The United States scarcely knew what a complex disaster it was confronting when it went to war in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001. It will eventually — perhaps years from now — suffer the same fate as Alexander the Great, the British, and the now-defunct Soviet Union: defeat.

What is called "Afghanistan" is really a collection of tribes and ethnic groups — Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and more — there are seven major ethnic groups, each with their own language. There are 30 minor languages. Pashtuns are 42 percent of the population and the Taliban comes from them. Its borders are contested and highly porous, and al-Qaeda is most powerful in the Pashtun regions of northern Pakistan as well as Afghanistan. "The fate of Afghanistan and Pakistan are inextricably tied," President George Bush declared in December 2007. This fact makes the war far more complicated, not the least because enormous quantities of military aid sent to Pakistan is mostly wasted.

Worse yet, Pakistan possesses about 70 to 90 nuclear weapons and the U.S. fears some may fall into the hands of Islamic extremists. At least three-quarters of the supplies essential for America’s and its allies’ war effort flow through Pakistan, and they are often assaulted. Moreover, a large and growing majority of the Pakistanis distrust U.S. motives. The U.S.’s tilt to New Delhi after 2007, which greatly augmented Indian nuclear power, made Pakistan far more reticent to do Washington’s bidding.

Afghanistan is a mess, complex beyond description with mountainous terrain to match. Its principal problems are political, social, and cultural — in large part because Great Britain concocted it arbitrarily. There is no durable military solution to its many problems. As in Vietnam, the U.S. will win battles but it has no strategy for winning this war.

Above all, the regional geo-political context is decisive, involving, India-Pakistan relations — a factor that will prevail whatever the United States and its allies do. Pakistan’s most vital interest is seeing a friendly government rule Afghanistan — no matter who it is. They will not waver on this principle. The Pakistani military is adamant about making India its key focus, and while it is opposed to al Qaeda and the Arab membership, it maintains good relations with the anti-Karzai Taliban — with whom it worked when it fought the Soviets.

The power of Afghanistan’s nominal president, Hamid Karzai, barely extends beyond Kabul, and his inefficiency and corruption shocks many U.S. leaders — most of whom, as in South Vietnam, are ultimately prepared to tolerate it. The Pakistanis regard Karzai as an Indian puppet, and however much many of its leaders dislike Pashtun separatism or the Taliban, they fear India far more. Their military is structured to fight India, not a counterinsurgency against the Taliban and its allies who operate within its borders.

Karzai, a Pashtun who nonetheless is far closer to Tajiks and Uzbeks, is indeed very cordial to India. Indian foreign aid to his government has amounted to over a billion dollars. His "re-election" earlier this month — at a time when he is increasingly unpopular — has been attacked as based on fraud. Former President Jimmy Carter declared "Hamid Karzai has stolen the election."

This is only part of the context in which the U.S. has been mired for eight years, and Obama’s strategy of escalation will confront growing resistance both in Afghanistan and among the U.S. Congress and public. There are now over 100,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, mainly American, and more will not change the situation. Fifty-eight percent of the American population was against the Afghan war in September this year, and in some NATO nations — particularly Germany, Great Britain, and Italy — opposition to the war is increasing. These countries will not send significantly more troops to fight there. Influential U.S. Senators — who are still a small minority but an indication the war is becoming increasingly unpopular within the U.S. — are questioning Obama’s strategy.

Obama’s approach to winning the war is far too convoluted to succeed and it is dependent on factors over which he has scant control — not the least being the advice of one of his key advisers, Bruce Riedel, that "the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the central all-consuming issue for al Quada." This issue must finally be settled; the chances of that happening are close to non-existent. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, has warned Obama on several occasions that "we are running the risk of replicating … the fate of the Soviets." As the author of Moscow’s "Afghan trap," he should know.

Still, Obama is likely to escalate. Apart from the "credibility" of American power being involved, most key American officers think, to quote chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, that "the main effort in our strategic focus from a military perspective must now shift to Afghanistan." A few officers, mostly lacking influence, believe it will lead to disaster, and the American military commander in Afghanistan at the end of last September warned that unless there is a rapid escalation of troops within a year the war "will likely result in failure."

Meanwhile, Obama thinks he will win the war by escalation — an illusion that also marked the futile war in Vietnam. He also believes he can "Afghanisize" the war — like Nixon thought he could "Vietnamize" that conflict — even though recruits for Karzai’s army have little motivation apart from collecting their salary, and are scarcely a match for the Taliban — a quite divided, complex organization which today dominates much of the country.

A growing majority of the Afghan population now oppose the U.S. effort because they have led to frightful civilian casualties without attaining decisive military successes. "The mission is on the verge of failing," a writer in the U.S. Army’s quarterly, Parameters, concluded last spring.

That, indeed, may be an understatement.

Gabriel Kolko is the author, among other works, of Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914, Another Century of War?, and Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States and the Modern Historical Experience. His latest book is The Age of War.

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But one thing is certain. Israel has killed at least 100 Palestinians for each of its own claimed losses, a vast disproportion that has produced horror in much of the world, creating a new cause which has mobilized countless numbers of people — possibly as strong as the Vietnam war movement. It has made itself a pariah nation — save in the United States and a few other countries. Above all, it has enflamed the entire Muslim world

As Bruce Riedel, a "hawk" who has held senior posts in the CIA for nearly 30 years and is now one of President Obama’s many advisers, has just written: "…the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the central all-consuming issue for al Quaeda," and "Muslims feel a profound sense of wrong about the creation of Israel that infuses every aspect thinking and activities and has become the rallying cry used the convince the ummah of the righteousness of al Quaeda’s cause." That was before Gaza. Much of the world now detests Israel but most it will live for many years to come with the consequences of Israel’s atrocities. Muslim extremists will now become much stronger.

Charges of war crimes are now being leveled — and justifiably so — at the Israelis, many of whom themselves come from families that suffered in the hands of the Nazis over 60 years ago and now claim that the Holocaust was the only tragedy — as if the far more numerous deaths of goyim throughout the world after 1945 count for nothing. The United Nations and human rights groups are demanding that Israel be brought to justice for what now amounts to having killed over 1300 Gazans with immense firepower, many of which, like phosphorous bombs, are illegal. Israel has already prepared its senior officers to be ready to defend themselves against war crimes charges and Israeli Attorney General Menahem Mazuz several weeks ago warned the government was expecting a "wave of international lawsuits."

It will now have to live with the geo-political consequences in the region. Israel has, perhaps irreparably, imperiled its relations with the neighboring Arab states and other Muslim nations — Qatar and Mauritania have already suspended diplomatic relations with it — less because the ruling classes of these nations want to penalize it but because the Arab masses demand it, imperiling their own positions as rulers.

Even more important, although the United States has loyally supported Israel for decades, deluging it with the most modern arms and giving it diplomatic protection, it is now in an economic crisis and needs Arab money, not to mention oil imports, as never before. The stability of this crucial alliance will now be tested.

Since its inception, a cult of machismo — called self-defense — characterized much of Zionism, and although there were idealists like A. D. Gordon, the mainstream was more and more committed to a violent response to the Arabs who surrounded them. The military was increasingly glorified, including by nominal Leftists like David Ben Gurion, so that today Israel is a regional Sparta armed with the most modern military and nuclear weapons, giving it a virtual monopoly in a vast region — one that will inevitably be challenged.

Uri Avnery, a leading Israeli anti-war activist, has just written that "… hundreds of millions of Arabs around us… will they see the Hamas fighters as the heroes of the Arab nation, but they will also see their own regimes in their nakedness: cringing, ignominious, corrupt and treacherous… In coming years it will become apparent that this war was sheer madness."

We are living through yet another great tragedy, and tragedies have been the staple of world history for centuries. Now former victims and their descendants are the executioners.

Gabriel Kolko is the leading historian of modern warfare. He is the author of the classic Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914, Another Century of War? The Age of War: the US Confronts the World, and The Triumph of Conservatism. He has also written the best history of the Vietnam War, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the US and the Modern Historical Experience. His latest book is After Socialism.

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One of the many quirks of the nineteenth century’s intellectual heritage was the great intensification of nationalism and — to quote one expert — the creation of u201Cnation-ness,u201D the consequences of which have varied dramatically all the way from the negligible to the crucial (as in the case of Israel), to war and peace in a vast strategic region. There was, of course, often a basis for various nationalisms to build upon, but the essentially artificial function of forming nations from very little or nothing was common.

Wars were the most conducive to this enterprise, and the emergence of what was termed socialism after 1914 — which had a crucial nationalist basis in such places as China and Vietnam — was due to the fact that foreign invasions greatly magnified nationalism’s ability to build on ephemeral foundations to merge socialism and patriotism. For a vital component of nationalism, often its sole one, was a hatred of foreigners — u201Cothersu201D — giving it largely a negative function rather than an assertion of distinctive values and traits essential to a unique entity. Myths, often far-fetched and irrational, were built. Zionism is the focus of this discussion but it was scarcely alone.1

Vienna was surely the most intellectually creative place in the world at the end of the 19th century. Economics, art, philosophy, political theories on the Right as well as Left, psychoanalysis — Vienna gave birth or influenced most of them. Ideas had to be very original to be noticed, and most were. We must understand the unique and rare innovative environment in which Theodore Herzl, an assimilated Hungarian Jew who became the founder of Zionism, functioned. For a time he was also a German nationalist and went through phases admiring Richard Wagner and Martin Luther. Herzl was many things, including a very efficient organizer, but he was also very conservative and feared that Jews without a state — especially those in Russia — would become revolutionaries.

