers in New York burned into America\u2019s collective consciousness, the idea that the U.S. might respond with an international \u201cpolicing\u201d action aimed at taking criminals off the global streets was instantly banished from discussion.\u00a0 What arose in the minds of the Bush administration\u2019s top officials instead was vengeance via a full-scale, global, and\u00a0generational<\/a>\u00a0\u201cwar on terror.\u201d\u00a0 Its thoroughly militarized goal was not just to eliminate al-Qaeda but\u00a0any terror outfits<\/a>\u00a0anywhere on Earth, even as the U.S. embarked on a full-fledged experiment in violent nation building in Afghanistan.\u00a0 More than 13 dismal years later, that Afghan War-cum-experiment is ongoing at staggering expense and with the most disappointing of results.<\/p>\n

While the mindset of global war was gaining traction, the Bush administration launched its invasion of Iraq.\u00a0 The most technologically advanced military on Earth, one that the president termed \u201cthe greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known,\u201d was set loose to bring \u201cdemocracy\u201d and a\u00a0Pax Americana<\/em>\u00a0to the Middle East.\u00a0 Washington had, of course, been in conflict with Iraq since Operation Desert Storm in 1990-1991, but what began as the equivalent of a military coup (aka a \u201cdecapitation<\/a>\u201d operation) by an outside power, an attempt to overthrow Saddam Hussein and eliminate his armed forces and party, soon morphed into a prolonged occupation and another political and social experiment in violent nation-building.\u00a0 As with Afghanistan, the Iraq experiment with war is still ongoing at enormous expense and with even more disastrous results.<\/p>\n

Radical Islam has drawn strength from these American-led \u201cwars.\u201d\u00a0 Indeed, radical Islamists cite the intrusive and apparently\u00a0permanent presence<\/a>\u00a0of American troops and bases in the Middle East and Central Asia as confirmation of their belief that U.S. forces are leading a crusade against them — and by extension against Islam itself.\u00a0 (And in a revealing\u00a0slip of the tongue<\/a>, President Bush did indeed once call his war on terror a \u201ccrusade.\u201d)\u00a0 Considered in these terms, such a war is by definition a losing effort because each \u201csuccess\u201d only strengthens the narrative of Washington\u2019s enemies.\u00a0 There\u2019s simply no way to win such a war except by stopping it.\u00a0 Yet that course of action is\u00a0never<\/a>\u00a0on the proverbial \u201ctable\u201d of options from which officials in Washington are said to choose their strategies.\u00a0 To do so, in the context of war thinking, would mean to admit defeat (even though true defeat arrived the very instant the problem was first defined as war).<\/p>\n

Our leaders persist in such violent folly at least in part because they fear the admission of defeat above all else.\u00a0 After all, nothing is more pejorative in American politics or culture than to be labeled a loser in war, someone who \u201ccuts and runs.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the 1960s, despite his own\u00a0serious misgivings<\/a>\u00a0about the ongoing conflict in Vietnam, President Lyndon B. Johnson set the gold standard in his determination not to be the first American president to lose a war, especially in a \u201cdamn little pissant country<\/a>\u201d like Vietnam.\u00a0 So he persisted — and the conflict turned him into a loser anyway and destroyed his presidency.<\/p>\n

Even as he waged war, as historian George Herring\u00a0has noted<\/a>, LBJ did not want to be known as a \u201cwar president.\u201d \u00a0Two generations later, another Texan, George W. Bush, grasped the \u201cwar president\u201d moniker with genuineenthusiasm<\/a>.\u00a0 He, too, vowed he would win his war when things started to go sour.\u00a0 Staring down a growing insurgency in Iraq in the summer of 2003, Bush did not shy from the challenge.\u00a0 \u201cBring \u2018em on<\/a>,\u201d he said in what was supposed to be a Clint Eastwood\/Dirty Harry-style\u00a0moment<\/a>. \u00a0Now, Washington is sending troops\u00a0back into Iraq<\/a>\u00a0for the third time to engage an even more intractable insurgency, the Islamic State’s radical version of Islam, a movement originally fed and bred partly in\u00a0Camp Bucca<\/a>, an American military prison in Iraq.<\/p>\n

And just to set the record straight, President Obama, too, accepted the preeminence of war in American policy in his 2009 Nobel Prize\u00a0acceptance speech<\/a>\u00a0in Oslo.\u00a0 There, he offered a stirring defense of America\u2019s role and record as \u201cthe world\u2019s sole military superpower\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest — because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a moment that defined the Obama presidency as being remarkably in tune with America\u2019s already omnipresent war ethos.\u00a0 It was the very negation of \u201chope\u201d and \u201cchange\u201d and the beginning of Obama\u2019s transition, via the CIA\u2019s drone assassination program, into the role of\u00a0assassin-in-chief<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Everything Is Jihad<\/strong><\/p>\n

Recent American leaders have something in common with their extremist Islamic counterparts: all of them define everything, implicitly or explicitly, as a jihad, a crusade, a holy war.\u00a0 But the violent methods used in pursuit of various jihads, whether Islamic or secular, simply serve to perpetuate and often aggravate the struggle.<\/p>\n

