Change the Way They Live

America's War for the Greater Middle EastBy Andrew BacevichRandom House, 2016“Where am I controversial? When it comes to the use of military power.”That's what Barack Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg during one of the interviews supporting “The Obama Doctrine,” a 19,000-word article published in The Atlantic last month. The President continued: “That is the source of the controversy. There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses.”Obama was speaking in general terms but he was referring to a specific incident, the moment in 2013 where he went against virtually all of his advisers and decided not to bomb Syria to punish Bashar Assad for gassing his own people. In the end, Vladimir Putin brokered an agreement which saw most of Assad's chemical weapons removed from the country. Goldberg believes (rightly, I think) that “in Obama’s mind, August 30, 2013, was his liberation day,” the day he threw away the playbook.Indeed, there's an unusual freedom to the rhetoric Obama uses here to describe his view of foreign policy. He believes America places undue emphasis on the Middle East, that Saudi Arabia is a destabilizing force in the world, that Israel's government is unwilling to make peace, and that Asia (China, particularly) is far more important to American interests than any other region, Europe included. No doubt Obama has also been freed by his lame-duck status: there are no more elections for him to win. Still, these are refreshing sentiments to hear from a powerful Washingtonian, much less the president.And yet, there's another sense in which Obama has been controversial, and reason to give more weight to the phrase “in Obama's mind” than one would place on “his liberation day.” Obama's most perceptive observers have long noted that there is a dissonance in his conduct of foreign policy. It has been clear from the beginning that he wanted to move away from the D.C. playbook—how much is impossible to know because more than any of his recent predecessors, Obama is difficult to read. He gave a speech from Cairo, admitting some of the horrors America perpetrated there during the Cold war; he pushed Netanyahu to freeze settlements and make peace; he made a deal with Iran; he urged Egypt's dictator to give in to the will of the people camped in Tahrir Square. But then he acceded to a coup overthrowing Egypt's elected government; intervened to disastrous effect in Libya; supported the catastrophic Saudi intervention in Yemen; re-engaged in Iraq; expanded the remit of the Special Forces and sent drones to haunt the skies over half a dozen nations. People find Obama controversial for these reasons, too, and they suggest that for all his misgivings and deviations, he's still following the rules laid out for him by the Washington establishment.One of America's most astute and prolific critics of Barack Obama, and of American foreign policy in general, is Andrew Bacevich. His new book, America's War for the Greater Middle East, is, as its title suggests, an effort to reframe American intervention in that region as one long, evolving conflict. The subtitle is “A Military History,” but this book is as much a history of ideas – of delusions, really – as it is a chronicle of battle. He dates the war's inception to 1980. It's a conflict with many fathers, but first among them is, of all people, Jimmy Carter.It's counter-intuitive, but Bacevich's argument is convincing if you acknowledge that 1980 marks a decisive break with America's previous policy in the region. Before that, America relied on proxies like Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Shah Pahlavi's Iran to ward off Soviet influence, maintain stability, and keep the flow of oil uninterrupted. Three events precipitated a change in thinking: the OPEC embargo in the 1970s (a response to American support for Israel), the Islamic revolution in Iran, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The first event drove home the fact that America's prosperity and power were vulnerable to the decisions of others, the second that America's allies were vulnerable too, and the third convinced the Washington establishment that the Soviets, after pacifying Afghanistan, wanted to make a play for the Middle East via a newly destabilized Iran. Carter, smarting from the humiliation of the hostage crisis in Tehran, and bending against type toward the counsel of his more hawkish advisers, decided to draw a red line. The result was the Carter Doctrine.Just the previous year, in his so-called “malaise” speech (the word in fact never passed his lips), Carter admonished Americans for worshiping “self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.” Invoking “hard work strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God,” Carter appealed to Americans to return to an older, almost Jeffersonian conception of freedom, a transformation that would begin by reducing the country's dependence on foreign oil. “Now, the America that Carter so nostalgically described never existed,” Bacevich observes. “But this myth of a people defined by faith, community, family and hard work has always exerted considerable appeal and does so even today.” The initial response was positive, but Carter, who was “insufficiently devious,” as Bacevich astutely puts it, had reduced his options by calling for wholesale change instead of assembling new policy piece by piece. Led by a jingoistic commentariat, public opinion swiftly turned against him. But Carter had already undermined himself: ten days before the speech, he signed off on the first round of aid for Afghanistan's rebels.

