What’s the
value of an American life in the age of Donald Trump? If you were judging by
the death of Nawres Hamid, an Iraqi-American contractor
killed in late December after an American base in Iraq was mortared by a Shiite
militia believed to have ties to Iran, the answer would be obvious: enough to
risk war. After all, the president cited Hamid’s death
in going after that militia and then drone-assassinating Iranian
Major General Qassem Suleimani. In response to the mortar attack, U.S. air
strikes in Iraq and Syria killed at least 25Iraqi militia
fighters and then, as January began, that drone strike near Baghdad
International Airport took out a figure who was often considered the number-two
man in Iran, as well as its possible future leader. In addition, it killed an Iraqi
militia commander and eight otherpeople.
So you might say that the
president considers any American death under such circumstances worth not just
35 Iraqis and Iranians, but the possibility of adding in a significant way to
America’s forever wars (that he’s long denounced). Of course,
you would have to reach a different conclusion if you considered the deaths in early
January of an American soldier and two American contractors at an airport in
Kenya after an attack by the Somali terror group al-Shabaab. In that case,
there was no obvious response at all, not even a comment from the president.
And the same would be true of the two dead and two
wounded U.S. soldiers whose vehicle recently ran over a roadside bomb in
southern Afghanistan (deaths immediately claimed by the Taliban). Again,
neither a comment nor a response from you-know-who.
In other words, as TomDispatch regular and
retired U.S. Army Major Danny Sjursen points out today, who can be surprised
that, in the age of Trump, this country’s forever wars are also a chaos
machine? If you’re looking at the non-American dead, of course, that’s been so
since the beginning. After all, the U.S. military has taken out one
wedding after another across the Greater Middle East since it invaded
Afghanistan in 2001 and it’s counted for nothing, mattered not at all. And the
slaughter of civilians never ends. Only recently, for instance, in an attack in
Afghanistan that killed a Taliban commander and some of the militants under his
command, U.S. air strikes also reportedly killed at least 60 civilians, including
women and children. And in the Trump era, although we know that civilian casualties have
been rising in
Washington's ever-spreading war zones, a penumbra of secrecy has fallen over
such deaths. American air strikes against al-Shabaab in Somalia, for
instance, rose dramatically in
2019, but we have almost no idea how many civilians died in the process. (Rest
assured that they did, though.)
Now, take a moment, with Sjursen,
to consider just what it’s meant for a “true stable genius” to
inherit such an unstable killing machine. Tom
The
American Chaos Machine
U.S. Foreign Policy Goes Off the Rails
By Danny Sjursen
U.S. Foreign Policy Goes Off the Rails
By Danny Sjursen
In March
1906, on the heels of the U.S. Army’s massacre of some
1,000 men, women, and children in the crater of a volcano in the
American-occupied Philippines, humorist Mark Twain took his criticism public. A
long-time anti-imperialist, he flippantly suggested that Old Glory should be
redesigned “with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the
skull and cross-bones.”
I got to
thinking about that recently, five years after I became an antiwar dissenter
(while still a major in the U.S. Army), and in the wake of another near-war,
this time with Iran. I was struck yet again by the way every single U.S.
military intervention in the Greater Middle East since 9/11 has backfiredin wildly
counterproductive ways, destabilizing a vast expanse of the planet stretching
from West Africa to South Asia.
Chaos, it
seems, is now Washington’s stock-in-trade. Perhaps, then, it’s time to
resurrect Twain’s comment -- only today maybe those stars on our flag should be
replaced with the universal symbol for chaos.
After all, our present administration, however unhinged,
hardly launched this madness. President Trump’s rash, risky, and
repugnant decision to
assassinate Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani on the sovereign soil of
Iraq was only the latest version of what has proven to be a pervasive state of
affairs. Still, that and Trump’s other recent escalations in the
region do illustrate an American chaos machine that’s gone off the rails. And
the very manner -- I’m loathe to call it a “process” -- by which it’s happened
just demonstrates the way this president has taken American chaos to its dark
but logical conclusion.