A state based on religion rather than the will of all of its inhabitants was at the end of the 19th century not only a medieval notion but also a very eccentric idea, one Herzl concocted in the rarified environment of cafs where ideas were produced with scant regard for reality. It was also full of countless contradictions, based not merely on the conflicts between theological dogmas and democracy but also vast cultural differences among Jews, all of which were to appear later. Europe’s Jews have precious little in common, and their mores and languages are very distinct. But the gap between Jews from Europe and those from the Arab world was far, far greater. Moreover, there were many radically different kinds of Zionism within a small movement, ranging from the religiously motivated to Marxists who wanted to cease being Jews altogether and, as Ber Borochov would have it, become u201Cnormal.u201D In the end, all that was to unite Israel was a military ethic premised on a hatred of those u201Cothersu201D around them — and it was to become a warrior-state, a virtual Sparta dominated by its army. Initially, at least, Herzl had the fate of Russian and East European Jews in mind; the outcome was very different.

Zionism was original but at the turn of the century it’s following was close to non-existent. An important exception was the interest of Lord Rothschild. Moreover, from its inception Zionism was symbiotic on Great Powers — principally Great Britain — that saw it as a way of spreading their colonial ambitions to the Middle East. As early as 1902 Herzl met with Joseph Chamberlain, then British Colonial Secretary, to further Zionist claims in the region bordering Egypt, and the following year he hired David Lloyd George — later to become prime minister — to handle the Zionist case.2 Herzl also unsuccessfully asked the sultan of the Ottoman Empire if he might obtain Palestine, after which he advocated establishing a state in Uganda — although his followers much preferred the Holy Land. Only the principle of a Jewish State, anywhere, appealed to him — but mainly for Jews in the Russian Empire. Herzl was only the first in the Zionist tradition of advocating a state for others; he was never in favor of all Jews moving there. Chaim Weizmann wrote Herzl in 1903 that the large majority of the young Jews in Russia were anti-Zionist because they were revolutionaries — which only reinforced Herzl’s convictions. In 1913 British Intelligence estimated that perhaps one percent of the Jews had Zionist affiliations, a figure that rose in the Russian Pale — which contained about six million Jews — as the war became longer.

It was scarcely an accident that in November 1917 Lord Arthur Balfour was to make Britain’s historic endorsement of a Jewish homeland in their newly mandated territory of Palestine in a letter to Rothschild. Some of these Englishmen also shared the Biblical view that it was the destiny of Jews to return to their ancient soil. Others thought that this gesture would help keep Russia in the war, and that nefarious Jews had the influence to do so. Most saw a Jewish state as a means of consolidating British power in the vast Islamic region.3

Jewish Migration: Many Promised Lands

Migration has been one of the universal phenomena of world history since time immemorial, and we know a great deal about its causes and motives. People migrate mainly out of necessity, generally economic, and they choose from existing options. They very rarely go someplace for the u201Cblessings of liberty,u201D or ideology; if they do such variable factors as economic deprivation or changes in laws should not exist. But in the case of Palestine and Zionism, Jews behaved like people everywhere and at most times.

It is a Zionist myth that there were many Jews who wished to go to a primitive hot, dusty place and did so. They did not — and all of the available numbers prove this conclusively. After the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 the Pale was abolished and a very large number of the Jews in it moved to Russia’s cities; many of them saw the Bolsheviks as liberators and filled the ranks of the revolution at every level.4 If they emigrated, and here the numbers are very important, it was not — if they had a choice — to Palestine.

From 1890 to 1924 about two million of the 20 million immigrants to the United States were Jews — overwhelmingly from East Europe. Other nations in the Western Hemisphere also attracted about a million Jews during this period, to which we must add Jewish migration to South Africa, Australia, West Europe, and the like. This does not mean that Jews were not u201CZionistsu201D but they had no intention whatsoever of embarking on Aliyah — of going to Palestine themselves. As Herzl believed, it was a project for others.

Jews in the Diaspora, like most ethnic groups, banded together in numerous organizations and nostalgia — and confusion — soon overwhelmed them. Organized Zionism grew in the U. S. as it had not in East Europe — but it demanded only money, thereby ultimately making Israel viable.

In 1893 there were an estimated 10,000 Jews in Palestine, 61,000 in 1920, and 122,000 in 1925. All of these figures are only the best-informed estimates; there were censuses in 1922 and 1931 only, and even the 1922 numbers are contested. But the general trend is beyond doubt and very clear. For every Jew who went to Palestine from 1890 to 1924, at least 27 went to the Western Hemisphere alone. Relatively, the Zionist project was the utopian dream of a tiny minority and it would have failed save for two factors, the Holocaust and the much-overlooked fact that in 1924 the U. S. passed a new immigration law based on quotas using the nationalitiesdistribution in the 1890 census as a basis, effectively cutting off migration from East and South Europe to a mere trickle of what it had been.

In 1924, Jewish population in Palestine increased 5.9 percent but in 1925 — the first year the American law went into effect — it leaped 28 percent, and 23 percent in 1926. This was still a small minority of the Jews who left Europe but this sudden spurt was directly related to American policy. From 1927 to 1932 it never grew more than 5.3 percent annually and in 1927 it was a mere 0.2.5 Very few Jews went to Palestine, and a small proportion of them were ideologically motivated; the vast majority migrated elsewhere.

The British had always been in favor of Jewish migration and after 1933 it grew greatly — Jews were six percent of the Palestinian population in 1912 but 29 percent in 1935 — but now it was increasingly composed of Jews from Germany rather than Poland. These Jews had to get out of Germany, where the Zionist movement had always been very weak, and they were scarcely ideological zealots. Had there been open migration to the U. S. they would have gone there. Arab riots after 1935 compelled the British to reduce the inflow and in 1939 they adopted a White Paper enforcing strict restrictions on immigration.

What is certain is that Hitler’s importance must always be set in a larger context. Without him there never would have been a flow of Jews out of Germany, and very probably no state of Israel, but also crucial was the U.S. 1924 Immigration Act. Migrants went to Palestine out of necessity, in the vast majority of cases, not choice. Both of these factors were crucial, and to determine their relative importance is an abstract, futile enterprise. But without either the Zionist project of creating a Jewish state in Palestine would have remained another exotic Viennese concoction, never to be realized, because while the Jews in the Diaspora were in favor of a Jewish state, virtually none living in safe nations were ever to uproot themselves and embark on Aliyah — the return to the ancient homeland. They had no reason to do so.

There were many promised lands and Herzl’s exotic ruminations were scarcely the inspiration for the flow of Jews out of Europe. Israel’s existence was an unpredictable accident of history. The past century has been full of them, everywhere. That is why the world is in such a perilous condition.

Notes

1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, Verso, 1983, pp. 4—6.

2 David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, New York, Henry Holt, 1989, pp. 272—3, 278, 317.

3 William M. Johnston, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848—1938, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1972, pp. 357—61; Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, Princeton University Press, 2004, pp. 149—52; David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, op. cit., pp. 272, 294.

4 Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, passim.

5 Data on Palestine is from Population of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine: Statistical and Demographic Considerations, 2002—05, pp. 5, 6, 11 and passim.

Gabriel Kolko is the author, among other works, of Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914, Another Century of War?, and Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States and the Modern Historical Experience. His latest book is The Age of War.

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It is understandable that intelligent people should be preoccupied with the crises reported in the daily press, but they are best comprehended in their historical context. That context, and the crucial causes and motives guiding American foreign policy since 1950, are crucial to understanding the often bewildering and multidimensional events since the year 2000. George W. Bush and his cronies have done incalculable damage and committed terrible follies, but it is a fundamental error to assume that he is somehow original and the genesis of our present crisis.

It is much riskier to focus on particulars as if they have no precedents or are not part of an older, longer historical pattern. Indeed, a major fault of many assessments of US actions abroad is precisely such a disregard for the circumstances that led to them and their historical framework.

The world has changed with increasing speed over the last half-century, and there have been more wars and upheavals over the past decade than any time since 1945. Given the weaponry now available and the growing political and diplomatic instability that has accompanied the demise of Communism, this is the most dangerous period in mankind’s entire history. It is also the period of greatest changes in the balance of world forces, with the decentralization of not only powerful weapons but the reemergence of nationalist, ethnic, and religious factors. The breakup of the USSR and Communism was only partially the cause.

How global military, political, economic and other variables interact is very often unpredictable, to which one must add the domestic politics and public moods within crucial nations — of which the US is most important. World affairs are not only complex but also full of surprises — not only for us but also for those in Washington and elsewhere who aspire to control the destiny of humanity.

Contradictions and errors have been the principal characteristic of all ambitious nations, leading to wars that are not only far bloodier and longer than anticipated but also produce such unwanted political and social consequences as revolution or its opposite, reaction. The emergence of communism and fascism, and the sequence of wars over the past century, was merely confirmation of the fact that once fighting begins, human values and institutions — all the forces that create social stability — go awry.