Instead of seeing the Soviet invasion as a rearguard action designed to stabilize a client state (which, history has made clear, it actually was), Carter's advisers believed it was the first move in a wider campaign to control the oil flowing out of the Persian Gulf. That misapprehension, combined with the loss of a pliant Iran, led Carter to declare that “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interest of the United States of America, an such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” Acting on the advice of the hawks in his administration (including a young Paul Wolfowitz, the ideological godfather of the 2003 invasion of Iraq), the dovish Carter had committed the United States to go to war for oil.This constituted “a remarkable turnabout,” Bacevich writes:

In the summer of 1979, Jimmy Carter had invited Americans to consider changing the American way of life, trading a shallow freedom for true freedom and dependence for autonomy. They had rejected the invitation. The existing American way of life remained sacrosanct. If its preservation meant fighting, Americans welcomed the fight, even without knowing what fighting might entail. So in January 1980, they embarked upon a war for oil, which was in its way a war to preserve the American way of life, but which was destined by fits and starts to become a War for the Greater Middle East. Even at the outset, no one thought that the challenges ahead would be easy. But at least they appeared straightforward and unambiguous. They would prove to be neither.

Ronald Reagan, buoyed in the polls by Carter's ostensible weakness, propounding a sunny vision of American life in studied contrast to Carter's asceticism, was next to take up the cudgel. In his eight years in office Reagan oversaw the slow militarization of American involvement in the Middle East. Carter’s Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, an underpowered and undermanned contingency force, evolved into CENTCOM, United States Central Command, a theater command which grew to encompass the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia—Bacevich’s “Greater Middle East,” to which the author would add the Muslim areas of the former Yugoslavia. (Excepting Egypt, today North Africa is part of AFRICOM, a growing command with at least 5,000 personnel.) But during the 80s America engaged in little direct military action: downing a handful of Libyan planes in the Gulf of Sidra, shipping peacekeeping forces to war-ravaged Lebanon, sinking Iranian ships in the Persian Gulf. None were truly successful. Muammar Gaddafi continued to perpetrate terrorism, America pulled out after Hezbollah killed 247 marines in a suicide bombing in Beirut, and Iran continued to pursue its interests free of American influence.There were grim portents here, and Bacevich ticks them off with a quiet, Thucydidean rage. America couldn’t seem to make people do what it wanted, a lesson policy makers ignored, along with many others. The peacekeeping mission in Lebanon telescoped, in the national consciousness, into a single tragedy—the memory “sacralized,” as Bacevich puts it, the chain of events leading to it forgotten. Similarly, the obsession with punishing Gaddafi augured an unhealthy American fixation on bad actors at the expense of a wider view of regional context, a tendency, Bacevich notes, whose logic found its ultimate expression in the targeted assassinations of the Obama era.Reagan also intervened in the Iran-Iraq War—first on the side of the aggressor, Iraq, and then, in order to keep the balance roughly even and free some hostages in Latin America, he decided to send weapons to Iran. Hundreds of thousands died in combat, many thousands – including civilians – from exposure to chemical weapons. Bacevich has a lot of material to cover, but here I wish he'd lingered on the human effects, because it would help to explain the anger Americans too conveniently ignore. Kurdish victims, skin bloated with blisters full of yellow fluid, blinded by swollen eyelids, were killed by mustard gas, a weapon whose chemical precursors were bought from American companies. Iranian soldiers were targeted with mustard and sarin gas. Sarin kills by attacking the nervous system. The victims lose control of all their bodily functions and die, twitching and convulsing, in a mess of their own vomit, urine and feces. Saddam targeted those Iranians with satellite imagery obtained from the United States.

The war ended in stalemate in 1988. For a short while at least, America had the strategic balance it wanted. But the Iran-Iraq War (which Bacevich calls the First Gulf War) had almost nothing to do with the Soviet Union. Reagan had taken the next step forward in America's war for the region. “The upshot,” as Bacevich succinctly puts it, was that “a posture justified by the need to defend the Persian Gulf from outside intrusion positioned the United States itself to intrude. As the Soviet Union faded from the scene, Washington began entertaining visions of policing the entirety of the Greater Middle East.”Once the Soviet Union collapsed, Cold War excuses were mooted altogether. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, George H.W. Bush proclaiming a “new world order,” laid out a new marker, and the United States intervened with overwhelming force. Following a long air campaign, the ground war took a week. But just like after the Iran-Iraq War, American intervention left the region's true challenges unaltered, and perhaps worse for U.S. involvement. Kuwait was no longer occupied, but Saddam responded to revolt among his people (which was encouraged but not supported by Bush himself) with brutal repression. Embarrassed by his own inaction, Bush established no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq. Over the next decade, American warplanes would fly 150,000 sorties between these imaginary lines. Meanwhile, the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia kindled resentment that found form in Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, which drew manpower from the contacts bin Laden had made, and America had supplied, in Afghanistan.Patterns repeated themselves throughout in the 1990s. George Bush undertook another ill-fated peacekeeping mission, this one in Somalia, which he bequeathed to Clinton. It went bad for familiar reasons: America's leaders had no understanding of regional dynamics, fixated again on single actors (in this case, the warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid), and the military's generals made poor decisions (bad generalship is a recurring theme in Bacevich's work). American raids were becoming predictable. On October 3, 1993, two helicopters were shot down and three others were damaged in Mogadishu. The stranded crewmen and their rescuers were pinned down for most of the day; at the conclusion, 18 Americans were killed, 80 were wounded, and perhaps 200 Somalis, mostly civilians forced to be human shields by Aidid's forces, were dead. President Clinton fired Secretary of Defense Les Aspin in response, but that was showbiz: Aspin was already on his way out for other reasons. Once again, a long, fraught campaign was telescoped into a single episode of sacrifice and heroism. As Bacevich explains:

