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B Y

Who Lost Iraq?


That depends on whet her you ever t hought i t coul d be won.
AARON DAVI D MI L L ER
A
mericans love keeping score. We love lists, ranking presidents, and Top 10s in
just about every category. And we particularly love trying to gure out who
won and lost things.
I n foreign policy, this has devolved into by now the well-established "Who Lost
What" game. And we've played it now for over half a century. Take your pick: who
lost China, Vietnam, Egypt, Ukraine, Syria, the war on terror, and now I raq. Part of
this process, of course, is that we love beating up whomever we peg responsible for
putting up an L rather than a W -- Democrats, Republicans, even ourselves.
Why ourselves? Because at the heart of the Who Lost What game is the elusive
notion that these prizes were ours to "win" in the rst place. That's not to say what
America does (or doesn't do) is irrelevant to determining how we fare in the world,
or that we haven't made mistakes that have made matters worse.
But when it comes to inuencing countries, small tribes or big powers, it's always a
matter of degree. And this is most certainly the case when we're trying to
reconstruct a country, build a nation, or assume responsibility for ending sectarian,
religious, and ethnic tensions in societies that lack enlightened leadership and
legitimate institutions -- especially when we don't have the power, capacity, and
partners to do it. And yet, faced with these challenges, we all too often assume a
power and capacity -- driven usually by arrogance and ignorance -- that somehow
we can bend the world or the forces of history to our will. This isn't a defense of the
Obama administration's risk-aversion as much as it is a defense of common sense
and reality.
That said, the who lost -- or perhaps more precisely the who's losing -- Iraq debate
is no academic matter.
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The president may be getting ready to blow a whole lot of stu up on the ground in
that country. And he's being encouraged by a lot of people who are trying to guilt
him into doing so to compensate, presumably, for what we failed to do before. But
while Obama's besieged with calls for airstrikes and T-LAMs to break the back of
the I SI S siege, he should remind himself of two things. He didn't lose I raq because
it has never been ours to win. And he can't win it now. Here's why.
I raq Was Unwinnable
The Bush 43 vision for the country -- free, secure, violence-free, and stable with
Shiites, Kurds, and Sunnis all getting along in a contentious yet real democracy --
was always a fantasy. I t denied what Iraq was and where it was. We can heap as
much blame on the Obama administration as we want. And they may well deserve
a fair share of it for not trying hard enough to secure an agreement that would have
allowed a residual U.S. presence and which might have helped stabilize things. But
it doesn't change the reality that demography and geography made almost
impossible the prospects of an I raq made in America and fashioned with a
Hollywood happy ending.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a profound blunder that would set into motion a
series of events that contained much of the dysfunction that we see in I raq today,
including the unintended rise of al Qaeda in I raq. When you invade a country in
the heart of Arabdom with insucient forces, unclear objectives, and a woeful
misunderstanding of that nation's politics, you aren't o to a good start.
The I raq invasion destroyed the country's institutions; triggered a major shift in
the balance of power in favor of the Shiites; alienated the Sunnis and made them
vulnerable to jihadi persuasions (even with the success of the 2007 surge); and
enhanced Iran's role and inuence. It also left a ton of unnished business that the
United States tried its best to take care over the next eight years.
But so much of that -- creating a legitimate and sustainable contract between the
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governed and those who govern; countering Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's
sectarian agenda; nding an equitable share for the Sunnis; getting a newly
self-condent and liberated Kurdish community integrated in the new Iraq; and
checking Iran's inuence -- was simply beyond America's capacity. We didn't sign
up for nation-building, kept denying that's what we
wanted to do, and in the end stopped trying. And it
was easy to see why.
We didn't sign up
for nation-building,
kept denying that's
what we wanted to
do, and in the end
stopped trying.