Think of America\u2019s numerous so-called wars and consider if there\u2019s been any measurable progress made in any of them.\u00a0 Lyndon Johnson declared a \u201cwar on poverty\u201d in 1964.\u00a0 Fifty-one years later, there are still startling numbers of desperately poor people and, in this century, the gap between the poorest many and richest few has widened to a chasm.\u00a0 (Since the days of President Ronald Reagan, in fact, one might speak of a war on the poor, not poverty.)\u00a0Drugs<\/a>?\u00a0 Forty-four years after President Richard Nixon proclaimed the war on drugs, there are still millions in jail, billions being spent, and drugs galore on the streets of American cities.\u00a0\u00a0Terror<\/a>?\u00a0 Thirteen years and counting after that \u201cwar\u201d was launched, terror groups, minor in numbers and reach in 2001, have proliferated wildly and there is now something like a \u201ccaliphate\u201d — once an Osama bin Laden fantasy — in the Middle East: ISIS in power in parts of Iraq and Syria, al-Qaeda\u00a0on the rise<\/a>\u00a0in Yemen, Libya destabilized and divvied up among ever more extreme outfits, innocents still dying in U.S.\u00a0drone strikes<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0Afghanistan<\/a>?\u00a0 The opium trade has\u00a0rebounded<\/a>\u00a0big time, the Taliban is\u00a0resurgent<\/a>, and the region is being destabilized.\u00a0\u00a0Iraq<\/a>? \u00a0A cauldron of ethnic and religious rivalries and hatreds, with\u00a0more U.S. weaponry<\/a>\u00a0on the way to fuel the killing, in a country that functionally no longer exists.\u00a0 The only certainty in most of these American \u201cwars\u201d is their violent continuation, even when their original missions lie in tatters.<\/p>\n

The very methods the U.S. employs and the mentality its leaders adopt ensure their perpetuation.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because drug addiction and abuse can\u2019t be conquered by waging a war.\u00a0 Neither can poverty.\u00a0 Neither can terror.\u00a0 Neither can radical Islam be defeated through armed nation building.\u00a0 Indeed, radical Islam thrives on the very war conditions that Washington helps to create.\u00a0 By fighting in the now familiar fashion, you merely fan its flames and ensure its propagation.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the mindset that matters.\u00a0 In places like Iraq and Afghanistan, places that for most Americans exist only within a “war” matrix, the U.S. invades or attacks, gets stuck, throws resources at the problem indiscriminately, and “makes a desert and calls it ‘peace'” (to quote the Roman historian Tacitus).\u00a0 After which our leaders act surprised as hell when the problem only grows.<\/p>\n

Sadly, the song remains monotonously the same in America: more wars, made worse by impatience for results driven by each new election cycle.\u00a0 It\u2019s a formula in which the country is eternally fated to lose.<\/p>\n

Two Curious Features of America\u2019s New Wars<\/strong><\/p>\n

Historically, when a nation declares war, it does so to mobilize national will, as the U.S. clearly did in World War II.\u00a0 Accompanying our wars of recent decades, however, has been an urge not to mobilize the people, butdemobilize<\/em><\/a>\u00a0them — even as the “experts” are empowered to fight and taxpayer funds pour into the national security state and the military-industrial complex to keep the conflicts going.<\/p>\n

Recent wars, whether on drugs or in the Greater Middle East, are never presented as a challenge we the people can address and solve together, but as something only those who allegedly possess the expertise and credentials — and the weapons — can figure out or fight.\u00a0 George W. Bush summed up this mindset in classic fashion after 9\/11 when he urged Americans\u00a0to go shopping<\/a>\u00a0and visit Disney World and leave the fighting to the pros. War, in short, has become yet another form of social control.\u00a0 Have a gun or a badge of some sort and you can speak forcefully and be listened to; otherwise, you have no say.<\/p>\n

In addition, what makes America\u2019s new wars unique to our moment is that they never have a discernible endpoint.\u00a0 For what constitutes \u201cvictory\u201d over drugs or terror? \u00a0Once started, these wars by definition are hard to stop.<\/p>\n

Cynics may claim there\u2019s nothing new here.\u00a0 Hasn\u2019t America always been at war?\u00a0 Haven\u2019t we always been a violent people?\u00a0 There\u2019s truth in this.\u00a0 But at least Americans of my grandfather\u2019s and father\u2019s generation didn\u2019t define themselves by war.<\/p>\n

What America needs right now is a 12-step program to break the urge to feed further our national addiction to war. \u00a0The starting point for Washington — and Americans more generally — would obviously have to be taking that first step and confessing that we have a problem we alone can\u2019t solve.\u00a0 “Hi, I\u2019m Uncle Sam and I\u2019m a war-oholic.\u00a0 Yes, I\u2019m addicted to war.\u00a0 I know it\u2019s destructive to myself and others.\u00a0 But I can\u2019t stop — not without your help.”<\/p>\n

True change often begins with confession.\u00a0 With humility.\u00a0 With an admission that not everything is within one\u2019s control, no matter how violently one rages; indeed, that violent rage only aggravates the problem.\u00a0 America needs to make such a confession.\u00a0 Only then can we begin to wean ourselves off war.<\/p>\n

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), is a\u00a0<\/em>TomDispatch\u00a0regular<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 He edits the blog<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>The Contrary Perspective<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0William J. Astore, Tom Dispatch click here for original article War on drugs.\u00a0War on poverty. War in Afghanistan. War in Iraq.\u00a0War on terror. The biggest mistake in American policy, foreign and domestic, is looking at everything as war. When a war mentality takes over, it chooses the weapons and tactics for you.\u00a0 It limits the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3848"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3850,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3848\/revisions\/3850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}