George W. Bush inherited conventional wisdom regarding the world mission and universal interests that guide American policies on the world scene. The same ambitions have often been shared by leaders of other powers who believe that wars serve as effective, controllable instruments of national goals. What Bush did do, however, was intensify the most dangerous traits always inherent in American institutions and beliefs since 1945. He scarcely expected to get bogged down in the affairs of the Middle East, making Iran the strategically most important power in the entire region. Still less did he imagine that America’s war would rip apart the existing fragile political arrangements and boundaries so that the specter of civil wars and bloodshed along sectarian and ethnic lines in the entire Middle East that may last for years to come. President John F. Kennedy and his successors earlier had also expected that their involvement in Vietnam would be limited and short.

But once the shooting begins — and America’s "credibility" is at stake — priorities are decided for it where there is combat. Moreover, what is crucial is that its pretensions and ambitions have often led to very different parts of the globe — and the US often loses control over the military and political results of its many interventions. The world has always been very large and very complex, and it is becoming more so; the US may eventually adjust to that reality. But it has refused to do so in the past as well as the present.

Both Presidents George H. W. Bush — the incumbent president’s father — and Bill Clinton radically altered the justifications for the United States’ global foreign policy after Communism disappeared. The second Bush claims there is "a decisive ideological struggle" against Islamic fundamentalism and "terrorism," and it is the main rationale for wars the US is now fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, and may perhaps also fight elsewhere. But his predecessors concocted variations of these themes based on fear and anxiety in large part to justify massive military spending after the demise of the USSR, and the US’ "preemptive" interventions have been a rationale for American interventions for many decades.

Yet while an alleged Islamic threat took Communism’s place throughout the 1990s, it did so in an often-contrived fashion that made exceptions for America’s important alliances with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and other orthodox Muslim states. But Islam has existed for centuries, it has changed very little if at all, and the US often utilized fundamentalist religion in Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere after 1950 as an antidote to fight godless Communism. What was crucial was that the US needed a threat and alleged danger to legitimize to its own population its global role and readiness to intervene everywhere. This justification causes it to spend almost as much on its military machine as the entire rest of the world combined.

We must never forget that the origins of most of the world’s problems go back many centuries and involve religion, boundaries, demography, nationalism — the list of causes of war and human misery is very long. The United States has scarcely been the cause of most of them. But even granted that international politics has been violent and quite irrational far, far longer, after the Second World War the American role was decisive in most places on the globe. Had Washington behaved differently after 1945 then many of today’s international crises would be very different also. In short, the "American problem" after the Second World War became synonymous with the world’s problem; virtually everything important involving change is now contingent on it.

The US since 1945 has poured fuel on the fire of atavism and irrationality, and it has blocked efforts to solve the domestic problems of countless nations in ways that were often quite sensible and equitable. It is worth contemplating what might have happened had it minded its own affairs and avoided making matters — good, bad, or neither — far worse, but especially preventing needed social and economic reforms. I have devoted one book to its interventions in the Third World alone, another on the Vietnam War, and dealt with yet many other cases elsewhere. There are also innumerable excellent detailed works that go much further.

The Middle East is currently the leading crisis facing the US and the world. President Woodrow Wilson predicted in 1919 that if the peace made after the war were not just "…there will follow not mere conflict but cataclysm." The territorial settlements imposed on the Middle East after 1918 were entirely capricious, unjust, and arranged by the great powers with scant regard for local conditions or desires. An astonishing ignorance prevailed among most of the crucial decision-makers, not just the Americans. The reemergence of Islamic ideologies, the rise of secular nationalism in the region, Zionism and the seemingly intractable Arab-Jewish conflict, and much else is a result, to a crucial extent, of the role of outside foreign intervention.

The Second World War was further vindication of Wilson’s fears, and today we are experiencing the irrationality of the settlements that followed the First World War in the Middle East. The vast region’s nations and borders were created arbitrarily; in no area was the potential for chaos — the contested boundaries, the creation of a Jewish homeland, and much else — greater than this inherently volatile region. For there are no "natural" nations and boundaries in the Middle East and by attacking Iraq the US has reopened a potential for chaos and disorder in the entire vast region which surpasses, by far, both in size and economic importance the potential for instability which existed in Indochina, Brazil, or anyplace else where it mucked around. For while there were plenty of illusions in many other areas, in fact the turmoil the US is now creating in the Middle East is unprecedented. It could have been far different had the US not tried to control the fate of this region at all.

Communism is all but dead but the world’s sufferings have, if anything, increased with the disappearance of what was the justification for the Cold War. The resources that the US and mankind might have devoted to making peace and meeting rational human needs and desires have instead gone to preparing for and making war. Today we confront the indefinite prospect of war and human suffering on a vast scale — but this has also been the case for at least the past half-century.

Gabriel Kolko is the author, among other works, of Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914, Another Century of War?, and Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States and the Modern Historical Experience. His latest book is The Age of War.

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There has been
a qualitative leap in military technology that makes all inherited
conventional wisdom, and war as an instrument of political policy,
utterly irrelevant, not just to the United States but also to any
other state that embarks upon it. Nations should have realized this
a century ago but they did not. But there have been decisive changes
in balances of power, and more accurate and destructive weapons
— and soon nuclear bombs and the missiles to deliver them — are
becoming more and more available to the poorer countries. Technology
is moving much more rapidly than the diplomatic and political resources
or will to control its inevitable consequences.

The United
States should have learned its lesson in Vietnam, and its public
is aware of it to a far greater extent than its politicians. The
war in Iraq has reaffirmed the decisive limits of technology when
fighting against enemies who are decentralized and determined. It
has been extraordinarily expensive but militarily ineffective, and
America is ineluctably losing its vast undertaking. Rivals are much
more equal, and wars more protracted and expensive for those who
persist in fighting them. America's ambitions for hegemony throughout
the globe can now be more and more successfully challenged. Nowhere
is this truer than the Middle East, where the U.S.' long-standing
alliance with Israel, which shares its fascination with military
power, has produced colossal political failures for both nations.

The ultra-modern
Israel Defense Force finally learned this in Lebanon last July,
when Hezbollah rockets destroyed or seriously damaged at least 20
of its best tanks and they were fought to a draw — abandoning the
field of battle and losing their precious myth of invincibility.
Growing demoralization well before the Lebanon war plagued Israel,
and the percentage of Jews with higher academic degrees that migrated
grew steadily after 2002. Israel exports brainpower to an extent
very high by world standards. The Lebanon war and talk — both from
Israeli and Iranian leaders — of "existential" threats
to the state's very existence only gravely aggravated this defeatism
and the desire to leave. At the end of January, 78 percent of the
Israeli public was "unhappy" with their leaders for a
variety of reasons.

Israeli politics
has always been highly unstable by any standard but the corruption
and other scandals that are now plaguing it exceed any in its history,
paralleling its loss of confidence in its military power. Alienation
from the political class in Israel has never been greater and Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert and his cronies hope that spreading fear of
the Iranian bomb will help them ride out a political storm that
has seen his poll-rating plummet to a record low. But fear works
both ways, frightening the people who can migrate most easily and
keeping out tourists and foreign investors.

Moreover, the
Israeli public's anxiety has not been lessened by reports of the
efficacy of anti-missile systems that Israel has installed at great
expense. The Iranians have mastered all of the technical bases of
missile technology, according to Israeli experts, and although the
quality and precision of its missiles may leave something to be
desired they can inflict immense damage. Israeli specialists also
argue that the missile defense shield that Israel possesses — in
common with those of all other nations — is not sufficient to protect
it. Syria has missiles also — not so effective as the Iranian but
much closer and capable of inflicting much damage if used.

Notwithstanding
the apocalyptic proclamations on Iran's imminent nuclear power by
Olmert's major rival, Binyamin Netanyahu, or by the prime minister
himself and some of his cabinet on occasion, this hysteria is politically
motivated and intended to garner public support.

Meir Dagan,
the head of Mossad, told the Israeli Knesset last December that
diplomatic efforts were "far from being over" — and that
an Iranian nuclear bomb was at least two years or more off. Many
Israeli strategists, including Yuval Diskin, head of Shin Bet, now
regard Bush's war in Iraq as a highly destabilizing disaster for
the entire region and a major boon to Iran's power, and they regret
having endorsed it. A war with Iran would be far more dangerous.
Worse yet, efforts to demonize Iran have failed. Only 36 percent
of the Jewish population of Israel polled last month thought an
Iranian nuclear attack the "biggest threat" to Israel.

Serious Israeli
strategists overwhelmingly believe, to cite Reuven Pedatzur in Ha'aretz
last November, that "mutual assured deterrence, can be forged,
with high degree of success, between Israel and Iran." Israeli
strategic thinking is highly realistic. Early this February a study
released at a conference by the Institute for National Security
Studies at Tel Aviv University predicted that Iran would behave
rationally with nuclear weapons and "that the elimination of
Israel is not considered to be an essential national interest"
for it. Iran "will act logically, evaluating the price and
risks involved." A preemptive attack on Iran nuclear research
sites would "be a strategic mistake," Pedatzur warned
the conference, and the use of tactical nuclear weapons against
them sheer folly. "Our best option is open nuclear deterrence."