Thanks to a bestselling book and then a hit movie, the episode that ought to have been known as the “Somalia Campaign, 1992-1994” became simply “Black Hawk Down.” Narrowing the aperture enshrined the melee of October 3-4, 1993, as a demonstration of soldierly grit and gallantry while robbing it of context.

Like Somalia, the breakup of Yugoslavia provided a new playground for old mistakes. Clinton had ridiculed Bush during the campaign for being weak on the issue, but this was mere opportunism, a chance to look tough: once he gained office Clinton displayed the same reticence as his predecessor. The years of half-measures, pull-backs and turnabouts that followed are too convoluted to summarize here. Suffice it to say, mistakes were ignored and victories were portrayed as lasting proof of self-flattering assumptions. When the Dayton Accords put an end to the Bosnian War, after a brief application of force, in 1995, it was seen as a triumph of America's leadership and proof of the efficacy of its military doctrine, especially the use of air power. After a brief period of uncertainty following the failure in Somalia, “America was back,” wrote Richard Holbrooke, the principle architect of the settlement. And so the warm afterglow of the Cold War continued.In truth, it took Clinton years to get NATO's disparate members to commit force to bring about a conclusion. Humanitarian concerns were secondary. The argument that finally won was familiar. It had provoked Carter to declare his doctrine, Reagan to shoot down Gaddafi's planes and sink Iranian ships, and Bush to invade Iraq. NATO, the logic went, had to intervene to maintain its credibility. Softer measures, which along with half-hearted warnings included training the brutal forces controlled by Croatia's Franjo Tudjman, hadn't worked. The answer was the application of force.And that force became the favored tool of the consensus in Washington. In the only first-person episode in the book, a short but telling anecdote about his time at the School of Advanced International Studies during the Bosnian crisis, Bacevich describes the attitude he found in its halls:

People ostensibly in the know turned out to know not all that much. Even in small off-the-record discussions, the views expressed were predictable and pedestrian.... Rooted in a conviction that Washington itself defined the center of the universe, that consensus took it for granted that the fate of humankind hinged on decisions made there.In the short run, all appeared uncertain. Crises abounded. To keep the world from cracking up, it was incumbent upon America to lead. In the long run, the outcome—freedom's ultimate triumph—was foreordained. This prospect imparted to American leadership all the justification it required, regardless of past blunders or any obstacles that lay ahead.

Perhaps the single most important thing to note about this consensus is that it is bipartisan. Think of the long, droning procession of articles by commentators and speeches by politicians over the past three decades, their eager title (What to do about Libya, What to do about Saddam, What to do about Milosevic, What to do about al Qaeda, What to do about ISIS), their stale themes (leadership, resolve, credibility, decisive action), their unimaginative World War II analogies. The differences between parties exist only at the margins:

As a candidate for the presidency, Bill Clinton had signaled his intention to conform, although his partisan critics were never going to credit him with actually doing so. Ideologues on the right were calling for the United States to exercise “benign global hegemony” as it guided humankind toward “the end of history.” The Clinton administration employed a different vocabulary to make the same point, describing the United States as the “indispensable nation” charged with ushering others to join it on “the right side of history.”

Obama, of course, finds himself forced to sound similar themes today.America bombed Bosnian forces again in 1999, this time in Kosovo. It fixated on an enemy personified in the figure of Slobodan Milosevic, and ignored the lesser but still brutal crimes perpetrated by the Kosovo Liberation Army. It did the same, to lesser effect, in Iraq, launching intermittent bombing campaigns that changed nothing. Eventually, the Clinton Administration came to realize that bin Laden's al Qaeda posed a threat. The CIA was tasked with capturing him, and a camp in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum were bombed. The only lasting effect was a shortage of crucial medicines in Sudan. But why did al Qaeda exist, and, more to the point, why was the United States so unpopular in the Middle East? The questions had no place in the American consensus.

