{"id":1735,"date":"2020-12-10T08:35:38","date_gmt":"2020-12-10T08:35:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=136725"},"modified":"2020-12-10T08:35:38","modified_gmt":"2020-12-10T08:35:38","slug":"spilling-ink-and-spilling-blood-fighting-and-writing-against-americas-forever-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/12\/10\/spilling-ink-and-spilling-blood-fighting-and-writing-against-americas-forever-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"Spilling Ink and Spilling Blood: Fighting and Writing Against America\u2019s Forever Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you have a moment, how about joining two retired officers, Bill Astore and me, Danny Sjursen, as we think about this country\u2019s catastrophic forever wars that, regardless of their deadly costs and lack of progress, never seem quite to end<\/a>?<\/p>\n

Recently, in a podcast<\/a> chat about our very different but somehow twin journeys through those wars, he and I got to thinking about what might have happened if our paths had crossed so much earlier. Both of us, after all, have been writing for TomDispatch<\/a><\/em> for years. As Bill once said to me, thinking about his post-military writing career, \u201cYou know, Danny, in my small way I was trying \u2014 and failing \u2014 to stop the wars you were heading into.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now that\u2019s an interesting, if disturbing, thought. But Bill, what would you have said to Lieutenant Danny (that was me once upon a time!) and how might he have responded then?<\/p>\n

Who could know now, of course? Still, here\u2019s our retrospective attempt to sort that out in joint correspondence in which we track about 15 years\u2019 worth of this country\u2019s unending wars.<\/p>\n

The Frankenstein<\/em> and Star Trek<\/em> Years of American War<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bill:<\/strong> When you were graduating from West Point in 2005 and shining your lieutenant\u2019s bars, Danny, I was putting my uniform away after 20 years in the Air Force and driving to Pennsylvania for a new career as a history professor. I thought I\u2019d teach and maybe write a book or two. I never pictured myself as a dissenter, and I\u2019d never spoken out publicly against the wars we were in. The one time I was interviewed<\/a> about them, in 2005 when I was still the military dean of students at the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey, I remember saying that I preferred our troops use words rather than rifle butts to communicate with the Afghans and Iraqis. Of course, we had so few troops who spoke Arabic or Pashto or Dari that we leaned on our rifles instead, which meant lots of dead and alienated people in both countries.<\/p>\n

In the summer of 2007, I was increasingly disgusted by the way the administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney was hiding behind the bemedaled chest of Iraq commander General David Petraeus. Our civilian commander-in-chief, George W., was avoiding responsibility for the disastrous Iraq War by sending Petraeus, then known as the \u201csurge\u201d general, before Congress to testify that some sort of victory was still possible, even as he hedged his talk of progress with words like \u201cfragile\u201d and \u201creversible.\u201d<\/p>\n

So I got off my butt and wrote an article that argued we needed to end the Iraq War and our folly of \u201cspilling blood and treasure with such reckless abandon.\u201d I submitted it to newspapers like the New York Times<\/em> with no success. Fortunately, a friend told me about TomDispatch<\/em>, where Tom Engelhardt had been publishing critical articles by retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich. Luckily for me, Tom liked my piece and published<\/a> it as \u201cSaving the Military from Itself\u201d in October of that same year.<\/p>\n

That article put me on the path of dissent from America\u2019s forever wars, even if I wasn\u2019t so much antiwar as anti-dumb-war then. As I asked at the time, how do you win someone else\u2019s civil war? Being a Star Trek<\/em> fan, I referred to the Kobayashi Maru<\/a>, a \u201cno-win\u201d scenario introduced in the second Star Trek<\/em>movie. I saw our troops, young lieutenants like yourself in Iraq, being stuck in a no-win situation and I was already convinced that, no matter how much Petraeus talked about \u201cmetrics\u201d and \u201cprogress,\u201d it wasn\u2019t going to happen, that \u201cwinning\u201d really meant leaving, and we haven\u2019t won yet since, god help us, we\u2019re still there.<\/p>\n