I raq in 2003, 2011, and today is a bridge too far. I t was
never going to be post-1945 Europe or J apan. It
wasn't even the Balkans. Consider the fact that we
occupied J apan between 1945 and 1952 -- a
militaristic nation, some of whose soldiers refused to surrender until the 1970s --
and not a single American was killed in a hostile action by J apanese during that
entire period. I n I raq, we had no entrance strategy and no exit strategy either. The
foundation was rotten before we arrived. And despite a good faith eort, the U.S.
reconstruction job left a foundation somewhat improved but still fundamentally
unsound.
Blame Maliki rst
America's trillion-dollar social science experiment -- to build a new I raqi state on
the ruins of the old one -- failed only partly because of what we did or didn't do.
The main problem was the playing eld itself: Iraq. The most central actor in the
current mess isn't Barack Obama or even George W. Bush, but Nouri al-Maliki, a
diehard Shiite triumphalist whose vision of the new I raq had little to do with a
more broadminded future and everything to do with taking care of business related
to the past -- settling scores and gaining power. And that meant pursuing a
sectarian agenda at the expense of what we might have considered a national one.
The United States may have helped moderate Maliki's worst impulses while troops
were there in force, but how long were we reasonably expected to stay in order to
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continue to baby sit him -- ve, 10 years?
Leaders are driven by who they are and where they are. And Maliki is a Shiite
looking to right old wrongs. But now, extremist Sunni groups are determined to
right Maliki's new wrongs. Meanwhile, the Kurds understandably are determined
to ensure their interests are protected even at the expense of the I raqi state. And
all of them operate in a neighborhood where I ran -- whose interests in I raq are not
ours over the long-term -- plays a critical role. These forces of geography, history,
and sectarian identity were always going to be more powerful and enduring than
American civic lessons or nancial and political support.
Syria: America's fault too?
I f only Obama acted in 2011 to arm the moderate opposition and in 2012 to enforce
his redline on chemical weapons, everything would have been dierent. The
jihadists would have been contained, I SI S relegated to the margins, and maybe
even Assad would have been shot crawling out of a drainage pipe (or at minimum,
ed the country, or cried "uncle"). What's happening in Syria and now Iraq is a
direct result of President Obama's refusal and failure to act in a timely and eective
manner and his abdication of moral and humanitarian responsibility to boot.
I f only Cleopatra's nose would have been shorter, Pascal famously argued in his
Penses, the world would have been a dierent place. Maybe. I get the criticism.
But the upbeat notions of how the United States might have inuenced the
situation in Syria sound pretty similar to those that still linger I raq, don't they?
There are no rewind buttons on history, no way to disprove counterfactuals and
speculation about alternative realities. But it's a real stretch to imagine that
anything this risk-adverse administration would have been prepared to do in 2011
or 2012 would have fundamentally changed the arc of either conict. Indeed, to do
that, the Obama administration would have had to become, well... the un-Obama
administration, committing to a serious military and political strategy that would
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have been sustained for months, even years, though probably not including boots
on the ground. I'm not sure any administration -- a Mitt Romney or Hillary Clinton
presidency -- in the wake of years of eort in Afghanistan and Iraq would have
been willing to do that either. And let's not forget that this is something that
Congress would have been unwilling to endorse.
Of course, nature then took its course: rst, the Syrian civil war became a natural
breeding ground for I SI S; second, I raq was a ripe host for the spread of the
contagion across the border. Brookings's Bruce Riedel, no sentimentalist on these
matters, recently argued that the Bush surge could not have destroyed Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi's empire; nor would have a U.S. residual force. "Only sustained good and
smart governance could kill it, and that was something post-Saddam Hussein I raq
could not produce, with or without the United States," writes Riedel.
Obama didn't create the environment for I SI S's recent rampages in I raq, the Iraqis
did. That hundreds -- perhaps a few thousand armed men -- could subdue a city of
1.7 million people is a stunning testament to just how empty a shell the I raqi state
really is, to how Maliki coup-proofed the army at the expense of its eectiveness,
and to the reality that Sunnis and Kurds weren't going to sacrice much to keep
Maliki's Iraq aoat.
