[Peace-discuss] Norman Soloman

[Morton K. Brussel]

A interesting commentary, only lacking, I think, what may be the roots  
of the Obama administration's policies, i.e., what the "pros" think is  
the value of controlling S and SW Asia.  --mkb

Published on Thursday, May 21, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
The March of Folly, Continued
by Norman Solomon
To understand what's up with President Obama as he escalates the war  
in Afghanistan, there may be no better place to look than a book  
published 25 years ago. "The March of Folly," by historian Barbara  
Tuchman, is a chilling assessment of how very smart people in power  
can do very stupid things -- how a war effort, ordered from on high,  
goes from tic to repetition compulsion to obsession -- and how we,  
with undue deference and lethal restraint, pay our respects to the  
dominant moral torpor to such an extent that mass slaughter becomes  
normalized in our names.
What happens among policymakers is a "process of self-hypnosis,"  
Tuchman writes. After recounting examples from the Trojan War to the  
British moves against rebellious American colonists, she devotes the  
closing chapters of "The March of Folly" to the long arc of the U.S.  
war in Vietnam. The parallels with the current escalation of the war  
in Afghanistan are more than uncanny; they speak of deeply rooted  
patterns.

With clarity facing backward, President Obama can make many wise  
comments about international affairs while proceeding with actual  
policies largely unfettered by the wisdom. From the outset of U.S.  
involvement in Vietnam, Tuchman observes, vital lessons were "stated"  
but "not learned."

As with John Kennedy -- another young president whose administration  
"came into office equipped with brain power" and "more pragmatism than  
ideology" -- Obama's policy adrenalin is now surging to engorge  
something called counterinsurgency.

"Although the doctrine emphasized political measures,  
counterinsurgency in practice was military," Tuchman writes, an  
observation that applies all too well to the emerging Obama enthusiasm  
for counterinsurgency. And "counterinsurgency in operation did not  
live up to the high-minded zeal of the theory. All the talk was of  
‘winning the allegiance' of the people to their government, but a  
government for which allegiance had to be won by outsiders was not a  
good gamble."

Now, as during the escalation of the Vietnam War -- despite all the  
front-paged articles and news bulletins emphasizing line items for  
civic aid from Washington -- the spending for U.S. warfare in  
Afghanistan is overwhelmingly military.

Perhaps overeager to assume that the context of bombing campaigns  
ordered by President Obama is humanitarian purpose, many Americans of  
antiwar inclinations have yet to come to terms with central realities  
of the war effort -- for instance, the destructive trajectory of the  
budgeting for the war, which spends 10 dollars toward destruction for  
every dollar spent on humanitarian programs.

 From the top of the current administration -- as the U.S. troop  
deployments in Afghanistan continue to rise along with the American  
air-strike rates -- there is consistent messaging about the need to  
"stay the course," even while bypassing such tainted phrases.

The dynamic that Tuchman describes as operative in the first years of  
the 1960s, while the Vietnam War gained momentum, is no less relevant  
today: "For the ruler it is easier, once he has entered a policy box,  
to stay inside. For the lesser official it is better, for the sake of  
his position, not to make waves, not to press evidence that the chief  
will find painful to accept. Psychologists call the process of  
screening out discordant information ‘cognitive dissonance,' an  
academic disguise for ‘Don't confuse me with the facts.'" Along the  
way, cognitive dissonance "causes alternatives to be ‘deselected since  
even thinking about them entails conflicts.'"

Such a psycho-political process inside the White House has no use for  
the report from the Congressional Progressive Caucus that came out of  
the caucus's six-part forum on Capitol Hill this spring, "Afghanistan:  
A Road Map for Progress."

Souped up and devouring fuel, the war train cannot slow down for the  
Progressive Caucus report's recommendation that "an 80-20 ratio  
(political-military) should be the formula for funding our efforts in  
the region with oversight by a special inspector general to ensure  
compliance." Or that "U.S. troop presence in the region must be  
oriented toward training and support roles for Afghan security forces  
and not for U.S.-led counterinsurgency efforts."

Or that "the immediate cessation of drone attacks should be required."  
Or that "all aid dollars should be required to have a majority  
percentage of dollars tied or guaranteed to local Afghan institutions  
and organizations, to ensure countrywide job mapping, assessment and  
workforce development process to directly benefit the Afghan people."