Of course, the so-called surge<\/a> in Iraq back then did what it was actually meant to do. It provided an illusion of progress and stability even while proving just as fragile and reversible as the weaselly Petraeus said it would be. Worse yet, the myth of that Iraqi surge would lead disastrously to the Afghan version<\/a> of the same under Barack Obama and \u2014 yet again \u2014 Petraeus who would prove to be a general for all presidents.<\/p>\n

Lucky you! You were on the ground in both surges, weren\u2019t you?<\/p>\n

Danny:<\/strong> I sure was! Believe it or not, a colonel once told me I was lucky to have done \u201cline duty\u201d in both of them \u2014 platoon and<\/em> company command, Iraq and<\/em> Afghanistan, Baghdad and<\/em> Kandahar. To be honest, Bill, I knew something was fishy even before you retired or I graduated from West Point and headed for those wars.<\/p>\n

In fact, it\u2019s funny that you should mention Bacevich. I was first introduced to his work in the winter of 2004 as a West Point senior by then-Lieutenant Colonel Ty Seidule<\/a>. Back then, for a guy like me, Bacevich had what could only be called bracing antiwar views (a wink-nod to your Bracing Views blog<\/a>, Bill) for a classroom of burgeoning neocons just about certain to head for Iraq. Frankly, most of us couldn\u2019t wait to go.<\/p>\n

And we wouldn\u2019t have that long to wait either. The first of our classmates<\/a> to die, Emily Perez, was killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb in September 2006 within 18 months of graduation (and five more<\/a> were to die in the years to come). I took a scout platoon to southeast Baghdad a month later and we didn\u2019t leave \u2014 most of us, that is \u2014 for 15 months.<\/p>\n

My partly Bacevich-bred sneaking suspicions about America\u2019s no-longer distant wars were, of course, all confirmed. It turned out that policing an ethno-religious-sectarian conflict, mostly of our own country\u2019s making, while dodging counter-counterinsurgent attacks aimed at expelling us occupiers from that country was as tough as stateside invasion opponents had predicted.<\/p>\n

On lonely outpost mornings, I had a nasty daily habit of reading the names of our announced dead. Midway through my tour, one of those countless attacks killed<\/a> 1st Lt. Andrew J. Bacevich. When I saw that name, I realized instantly that he must be the son of the man whose book I had read two years earlier, the man who is now our colleague. The moment remains painfully crystal clear in my memory.<\/p>\n

By the way, Bill, your Iraq War take was dead on. During my own tour there, I came to the same realization. Embarrassingly enough, though, it took me seven years to say the same things publicly in my first book<\/a>, fittingly subtitled \u201cThe Myth of the Surge.\u201d By then, of course, ISIS \u2014 the Frankenstein\u2019s monster<\/a> of America\u2019s misadventure \u2014 was already streaming across Syria\u2019s synthetic borders and conquering swaths of northern and western Iraq, which made an anti-Iraq War screed seem quaint indeed, at least in establishment circles.<\/p>\n

But Bill, do go on.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bill:<\/strong> It was also back in 2007 when something John McCain said on PBS really ticked me off. In essence, he warned that if the U.S. military lost in Iraq, it wouldn\u2019t be the generals\u2019 fault. No, it would be ours, those of us who had questioned the war and its conduct and so had broken faith with that very military. In response, I wrote a piece at TomDispatch<\/em> with the sarcastic title<\/a>, \u201cIf We Lose Iraq, You\u2019re to Blame,\u201d because I already found such \u201cstab-in-the-back\u201d lies pernicious beyond words. As Andy Bacevich noted recently<\/a>when it came to such lies about an earlier American military disaster: we didn\u2019t lose the Vietnam War in 1975 when Saigon fell, we lost it in 1965 when President Johnson committed American troops to winning a civil war that South Vietnam had already lost.<\/p>\n

Something similar is true for the Iraq and Afghan wars today. We won\u2019t lose those conflicts when we finally pull all U.S. troops out and the situation goes south (as it most likely will). No, we lost the Afghan War in 2002 when we decided to turn a strike against the Taliban and al-Qaeda into an occupation of that country; and we lost the Iraq War the moment we invaded in 2003 and found none of the weapons of mass destruction that Bush and his top officials had sworn<\/a> were there. Those were wars of choice, not of necessity, and we could only \u201cwin\u201d them by finally choosing to end them. We lose them \u2014 and maybe our democracy as well \u2014 by choosing to keep on waging them in the false cause of \u201cstability\u201d or \u201ccounterterrorism,\u201d or you-name-it.<\/p>\n