The
Goldilocks Method
Any
military officer worth his salt knows full well the importance of understanding
the basic psychology of your commander. President George W. Bush liked to call himself “the
decider,” an apt term for any commander. Senior leaders don’t, as a rule,
actually do that much work in the traditional sense. Rather, they hobnob with
superiors, buck up unit morale, evaluate and mentor subordinates, and above all
make key decisions. It’s the operations staff officers who analyze problems,
present options, and do the detailed planning once the boss blesses or signs
off on a particular course of action.
Though
they may toil thanklessly in the shadows, however, those staffers possess
immense power to potentially circumscribe the range of available options and so
influence the future mission. In other words, to be a deft operations officer,
you need to know your commander’s mind, be able translate his sparse guidance,
and frame his eventual choice in such a manner that the boss leaves a “decision
briefing” convinced the plan was his own. Believe me, this is the actual
language military lifers use to describe the tortured process of
decision-making.
In 2009,
as a young captain, fresh out of Baghdad, Iraq, I spent two unfulfilling, if
instructive, years enmeshed in exactly this sort of planning system. As a
battalion-level planner, then assistant, and finally a primary operations
officer, I observed this cycle countless times. So allow me to take you “under
the hood” for some inside baseball. I -- and just about every new staff officer
-- was taught to always provide the boss with three plans, but to suss out
ahead of time which one he’d choose (and, above all, which one you wanted him
to choose).
Confident
in your ability to frame his choices persuasively, you’d often even direct your
staffers to begin writing up the full operations order before the
boss’s briefing took place. The key to success was what some labeled the Goldilocks method.
You’d always present your commander with a too-cautious option, a too-risky
option, and a “just-right” course of action. It nearly always worked.
I did this
under the command of two very different lieutenant colonels. The first was
rational, ethical, empathetic, and tactically competent. He made mission
planning easy on his staff. He knew the game as well as we did and only
pretended to be fooled. He built relationships with his senior operations
officers over the course of months, thereby revealing his preferred methods,
tactical predilections, and even personal learning style. Then he’d give just
enough initial guidance -- far more than most commanders -- to set his staff
going in a reasonably focused fashion.
Unfortunately,
that consummate professional moved on to bigger things and his replacement was
a sociopath who gave
vague, often conflicting guidance, oozed insecurity in briefings, and had a
disturbing penchant for choosing the most radical (read: foolhardy) option
around. Sound familiar? It should!
Still,
military professionals are coached to adapt and improvise and so we did. As a
staff we worked to limit his range of options by reverse-ordering
the choices we presented him or even lying about nonexistent logistical
limitations to stop him from doing the truly horrific.
And as
recent events remind us, such exercises play out remarkably similarly, no
matter whether you’re dealing at a battalion level (perhaps 400 to 700 troops)
or that of this country’s commander-in-chief (more than two millionuniformed
service personnel). The behind-the-scenes war-gaming of the boss, the entire
calculus, remains the same, whether the options are ultimately presented by a
captain (me, then) or -- as in the recent decision to assassinateIranian Major
General Suleimani -- Mark Milley, the four-star general at the helm of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Soon after
President Trump’s egregious, a-strategic,
dubiously legal, unilateral execution of a uniformed leader of a sovereign
country, reportssurfaced
describing his convoluted decision-making process. Perhaps predictably, it
appears that The Donald took his military staff by surprise and chose the most extreme measure
they presented him with -- assassinating a foreign military figure. Honestly,
that this president did so should have surprised no one. That, according to a
report in the New York Times, his generals were indeed surprised
strikes me as basic dereliction of duty (especially given that, seven months
earlier, Trump had essentially given the green light to
such a future assassination -- the deepest desire, by the way, of both his
secretary of state and his then-national security advisor, John Bolton).