This administration owes the foreign policy piper plenty, for many things. And yes,
maybe Obama's rush for the exits in 2011 accelerated the downward arc of events.
But the primary responsibility for the current mess lies elsewhere: with a previous
administration that badly and tragically overreached in an eort to create a new
I raq; an I raqi government and sectarian political system far more committed to
getting even with other sectarian groups at the expense of the nation state; and
neighbors determined to ensure their own interests take precedence over I raq's.
Do what you can, Mr. President, to break the momentum of the I SI S attacks; press
Maliki to be a more inclusive leader; and up the support for Syria's opposition -- as
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you promised to do. But don't let anyone guilt or shame you into thinking you can
save, win, or redeem these sad and forlorn Arab lands. I raq was always a trap for
America. I t remains so to this day.
STR/AFP/Getty I mages
B Y
The U.S.-Led International Order
Is Dead
Long l ive a new era of Am erica' s halt i ng i nvol vem ent i n a world not of it s own m ak i ng.
EMI L E SI MPSON
A
s I SI S forces sweep through Sunni I raq, whether or not the United States will
help Baghdad to bring back its provinces has overtaken "bring back our girls"
in Nigeria as the central public concern of U.S. foreign policy.
The contrast matters because it marks not the end, but potentially the start, of an
era of American exceptionalism.
The masterful performance through which Michelle Obama galvanized global
opinion on the Nigerian schoolgirls might have been seen at the time, only a
month ago, as an armation of a U.S. belief in its global destiny: That the
schoolgirls really were, for the rst lady, and for that intangible sense of U.S.
mission and responsibility to the rest of the world, "ours."
From the end of World War II , the world's destiny has
been America's destiny. Although the U.S.
market-based economic model has been imitated
globally more than its democratic political
institutions, the basic structures of international
order have been underpinned by America's
economic, military, and cultural inuence. From
1945, to subscribe to the idea of the West, or at least to the economic and cultural
From the end of
World War II, the
world's destiny has
been America's
destiny.
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aspects of that contested concept, has been to subscribe to a U.S.-led international
order. That has been the case for better and for worse, as we are respectively
reminded, on the one hand, by the U.S. victory in the Cold War, and on the other by
the near collapse of the U.S.-centered international nancial system in 2008.
The Western world order is no longer a post-1945 platitude, but a distinctly fragile
proposition, the reality of which people across the world need actively to be
persuaded of to believe in, as President Barack Obama attempted to do in his
recent foreign-policy speech at West Point.
Supercially, the president appeared to amplify the rst lady's message of
America's global responsibilities: America was the "indispensable nation," so when
"schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria... it is America that the world looks to for
help."
But the underlying eect of the president's speech was to bookmark the end of an
era of American intervention; it closed the chapter starting from 2001, and perhaps
even the volume from 1945.
"Bring back our girls" may have inoculated the United States against claims that it
was not upholding the global rights of young women to an education, and
implicitly shifted the burden of proving whose world order gave the better deal to
young women across to Boko Haram -- which threatened to sell the girls into
slavery -- and I slamic jihadists worldwide. The Twitter campaign isolated a
clear-cut case of right and wrong, and was heard across the world, loud and clear.
But sometimes silence speaks louder than words. The world is virtually silent
about the genocide going on this very day in the Central African Republic (CAR).
There is no global Twitter campaign about schoolgirls there. They aren't ours.
As if to amplify the silent point in the West Point speech that an era of U.S.
intervention is eectively over, CAR even dropped out of the rhetorical
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"Today, according to self-described realists, conicts in Syria or Ukraine or the
Central African Republic are not ours to solve. And not surprisingly, after costly
wars and continuing challenges here at home, that view is shared by many
Americans.
A dierent view from interventionists from the left and right says that we ignore
these conicts at our own peril; that America's willingness to apply force around
the world is the ultimate safeguard against chaos, and America's failure to act in
the face of Syrian brutality or Russian provocations not only violates our
conscience, but invites escalating aggression in the future."
consciousness of the speech itself from one paragraph to the next:
I f the responsibility to protect 276 abducted schoolgirls is alive and well, what's
clear from Syria to the CAR is that the "responsibility to protect" whole populations
as a doctrine of international policy is dead in the water; it's the language of the
last era, and to suggest otherwise in the face of one of the biggest humanitarian
catastrophes in history in Syria is surely untenable.