Early in 2009, I had an epiphany of sorts while walking around a cemetery. With those constant deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and dozens of other countries globally, the U.S. military, I thought, was becoming a foreign legion<\/a>, almost like the quintessential French version of the same, increasingly separated from the people, and increasingly recruited from \u201cforeign\u201d elements, including recent immigrants to this country looking for a fast-track to citizenship.<\/p>\n

Danny:<\/strong> Bill, one of my own soldiers fit the mold you just mentioned. Private First Class Gustavo Rios-Ordonez, a married father of two and a Colombian national. Partly seeking citizenship through service, he was the last trooper to join my command just before we shipped out and the first killed<\/a> when, on June 20, 2011, he stepped on an improvised explosive device within sight of the Afghan outpost I then commanded. Typing this now, I stare at a framed dusty unit guidon, the pennant that once flew over that isolated sandbagged base of ours and was gifted to me by my soldiers.<\/p>\n

Sorry, Bill, last interruption\u2026 scout\u2019s honor!<\/p>\n

Surges to Nowhere<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bill:<\/strong> So I wrote an article<\/a> that asked if our military was morphing into an imperial police force. As I put it then: \u201cForeign as in being constantly deployed overseas on imperial errands; foreign as in being ever more reliant on private military contractors; foreign as in being increasingly segregated from the elites that profit most from its actions, yet serve the least in its ranks.\u201d And I added, \u201cNow would be a good time to ask exactly why, and for whom, our troops are currently fighting and dying in the urban jungles of Iraq and the hostile hills of Afghanistan.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few people torched me for writing that. They thought I was saying that the troops themselves were somehow foreign, that I was attacking the rank-and-file, but my intent was to attack those who were misusing the military for their own purposes and agendas and all the other Americans who were acquiescing in the misuse of our troops. It\u2019s a strange dynamic in this country, the way we\u2019re cajoled into supporting our troops without ourselves having to serve or even pay attention to what they\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Indeed, under George W. Bush, we were even discouraged from commemorating the honored dead, denied<\/a> seeing footage of returning flag-draped caskets. We were to celebrate our troops, while they (especially the dead and wounded) were kept out of sight \u2014 literally behind curtains<\/a>, by Bush administration order \u2014 and so mostly out of mind.<\/p>\n

I was against the Afghan surge, Danny, because I knew it would be both futile and unsustainable. In arguing that case, I reached back to the writings of two outspoken opponents of the Vietnam War, Norman Mailer<\/a> and Mary McCarthy<\/a>. As President Obama deliberated on whether to surge or not, I suggested that he should confer with broadminded critics outside the government, tough-minded freethinkers cut from the cloth of Mailer and McCarthy.<\/p>\n

Mailer, for example, had argued that the Vietnamese were \u201cfaceless\u201d to Americans (just as the Iraqis and Afghans have been all these years), that we knew little about them as a people and cared even less. He saw American intervention in \u201cheart of darkness\u201d terms. McCarthy was even blunter, condemning as \u201cwicked\u201d the government\u2019s technocentric and hegemonic form of warfare with its \u201cabsolute indifference to the cost in human lives.\u201d Predictably, Obama listened to conventional wisdom and surged again, first under General Stanley McChrystal and then, of course, under Petraeus.<\/p>\n

Danny:<\/strong> Well, Bill, paltry as it may now sound, I truly thank you for your post-service service to sensibility and decency \u2014 even if those efforts didn\u2019t quite spare me the displeasure of a second stint in a second theater with Petraeus as my supreme commander for a second time.<\/p>\n