At this
point in their careers, having played out such processes at every possible
level for at least 30 years, his generals ought to have known their boss
better, toiled valiantly to temper his worst instincts, assumed he might choose
the most extreme measure offered and, when he did so, publicly resigned before
potentially relegating their soldiers to a hopeless new conflict. That they
didn’t, particularly that the lead briefer Milley didn’t, is just further proof that, 18-plus
years after our latest round of wars began, such senior leaders lack both
competence and integrity.
Bush,
Obama, and the Chaos Machine’s Tragic Foundations
The current
commander-in-chief could never have expanded America’s
wars in the Greater Middle East (contra his campaign promises) or unilaterally drone-assassinated a
foreign leader, without the militaristic foundations laid down for him by
George W. Bush and Barack Obama. So it’s vital to review, however briefly, the
chaotic precedents to the rule of Donald Trump.
Guided by
a coterie of neoconservative zealots, Bush the Younger committed the nation to
the “original sin" of
expansive, largely unsanctioned wars as his chosen response to the 9/11
attacks. It was his team that would write the playbook on selling an
ill-advised, illegal invasion of Iraq based on bad intelligence and false pretenses.
He also escalated tensions with Iran to the brink of war by including the
Islamic Republic in an imaginary “axis of evil” (with Iraq
and North Korea) after invading first one of its neighbors, Afghanistan, and
then the other, Iraq, while imposing sanctions, which frozethe assets of Iranians allegedly
connected to that country’s nuclear program. He ushered in the use of torture,
indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, illegal
domestic mass surveillance, and
drone attacks over the sovereign airspace of other countries -- then lied about
it all. That neither Congress, nor the courts, nor his successor held him (or
anyone else) accountable for such decisions set a dangerous new standard for
foreign policy.
Barack
Obama promised “hope and change,” a refreshing (if vague) alternative to the
sins of the Bush years. The very abstraction of that slogan, however, allowed
his supporters to project their own wants, needs, and preferred policies onto
the future Obama experiment. So perhaps none of us ought to have been as
surprised as many of us were when, despite
slowly pulling troops out of Iraq, he only escalated the Afghan War, continued
the forever wars in general (even returning to Iraq in 2014), and set his own
perilous precedents along the way.
It was,
after all, Obama who, as an alternative to large-scale military occupations,
took Bush’s drone program and ran with it. He would be
the first president to truly earn the sobriquet “assassin-in-chief."
He made selecting individuals for assassination in “Terror Tuesday"
meetings at the White House banal and put his stamp of approval on the drone
campaigns across significant parts of the planet that followed -- even killing
American citizenswithout due
process. Encouraged by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he also launched a
new regime-change war in Libya, turning that land into a failed state filled
with terror groups, a decision which, he later admitted, added up to a “shit show." After
vacillating for a couple years, he also mired the U.S., however indirectly, in
the Syrian civil war, empowering Islamist
factions there and worsening that already staggering humanitarian catastrophe.
In
response to the sudden explosion of the Islamic State -- an al-Qaeda offshoot
first catalyzed by the
Bush invasion of Iraq and actually formed in an
American prison in that country -- its taking of key Iraqi
cities and smashing of the
American-trained Iraqi army, Obama loosed U.S. air power on them and sent
American troops back into that country. He also greatly expanded his
predecessor’s nascent military interventions across the African continent.
There, too, the results were largely tragic and counterproductive as ethnic
militias and Islamic terror groups have spread widely and civil warfare
has exploded.
Finally,
it was Obama who first sanctioned, supported, and enabled the Saudi terror
bombing of Yemen, which, even now, remains perhaps the world’s worst humanitarian
disaster. So it is that, from Mali to Libya, Syria to Afghanistan, every one of
Bush’s and Obama’s military forays has sowed further chaos, startling body counts, and increased
rates of terrorism. It’s those policies, those results, and the military
toolbox that went with them that Donald J. Trump inherited in January 2017.
The
Trumpian Perfect Storm
During the
climax to the American phase of a 30-year war in Vietnam, newly elected
President Richard Nixon, a well-established Republican cold warrior, developed
what he dubbed the “madman theory" for
bringing the intractable U.S. intervention there to a face-saving conclusion.
