Why American Interventions Happen (And Why They Fail) - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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I am not among those who predict the imminent demise of the United States of America. We will live with its power for a some time still and the thing may prove more problematic when wracked by weakness and instability, than in strength. We do well to ask why American bombs and boys always manage to find themselves in the most forlorn corners of the globe, places the American has never heard of until he finds killing and dying there. It is a life-and-death question for those who, ten or twenty years from now, will join the Koreans, Vietnamese, Panamanians, Serbs, Afghans or Iraqis in wondering why the Americans came.

The origins, of course, are European, dating essentially from the rise of the West in fifteenth century. It is an exercise in technology and its application. On the one hand, galleon and sail put Europe and the other continents in touch with each other as never before. On the other, that technological superiority translated into the military supremacy of the Europeans meant the relationship could only be unequal. One would necessarily dominate the other, and sure enough this domination was accompanied by doctrines of inherent European racial, cultural and religious superiority. This unequal relationship has persisted. While Europe has largely demilitarized, the United States maintains the world’s only largescale force capable of intercontinental power projection. If the Americans intervene, the answer as to “why” is almost too obvious: because they can.

But why do Americans choose to intervene in some places and not others? The answer cannot usually be found in terms of “vital national interest”. In fact, the most hard-headed “realist” scholars – from Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan on Vietnam to Stephen Waltz and John Mearsheimer on Iraq – have tended to oppose America’s wars in the Third World. The countries of the South are underdeveloped, lack industry, lack technology, often fractious and unstable, they lack the ability to “hegemonic” threats or “peer-competitors” in a way which Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union once were.

In truth, Third World interventions are overwhelmingly “optional”. General Douglas MacArthur had said Korea had little strategic value prior to waging war there. The “fall” of South Vietnam to Communism could hardly mean that the Viet Cong guerrillas would now swim across the South China Sea to attack Malaysia or Indonesia (Lyndon Johnson once said they would be on the shores of Hawaii). Equally, in places like Rwanda, Bosnia or Kosovo, where “humanitarian intervention” is called upon or practiced, there is rarely a serious American national security interest. One could say the same with Iraq. There was no reason why Saddam Hussein with his little rump state would be more difficult to live with, even if he had nuclear weapons, than Joseph Stalin’s U.S.S.R. or Mao Zedong’s China.

American interventions occur because American leaders feel like it. And here the causes are always different, although they tend to be grounded in part in some aspect of the American imperial ideology. Whether “Wilsonian,” “liberal democratic,” “universalist,” or what have you, it simply states that America can and must save the poor devils in those nasty foreign countries from themselves (whether they like it or not). Any intervention abroad, no matter the place or the nature, can be justified with those splendid incantations: liberty, democracy, rule of law.

But if we look at American interventions, we are struck by how, on their own terms, they are so singularly unsuccessful. Because, if we want to know why America insists on trying and failing with such monotonous consistency, we must understand how the American imperial ideology has evolved over time. And here, one cannot emphasize enough the mythology born of the Second World War. The facts are simple enough. The United States waged war in Europe and Asia, restored peace and freedom to its allies, and taught democracy and prosperity to its enemies. There is truth in this, of course. But it is also true that Europe and Japan were among the most developed countries in the world and it is easy to exaggerate how critical the Marshall Plan was. (France, for example, squandered wealth many times over the value of the Plan in fruitless wars in Indochina and Algeria, yet still knew thirty years of spectacular economic growth.) And if Russians and Germans and Frenchman no longer fight, it is not solely because of the Americans. The threat posed by the Soviet Union made the Rhine a rather less hostile border, surely the general peace in Europe had as much to do with the balance of terror created by nuclear weapons (a situation not existing in most of the world), than about the mystical value of those words, Pax Americana. And surely Adenauer and de Gaulle, Schuman and Monnet, Mitterrand and Kohl, and all the leaders of Franco-German reconciliation and European construction deserve some credit too.

But American Hawks tend to overlook this. They will look at any country – no matter how underdeveloped, ethnically divided, or illiterate – as a promising new potential West Germany. Americans intervene because they think it will be easy. That is how a disaster like the invasion of Iraq could occur. The inability of the U.S. military to prevent elements of the catastrophe had all been evidenced in previous interventions. In Vietnam, “counter-insurgency” for the U.S. meant the destruction of the human environment in which the rebels operated, killing or moving the peasants into camps (“strategic hamlets”) or the cities. In Iraq, the most rebellious town, Fallujah, one quarter of all houses have been destroyed, another quarter damaged, and the population has apparently been halved through death and movement. In the 1989 invasion of Panama, the U.S. proved equally unable of maintaining order. The application of military force and resultant looting and chaos led to some 4,000 deaths. Finally, in Bosnia and Kosovo we have a broader Western failure. The U.S. will never “teach” the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds to get along, nor will they restore Iraq’s economy. In Bosnia and Kosovo, we have had 10 and 15 years of peace and huge amounts of international aid, yet we are no closer today to having Muslim Albanians and Bosniaks getting along with Croats and Serbs. The economies of both territories areas are extremely weak, with unemployment on the order of 30-40%. Against this record, the invasion of Iraq can only be attributed to the gross arrogance and vanity of the Bush era national security clique. That they in fact were gods in whose hands the Arabs were only so much malleable putty that they could reshape in their own image.

But we are not there today. We have a new, good liberal president, with no temptation to pander to the religious bigots or the crassness of American nationalism. Yet it is Barack Obama who is sending 30,000 men on a “quick-fix” mission to Afghanistan, as George W. Bush did in Iraq in 2007. Of course, the latter did not have the embarrassment of being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in less than a year, only to use the occasion expound on theories of just war. Those time-tested words return: the first time as a tragedy, the second as a farce. It is beyond parody and one might laugh if the issue was not so serious.

A just war is ultimately one that can result in success, in more good than the inevitable harm caused. We are submitted to so much rhetoric about “population protection” and “training the Afghan National Army,” but it is nothing but air. It will not be possible, as currently planned, to triple the Afghan Army’s forces in the next few years when the efforts of the past eight have been so fruitless. That army will not be able to “secure” the country when the West – with infinitely better technology, logistics, training and so forth – cannot do so despite spending the equivalent of several times Afghanistan’s GDP on the effort. Thirty-thousand men or not, Afghanistan will be Afghanistan: a country where eighty percent are illiterate, the population lives on a dollar a day, where “government” is at once weak and brutal. It is deplorable, but one does not change that with soldiers with their rifles or drones with their bombs. In ten or twenty years, whatever the Americans and the Europeans do, Afghanistan will again face “anarchy” and “warlords,” and no doubt a few of the latter will choose the moniker “Islamic” for good measure.

What, then, are Obama and the Liberals doing? He will do as every Liberal president does: whatever it takes to not look weak. They would rather that people die than to tell Americans that they must not always “save the world,” that they cannot always remake nations. President Jimmy Carter made something of an attempt, and was devoured for it. In truth it is the hardest thing to end a war. It is a dilemma that other nations have faced many times, from the fields of Flanders to the jungles of Indochina, and there too politicians preferred death to losing face. How easier it is, to delay with more war and more death, than to admit that it is vain and useless and has always been so. It is the hardest thing to say, that all those who have sacrificed, all those who have died, did so not for a good or an ideal, but for nothing.

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