Israeli experts
have come to the realization that American policy in the Middle
East is not merely an immense failure but also a decisive inhibition
to Israel reorienting its foreign policy to confront the realities
of the region that the Jews have chosen to live in. It has ousted
the Taliban from Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein from Iraq and created
an overwhelming Iranian presence. In Palestine its campaign for
democracy has brought Hamas to power. Troop escalation in Iraq is
deemed futile. "It's a total misreading of reality," one
Israeli expert is quoted when discussing America's role in the region.
Israeli interests were no longer being served. American policies
have failed and Israel has given a carte blanche to a strategy that
leaves it more isolated than ever.

Peace…or
War

The only security
Israel can have will be a result of its signing peace accords with
the Palestinians and the neighboring countries. It is no more likely
than the U. S. to defeat its enemies on the field of battle and
its arms have been neutralized. The war in Lebanon was only an augury
of the decisive limits of its military power. It is in this context
that secret Israeli talks with Syria have enormous significance.
They began in January 2004 in Turkey with the approval of Sharon,
moving on to Switzerland, where the Swiss Foreign Office played
the role of intermediary. By August 2005 they had reached a very
advanced form and covered territorial, water, border and political
questions. Details remained to be ironed out but they were a quantum
leap in solving one of the region's crucial problems. When the Baker-Hamilton
Study Group filed its recommendations last December, negotiations
with Syria were especially stressed — a point Baker reiterated when
he testified to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations last
January 30th. Baker undoubtedly knew about the secret talks and
Syria's explicit statements it wished to break with radical Islamic
movements and was ready to discuss its ties with Iran, Hezbollah,
and Hamas.

These nominally
secret talks were made public on January 8, 2007 when Egyptian president
Hosni Mubarak accused the United States in an interview with an
Israeli paper of obstructing peace between Israel and Syria.

Ha'aretz'
Akiva Eldar then published a series of extremely detailed accounts,
including the draft accord, confirming that Syria offered a far
reaching and equitable peace treaty that would provide for Israel's
security and is comprehensive — and divorce Syria from Iran and
even create a crucial distance between it and Hezbollah and Hamas.
The Bush Administration's role in scuttling any peace accord was
decisive. C. David Welch, Assistant Secretary of State for Near
Eastern Affairs, sat in at the final meeting, two former senior
CIA officials were present in all of these meetings and sent regular
reports to Vice President Dick Cheney's office. The press has been
full of details on how the American role was decisive, because it
has war, not peace, at the top of its agenda.

Most of the
Israeli Establishment favors it. On January 28 important Israelis
met publicly in Jaffa and called the Israeli response "an irresponsible
gamble with the State of Israel" since it made Cheney arbiter
of Israeli national interests. They included former IDF chief of
staff Amnon Lipkin Shahak, former Shin Bet chief Ya'akov Perry,
former directors of the Foreign Ministry David Kimche and Alon Liel
(who negotiated the deal and believes it is very serious), and the
like. Shlomo Ben-Ami, former Foreign Minister, has since supported
their position and argued that it is "too important" for
Israel to endorse yet "another failure in the U.S. strategy."

But Olmert
has explicitly said that the Bush Administration opposes a negotiated
peace with Syria. Therefore he is opposed to it also. Olmert's contradiction
is that he wants to remain closely allied to the U.S., whatever
its policies, yet he is now one of the most unpopular prime ministers
in Israel's history and in power only because of Sharon's stroke.
Israel is a crucial pillar of American policy in the entire region
but this policy is failing. An alliance with America is Olmert's
recipe for political defeat when the inevitable election is called.
That is his problem.

Israel's
power after 1947 was based on its military supremacy over its weaker
neighbors. It is in the process of losing it — if it has not already.
Lesser problems, mainly demographic, will only be aggravated if
tension persists. It simply cannot survive allied with the United
States, because the Americans will either leave the region or embark
on a war that risks Israel's very existence. It is time for it to
become "normal" and make peace with its neighbors, and
that will require it to make major concessions. It can do that if
it embarks upon an independent foreign policy, and it can start
immediately to do so with Syria.

February
12, 2007

Gabriel
Kolko is the author, among other works, of Century
of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914, Another
Century of War?, and Anatomy
of a War: Vietnam, the United States and the Modern Historical Experience.
His latest book is The
Age of War.

DIGG THIS

Nearly
all wars in the twentieth century have both surprised and disillusioned
all leaders, whatever their nationality.  Given the political,
social, and human elements involved in every conflict, and the near
certainty that these mercurial ingredients will interact
to produce unanticipated consequences, leaders who calculate the
outcome of wars as essentially predictable military events are invariably
doomed to disappointment.  The theory and the reality of warfare
conflict immensely, for the results of wars can never be known in
advance. 

Blind men and
women have been the motor of modern history and the source of endless
misery and destruction.   Aspiring leaders of great powers
can neither understand nor admit the fact that their strategies
are extremely dangerous because statecraft by its very nature always
calculates the ability of a nation’s military and economic resources
to overcome whatever challenges it confronts.  To reject such
traditional reasoning, and to question the value of conventional
wisdom and react to international crises realistically on the basis
of past failures would make them unsuited to command.  The
result is that politicians succeed in terms of their personal careers,
states make monumental errors, and people suffer.  The great
nations of Europe and Japan put such illusions into practice repeatedly
before 1945.

At the beginning
of the 21st century only the U.S. has the will to maintain a global
foreign policy and to intervene everywhere it believes necessary.
Today and in the near future, America will make the decisions that
will lead to war or peace, and the fate of much of the world is
largely in its hands. It thinks it possesses the arms and a spectrum
of military strategies all predicated on a triumphant activist role
for itself.  It believes that its economy can afford interventionism,
and that the American public will support whatever actions necessary
to set the affairs of some country or region on the political path
it deems essential.  This grandiose ambition is bipartisan
and, details notwithstanding, both parties have always shared a
consensus on it. 

The obsession
with power and the conviction that armies can produce the political
outcome a nation's leaders desire is by no means an exclusively
American illusion.  It is a notion that goes back many centuries
and has produced the main wars of modern times. The rule of force
has been with mankind a very long time, and the assumptions behind
it have plagued its history for centuries. But unlike the leaders
of most European nations or Japan, the United States' leaders have
not gained insight from the calamities that have so seared modern
history. Folly is scarcely an American monopoly, but resistance
to learning when grave errors have been committed is almost proportionate
to the resources available to repeat them.  The Germans learned
their lesson after two defeats, the Japanese after World War Two,
and both nations found wars too exhausting and politically dangerous.  
America still believes that if firepower fails to master a situation
the solution is to use it more precisely and much more of it. 
In this regard it is exceptional — past failures have not made it
any wiser. 

Wars are at
least as likely today as any time over the past century.  Of
great importance is the end of Soviet hegemony in East Europe and
Moscow’s restraining influence elsewhere.  But the proliferation
of nuclear technology and other means of mass destruction have also
made large parts of the world far more dangerous.  Deadly local
wars with conventional weapons in Africa, the Balkans, Middle East,
and elsewhere have multiplied since the 1960s.  Europe, especially
Germany, and Japan are far stronger and more independent than at
any time since 1945, and China’s rapidly expanding economy has given
it a vastly more important role in Asia. Ideologically, Communism's
demise means that the simplified bipolarism that Washington used
to explain the world ceased after 1990 to have any value. 
With it, the alliances created nominally to resist Communism have
either been abolished or are a shadow of their original selves;
they have no reason for existence.  The crisis in NATO, essentially,
reflects this diffusion of all forms of power and the diminution
of American hegemony. Economically, the capitalist nations have
resumed their rivalries, and these have become more intense with
the growth of their economies and the decline in the dollar — which
by 2004 was as weak as it has been in over 50 years.  These
states have a great deal in common ideologically, but concretely
they are increasingly rivals.  The virtual monopoly of nuclear
weapons that existed about a quarter-century ago has ended with
proliferation.

Whether it
is called a "multipolar" world, to use President Jacques
Chirac's expression in November 2004, in which Europe, China, India,
and even eventually South America follow their own interests, or
another definition, the direction is clear. There may or may not
be  "a fundamental restructuring of the global order,"
as the chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council presciently
reflected in April 2003, but the conclusion was unavoidable "that
we are facing a more fluid and complicated set of alignments than
anything we have seen since the formation of the Atlantic alliance
in 1949."  Terrorism and the global economy have defied
overwhelming American military power: "Our smart bombs aren't
that smart."

All of the
many factors considered — ranging from events in Africa and the
Middle East and Afghanistan to the breakup of Yugoslavia — wars,
whether civil or between states, remain the principal (but scarcely
the only) challenge confronting humanity in the twenty-first century. 
Ecological disasters relentlessly affecting all dimensions of the
environment are also insidious because of the unwillingness of the
crucial nations — above all the United States — to adopt measures
essential for reversing their damage.  The challenges facing
humanity have never been so complex and threatening, and the end
of the Cold War, while one precondition of progress, is scarcely
reason for complacency or optimism.  The problems the world
confronts far transcend the Communist-capitalist tensions, many
of which were mainly symptoms of the far greater intellectual, political,
and economic problems that plagued the world before 1917 — and still
exist.

