ABC’s
As he said to Schieffer, “If [the Iraqis] ask us that they might want us to stay longer, we certainly would consider that.” Offering another scenario as well, he also suggested that, as Reuters put it, “U.S. troops… could move back to a combat role if there was ‘a complete failure of the security forces’ or if political divisions split Iraqi security forces.” (He then covered his flanks by adding, “but we don’t see that happening.”)
In February 2009, less than a month after Obama took office, Odierno was already broadcasting his desire to have up to 35,000 troops remain in Iraq after 2011, and at the end of 2009, Secretary of Defense Gates was already suggesting that a new round of negotiations with a future Iraqi government might extend our stay for years. All this, of course, could qualify as part of a more general campaign to maintain the Pentagon’s 800-pound status, the military’s clout, and a global military presence.
A Chorus of Military Intellectuals
Pentagon foreign policy is regularly seconded by a growing cadre of what might be called military intellectuals at think tanks scattered around Washington. Such figures, many of them qualifying as “warrior pundits” and “warrior journalists,” include: Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; retired Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security and Petraeus adviser; former U.S. Army officer Andrew Exum, fellow at the Center for a New American Security, founder of the Abu Muqawama website, and a McChrystal adviser; former Australian infantry officer and Petraeus adviser David Kilcullen, non-resident senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security; Thomas Ricks, formerly of the
These figures, and numerous others like them, have repeatedly been invited to U.S. war zones by the military, flattered, toured, given face time with commanders, sometimes hired by them, and sometimes even given the sense that they are the ones planning our wars. They then return to Washington to offer sophisticated, “objective” versions of the military line.
Toss into this mix the former neocons who caused so much of the damage in the early Bush years and who regularly return at key moments as esteemed media “experts” (not the fools and knaves they were), including former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) L. Paul Bremer III, and former senior adviser to the CPA Noah Feldman, among others. For them, being wrong means never having to say you’re sorry. And, of course, they and their thoughts are dealt with remarkably respectfully, while those who were against the Iraq War from the beginning remain the rarest of commodities on op-ed pages, as sources in news articles, and on the national radio and TV news.
This combined crew of former warriors, war-zone bureaucrats, and warrior pundits have been, like Odierno, stumping for a sizeable residual U.S. military force to stay in Iraq until hell freezes over. They regularly compare Iraq to postwar South Korea, where U.S. troops are still garrisoned nearly sixty years after the Korean War and which, after decades of U.S.-supported dictators, now has a flourishing democracy.
Combine the military intellectuals, the former neocons, the war commanders, the retired military-officer- commentators, the secretary of defense, and other Pentagon civilians, and you have an impressive array of firepower of a sort that no Eisenhower, Ridgeway, or even MacArthur could have imagined. They may disagree fiercely with each other on tactical matters when it comes to pursuing American-style war, and they certainly don’t represent the views of a monolithic military. There are undoubtedly generals who have quite a different view of what the defense of the United States entails. As a group, though, civilian and military, in and out of uniform, in the Pentagon or in a war zone, they agree forcefully on the need to maintain an American global military presence over the long term.
Producing War
Other than Robert Gates, the key figure of the moment has clearly been David Petraeus, who might be thought of as our Teflon general. He could represent a genuine challenge to the fading tradition of civilian control of the military. Treated as a demigod and genius of battle on both sides of the aisle in Washington, he would have been hard for any president, especially this one, to remove from command. (Obama, of course, finally “removed” him in 2011 by appointing him CIA director.) As a four-star who would have to throw a punch at Michelle Obama on national television to get fired, he had significant latitude to pursue the war policies of his choice in Afghanistan. He also has—should he care to exercise it someday—the potential and the opening to pursue much more. It’s not completely farfetched to imagine him as the first mini-Caesar-in-waiting of our American times.
As yet, he and other top figures may plan their individual media blitzes, but they are not consciously planning a media strategy for a coherent Pentagon foreign policy. The result is all the more chilling for not being fully coordinated, and for being so little noticed or attended to by the media that play such a role in promoting it. What’s at stake here goes well beyond the specific issue of military insubordination that usually comes up when military- civilian relations are discussed. After all, we could be seeing, in however inchoate form, the beginning of a genuine Pentagon/military production in support of Pentagon timing, our global military presence, and the global mission that goes with it.
In Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, you can see that Pentagon version of an American foreign policy straining to be born. In the end, of course, it could be stillborn, but it could also become an all-enveloping system offering Americans a strange, skewed vision of a world constantly at war and of the importance of planning for more of the same. To the extent that it now exists, it is dominated by the vision of figures who have been deeply immersed in the imperial mayhem that our wars created, have left us armed to the teeth and flailing at ghosts and demons, and are still enmeshed in the process by which American money has been squandered to worse than no purpose in distant lands.
Nothing in the record indicates that anyone should listen to what these men have to say. Yet nothing in the record indicates that Washington won’t be all ears and the media won’t remain an enthusiastic conduit for whatever they say we must do, no matter how steep the price.
Cutting $100 Billion—Easy, If Only Washington Had a Brain
In 2011, we were treated to a “debate” in Washington in which only one question was on the table: how much of the federal budget do we cut?
The Republican leadership of the House of Representatives originally picked $40 billion as its target figure for cuts to the as-yet-not-enacted 2011 budget. That was the gauntlet it threw down to the Obama administration, only to find its own proposal slashed to bits by the freshman class of that body’s conservative majority. The upstarts insisted on adhering to a Republican Pledge to America vow to cut $100 billion from the budget. With that figure on the table, pundits were predicting widespread pain in the land, including the possible loss of at least