ISIS in Iraq is in a completely dierent league of complexity and geopolitical
signicance than the Nigerian schoolgirls. Given that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki is most to blame for the chaos, having systematically marginalized the
Sunni population since 2010, should Washington back Baghdad at all? Given the
risk of making an enemy of all of I raq's Sunnis, whose reconciliation with U.S.
forces and Baghdad was the prime achievement of the 2008 surge, should the
United States strike I SI S? Given that Maliki has shown no competence to be able to
retake the Sunni provinces, militarily or politically, if the United States does
engage in limited strikes, given the risk of being drawn into an open-ended
commitment to back up Baghdad, where does that eort end? Should the United
States try to keep I raq together at all, or is this the moment to cut losses and avoid
being drawn into a quagmire of sectarian violence, and see Iraq split up?
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And how should Washington understand I SI S: Should it accept Maliki's
self-interested argument that they are the same al Qaeda "terrorists" of 9/11, that
this is the same ght against common enemies? Or should the United States
refrain from grouping together all jihadists as "the terrorists," thus exploiting the
various groups' principal vulnerability -- that they ght endlessly with each other,
as ISIS's break with al Qaeda testies? If it's the latter, then ISIS is not part of the
war the Obama administration refuses to call the war on terror -- despite still
relying on the 2001 post-9/11 Congressional Authorization to Use Military Force
(AUMF). And if the 2001 AUMF is not going to be used to ght ISIS, is the
administration going to rely on the 2003 I raq War AUMF, and thus re-open the
war? Or will the White House stand back while I SI S takes control of the Sunni
provinces?
I t is worth remembering in all this that, barely a month ago, resolving the kidnap
of the Nigerian schoolgirls was "one of the highest priorities of the U.S.
Government," according to the U.S. State Department.
I n the context of far more serious and more morally complicated contemporary
security problems today, it still bears looking at the xation on the Nigerian
schoolgirls last month. This was hardly an armation of international ambition so
much as an example of a relatively small and morally clear-cut case that marked
the limits of U.S. interventionism in a new era. The reticence to be drawn beyond
those limits is clear from the Obama administration's agony over whether or not to
intervene in I raq.
The transition from one era to the next marked by the West Point speech could not
be better captured than by the now-anachronistic competition among
commentators to be the most outraged about why the United States had taken so
long to declare Boko Haram a terrorist group, or the delay to put pressure on the
Nigerian government to bring back our girls. I f there is one lesson from the
post-2001 wars, it's that perhaps we should not rush in to complex conicts that
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very quickly move away from being clear-cut cases of right and wrong, to
entanglement in intractable age-old tribal ghts, with no clear boundary between
enemy and civilian.
The anachronism of the commentators' outrage at the delay in intervention in
Nigeria -- the knee-jerk desire to intervene everywhere and ght every jihadist
under the sun -- was nonetheless echoed in parts of the president's speech. The
speech worked where it looked forward, and set out the new and critical
distinction between the potentially unilateral use of force "when our core interests
demand it," but oered a higher bar for using force in relation to broader issues of
"global concern that do not pose a direct threat to the United States." The speech
failed where it blurred this new and important distinction by rehearsing the
language and motifs of the last era, motifs that now sounded tired, and out of tune
with U.S. public opinion.
We heard that "America's support for democracy and human rights goes beyond
idealism -- it is a matter of national security," because "democracies are our closest
friends and are far less likely to go to war," and that "respect for human rights is an
antidote to instability and the grievances that fuel violence and terror." That
doesn't t with the small print: "In countries like Egypt, we acknowledge that our
relationship is anchored in security interests."