Whatever its
original intention, America’s interventions can lead to open-ended
commitments in both duration and effort.  They may last a short
time, and usually do, but unforeseen events can cause the U.S. to
spend far more resources than it originally anticipated, causing
it in the name of its “credibility” or some other doctrine to get
into situations which are disastrous and which in the end produce
defeats and will leave America much worse off.  Vietnam is
the leading example of this but Iraq, however different in degree,
is the same.  Should it confront even some of the forty or
more nations that now have terrorist networks then it will in one
manner or another intervene everywhere, but especially in Africa
and the Middle East.  The consequences of such commitments
will be unpredictable.

The U.S. has
more determined and probably more numerous enemies today than at
any time, and many of those who hate it are ready and able to inflict
destruction on its shores.  Its interventions often triumphed
in the purely military sense, which is all the Pentagon worries
about, but in all too many cases they have been political failures
and eventually led to greater American military and political involvement. 
Its virtually instinctive activist mentality has caused it to get
into situations where it often had no interests, much less durable
solutions to a nation's problems, and thereby repeatedly creating
disasters and enduring enmities. America has power without wisdom,
and cannot, despite its repeated experiences, recognize the limits
of its ultra-sophisticated military technology.  The result
has been folly, and hatred, which is a recipe for disasters. 
September 11 confirmed that, and war has come to its shores. 

That the U.S.
end its self-appointed global mission of regulating all problems,
wherever, whenever, or however it wishes to do so, is an essential
precondition of stemming, much less reversing, the accumulated deterioration
of world affairs and wars.  We should not ignore the countless
ethical and other reasons it has no more right or capacity to do
so than any state over the past century, whatever justifications
they evoked.  The problems, as the history of the past century
shows, are much greater than America's role in the world; but at
the present time its actions are decisive and whether there is war
or peace will be decided far more often in Washington than any other
place.  Ultimately, there will not be peace in the world unless
all nations relinquish war as an instrument of policy, not only
because of ethical or moral reasoning but because wars have become
deadlier and more destructive of social institutions.  
A precondition of peace is for nations not to attempt to impose
their visions on others, adjudicate their differences, and never
to assume that their need for the economic or strategic resources
of another country warrants interference of any sort in its internal
affairs.

But September
11 proved that after a half-century of interventions America has
managed to be increasingly hated.  It has failed abysmally
to bring peace and security to the world.  Its role as a rogue
superpower and promiscuous, cynical interventionist has been spectacularly
unsuccessful even on its own terms.  It is squandering vast
economic resources, and it has now endangered the physical security
of Americans at home.  To cease the damage the U.S. causes
abroad is also to fulfill the responsibilities that America's politicians
have to their own people.  But there is not the slightest sign
at this point that voters will call them to account, and neither
the American population nor its political leaders are likely to
agree to such far-reaching changes in foreign policy.  The
issues are far too grave to wait for American attitudes and its
political process to be transformed.  The world will be safer
to the extent that the U.S.' alliances are dissolved and it is isolated,
and that is happening for many reasons, ranging from the unilateralism,
hubris, and preemptory style of the Bush Administration to the fact
that with the demise of Communism the world's political alignments
are changing dramatically.

Communism and
fascism were both outcomes of the fatal errors in the international
order and affairs of states that the First World War spawned. 
In part, the Soviet system’s disintegration was the result of the
fact it was the aberrant consequence of a destructive and abnormal
war, but at least as important was its leaders’ loss of confidence
in socialism.  But suicidal Muslims are, to a great extent,
the outcome of a half-century of America’s interference in the Middle
East and Islamic world, which radicalized so many young men ready
to die for a faith.   Just as the wars of 1914–18 and
1939–45 created Bolsheviks, the U.S.' repeated grave errors, however
different the context or times, have produced their own abnormal,
negative reactions.   The twenty-first century has begun
very badly because of America's continued aggressive policies. 
These are far more dangerous than those of the preceding century.
 The destructive potential of weaponry has increased exponentially
and many more people and nations have access to it.  What would
once have been considered relatively minor foreign policy problems
now have potentially far greater consequences.  It all augurs
very badly.  The world has reached the most dangerous point
in recent, perhaps all of history.  There are threats of war
and instability unlike anything that prevailed when a Soviet-led
bloc existed.

Even if the
U.S. abstains from interference and tailors its actions to fit this
troubled reality, there will be serious problems throughout much
of the world. Internecine civil conflicts will continue, as well
as wars between nations armed with an increasing variety of much
more destructive weapons available from outside powers, of which
the U.S. remains, by far, the most important.  Many of these
sources of conflicts have independent roots, but both principles
and experiences justify America staying out of them and leaving
the world alone.  Both the American people and those involved
directly will be far better off without foreign interference, whatever
nation attempts it.

The U.S.' leaders
are not creating peace or security at home or stability abroad.
The reverse is the case: its interventions have been counterproductive
and its foreign policy is a disaster.  Americans and those
people who are the objects of successive administrations' efforts
would be far better off if the U.S. did nothing, closed its bases
overseas and withdrew its fleets everywhere, and allowed the rest
of world to find its own way. Communism is dead, and Europe and
Japan are powerful and both can and will take care of their own
interests.  The U.S. must adapt to these facts.  But if
it continues as it has over the past half-century, attempting to
attain the vainglorious but irrational ambition to run the world,
then there will be even deeper crises and it will inflict wars and
turmoil on many nations as well as on its own people.  And
it will fail yet again, for all states that have gone to war over
the past centuries have not achieved the objectives for which they
sacrificed so much blood, passion, and resources.  They have
only produced endless misery and upheavals of every kind.

February
1, 2007

Gabriel
Kolko is the author, among other works, of Century
of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914, Another
Century of War?, and Anatomy
of a War: Vietnam, the United States and the Modern Historical Experience.
His latest book is The
Age of War.

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It is relatively easy to comprehend the thinking, motives, and ideas of those who embark on wars. At the inception of conflicts, all advocates of war are very similar, regardless of time and place, and a simplistic euphoric optimism suffuses their thinking. They expect triumph and glory, not ashes. More than most nations, however, optimism is integral to the American creed.

Defeat is a wholly different matter. Denial, fantasy, illusions and wish fulfillment — how do politicians confront failure? They find it too difficult to face the enormous damage they have done and the immense losses they created. If the rulers of Germany, Russia, Japan, Italy and others had known the momentous social and political costs their wars would entail, they surely would have been far more reluctant to embark on adventures that were to bring their societies to an end and radically change much of the history of the past century.

Disjunction and irrationality become the norm in these kinds of situations, and responses that seem bizarre are fairly predictable. Rationality often disappears in this process and denial — and delay — becomes the norm. That is happening now in Washington, and probably in London and Canberra as well, because Bush’s foreign policy has produced an immense disaster and there is less peace and stability in the world and security at home than anytime since 1945. Donald Rumsfeld’s December 15th farewell speech as Defense Secretary should be read in this light, but also as a reflection of the much larger problem of the way American foreign and military policy has been conducted for decades. It is probably the precursor of those we have yet to hear — and will. If his speech were not so important it would simply be pathetic.

Rumsfeld: “Shock and Awe”

Rumsfeld is one of the most articulate advocates of the two major wars the U.S. has embarked upon since 2000, and he had earlier made it plain to George Bush when he took office as Secretary of Defense that he would be “forward-leaning.” September 11 was an opportunity to realize dreams of heroism and success. He and Vice-president Dick Cheney are soul mates, their careers have been intertwined, but Cheney seeks to keep out of the limelight and Rumsfeld adored the publicity that his cleverness attracted. He is best known for his desire to make the military both meaner and leaner, relying on high tech rather than manpower, and “shock and awe” became his slogan. But to do so, national defense spending, which had been stable in the 1990s, increased from $294 billion in 2000 to $536 billion in 2006, and as a percentage of the GNP it grew 37 percent from 2000 to 2006. All kinds of weapons, many the futuristic products of junk science concocted by well-placed manufacturers, were funded for eventual production — a dozen years being a short delivery time for many of them.

Rumsfeld’s military dream was technology-intensive, even more now than 40 years ago, and it failed abysmally in Iraq. Army manpower, however, was reduced and it was left unprepared in countless domains, under-funded and overstretched even before the Iraq war began. Since then its “readiness” in terms of available troops and equipment has only fallen precipitously. And while Rumsfeld made the Army his enemy, even the Air Force now has to cut manpower to raise funds for new equipment.

He always premised his ambition, which various defense secretaries had attempted before him and failed, on the notion that the secret of military success was better and more weapons — “more bang for the buck” as an illustrious predecessor phrased it. More bucks also made the Pentagon requests that much more palatable to a pork-hungry Congress eager to increase spending in their districts. Politics and complex diplomacy never interested people like Rumsfeld, even after the abysmal failure of the Vietnam War. Delivering bad news, which meant serious assessments, was the best way not to advance in the hierarchy, and careerism was crucial to what people said. The name of the game was the game.

In both Afghanistan and Iraq he learned that realities were far more complex and he managed to shock and awe himself and the neoconservatives who shared his naïve assumptions. Reliance on high tech did not prevent warfare from becoming protracted, and it guaranteed that it would become far more costly. Both wars produced stalemates that have become the preludes to American defeats now staring the Bush administration in the face.