By the way, I ran into King David<\/a> (as he came to be known) last year in a long line for the urinals at Newark airport. Like you, I\u2019ve been tearing the guy\u2019s philosophy and policies up for years. Still, I decided decorum mattered, so I introduced myself and mentioned that we\u2019d met once at a Baghdad base in 2007. But before I could even kid him about how his staff had insisted that we stock ample kiwi slices because he loved to devour them, Petraeus suddenly walked off without even making it to the stall! I found it confusing behavior until I glimpsed myself in the mirror and remembered that I was wearing an \u201cIraq Veterans Against the War\u201d t-shirt.<\/p>\n

Okay, here\u2019s a more instructive anecdote: Have I ever mentioned to you that my Afghan outpost, \u201cPashmul South\u201d as it was then known, featured prominently in the late journalist Michael Hasting\u2019s classic book, The Operators<\/a><\/em> (which inspired the Netflix original movie War Machine<\/em>)? At one point, Hastings describes how Petraeus\u2019s predecessor in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, visited an isolated base full of war-weary and war-exasperated infantrymen. In one<\/a> of the resident platoons, all but seven of its 25 original members had \u201cbeen killed, wounded, or lost their minds.\u201d And yes, that was the \u201cpalace\u201d I took over a couple of years later, an outpost the Taliban was then attacking almost daily.<\/p>\n

By the time I took up the cause of \u201cEnduring Freedom<\/a>\u201d (as the Afghan operation had been dubbed by the Pentagon), I had already resigned myself to being one of those foreign legionnaires you\u2019ve talked about, if not an outright mercenary. During the Afghan surge, I fought for pay, healthcare, a future West Point faculty slot, and lack of a better alternative (or alternate identity). My principles then were simple enough: patrol as little as possible, kill as few locals as you can, and make sure that one day you\u2019ll walk (as many of my scouts literally did) out of that valley called Arghandab.<\/p>\n

I was in a dark headspace then. I didn\u2019t believe a damn thing my own side said, held out not an ounce of hope for victory, and couldn\u2019t even be bothered to hate my \u201cenemy.\u201d On the 10th anniversary of the 9\/11 attacks, staff officers at brigade headquarters sent a Reuters reporter deep into the boonies to profile<\/a> the only commander around from the New York City area and I told him just what I thought, or close enough in any case. Suffice it to say that my colonels were less than pleased when Captain Sjursen was quoted as saying that \u201cthe war was anything but personal\u201d and that he never \u201cthought about 9\/11 at all\u201d or when he described the Taliban this way: \u201cIt\u2019s farm-boys picking up guns. How do you hate that?\u201d<\/p>\n

Rereading that article now, I feel a certain sadness for that long-gone self of mine, so lost in fatalism, hopelessness, and near-nihilism. Then I catch myself and think: imagine how the Afghans felt, especially since they didn\u2019t have a distant home to scurry off to sooner or later.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I never forgot that it was Obama \u2014 from whom I\u2019d sought Iraq War salvation \u2014 who ordered my troops on that even more absurd Afghan surge to nowhere (and I\u2019m not sure I\u2019ve forgiven him either). Still, if there was a silver lining in all that senselessness, perhaps it was that such a bipartisan betrayal widened both the breadth and depth of my future dissent.<\/p>\n

The Struggle Itself<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bill:<\/strong> Speaking of surges, Danny, even the word is a military misnomer. It\u2019s dishonest. Real generals advance and retreat. They reinforce. They win (or lose). They occupy the battlefield. Lines move on maps. Foes are beaten and surrender. None of this happens with a \u201csurge.\u201d Our generals just added more troops to exert temporary control over an area in what was nothing more than a fallacious face-saving gesture. A mask. A conceit. All those surges did was sustain a losing cause and reinforce failure. Consider them a fundamental mistake of military strategy, like throwing good money after bad or doubling down on a losing hand.<\/p>\n