We heard that the test of any U.S. drone strike was whether "[we] create more
enemies than we take o the battleeld." But the idea of a global battleeld against
terrorist enemies is seriously out of date, at least since we worked out that the
original Taliban and Saddam Hussein actually had very little to do with al Qaeda.
I ndeed, the irrational durability of the idea of the world as a battleeld is as
anachronistic as Guantanamo Bay.
Paradoxically, the speech itself acknowledged that al Qaeda was decentralized,
with many aliates and extremists having "agendas focused in countries where
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they operate." But if that is true, why then are they the enemy of the United States?
Was the Nairobi Westgate Mall attack, mentioned as an example of a "less
defensible target," really an attack against the United States? Five U.S. citizens were
wounded, among hundreds of other nationalities. But if that is the threshold for
identifying a terrorist group as an enemy of the United States, then Obama's new
distinction is so porous as to be of little practical utility.
The vague and permissive concept of the terrorist enemy that punctuated certain
parts of the speech was contradicted by the main direction of the speech, which
was about limiting U.S. exposure to open-ended conicts, not being drawn into
other people's ghts and tribal-sectarian wars. Eras of U.S. intervention come and
go. Vietnam closed the last one, and Afghanistan will close this one. There will be
new eras of U.S. intervention in future, and the closing of the 2001 chapter is not
remarkable in the long view, as permanent war is plainly unsustainable. The
United States remains the global military superpower, and claims of the end of its
military dominance are exaggerated.
I f that were the case, why would the speech potentially be closing not just a
chapter from 2001 but a volume from 1945?
Consider for a moment President Harry Truman's inaugural address on J an. 20,
1949. As cultural historian Nick Cullather has written, by re-framing what would
previously have been perceived as colonial intrusion as "development," Truman, as
Fortune magazine put it at the time, "hit the jackpot of the world's political
emotions." Cullather notes how leaders of then newly independent states, such as
Zahir Shah of Afghanistan and J awaharlal Nehru of I ndia, accepted these terms,
merging their own governmental mandates into the stream of nations moving
toward modernity. Development was not only the best, but the only course. As
Nehru stated, "There is only one-way trac in time."
President Obama mentioned the importance of development in the speech, and
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how American assistance aimed, for example, "to double access to electricity in
sub-Saharan Africa so people are connected to the promise of the global economy."
A noble thought perhaps, but this is a world away from Truman. The developing
states of 1949 are now powerful economies, and they hardly see themselves as
little Americas. Westernization in 1949 meant
Americanization; now it doesn't.
Westernization in
1949 meant
Americanization;
now it doesn't.
The very success of the United States in the Cold War
and in the brief period of post-1991 global hegemony
was to mold the world in its own image, with the
eect that Westernization -- at least its economic and cultural dimension -- is now
so universally accepted in varying forms that it changes the meaning of what being
Westernized is: Even I SI S probably uses iPhones.
I n this new context, despite sympathy with the humanitarian ambition of bringing
electricity to sub-Saharan Africa, the very discourse of international development
as something Western states engage in seems at best dated: a vexed idea drifting
away from its post-colonial moorings towards the post-post-colonial waters in
which it has no clear anchor points.
President Obama said that America remains the "indispensable nation." He's right;
it is. But he was wrong to use the examples of "when a typhoon hits the
Philippines, or schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men occupy a
building in Ukraine, it is America that the world looks to for help." That is to attach
the meaning of America's role in this new era to being a rst responder for a
fragmented set of events that don't t into a clear narrative. Moreover, most of the
world does not want America as a bull in a china shop, rushing to create new
terrorist enemies or to chase J oseph Kony around jungles, changing foreign policy
in accordance with the latest YouTube or Twitter sensations.
America does not need to seek sensation, precisely because it remains the world's
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great democratic nation.
The rest of the liberal world's relationship with America is not one of love but one
of faith. America is the indispensable nation not just to its allies, but to individuals
and families around the world who rely on it to uphold some kind of liberal world
order: the educated Afghanis whose families will be killed if the Taliban take
control again; the Saudi woman who might hope to drive a car one day; the
students in Tehran arrested just for singing "Happy;" or any number of others,
from Kiev, through Cairo, to Baghdad.