Rumsfeld showed at various times that in certain ways he was a person of superior intelligence notwithstanding the basically erroneous premises of the military system he led and the imperatives of ambition that demanded he share them. But like his peers, he learned far too slowly. He suffered from the typical contradiction between intelligence and ambition, and the latter requires an ideology and assumptions which most men-of-power come to believe. He admitted in a confidential memo in October 2003 that “we lack the metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror"; even then key members of the Bush Administration were far less confident of what they are doing.

His November 6, 2006 memo on the Iraq war admitted that “what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough.” There are some anodynes he advocated too, but it was rightly interpreted as his concession to the Baker-Hamilton panel view, which is the voice of the traditional foreign policy Establishment, that the Iraq war was going disastrously — in effect, was being lost. Since then, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has declared there is a civil war raging in Iraq and there should be a drawdown of American troops, to begin by the middle of next year — a step that even Rumsfeld favored with modest withdrawals that would compel the Iraqis “to pull up their socks.”

Rumsfeld and his peers know the American military cannot win the war in Iraq. Just as during the Vietnam war, they have the quixotic hope that a solution for the profound and bloody turmoil that reigns there can be found politically — at first the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds were to have parliamentary elections and then make a political deal. They did not. Then they were to write a constitution, which they eventually managed to do but it changed nothing. Now they are hoping that the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, can miraculously cobble together some kind of consensus that will produce peace, but Bush’s closest advisers think it is very likely he will fail. They have no one else to turn to. Politics, like military power, will not prevent the United States from losing control over events in Iraq — thereby losing the war. A “surge” in American troops in Iraq, as even the Joint Chiefs of Staff now argues, is only a recipe for greater disasters. Attacks against U.S. coalition forces, their Iraqi dependents, and civilians have now reached a peak and are over twice that two years ago. The Bush Administration today confronts disaster in Iraq, and probably the worst foreign policy failure in American history. Futility is the hallmark of all its efforts.

Rumsfeld’s Final Thoughts

Rumsfeld’s farewell speech on December 15th is therefore all the more remarkable because it attempts to revive older notions, long discredited and seriously at odds with facts that he himself accepted only weeks earlier. It represents a type of recidivism that is all-too-common when disaster approaches and it reveals the kind of intellectual schizophrenia that afflicts those who rise the top. It is a symptom of the complete failure of the crew that has led the U.S. for the past six years, and their total inability to confront reality.

Rumsfeld’s final words are Soviet-centric, and he reiterated his 1977 declaration that “weakness is provocative.” If “aggressors” in our “new era” perceive weakness or a lack of resolution they are enticed “into acts they otherwise would avoid.” But “the enemy” consists of “unstable dictators, weapons proliferators and rogue regimes” ready to use “unconventional” and “irregular” threats. They mix “extremist ideology” with modern weaponry. The “perception of weakness” is provocative, as is the “reluctance to defend our way of life.” The unnamed enemy is resolved to destroy “freedom.” Concretely, Rumsfeld thinks the U.S. should “invest more” to protect itself.

His mélange includes a theory of credibility, a notion that got America into the Vietnam debacle. Credibility is certainly now a factor in the Iraq-Afghan wars, one shared by many administration leaders. Rumsfeld does not confront why persisting until utter defeat will make the U.S. look not credible but dangerously irrational. His speech is historically and factually wholly inaccurate. It ignores entirely that the existence of modern weapons in Saddam Hussein’s hands was used as an excuse for the Iraq war but not found there. Many of the unstable dictators, rogue regimes, Islamic fundamentalists, and what have you were useful allies in the American confrontation with the USSR and Communism, and America gave them both weapons and training. This policy was bipartisan, pursued by Democrats as enthusiastically as by Republicans, and reflects the consensus which the Bush Administration shares with its predecessors, a fact that explains why the Democrats refuse to break with the President’s wars.

Had the U.S. not intervened covertly and overtly after 1947 to undermine countless regimes it thought dangerous, even though most were neutralist, reformist, and legitimate, there would be far fewer extremists today for it to worry about. But that they now pose some sort of fatal danger to the United States is a sheer fantasy that the Bush Administration has concocted to justify a foreign policy the American people now reject.

Rumsfeld’s final speech bears no relation whatever to the realities the U.S. now confronts, not just in the Middle East but everywhere. Like the president and those around him, it refuses to confront reality.

The American Way of War

The fact is that the immense and costly American military today bears no relationship to politics and reality. It accounts for nearly half of the world’s military expenditures but it cannot win its two wars against the most primitive enemies, enemies who exist in multiple factions who often fight each other more than Americans and who could not care less what Washington spends on weaponry and manpower. But America’s leaders have always assumed convenient enemies who calculate the way the U.S. wants them to. More important, politics was never complicated; it existed as an afterthought and never interfered with fighting and winning wars the American way. But the Soviet Union and Communism no longer exist, and absolutely nothing has changed in America’s behavior and thinking. The Pentagon is superb at spending money but its way of warfare in now in a profound and perhaps terminal crisis. It has lost all its wars against persistent guerillas armed with cheap, light weapons that decentralize and hide.

The military system that Rumsfeld and his precursors created is increasingly dysfunctional and meant only to suit the expensive demands and pretensions of the powerful companies in the military-industrial complex. The emphasis on expensive weaponry is good for the American economy; successful counterinsurgency war costs too little to maintain full employment. It bears scant relationship to the political problems that the U.S. has confronted for decades — and more now than ever.

America’s weapons are made to fight state-centric wars and destroy concentrated targets — they were designed originally for the USSR and its Warsaw bloc allies, and for European conditions. China compelled some minor modifications in this strategy. Even ignoring that nuclear deterrence made this emphasis irrelevant, or that the Korean and Vietnam wars proved it was destined to fail, it took (and still takes) 15 to 20 years to develop and produce this equipment. But Communism has disappeared in Europe and in all but name in China. The budgeting cycle, which keeps the economy of the U.S. buoyant and is deftly spread to numerous Congressional districts, bears no relation to American foreign policy, which makes former friends foes, ex-foes allies and members of NATO, and changes every few years like a kaleidoscope. As a very recent study for the U.S. Army Strategic Studies Institute concludes, “the United States [is] prepared to fight the most dangerous but least likely threats and unprepared to fight the least dangerous but most likely threats.” The American way of war is technology intensive, firepower focused, logistically superior but politically and culturally ignorant to the point of being pathetic.

Rumsfeld did not initiate this myopia, which has been inherent in the U.S.’ foreign and military policies after 1947 regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans were in power. He only attempted to apply it to Afghan and Iraqi conditions, to sand and heat, to profoundly divided places, and he only continued the legacy of failures that began long ago.

Hence defeat.

Gabriel Kolko is the author, among other works, of Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914, Another Century of War?, and Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States and the Modern Historical Experience. His latest book is The Age of War.

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The United
States had a monopoly of nuclear weaponry only a few years before
other nations challenged it, but from 1949 until roughly the 1990s
deterrence theory worked – nations knew that if they used the
awesome bomb they were likely to be devastated in the riposte. Despite
such examples of brinkmanship as the Cuban missile crisis and numerous
threats of nuclear annihilation against non-nuclear powers, by and
large the few nations that possessed the bomb concluded that nuclear
war was not worth its horrendous risks. Today, by contrast, weapons
of mass destruction or precision and power are within the capacity
of dozens of nations either to produce or purchase. With the multiplicity
of weapons now available, deterrence theory is increasingly irrelevant
and the equations of military power that existed in the period after
World War Two no longer hold.

This process
began in Korea after 1950, where the war ended in a stand off despite
the nominal vast superiority of America’s military power, and
the Pentagon discovered that great space combined with guerrilla
warfare was more than a match for it in Vietnam, where the U.S.
was defeated. Both wars caused the American military and establishment
strategists to reflect on the limits of high tech warfare, and for
a time it seemed as if appropriate lessons would be learned and
costly errors not repeated.

The conclusion
drawn from these major wars should have been that there were decisive
limits to American military and political power, and that the U.
S. should drastically tailor its foreign policy and cease intervening
anywhere it chose to. In short, it was necessary to accept the fact
that it could not guide the world as it wished to. But such a conclusion,
justified by experience, was far too radical for either party to
fully embrace, and defense contractors never ceased promising the
ultimate new weapon. America’s leaders and military establishment
in the wake of 9/11 argued that technology would rescue it from
more political failures. But such illusions – fed by the technological
fetishism which is the hallmark of their civilization – led
to the Iraq debacle.

There has now
been a qualitative leap in technology that makes all inherited conventional
wisdom, and war as an instrument of political policy, utterly irrelevant,
not just to the U.S. but to any other nation that embarks upon it.