Why didn\u2019t they listen to me? Why didn\u2019t they stop the Iraq and Afghan surges and end those wars? And now that, with other retired military types, we\u2019re both in the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN) you organized, continuing to speak out against the twenty-first-century American way of making war, why do they still not listen to us? I fear that the answer\u2019s simple enough: they have a trillion reasons not to. After all, roughly a trillion-plus dollars<\/a> is spent each year on the Pentagon, on so-called homeland security, on nuclear weapons, on intelligence and surveillance, on buying weaponry and then more of the same after that. Why won\u2019t they listen to us? We threaten their bottom line, their profits. And why should we get invites to CNN and MSNBC and other mainstream media sites when they already have Pentagon cheerleaders<\/a> on their staffs and retired senior officers who spout the party line, as journalist David Barstow revealed<\/a> in his Pulitzer-award-winning<\/a>series? We aren\u2019t really in EMN, Danny, we\u2019re in the IMF, the impossible missions force<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I remember reading old newspapers from the 1930s that were quite blunt about how to end war: get the profit motive out of it. That was when the standing U.S. military was fairly small and Americans were skeptical of weapons makers, the \u201cmerchants of death<\/a>\u201d as they were so rightly called back then. Almost a century later, we\u2019re the leading<\/a> merchant of death, the country that arms the world<\/a>. Domestically, we\u2019re awash in weaponry, with a gun for every American and a mini-tank<\/a> for every police force. I\u2019ve attacked this creeping militarism<\/a>, this degradation of our democracy, but with little success. So welcome to the IMF from the classic TV show Mission Impossible<\/em>. Unless we smarten up and end these perpetual wars, this democracy will self-destruct in five seconds<\/a>. The odds are long, but it\u2019s a mission we just have to accept.<\/p>\n

Danny:<\/strong> I couldn\u2019t agree more, Bill. The militarism problem is cyclical and systemic with a backstory that\u2019s sure to ping our shared historian\u2019s radar. I hinted at this two months ago in remarks<\/a> I made at legendary antiwar vet Smedley Butler\u2019s graveside (the former major general I wrote about<\/a> at TomDispatch<\/em> in February). Highlighting his prophetic aspect, I noted that the two-time Medal of Honor-recipient had diagnosed core components of the military-industrial complex a quarter of a century before our new organization\u2019s namesake, former president Dwight D. Eisenhower, coined the term in his Cassandra-like 1961 farewell address<\/a>. If that isn\u2019t proof our forever-war problems are systemic rather than discrete, I don\u2019t know what is.<\/p>\n

That short speech of mine was occasioned by the 19th anniversary of our absurd Afghan War, the conflict you couldn\u2019t singlehandedly stop in time to save me from a second surge<\/a> excursion. Anyway, don\u2019t beat yourself up about that, Bill. Like you said, the war-state beast is humongous and our buddy Bacevich has been beating this drum since<\/a> you were still wearing Air Force blue. Under the circumstances and in these pandemic times, what could be more appropriate than a buck-up from that ever-cheery French novelist of plagues and philosopher Albert Camus<\/a>: \u201cThe struggle itself\u2026 is enough to fill a man\u2019s heart.\u201d<\/p>\n

And you won\u2019t believe this, but I had to stop there a moment to field a tortured text from an ex-student of mine turned Army lieutenant who\u2019s now straddling those spheres of doubt and dissent that you and I know all too well. You may recall that I penned a piece<\/a> last year for our mutual friend Tom Engelhardt on \u201cWatching My Students Turn Into Soldiers of Empire.\u201d Damned if that wasn\u2019t a hard pill to swallow. Come to think of it, that must be precisely the feeling of failure you\u2019ve described in our recent correspondence.<\/p>\n

Well, at least the military dissent gestation period seems to be shortening. I commissioned exactly 20 years after you. The last crop of cadets from the freshman history class I taught at West Point after I returned from those wars were just 15 years behind me and some of them are now in doubt deep.<\/p>\n

The thing is, I fear you\u2019re a better man than I am, my friend. I can see the script that\u2019s coming down the dusty and well-trodden trail, but I\u2019m not sure I could stomach writing a co-column with one of those kids \u2014 let alone attending one of their funerals.<\/p>\n

I guess we old hands had better get to work. In the battle against endless war, our motto has to be: no retreat, no surrender.<\/p>\n

This article was distributed by TomDispatch<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you have a moment, how about joining two retired officers, Bill Astore and me, Danny Sjursen, as we think about this country\u2019s catastrophic forever wars that, regardless\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1735"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1735"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1735\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1736,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1735\/revisions\/1736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}