“Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” if remembered at all today, is recalled mainly for a throwaway sentence that looked ominous indeed in retrospect: “Further, the process of transformation [of the military], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” It remains, however, a remarkable document for other reasons. In many ways canny about the direction war would take in the near future, ranging from the role of drones in air war to the onrushing possibility that cyberwar (or “Net-War,” as they called it) would be the style of future conflict, it was a clarion call to ensure this country’s “unchallenged supremacy” into the distant future by military means alone.
In 1983, in an address to the National Association of Evangelicals, President Ronald Reagan famously called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” It wanted, as he saw it, what all dark empires (and every evildoer in any James Bond film) desires: unchallenged dominion over the planet—and it pursued that dominion in the name of a glorious “world revolution.” Now, in the name of American safety and the glories of global democracy, we were—so the PNAC people both pleaded and demanded—to do what only evil empires did and achieve global dominion beyond compare over planet Earth.
We could, they insisted, enforce an American peace, a Pax Americana, for decades to come, if only we poured our resources, untold billions (they refused to estimate what the real price might be) into war preparations and, if necessary, war itself, from the seven seas to the heavens, from manifold new “forward operating bases on land” to space and cyberspace. Pushing “the American security perimeter” ever farther into the distant reaches of the planet (and “patrolling” it via “constabulary missions”) was, they claimed, the only way that “U.S. military supremacy” could be translated into “American geopolitical preeminence.” It was also the only way that the “homeland”—yes, unlike 99.9 percent of Americans before 9/11, they were already using that term—could be effectively “defended.”
In making their pitch, they were perfectly willing to acknowledge that the United States was already a military giant among midgets, but they were also eager to suggest that our military situation was “deteriorating” fast, that we were “increasingly ill-prepared” or even in “retreat” on a planet without obvious enemies. They couldn’t have thought more globally. (They were, after all, visionaries, as druggies tend to be.) Nor could they have thought longer term. And on military matters, they couldn’t have been more up to date.
Yet on the most crucial issues, they—and their documents—couldn’t have been dumber or more misguided. They were fundamentalists when it came to the use of force and idolaters on the subject of the U.S. military. They believed it capable of doing just about anything. As a result, they made a massive miscalculation, mistaking military destructiveness for global might. Nor could they have been less interested in the sinews of global economic power (though they did imagine our future enemy to be China). Nor were they capable of imagining that the greatest military power on the planet might be stopped in its tracks—in the Greater Middle East, no less—by a ragtag crew of Iraqis and Afghans. To read “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” today is to see the rabbit hole down which, as if in a fever dream, we would soon disappear.
It was a genuine tragedy that they came to power and proceeded to put their military-first policies in place; that, on September 12 of the year that “changed everything,” the PNAC people seized the reins of defense and foreign policy, mobilized for war, began channeling American treasure into the military solution they had long desired, and surged. That urge to surge was infamously caught in notes based on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s comments taken on September 11, 2001.
“[B]arely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon…. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq,” even though he was already certain that al-Qaeda had launched the attack. (“‘Go massive,’ the notes quote him as saying. ‘Sweep it all up. Things related and not.’”) And so they did. They swept up everything and then watched as their dreams and geopolitical calculations were themselves swept into the dustbin of history. And yet the urge to surge, twisted and desperate, did not abate.
To one degree or another, we have been on the Soviet path for years and yet, ever more desperately, we continue to plan additional surges. Our military, like the Soviet one, has not lost a battle and has occupied whatever ground it chose to take. Yet, in the process, it has won less than nothing at all. Our country, still far wealthier than the Soviet Union ever was, has nonetheless entered its Soviet phase. At home, in the increasing emphasis on surveillance of every sort, there is even a hint of what made “soviet” and “totalitarian” synonymous.
The U.S. economy looks increasingly sclerotic as state and city governments are laying off teachers, police, even firefighters, Americans are unemployed in near record numbers, global oil prices are ominously on the rise, and yet taxpayer money continues to pour into the military and into its foreign wars. It has recently been estimated, for instance, that after spending $11.6 billion in 2011 on the training, supply, and support of the Afghan army and police, the U.S. government will continue to spend an average of $6.2 billion a year at least through 2015—and that’s but one expense in the estimated $120 billion a year being spent at present on the Afghan War, what can only be described as part of our war stimulus package abroad.
Sooner than later, Washington, the Pentagon, and the U.S. military will have to enter rehab. They desperately need a twelve-step program for recovery. Until then, the delusions and the madness that go with surge addiction are not likely to end.
Osama bin Laden’s American Legacy
Back in the 1960s, Senator George Aiken of Vermont offered two American presidents a plan for dealing with the Vietnam War: declare victory and go home. Roundly ignored at the time, it’s a plan worth considering again today for a war in Afghanistan and Pakistan now more than a decade old.
Osama bin Laden has, of course, been eliminated. Literally. By Navy SEALS. Or as one of a crowd of revelers who appeared in front of the White House the night his killing was announced put it on an impromptu sign riffing on The Wizard of Oz: “Ding, Dong, Bin Laden Is Dead.” And wouldn’t it be easy if he had indeed been the Wicked Witch of the West and all we needed to do was click those ruby slippers three times, say “there’s no place like home,” and be back in Kansas. Or if this were V-J day and a sailor’s kiss said it all.
Unfortunately, in every way that matters for Americans, it’s an illusion that Osama bin Laden is dead. In every way that matters, he will fight on, barring a major Obama administration policy shift in Afghanistan, and it’s we who will ensure that he remains on the battlefield that George W. Bush’s administration once so grandiosely labeled the Global War on Terror.
Admittedly, the Arab world had largely left bin Laden in the dust even before he took that bullet to the head. There, the focus was on the Arab Spring, the massive, ongoing, largely nonviolent protests that shook the region and its autocrats to their roots. In that part of the world, his death was, as Tony Karon of Time magazine wrote, “little more than a historical footnote,” and his dreams are now essentially meaningless.