WINNING IS IMPOSSIBLE

From the Nation, Jonathan Schell, author of the definitive history of the Nixon era, Time of Illusion, on why the neo-conservative dream of American empire is simply impossible in today's world:

Too Late for Empire

Very possibly, the United States, with all its resources, would have been the sort of globe-straddling empire that Joseph McCarthy wanted it to be had it risen to pre-eminence in an earlier age. It was the peculiar trajectory of the United States, born in opposition to empire, to wind up making its own bid for empire only after the age of imperialism was over. Though it's hard to shed a tear, you might say that there was a certain unfairness in America's timing. All the ingredients of past empires were there--the wealth, the weapons, the power, hard and soft. Only the century was wrong. The United States was not, could not be and cannot now be a new Rome, much less greater than Rome, because it cannot do what Rome did. It cannot, in a postimperial age, conquer other countries and lastingly absorb them into a great empire; it cannot, in the nuclear age, not even today, fight and win wars against its chief global rivals, who still, after all, possess nuclear arsenals. Even tiny, piteous, brutalized, famine-ridden North Korea, more a cult than a country, can deter the United States with its puny putative arsenal. The United States, to be sure, is a great power by any measure, surely the world's greatest, yet that power is hemmed in by obstacles peculiar to our era. The mistake has been not so much to think that the power of the United States is greater than it is as to fail to realize that power itself, whether wielded by the United States or anyone else--if conceived in terms of military force--has been in decline. By imagining otherwise, the United States has become the fool of force--and the fool of history.

And

The pattern is not the old Roman one in which military conquest breeds arrogance and arrogance stokes ambition, which leads to usurpation at home. Rather, in the case of the United States, misunderstanding of its historical moment leads to misbegotten wars; misbegotten wars lead to military disaster; military disaster leads to domestic strife and scapegoating; domestic strife and scapegoating lead to usurpation, which triggers a constitutional crisis. Crises born of strength and success are different from crises born of failure. Fulbright warned of the corruption of imperial ambition and the arrogance of power. But we need also to speak of the corruption of imperial failure, the arrogance of anxiety.

Click here for the rest.

Like I mentioned a few days back, I've been reading Time of Illusion. The whole experience has been really weird; history really does seem to be repeating itself in many ways. There are exceptions, of course, but the central principles are essentially the same, a quagmire of an imperial war coupled with increasing levels of executive corruption in the face of popular opposition which ultimately led to a very dangerous Constitutional crisis. I'm sure that I'll be absorbing Schell's lessons for the next two or three years--a lot of his ideas are new to me and I need to fit them into what I already understand; I mean, he's forced me to look at military and political power in ways that have never occurred to me, and they don't teach this kind of thing in high school government classes.

Anyway, coming upon this new essay of his is one of the biggest coincidences of my life. It's almost like a companion piece, connecting the dots between Time of Illusion and the current corruption of the Bush administration, and here it is right after I finished the book. For instance, he ends Illusion with an analysis of American power in the nuclear age. It's mostly a rebuttal to Henry Kissinger's assertion that "limited war," that is, conventional proxy wars against Soviet client states instead of all out nuclear exchange with the USSR itself, in order to achieve "credibility," was the only way to advance US interests in the face of paralyzing fear of atomic annihilation. The faults with Kissinger's analysis are by now obvious: it's how we ended up stuck in Vietnam, and why we backed heinous military dictatorships in Central America in the 80s; generally, our proxy wars had little to do with the Cold War, and much more to do with local issues. And when it really did seem to have to do with the Soviets, in Afghanistan, we ended up funding and training the nucleus of what would eventually become Al Qaeda.

Despite the conventional wisdom, revisionist history more accurately, that these actions caused the Soviet Union to collapse, the reality is that they simply fucked up the world on a grand scale. The USSR actually fell because, you know, communism doesn't work.

But, as the essay observes, some of the principles of Schell's power analysis are still in play, despite the absence of our Cold War foe. The threat of nuclear war continues to exist, and it's potentially worse today, as first and second tier powers, scared shitless of a mighty American military machine in the hands of drunken cowboys, scramble to get the atomic weapons that have obviously cowed the US in its dealings with North Korea. As during the conflict with the Soviets, all out war with powerful nations is no longer an option. The stakes are just too damned high. Contrariwise, at the other end of the power scale, wars against weak but determined nations are also a losing proposition. Vietnam, and then later Afghanistan, showed the third world how to bring a superpower to its knees. Iraq has only driven the lesson home. In short, we now live in a world where our waging war won't really gain much for us. In fact, it's quite the reverse: when we go to war all that happens is that we lose young men and women, kill lots of civilians, and flush billions of dollars down the toilet. Oh yeah, we also piss off the rest of the civilized world.

It's not just that war is immoral, which it is. Rather, it's that war is just fucking stupid in this day and age. We can't win. Not in a big one, which would destroy the world, and not in a small one which would destroy our economy and souls. It is conceivable, of course, that in some few situations, war can successfully accomplish some concrete goals, like in the first Gulf War, or, maybe, in the Balkans conflict. But those wars had approval of virtually the entire world; they weren't imperial wars. Those two exceptions really only serve to prove the rule: diplomacy, real diplomacy, and not unilateral war with a sham "coalition," is the only option for the Global era.

Nobody, however, in either the US political class or the American corporate press, seems to understand this. Schooled by a thousand war movies, utterly in the grips of bygone myths of the glory of battle, politicians speak seriously of the "war" on terror, or of "World War III." But it's not like that at all. People are dying and shooting and wearing combat boots and fatigues, yes, but it's all ultimately a horrifying game. No good can come of it, for anybody, in this day and age. We are failing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and signs are starting to appear in Lebanon which suggest that Israel may be failing in its drive to destroy Hezbollah. If these conflicts were old school army versus army, we and Israel would have already won decisively. But this is new school.

Nobody wins.

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