Three pieces of note this morning which should be read if you have the time. The first is by Gabriel Kolko and is entitled Mechanistic Destruction: American Foreign Policy at Point Zero. Kolko’s opening of the piece is, in my opinion, extremely poignant…
“The United States has rarely lost any conventional military battle since at least 1950. Nor has it, at the same time, ever won a war. It has successfully overthrown governments through interventions or subversion but the political results of all its efforts – as in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Iran in 1953 – have often made its subsequent geopolitical position far, far more tenuous. In a word, in international affairs it bumbles very badly and it has made an already highly unstable world far more precarious than it otherwise would be if only the U.S. had left the world alone. No less important, Americans would be far better off thereby. Because – to repeat a critical point – it has failed to attain victory in any of the real wars it has fought since Korea. Its adversaries learned as long ago as the Korean War that decentralization would stymie America’s overwhelming firepower, which was designed for concentrated armies, and provided a successful antidote for massive, expensive technology.
All this is very well known. The real issue is why the U.S. makes the identical mistakes over and over again and never learns from its errors.
At the present time it is losing two wars and creating a vast arc of profound strategic and political instability from the Mediterranean Sea to South Asia, it has resumed the arms race in Europe, and it is making Russia an enemy when it could easily have been friendly. Economically, it has run up the biggest deficits in American history, brought on the decline of the dollar, and wherever one turns this administration has been at least as bad as any in two centuries of American history – perhaps even the worst. We now have an unprecedented disaster in the conduct of American power, both overseas and at home, in part because of the people who now rule – ambitious men and women who calculate only what is best for their careers – but also because the imperatives and inexorable logic of past policies and conventional wisdom have brought us to this critical juncture. All the old mistakes have been repeated; nothing had been learned from the past, and official myopia is timeless.”
Such historical realities are something that every American should be exposed to. As Kolko goes on to articulate, the Bush administration is not alone in American history for repeating such mistakes. While the foreign policy doctrine named after him is, most certainly, one of the most overtly dangerous in US history, the repetition of global mistakes is something that, for some strange reason, doesn’t seem to make an impact on those in power. Kolko’s assertion that that has more to do with political ambition than reason is therefore of significant import. In fact, foreign entanglements, Vietnam being the most prevalent example, have often resulted in two very different realities – one being domestically inclined and the other, often vastly overlooked by many, is the international ramifications, predominantly to do with those publics that have fallen victim to US interventionism. No matter the realities of such interventionism, domestically the supposed importance of them is convoluted and presented the American people as necessity, and therefore just, given the view that most hold regarding their country and what it stands for. Thus, such action is commonly warped in a domestic sense to propagate the belief that such actions are moral and for the betterment of others, casting those that would feed on such distortions for domestic political gain in a favourable light. One need only look at the positions of many of the current Democratic presidential nominees to see this phenomenon in action.
The second article of note comes from Simon Jenkins of The Guardian and is entitled It takes inane optimism to see victory in Afghanistan. Jenkins begins the article…
“This war against the Taliban is part of a post-imperial spasm. The longer it is waged, the graver the consequences.”
Well, at least someone’s said it.
Second…
“Paddy Ashdown returned recently from Kabul consumed with imperial zeal. On these pages he admitted the current chaos, a city awash with thousands of troops and aid workers from some 36 countries, all supposedly involved in “security and reconstruction” and almost none able to leave the capital by land. A reputed 10,000 NGO staff have turned Kabul into Klondike during the goldrush, building office blocks, driving up rents, cruising about in armoured jeeps and spending stupefying sums of other people’s money, essentially on themselves. They take orders only from some distant agency, but then the same goes for the American army, Nato, the UN, the EU and the supposedly sovereign Afghan government.
In the provinces, the Americans are running a guerrilla army out of Bagram, trying to kill as many “Taliban” or “al-Qaida” as possible, while the British heroically re-enact the Zulu wars down in Helmand. Neither takes any notice of President Hamid Karzai, whose deals with warlords, druglords, Iranians and Taliban collaborators are probably the best hope of stabilising Afghanistan when the foreign occupation is over. But since that is claimed by Britain to be virtually never, the only certainty is a rising tempo of insurgency.”
Not to beat a dead horse, but – at least someone said it.
Third, and last, is another article in The Guardian about new restrictions being implemented by the British Ministry of Defense with regards to what British soldiers can and cannot do or say as it pertains to their service. An excerpt…
“Sweeping new guidelines barring military personnel from speaking about their service publicly have been quietly introduced by the Ministry of Defence, the Guardian has learned.
Soldiers, sailors and airforce personnel will not be able to blog, take part in surveys, speak in public, post on bulletin boards, play in multi-player computer games or send text messages or photographs without the permission of a superior if the information they use concerns matters of defence.
They also cannot release video, still images or audio – material which has previously led to investigations into the abuse of Iraqis. Instead, the guidelines state that “all such communication must help to maintain and, where possible, enhance the reputation of defence”.
All of this comes in the wake of the HMS Cornwall sailors being offered payment for their stories upon their return to the UK from Iranian captivity.
The article continues…
“The MoD document, circulated last week, covers “all public speaking, writing or other communications, including via the internet and other sharing technologies, on issues arising from an individual’s official business or experience, whether on-duty, off-duty or in spare time”.
The rules have provoked consternation among the ranks, with human rights lawyers saying yesterday that they could be in contravention of Article 10 of the Human Rights Act, which allows for freedom of expression. The rules apply not only to full-time forces but to members of the Territorial Army and cadets whilst on duty, as well as MoD civil servants.
Service personnel are currently bound by Queen’s Regulations, which mean they must seek permission before speaking to the press but are free to blog and take part in online debates. However, many have spoken out anonymously on issues such as poor kit, housing and the treatment of wounded service personnel evacuated from combat zones. Criticism of the RAF in Afghanistan and the state of the ageing vehicles being used there have all appeared in the press.
An unofficial soldiers’ website, arrse.co.uk, was full of angry debate about the issue yesterday. One poster said: “Why does it not occur to MoD that if it did things properly, and treated its people well, they wouldn’t feel the need to bring things into the public arena quite so often, and they wouldn’t need to spend so much time covering-up?”
Another suggested that the rules were intended to silence the average “tommy” while senior personnel were free to speak to the media without fear of reprimand. “Every single leak of significant information to the media, certainly in the last six months, has come from the top down. Not the other direction,” he said. “Should Cpl Bloggs, or Major Good Bloke in some Platoon House in downtown Helmand-on-Styx complain in a private letter that he hasn’t enough ammo to despatch the Queens’ enemies, or the RAF really should try harder to deliver it, it’s ‘March in the guilty B*stard’ and ‘conduct prejudicial to good order’ and discipline and finger-wagging all round.”
There is one way to ensure that mistakes are not made public, and that is to ensure that those who have the ability to expose them do not have the legal right to do so. This speaks to the restrictions placed on our own soldiers, who, when they enter the ranks of the CF, are bound by a code that limits their ability to openly comment on operations. Thus, when asked if they are for the mission in Afghanistan, there can be only one answer – the one the military has provided them.