This faith is not the demonstrative faith of the zealot, but the quiet contemplation
that, despite America's moral failures -- be it torture or mass surveillance --
recognizes that the United States remains the great liberal power. There are still a
huge number of people anxious not to see on their horizon a U.S. carrier group
replaced with a Chinese one.
Unlike the sensational reaction desired from rescuing schoolgirls, or capturing
Kony, the United States can't expect any thanks or applause for its routine foreign
policy from its faithful across the globe. To be eective, Washington needs to be
tough and sometimes make ugly compromises, like backing a corrupt regime in
Kabul to stop a worse fate for the Afghan people, or the equivalent in I raq now. No
one is going to cheer that, even if they agree with it.
What is remarkable is not the enduring faith of those around the world in the
United States, but the enduring faith of the U.S. public in a U.S.-led international
order that is massively expensive and for which they receive little thanks.
The idea of a special global destiny is a fragile idea. Britain used to be the
indispensable nation; that ended a long time ago. When Britain announced its
famous decision to withdraw "East of Suez" in 1967, Dean Rusk, then U.S. secretary
of state, said to a colleague how he could not believe that the British viewed that
"free aspirin and false teeth were more important than Britain's role in the world."
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That shock would be banal today; the welfare state has permanently replaced the
warfare state. The idea of Britain's global destiny, within a generation, has become
ancient history.
But the United States still believes in its unique global destiny: "I believe in
American exceptionalism with every ber of my being," the president said. The
truth, however, is that America has not been the exceptional nation since 1945
because of the extent to which the rest of the world has copied it.
America has lost control of what is means to be Western, as a result of its very
success in spreading the idea across the globe since 1945. Perhaps the new era that
we are entering will see America attempting to re-claim the legacy of the West as
its own, for example by working with, not against, the international institutions it
set up after World War I I . On the other hand, we might see America assume a more
genuinely exceptional path, allowing itself to see a dierent destiny to that of the
West, or perhaps more accurately, Western-ism.
The president's speech undoubtedly marked the end of one era and the rst steps
into another. Whether and how Baghdad gets its provinces back will be a more
accurate signpost of the direction of American exceptionalism in the twenty-rst
century than the sorry fate of the Nigerian schoolgirls.
Andrew Burton/Getty I mages
B Y
When All You've Got Is an F-16
Why is bom bi ng t he only opt ion i n Washingt on' s poli cy t oolk i t ?
MI CAH ZEN KO
J
ust two days after the I slamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (I SI S) captured territory
and military installations in I raq, Washington foreign policy commentators
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"I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a
small boy a hammer, and he will nd that everything he encounters needs
pounding. I t comes as no particular surprise to discover that a scientist formulates
problems in a way which requires for their solution just those techniques in which
he himself is especially skilled."
and policymakers are considering options for responding. And unsurprisingly, the
scope of the debate about what to do in Iraq has broken down into bombing, or not
bombing. Sen. Lindsey Graham declared on the Senate oor, "I think American
airpower is the only hope to change the battleeld equation in Iraq." President
Barack Obama later said "I don't rule out anything," to which White House Press
Secretary J ay Carney later explained, "We are not contemplating ground troops.
The president was answering a question specically about air strikes." The debate
shrinks immediately around whether and how to use the tactic of force.