The president’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, recalled Nixon telling him:
“I call it
the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the
point where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to
them that, ‘for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We
can't restrain him when he's angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button’ and [North Vietnamese
leader] Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”
It didn't
work, of course. Nixon escalated and expanded the war. He briefly invaded
neighboring Cambodia and Laos, secretly (and
illegally) bombed both countries, and ramped up air strikes on North Vietnam.
Apart from slaughtering hundreds
of thousands of innocents, however, none of this had a notable effect on the
ultimate outcome. The North Vietnamese called his bluff, extending the war long
enough to force an outright American withdrawal less than four years later.
Washington lost in Southeast Asia, just as today it’s losing in the Greater
Middle East.
So it was,
with the necessary foundations of militarism and hyper-interventionism in
place, that Donald Trump entered the White House, at times seemingly intent on
testing out his own personal “fire and fury” version
of the madman theory. Indeed, his more irrational and provocative foreign
policy incitements, including pulling out of the Paris climate accords, spiking
a working nuclear deal with Iran, existentially threatening North
Korea, seizing Syrian oil
fields, sending yet more
military personnel into the Persian Gulf region, and most recently
assassinating a foreign leader seem right out of some madman instruction
manual. And just like Nixon’s stillborn escalations, Trump’s most absurd moves
also seem bound to fail.
Take the
Suleimani execution as a case in point. An outright regional war has (so far)
been avoided, thanks not to the “deal-making” skills of that self-styled “stable genius" in
the White House but to Iran’s long history of
restraint. As retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, a former top aide to
Secretary of State Colin Powell, recently put it: “The leadership
in Tehran is far more rational than the leadership in Washington.”
In fact,
Trump’s unprecedented assassination order backfired at every level. He even
managed briefly to unite a divided
Iranian nation, caused the Iraqi government to demand a full U.S.
troop withdrawal from that country, convinced Iran to end its commitment to
restrain its enrichment of uranium, and undoubtedly incentivized both Tehran
and Pyongyang not to commit to, or abide by, any future nuclear deals with
Washington.
If George
W. Bush and Barack Obama sowed the seeds of the American chaos machine, Donald
Trump represents the first true madman at the wheel of state, thanks to his
volatile temperament, profound ignorance, and crippling insecurity.
The
Rapture as Foreign Policy
All of
which raises another disturbing question: What if this administration’s
chaos-sowing proves an end in itself, one that coheres with the millenarian
fantasies of sections of the Republican Christian Right? After all, several key
figures on the Trump team -- notably Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence -- explicitly view the
Middle East as evangelical Christians. Like a disturbing 73% of evangelicals
(or 20% of the U.S.
population), Pompeo and Pence believe that
the Rapture (that is, the prophesied Christian
end of the world) is likely to unfold in this generation and that a
contemporary conflict in Israel and an impending war with
Iran might actually be trigger events ushering in just such an
apocalypse.
Donald
Trump is, by all indications, far too self-serving, self-absorbed, and cynical
to adhere to the eschatological blind-faith of the two Mikes. He clearly
believes only in Donald Trump. And yet what a terrible irony it would be if,
due to his perfect-storm disposition, he unwittingly ends up playing the role
of the very Antichrist those evangelicals believe
necessary to usher in end-times.
Given the
foundations set in place for Trump by George W. Bush and Barack Obama and his
capacity to throw caution to the wind, it’s hard to imagine a better candidate
to play that role.
Danny
Sjursen, a TomDispatch regular,
is a retired U.S. Army major and former history instructor at West Point. He
served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now lives in Lawrence, Kansas. He has
written a memoir of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers,
Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter
at @SkepticalVet and check out his
podcast “Fortress on a Hill,”
co-hosted with fellow vets Chris Henriksen and Keegan Ryan Miller.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and
join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books,
John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in
the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly
Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and
Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War,
as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American
Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John
Dower's The Violent American Century: War
and Terror Since World War II.
Copyright
2020 Danny Sjursen