The only lesson the second Bush Administration took from Clinton's use of force was that Clinton hadn't used enough of it. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, America quickly toppled the Taliban government in Afghanistan, but George W. Bush and his advisers knew that wouldn't alter the dynamics of the wider Muslim World. In order to do that – to “change the way they live,” as Bacevich puts it – they wanted to invade Iraq:

Given the self-evident centrality of Iraq in this scheme, President Bush seems never to have made an actual decision to go to war there. It was simply a given. So the president never convened a meeting to poll his key advisers on the question. No carefully staffed paper weighing pros and cons ever made it into the Oval Office... Here was the real consensus, in contrast to the artificially constructed on regarding WMD.

In Iraq, the early victories of American force seemed to justify faith in arms. George Bush declared “Mission Accomplished,” and the consensus found its emblem in a big, stupid banner strung up on the tower of an aircraft carrier. But life on the ground was more complicated, just as it was before in Yugoslavia, in Somalia, in Desert Storm, in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq War, in Libya, in Lebanon—and would be in the future, in Yemen, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Somalia again, in Libya again, and in Iraq, again. The wider dynamics in the region thrummed quietly in the background, a warning signal unheeded, and the situation soon turned bloody.Here once more was the monomaniacal focus on bad actors. This time it was Saddam Hussein, whose capture in December of 2003 changed nothing except the usefulness of the standard administration excuse that the growing insurgency could be attributed to Saddam and “pockets” of Baathist “dead enders.” The American press followed suit – the Washington consensus is not limited to its managerial class – and fleshed out the narrative, opposing bad guys with heroes of its own. As the Iraq descended into nightmare, generals rotated in and out of the country with baleful alacrity, greeted by credulous journalists who penned worshipful profiles.Bacevich tears down their reputations with admirable restraint. None was more feted than David Petraeus, a “warrior-scholar” who managed the “Surge” of American troops that ostensibly brought a measure of peace to the country. This supposed peace was hailed as a triumph of American fortitude – after all, Iraq merely had to be done right – but what appeared be imminent victory was merely a lull in violence, the true cause of which was a decision by Sunni tribesmen to turn against the jihadists who had bombed the country into civil war (this was the so-called “Sunni Awakening”). But the Iraqi government was still dominated by Shia, who constituted 60 percent of the population. Their leaders promptly alienated the Sunnis, who then protested and were in turn met with violence. By the time that simple fact permeated the D.C. bubble, the Obama Administration was pulling out of Iraq and the insurgency was gaining strength again. In a few years it was subsumed in ISIS' lightning march across the north.Afghanistan's descent into chaos (the title of an authoritative account by journalist Ahmed Rashid) was slower, but it was precipitated by many of the same mistakes, which Bacevich lays out expertly: not enough troops on the ground, bad generalship, underfunded civilian obligations, a fixation on personalities, and a pathetically shallow understanding of the country America was invading. It never seemed to occur to the Bush Administration that Afghans would resent their presence, or that the war could never be won as long as the Taliban had safe haven in Pakistan, a strategic problem with no tactical solution. By the time Barack Obama took office in January 2009, large swathes of the country were once more in the hands of the Taliban.“Often in American elections,” Bacevich writes, “the outcome of a contest based on ostensibly sharp differences affirms an implicit consensus transcending those differences. Certainly,” he says of the 2008 election, “that occurred here.” Obama won on the economy and his opposition to the Iraq War, which his campaign carefully set alongside his pledge to refocus the “right war,” the war in Afghanistan.But Obama, though “possessed by an impulse to do more in Afghanistan…lacked a clear idea of how to translate more into a positive outcome of the war.” Which meant that when General David McKiernan, who was commanding ground forces at the time, asked for more troops, the request met little resistance. McKiernan soon gave way to Stanley McChrystal, like Petraeus a “warrior-scholar” and media darling. McChrystal was charged with formulating a plan to regain the advantage. The plan came two months later in the form of a sixty-six page assessment, which Bacevich describes as “containing many assertions but few facts… long on exhortation and short on reasoned analysis.” (In other words, like something out of a Washington think tank.) McChrystal asked for 40,000 new troops for a counterinsurgency campaign, and by deciding to present no other options, he was in effect asking the President for a rubber stamp.This is yet another reason the United States has been unable to reexamine its policy in the Middle East: the quiet political power of the military, bolstered by the rhetorical deference it receives in Washington and the economic prerogatives of the industries that supply it. Petraeus, now commander of CENTCOM, was interviewed by Michael Gerson of the Washington Post, a shallow, hawkish columnist formerly employed by George W. Bush. He told Gerson that “the core principles of counterinsurgency still obtain” but America would need “a lot more resources” in Afghanistan. The interview, Bacevich writes, “constituted a veiled challenge to the authority of the commander in chief.” Obama wanted time to decide, but McChrystal’s report was promptly leaked, and in political terms the President was “boxed in” (those are his own words). The American ambassador to Afghanistan, a former general himself, questioned the counterinsurgency strategy in cables that also leaked (political battles are often carried out this this way in Washington). Obama could have used them as cover, but he was unwilling to bear the cost. The president ordered 30,000 more troops into the country but pledged to withdraw them after 18 months—a strategic faux pas which essentially told the Taliban, “come back in a year and a half.” Obama had committed 30,000 soldiers to risk their lives for a mission about which he had grave doubts.