Though it is commonly referred to as Maslow's Hammer, the concept of privileging
the tool at hand, irrespective of its appropriate t to solving a problem, originated
with the philosopher Abraham Kaplan. I n his 1964 classic, The Conduct of I nquiry:
Methodology for Behavioral Science, Kaplan discussed the issue of the abstract
nature of techniques, particularly the scientic method, used by scientists,
whether conducting surveys, doing statistical analysis, or deciphering foreign
language inscriptions. He worried that, since "the pressures of fad and fashion are
as great in science, for all its logic, as in other areas of culture," certain preferred
techniques in which a scientist nds him or herself particularly skilled could
predominate over all others. As Kaplan described this phenomenon:
Kaplan's fuller context for the hammer attributed to Abraham Maslow -- who just
re-packaged the idea two years later -- was worth bearing in mind during President
Barack Obama's speech last week, which was primarily a defense for the contexts
in which he applies military force. As Obama noted, "J ust because we have the best
hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail." Though Obama's speech
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provided no additional information about his thinking, it was useful because it
reinforced the singular conception of what foreign policy entails for many in
Washington: military force.
Somewhere along the line, in many inuential schools of punditry and analysis,
the totality of U.S. foreign policy has been reduced to whether presidents bomb
some country or adversary, and the alleged impressions that this decision leaves
on other countries. The binary construction employed by these pundits and
analysts is that a president either demonstrates strength and engagement with air
strikes, or fecklessness and detachment in their absence.
Today, the U.S. military has over 400,000 troops stationed or deployed in 182
countries around the world -- primarily conducting force protection, training, or
security cooperation missions, but these troops do not factor into this equation.
The binary choice is either bombs, or isolationism. Of course, the activities of the
State Department, U.S. Agency for I nternational Development, Treasury
Department, or any other government agency and entity working abroad are
wholly disregarded or given short shrift at promoting and implementing foreign
policy objectives.
This vast overestimation of what military force can plausibly achieve runs totally
contrary to what the past dozen years have demonstrated, at tremendous cost and
sacrice. The interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya show that the use of
force as the primary instrument did not sustainably secure U.S. interests in those
countries over time, nor assure U.S. allies of its mutual defense obligations, and
had no latent capacity to deter potential adversaries. Nobody on earth today is
scared of America because it put 170,000 troops in Iraq, 100,000 in Afghanistan,
and led a seven-month air campaign over Libya. I f anything, the resulting
instability or outright chaos led most to reach the opposite conclusion. Yet,
somehow pundits continue to think and argue that sending troops or bombs into
another country today will achieve this in the future. Op-ed militarism never dies,
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even as its underlying logic repeatedly does.
While "the pressures of fad and fashion" apparently compel pundits and analysts
to demand the use of force to address unstable or threatening situations, it is rarely
accompanied with a denable or measurable military or political objective that it is
intended to achieve within the targeted country. You rarely hear such pundits state
explicitly what exactly military force is supposed to accomplish. Rather, it is a
mindless demand to apply some military tactic to elicit some feeling -- presumably
fear and awe -- among third-party witnesses. The most remarkable characteristic
of this school of thought is that those within it also claim to be transcontinental
mind-readers capable of knowing what specic U.S. instrument of power will
change the calculus of potential adversaries. Unsurprisingly, it is always military
force.
Though never referred to by proponents of militarism, there is an actual joint
planning process and universal task list that the military uses when planning and
conducting operations. These documents provide the common reference points
and actions that all aected service members are supposed to know. Nowhere in
U.S. military planning documents can you nd missions like "demonstrating
resolve," "exhibiting strength," or "retaining superpower status." I t is impossible to
make other countries think of you what you would like. Their impressions are
highly situationally dependent, and the result of the power and interests that
surround a discrete country or issue. Their opinions of the United States are not
merely based upon whether the president decided to bomb someone or not.
I t is unfortunate that military force -- the most lethal, destructive, and
consequential foreign action that the United States can undertake -- suers from
such a dismal and imprecise discourse. I t contains meaningless and empty
metaphors characterized by crude gardening references, all options forever "on the
table," "setting the bar" higher, and Obama vowing to "take very tough actions."
Military force is about blowing things up and killing people. Trying to ascribe
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virtues to its nature, or magical powers to its eects, is misleading and imprudent.
Much of Washington does not see force as the solution to the world's problems
because the U.S. military has the best hammer, but rather because of the inuence
and supremacy that it falsely ascribes to it.
MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty I mages
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