Technology
is now moving much faster than the diplomatic and political resources
or will to control its inevitable consequences – not to mention
traditional strategic theories. Hezbollah has far better and more
lethal rockets than it had a few years ago, and American experts
believe that the Iranians compelled them to keep in reserve the
far more powerful and longer range cruise missiles they already
possess. Iran itself possesses large quantities of these missiles
and American experts believe they may very well be capable of destroying
aircraft carrier battle groups. All attempts to devise defenses
against these rockets, even the most primitive, have been expensive
failures, and anti-missile technology everywhere has remained, after
decades of effort and billions of dollars, unreliable.1

Even more ominous,
the U. S. Army has just released a report that light water reactors
– which 25 nations, from Armenia to Slovenia as well as Spain,
already have and are covered by no existing arms control treaties
– can be used to obtain near weapons-grade plutonium easily
and cheaply.2 Within a few years,
many more countries than the present ten or so – the Army study
thinks Saudi Arabia and even Egypt most likely – will have
nuclear bombs and far more destructive and accurate rockets and
missiles. Weapons-poor fighters will have far more sophisticated
guerilla tactics as well as far more lethal equipment, which deprives
the heavily equipped and armed nations of the advantages of their
overwhelming firepower, as demonstrated in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The battle between a few thousand Hezbullah fighters and a massive,
ultra-modern Israeli army backed and financed by the U.S. proves
this. Among many things, the war in Lebanon is a window of the future.
The outcome suggests that either the Israelis cease their policy
of destruction and intimidation, and accept the political prerequisites
of peace with the Arab world, or they too will eventually be devastated
by cheaper and more accurate missiles and nuclear weapons in the
hands of at least two Arab nations and Iran.

What is now
occurring in the Middle East reveals lessons just as relevant in
the future to festering problems in East Asia, Latin America, Africa
and elsewhere. Access to nuclear weapons, cheap missiles of greater
portability and accuracy, and the inherent limits of all antimissile
systems, will set the context for whatever crises arise in North
Korea, Iran, Taiwan…or Venezuela. Trends which increase the
limits of technology in warfare are not only applicable to relations
between nations but also to groups within them – ranging from
small conspiratorial entities up the scale of size to large guerilla
movements. The events in the Middle East have proven that warfare
has changed dramatically everywhere, and American hegemony can now
be successfully challenged throughout the globe.

Iranian Missile
Exercise

American power
has been dependent to a large extent on its highly mobile navy.
But ships are increasingly vulnerable to missiles, and while they
are a long way from finished they are more-and-more circumscribed
tactically and, ultimately, strategically. There is a greater balance-of-power
militarily, the reemergence of a kind of deterrence that means all
future wars will be increasingly protracted, expensive – and
very costly politically to politicians who blunder into wars with
illusions they will be short and decisive. Olmert and Peretz are
very likely to lose power in Israel, and destroying Lebanon will
not save their political futures. This too is a message not likely
to be lost on politicians.

To this extent,
what is emerging is a new era of more equal rivals. Enforceable
universal disarmament of every kind of weapon would be far preferable.
But short of this presently unattainable goal, this emergence of
a new equivalency is a vital factor leading less to peace in the
real meaning of that term than perhaps to greater prudence. Such
restraint could be an important factor leading to less war.

We live with
21st century technology and also with primitive political attitudes,
nationalisms of assorted sorts, and cults of heroism and irrationality
existing across the political spectrum and the power spectrum. The
world will destroy itself unless it realistically confronts the
new technological equations. Israel must now accept this reality,
and if it does not develop the political skills required to make
serious compromises, this new equation warrants that it will be
liquidated even as it rains destruction on its enemies.

 
Israeli
missiles target Beirut

This is the
message of the conflicts in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon –
to use only the examples in today’s papers. Walls are no longer
protection for the Israelis – one shoots over them. Their much-vaunted
Merkava tanks have proven highly vulnerable to new weapons that
are becoming more and more common and are soon likely to be in Palestinian
hands as well. At least 20 of the tanks were seriously damaged or
destroyed.

The U.S. war
in Iraq is a political disaster against the guerrillas – a
half trillion dollars spent there and in Afghanistan have left America
on the verge of defeat in both places. The “shock and awe”
military strategy has utterly failed save to produce contracts for
weapons makers – indeed, it has also contributed heavily to
de facto U.S. economic bankruptcy.

The
Bush Administration has deeply alienated more of America’s
nominal allies than any government in modern times. The Iraq war
and subsequent conflict in Lebanon have left its Middle East policy
in shambles and made Iranian strategic predominance even more likely,
all of which was predicted before the Iraq invasion. Its coalitions,
as Thomas Ricks shows in his wordy but utterly convincing and critical
book, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, are finished.
Its sublime confidence and reliance on the power of its awesome
weaponry is a crucial cause of its failure, although we cannot minimize
its preemptory hubris and nationalist myopia. The United States,
whose costliest political and military adventures since 1950 have
ended in failure, now must face the fact that the technology for
confronting its power is rapidly becoming widespread and cheap.
It is within the reach of not merely states but of relatively small
groups of people. Destructive power is now virtually “democratized.”

If
the challenges of producing a realistic concept of the world that
confronts the mounting dangers and limits of military technology
seriously are not resolved soon, recognizing that a decisive equality
of military power is today in the process of being re-imposed, there
is nothing more than wars and mankind’s eventual destruction
to look forward to.

Notes

1. Mark Williams,
   “The Missiles of August: The Lebanon War and the democratization
   of missile technology,” Technology Review (MIT), August
   16, 2006.
2. Henry Sokolski,
   ed., Taming the Next Set of Strategic Weapons Threats,
   U.S. Army Strategic Studies Institute, June 2006, pp. 33ff., 86.

September
1, 2006

Gabriel
Kolko [send him mail]
is the author, among other works, of Century
of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914, Another
Century of War?, and Anatomy
of a War: Vietnam, the United States and the Modern Historical Experience.
His latest book is The
Age of War.

DIGG THIS

The United
States had a monopoly of nuclear weaponry only a few years before
other nations challenged it, but from 1949 until roughly the 1990s
deterrence theory worked — nations knew that if they used the awesome
bomb they were likely to be devastated in the riposte. Nuclear war
was not worth its horrendous risks. Today, by contrast, weapons
of mass destruction or precision and power are within the capacity
of dozens of nations either to produce or purchase. Every kind of
weapon is now available; deterrence theory is less and less relevant,
and the equations of military power that existed in the period after
World War Two no longer hold. This process began in Korea after
1950 and the Americans discovered that great space combined with
guerrilla warfare was more than a match for them in Vietnam. But
there has now been a qualitative leap in technology that makes inherited
conventional wisdom utterly obsolete.

Technology
is now moving much faster than the diplomatic and political resources
or will to control its inevitable consequences — not to mention
traditional strategic theories. Hezbollah has far better and more
lethal rockets than it had a few years ago, and the U. S. Army has
just released a report that light water reactors – which 25
nations, from Armenia to Slovenia as well as Spain, already have
and are not covered at all by existing arms control treaties — can
be used to obtain near weapons-grade plutonium easily and cheaply.*
Within a few years, many more countries than the present ten or
so — the U.S Army think Saudi Arabia and Egypt most likely –
will have nuclear bombs and far more destructive and accurate rockets
and missiles, not to mention the means to deliver them accurately.
Weapons-poor fighters will have far more sophisticated tactics as
well as far more lethal equipment, which makes the heavily equipped
and armed nations lose the advantages (as in Vietnam and Iraq) of
their overwhelming firepower. The battle between a few thousand
Hezbullah fighters and a massive, ultra-modern Israeli army proves
this. Among many things, the war in Lebanon is a window of the future,
and either the Israelis cease their policy of bluster and intimidation,
and finally accept the political prerequisites of peace with the
Arab world, or they too will eventually be devastated by cheaper
nuclear weapons in the hands of at least three Arab nations.

We live with
21st century technology and also with primitive political
attitudes, nationalisms of assorted sorts, cults of heroism and
irrationality, and the world will destroy itself unless it realistically
confronts the new technological equations. Israel must now confront
this reality, and if it does not develop the political skills —
and serious compromises — this new equation warrants then it will
be liquidated even as it ruins its enemies.

This is
the message of the conflicts in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon
— to use only the examples in today's papers. Walls are no longer
protection for the Israelis — one shoots over them. Their much-vaunted
tanks have proven highly vulnerable to new weapons, and these are
becoming more and more common. The U. S. war in Iraq is a military
disaster against the guerrillas — a half trillion dollars spent
there and in Afghanistan have left America on the verge of defeats
in both places, its "shock and awe" strategy has utterly
failed save to produce contracts for weapons makers — but also de
facto economic bankruptcy.

The
Bush Administration has managed to deeply alienate more of America's
nominal allies than any government in modern times. Its coalitions,
as Thomas Ricks shows in his wordy but utterly convincing and critical
book, Fiasco, are finished. Its sublime confidence and reliance
on the power of its awesome weaponry is a crucial cause of its failure,
although we cannot minimize its preemptory hubris and extreme nationalist
myopia.

But
if the challenges of producing a realistic concept of the world
that confronts the mounting dangers and limits of military technology
seriously are not resolved soon there is nothing more than wars
and mankind's eventual destruction to look forward to.

* Henry Sokolski,
ed., Taming the Next Set of Strategic Weapons Threats, Strategic
Studies Institute, June 2006, p. 86.

August
16, 2006

Gabriel
Kolko [send him mail]
is the author, among other works, of Century
of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914, Another
Century of War?, and Anatomy
of a War: Vietnam, the United States and the Modern Historical Experience.
His latest book is The
Age of War.

The American
priorities were specific, focused on individual nations, but they
also set the United States the task of guiding or controlling the
entire world – which is a very big place and has proven time and
again to be far beyond American resources and imperial power. In
most of those places in the Third World where the US massively employed
its power directly it has lost, and its military might has been
ineffective. The US’s local proxies have been corrupt and venal
in most nations where it has relied upon them. The cost, both in
financial terms and in the eventual alienation of the American public,
has been monumental.