The policymakers who are gunning the war train can't be bothered with  
such ideas. After all, if the solution is -- rhetoric aside -- assumed  
to be largely military, why dilute the potency of the solution?  
Especially when, as we're repeatedly made to understand, there's so  
much at stake.

During the mid-1960s, while American troops poured into Vietnam,  
"enormity of the stakes was the new self-hypnosis," Tuchman comments.  
She quotes the wisdom -- conventional and self-evident -- of New York  
Times military correspondent Hanson Baldwin, who wrote in 1966 that  
U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam would bring "political, psychological and  
military catastrophe," signaling that the United States "had decided  
to abdicate as a great power."

Many Americans are eager to think of our nation as supremely civilized  
even in warfare; the conceits of noble self-restraint have been  
trumpeted by many a president even while the Pentagon's carnage  
apparatus kept spinning into overdrive. "Limited war is not nicer or  
kinder or more just than all-out war, as its proponents would have  
it," Tuchman notes. "It kills with the same finality."

For a president, with so much military power under his command,  
frustrations call for more of the same. The seductive allure of  
counterinsurgency is apt to heighten the appeal of "warnography" for  
the commander in chief; whatever the earlier resolve to maintain  
restraint, the ineffectiveness of more violence invites still more --  
in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

"The American mentality counted on superior might," Tuchman commented,  
"but a tank cannot disperse wasps." In Vietnam, the independent  
journalist Michael Herr wrote, the U.S. military's violent capacities  
were awesome: "Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do  
everything but stop."

And that is true, routinely, of a war-making administration.

The grim and ultimately unhinged process that Barbara Tuchman charts  
is in evidence with President Obama and his approach to the Afghan  
war: "In its first stage, mental standstill fixes the principles and  
boundaries governing a political problem. In the second stage, when  
dissonances and failing function begin to appear, the initial  
principles rigidify. This is the period when, if wisdom were  
operative, re-examination and re-thinking and a change of course are  
possible, but they are rare as rubies in a backyard. Rigidifying leads  
to increase of investment and the need to protect egos; policy founded  
upon error multiplies, never retreats. The greater the investment and  
the more involved in it the sponsor's ego, the more unacceptable is  
disengagement."

A week ago, one out of seven members of the House of Representatives  
voted against a supplemental appropriations bill providing $81.3  
billion to the Pentagon, mainly for warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan.  
An opponent of the funding, Congressman John Conyers, pointed out that  
"the president has not challenged our most pervasive and dangerous  
national hubris: the foolhardy belief that we can erect the  
foundations of civil society through the judicious use of our many  
high-tech instruments of violence."

Conyers continued: "That belief, promoted by the previous  
administration in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11,  
assumes that the United States possesses the capacity and also has a  
duty to determine the fate of nations in the greater Middle East.

"I oppose this supplemental war funding bill because I believe that we  
are not bound by such a duty. In fact, I believe the policies of  
empire are counterproductive in our struggle against the forces of  
radical religious extremism. For example, U.S. strikes from unmanned  
Predator Drones and other aircraft produced 64 percent of all civilian  
deaths caused by the U.S., NATO and Afghan forces in 2008. Just this  
week, U.S. air strikes took another 100 lives, according to Afghan  
officials on the ground. If it is our goal to strengthen the average  
Afghan or Pakistani citizen and to weaken the radicals that threaten  
stability in the region, bombing villages is clearly  
counterproductive. For every family broken apart by an incident of  
‘collateral damage,' seeds of hate and enmity are sown against our  
nation. . . .

"Should we support this measure, we risk dooming our nation to a fate  
similar to Sisyphus and his boulder: to being trapped in a stalemate  
of unending frustration and misery, as our mistakes inevitably lead us  
to the same failed outcomes. Let us step back; let us remember the  
mistakes and heartbreak of our recent misadventures in the streets of  
Fallujah and Baghdad. If we honor the ties that bind us to one  
another, we cannot in good faith send our fellow citizens on this  
errand of folly. It is still not too late to turn away from this path."

Norman Solomon is a journalist, historian, and progressive activist.  
His book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us  
to Death" has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name.  
His most recent book is "Made Love, Got War." He is a national co- 
chair of the Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign. In California, he is co- 
chair of the Commission on a Green New Deal for the North Bay;www.GreenNewDeal.info 
.
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