Those doubts were well-founded, but like every American president who met adversity in the Greater Middle East, he made as few negative admissions as possible and papered over the facts with sunny assurances of future victory. Here is Bacevich at his most contemptuous and cutting:

In 2011, with Petraeus preparing to relinquish command of ISAF to yet another American four-star, the president went on national television to pronounce the Afghanistan surge (to which he had assented with great reluctance) a success (which it was not), with “the light of a secure peace” now visible “in the distance” (an expectation devoid of empirical support).

There are still 10,000 troops in Afghanistan today, and the Taliban still controls vast swathes of territory in Pakistan and Afghanistan.Ground troops were not deployed in Libya, where Obama and NATO intervened in 2011 with the stated aim of preventing Muammar Gaddafi (him again) from crushing a rebellion. The true purpose wasn't to prevent humanitarian catastrophe, but to assist the rebels in deposing Gaddafi, which they promptly did. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration didn't learn any lessons from Iraq: there was little planning for the aftermath, and Libya today is a kaleidoscope of tribal and militant groups warring with each other and with a new branch of ISIS.Obama's insistence that ground troops would not be deployed to Libya reflected a new political reality, one for which he compensated by drastically increasing the use of special forces (they are now present in some 150 countries around the world, numbering over 70,000) and adopting the tactic of targeted assassination, sometimes with special forces but usually with missile-carrying drones, which now operate from Africa to Central Asia, buzzing in the skies, killing terrorists, stoking hatred, with no endpoint in sight.In the beginning, Obama tried, rhetorically at least, to beat a new path, and made a vow, Bacevich explains,

to “seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.” With this new beginning, “common principles... principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings” would provide the basis for relations...In effect, Obama began his presidency declaring that the War for the Greater Middle East had become redundant, as if the product of some unfortunate miscommunication.

But Obama, the most doubting of recent Presidents, couldn't end the war, “in no small part,” Bacevich writes, “due to actions on his part that expanded and thereby perpetuated it.”And perpetuated and expanded, too, the American President's ability to wage war without consulting Congress:

By the time Obama unleashed missile-firing UAVs and commandos on Pakistan, few bothered to question the legality of secret attacks in countries with which the United States was not at war. Unless large numbers of U.S. Ground troops were involved, the prerogatives enjoyed by the American commander in chief anywhere in the Greater Middle East had by now become pretty much limitless.

All of this legal authority is supposedly derived from an authorization of military force that Congress signed in an atmosphere of nationalism and fear 15 years ago. Today, Obama is using that authority to prosecute a war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Bacevich asks the key question:

Would defeating ISIS actually solve anything? Probably not, since the conditions that had given rise to ISIS would still persist. Yet focusing on this one specific manifestation of a larger problem provided an excuse to skip lightly past matters of far greater moment. It was like foreign drug cartels and the American epidemic of drug abuse and addiction. You can pretend that attacking the former will reduce the latter, but you're kidding yourself.

With the history of America's involvement in the Greater Middle East in mind, Obama's comments to Jeffrey Goldberg take on a more disquieting import. It is decidedly odd to hear the President express such deep skepticism about America's role in the Greater Middle East, to hear his doubts about the logic of supporting authoritarian regimes and the use of force. It says something about the permanence of American consensus when a President feels obligated to continue a policy that, in 35 years, has brought little but misery and death to all involved.The future, if anything, looks worse. At this stage, it appears Obama will be succeeded by Hillary Clinton, the most consistently hawkish candidate, of any party, still in the race. Which means the next chapter of Bacevich's disheartening history is already being written.____Greg Waldmann is the Editor-in-chief of Open Letters Monthly, and a native New Yorker living in Boston with a degree in International Affairs.