The Pentagon
developed strategic airpower and nuclear weapons with the USSR as
its primary target, and equipped itself to fight a massive land
war in Eastern Europe. Arms makers much preferred this expensive
approach, and they remain very powerful voices in shaping US foreign
and budgetary policy.

But the Soviet
enemy no longer exists. The US dilemma, and it is a fundamental
contradiction, is that its expensive military power is largely useless
as an instrument of foreign policy. It lost the war in Vietnam,
and while it managed to overthrow popular regimes in Brazil, Chile,
and elsewhere in Latin America, its military power is useless in
dealing with the effects of larger social and political problems
– and Latin America, the Middle East, and East Asia are more
independent of American control than ever.

Strategically,
also, the US is far worse off in the oil-rich Middle East because
it made every mistake possible. It supported Islamic fundamentalism
against Communism but also against secular nationalism, Iraq against
Iran in the 1980s, and it is not simply losing the war in Iraq militarily
but also alienating most of its former friends in the region. And
Iran is emerging as the decisive power in the area.

The basic problem
the world today confronts is American ambition, an ambition based
on the illusion that its great military power allows it to define
political and social trends everywhere it chooses to do so. When
the USSR existed it was somewhat more inhibited because Soviet military
power neutralized American military might and there was a partial
equilibrium – a deterring balance of terror – in Europe.
Moreover, the USSR always advised its friends and nations in its
orbit to move carefully not to provoke the US, an inhibition that
no longer exists.

On the other
hand, just as the Warsaw Pact has disappeared, NATO is well along
in the process of breaking up and going the way of SEATO, CENTO,
etc. The 1999 war against Serbia made its demise much more likely
but the US-led alliance disagreed profoundly over the Iraq War and
now is likely to dissolve in fact, if not formally. The Bush Administration
produced a crisis with its alliance and has created profound instability
in Iraq, which was always an artificial state since the British
created it after World War One resulted in the end of the Ottoman
Empire.

Eight nations
have nuclear weapons already, but the UN says another 30 or so have
the skill and resources to become nuclear powers. The world is escaping
the US, but it is also escaping the forms of control which were
in place when the USSR existed and states were too poor to build
nuclear weapons. The world is more dangerous now, in large part
because the US refuses to recognize the limits of its power and
retains the ambitions it had 50 years ago. But the spread of all
kinds of weapons also has its own momentum – one that US arms
exports aids immeasurably.

Iraq was not
at the top of the Bush Administration’s agenda when it came to power
in 2001. Bush was committed, however, to a "forward-leaning"
foreign policy, to use Rumsfeld’s words, and greater military activism.
Had September 11 not occurred, it is more likely that the Bush administration
would have confronted China, which has nuclear weapons. This administration
deems China a peer competitor in the vast East Asia region. It still
may do so, although Iraq has been a total disaster for the administration – militarily
and geopolitically – and greatly alienated the US public (faster
than Vietnam did).

The US military
is falling apart: its weapons have been ineffective, politically
Iraq is likely to break up into regional fiefdoms (as Afghanistan
has), and perhaps civil war – no one knows. From the Iraqi viewpoint
the war was a disaster, but it also repeated the failures the Americans
confronted in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere.

That the Iraq
resistance is divided will not save the US from defeat. Few believe
Iraq will be spared great trauma. In fact, many American officials
predicted this before the war began and they were ignored – just
as they were ignored when they predicted disaster in Vietnam in
the 1960s.

We live in
a tragic world and war is considered more virtuous than peace – and
since arms-makers profit from wars and not peace, conventional wisdom
is reinforced by their lobbies and by preaching the cult of weaponry.

The US may
explore how to end its predicament in Iraq but only Iran can help
it. Ironically, Iran has gained most geopolitically from Saddam
Hussein’s defeat and has no incentive to save the Bush Administration
from the defeat now staring at it – both in Iraq and in future elections
in the US.

The world is
escaping American control, and Soviet prudence no longer inhibits
many movements and nations. World opposition is becoming decentralized
to a much greater extent and the US is less than ever able to control
it – although it may go financially bankrupt and break up its alliances
in the process of seeking to be hegemonic.

This
is cause for a certain optimism, based on a realistic assessment
of the balance-of-power in the world. I think we must avoid the
pessimism-optimism trap but be realistic. Although the Americans
are very destructive, they are also losing wars and wrecking themselves
economically and politically. But for a century the world has fought
wars, and while the US has been the leading power by far in making
wars since 1946, it has no monopoly on folly.

But
it is crucial to remember that the US is only a reflection of the
militarism and irrationality that has blinded many leaders of mankind
for over a century.

The task is
not only to prevent the US from inflicting more damage on the hapless
world – Iraq at this moment – but to root out the historic, global
illusions that led to its aggression.

January
4, 2006

Gabriel
Kolko [send him mail]
is the author, among other works, of Century
of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914, Another
Century of War?, and Anatomy
of a War: Vietnam, the United States and the Modern Historical Experience.
His latest book, The
Age of War, will be published in March 2006.

If
we use conventional military criteria, the Americans should have
been victorious. They used 15 million tons of munitions (as much
as they employed in World War Two), had a vast military superiority
over their enemies by any standard one employs, and still they were
defeated.

The
Saigon army commanded by Nguyen van Thieu also was far stronger
than their adversaries. At the beginning of 1975 they had over three
times as much artillery, twice as many tanks and armored cars, 1400
aircraft and a virtual monopoly of the air. They had a two-to-one
superiority of combat troops – roughly 700,000 to 320,000. The Communist
leadership in early 1975 expected the war to last as much as a decade
longer. I was in South Vietnam at the end of 1973 and in Hanoi all
of April 1975 until the last four days of the war, when I was in
Hue and Danang in the south. I am certain the Communists were almost
as surprised as the Americans that victory was to be theirs so quickly
and easily; I told them from late 1973 onward to expect an end to
the war by the Saigon regime capsizing without a serious fight – much
as the Kuomintang had in China after 1947. As a future Politburo
member later confessed, they regarded my prediction as "crazy."
They were completely unprepared to run the entire nation, and their
chaotic, inconsistent economic policies since 1975 have shown it.

The
Americans and Communists alike shared a common myopia regarding
wars. What happens in the political, social, and economic spheres
are far more decisive than military equations. That was true in
China in the late 1940s, in Vietnam in 1975, and it is also the
case in Iraq today.

South
Vietnam was an artificially urbanized society whose only economic
basis was American aid. The value of that aid declined when the
oil price increases that began with the war in the Middle East in
1973 caused a rampant inflation, at which point the motorized army
and society the Americans had created became an onerous liability.

South
Vietnam had always been corrupt since the U.S. arbitrarily created
it in 1955 despite the Geneva Accords provision that there should
be an election to reunify what was historically and ethnically one
nation. Thieu, who was a Catholic in a dominantly Buddhist country,
retained the loyalty of his generals and bureaucracy by allowing
them to enrich themselves at the expense of the people. The average
Vietnamese, whether they were for or against the Communists, had
no loyalty whatsoever to the Thieu regime that was robbing them.
After 1973, soldiers’ salaries declined with inflation and they
began living off the land. The urban middle class was increasingly
alienated; the Thieu regime’s popularity fell with it. It admitted
there were 32,000 political prisoners in its jails, but other estimates
were far higher.

By
the beginning of 1975 the regime in South Vietnam was beginning
to disintegrate by every relevant criterion: economically and politically,
and therefore militarily. The Saigon army abandoned the battlefield
well before the final Communist offensive in March 1975. Moreover,
with the Watergate scandal, the Nixon Administration was on the
defensive after 1973, both with the American public and Congress,
and after Nixon’s forced resignation the new American President,
Gerald Ford, was simply in no position to help the economically
and politically bankrupt Thieu regime. The American army, at this
point, was too demoralized to reenter the war. Washington correctly
assumed that its diplomatic strategy had won Moscow and Peking to
its side by threatening to swing its power to the enemy of whatever
nation would not support its Vietnam strategy – triangular diplomacy.

But
it was irrelevant what Hanoi’s former allies did – and essentially
they did what the Americans wanted by cutting military aid to the
Vietnamese Communists. The basic problem was in Saigon: the regime
was falling apart for reasons having nothing to do with military
equipment. The Communists were stunned by their fast, total victory
over the nominally superior Saigon army, which refused to fight
and immediately disintegrated.

Thus
ended the most significant American foreign effort since 1945. There
are so many obvious parallels with their futile projects in Iraq
and Afghanistan today, and the lessons are so clear, that we have
to conclude that successive administrations in Washington have no
capacity whatsoever to learn from past errors. Total defeat in Vietnam
30 years ago should have been a warning to the U.S.: wars are too
complicated for any nation, even the most powerful, to undertake
without grave risk. They are not simply military exercises in which
equipment and firepower is decisive, but political, ideological,
and economic challenges also. The events of South Vietnam 30 years
ago should have proven that. It did not.

May
9, 2005

Gabriel
Kolko [send him mail]
is the author of Century
of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914, Another
Century of War?, and Anatomy
of a War: Vietnam, the United States and the Modern Historical Experience.