Angry Planet - Wars in the Middle East will cost the U.S. trillions more

Episode Date: July 21, 2016

The United States is at war and has been for more than a decade. Although major combat operations in Iraq in Afghanistan have ended, America still maintains a presence in both and will for years to come. It also funds Syrian rebels, bombs Islamic State strongholds in the region and runs drones from Afghanistan to the Horn of Africa.With America fighting on so many fronts, it’s hard to understand the Pentagon’s strategy or the endgame for the various conflicts. Retired U.S. Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich says it feels that way because it is that way. According to Bacevich, the American military is fighting a war that began decades before 9/11.This week on War College, Bacevich walks us through what he calls America’s War With the Greater Middle East and tells us how it started and why he thinks it must end.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' news. There is no question that by the time the final bill is paid, we will have spent trillions of dollars for our post-9-11 worth trillions of dollars. For what?

What was the exact moment when the United States became inextricably bound up with the Middle East? Was it with the invasion of Iraq in 2003? Was it the intervention in Kuwait in 1991? This week on War College, we talked to someone who puts that date a little further back. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion. of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College.

I'm Reuters.com managing editor, Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt, contributing editor at Wars Boring. Today, we're speaking with retired U.S. Army colonel and historian Andrew Bacevich. Bacevich is a conservative who's long been critical of U.S. foreign and military policy. His newest book, America's War for the Greater Middle East, details U.S. involvement in the region over the past four decades. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us. Glad to be with you.

Well, you've taken on just about the most complex subject you probably could. Can we just start off with a very, very basic question, which is what is America's military strategy right now as you see it? There is none. I mean, my book is intended to be, a history book. It's not a policy book. And the purpose of the book is to recount what has now become an endless string of interventions, large and small, brief and protracted, dating from 1980 and continuing down to the present moment. And indeed, one of the purposes of recounting this history

is to suggest that with rare exceptions that the United States really has not had anything qualifying as a coherent strategy. We have been engaged in sort of a willy-nilly problem-solving exercise, rarely with any sense of what we're trying to get done. It sounds like foreign policy by whack-a-mole the way you describe it. Why do you think that America doesn't have a coherent military strategy, especially when it comes to the Middle East? The foreign policy establishment has not evolved a consensus as to our old, overarching objective. I mean, let's compare, for example, this war for the greater Middle East with the Cold War. Cold War begins rather quickly in the aftermath of World War II. People thought

World War II was going to be the great victory to create a peaceful world. It quickly became apparent that was not going to be the case. And as early as 1947, the foreign policy establishment had evolved an approach to dealing with the threat posed by the Soviet Union and more broadly by communism, and that approach was called containment. It was controversial initially in the sense that as a strategy devised by the Democratic Truman administration, there were Republicans who insisted that containment was not enough. But when Dwight D. Eisenhower became president in 1953, a Republican, he basically affirmed and embraced the idea of containment. And so we had the nexus of a bipartisan approach to dealing with the threat posed by the Soviet Union.

By no means did all subsequent administrations faithfully adhere to that in all respects. but by and large, containment became a vector that shaped U.S. policy. There has not been an equivalent of that in the war for the greater Middle East. But the Middle East, though, I mean, sorry, I should say that at least some of the Middle East, in the current situation, comes from the Cold War, doesn't it? I mean, the Syrians not only are allied with the Russians, but, I mean, many of the countries in the Middle East are actually using former Soviet weaponry still. Do you see any roots in the policy of containment in what's currently going on?

Yes. I mean, I think I'd expand your point. I mean, it's not simply that the predicament that we're wrestling with bears some imprint carried over from the Cold War. I think more importantly, it bears an imprint carried over from the decades prior to the Cold War when the Middle East was a target of European imperialism. I mean, most famously in the wake of World War I, when. and the Brits primarily, but the Brits in collaboration with the French basically carved up the Ottoman Empire and created what we call the Middle East to suit their own purposes.

So yes, emphatically, if we want to understand the complexity of the situation, we certainly have to look beyond and prior to this period of recurring U.S. military involvement. That's certainly the case. My own book, however, takes a narrower frame, and I'm trying to explain why the United States has employed its military with the consistency that it has since 1980, what the United States was trying to achieve in its various interventions, what actually it did achieve and with what consequences. So I take your point about the importance of acknowledging a broader historical context. my particular focus has been on the misuse of American military power in this region. Where's the starting point? What incident or events do you see as the right jumping off point? Yeah, my jumping off point is the promulgation of the Carter Doctrine in January of 1980. Remember, the Carter Doctrine is a declaration by President Carter designating the Persian Gulf as a vital.

U.S. national security interest and indeed as a place that the United States now was willing to fight for. And it's important, I think, to remind ourselves that prior to 1980, meaning in the early decades of the Cold War, the United States was certainly prepared to fight for Western Europe. The United States had fought two wars, one in Korea, one in Vietnam, in East Asia, and was willing to fight another one, if need be. Prior to 1980, there had been no interest or will willingness or commitment to fight anywhere in the Middle East. The Middle East was a peripheral place as far as the Pentagon was concerned. All that begins to change as a consequence of Carter's declaration. In essence, and by no means do I think Carter understood what was about to

occur, but Carter initiated what turns out to be a full-fledged militarization of U.S. policy in the region. The very first intervention, albeit a a small but a very unsuccessful one occurs on Carter's watch. He attempts to rescue the hostages held in Iran, a failed mission at Desert One. But really, that opens the floodgates to what becomes a now very long series of interventions, undertaken by every one of the subsequent administrations down to the present moment, stated purposes varying. You know, sometimes it's we're doing this to spread democracy.

Sometimes we're doing this for humanitarian purposes. Sometimes we're doing this to, you know, take care of evildoers, but never resulting in anything like the success expected by the architects of policy. And I would argue having, for all practical purposes, made matters worse as a direct consequence of our interventionism. Well, it's actually, it's interesting. I think that there are a lot of people who may not have been aware or know the history to think about, I mean, Carter, and please believe me, this is not in defense in any way. It's actually, I just want to put a little bit of history into it. I was thinking, I mean, we were coming out of also a huge energy crisis where he went on TV wearing a sweater and the world went mad. I mean, so it's interesting because there, you got to, and you've probably know much better than I do, but, I mean, it seemed like there's a very keen economic interest in addition to everything that was happening with Iran when Carter made that declaration. Was that fair to say? Oh, heavens, yes. I mean, so there is a context there as well. Carter's

speech, January 1980. 1980 is, of course, a presidential election year. Carter looks like a very vulnerable incumbent. So there is a domestic political element here. That Carter needs to look strong, needs to look decisive if he's going to have a chance to win a second term. That's one factor. There are geopolitical factors, the Iranian revolution, which topples a valued U.S. ally in the region that brings to power an anti-American revolutionary ideology in Iran. That problem compounded by the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979, the month before Carter's address, we now know that the Soviets intervened in Afghanistan because they were, from their point of view, for defensive purposes, to try to prevent their empire from disintegrating.

At the time, however, the perception was that the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was a precursor, that the Soviets were on the march, that they were going to march from Afghanistan to Iran, from Iran to Saudi Arabia, And in retrospect, we would say all that is absurd, but nonetheless, things seem to be at a very precarious situation. And at the time, it appeared that the American way of life itself was contingent upon having access to Persian Gulf oil. Again, today, we would say, that's not true. But in 1979, it appeared to be true. So we have a convergence of factors that lead Jimmy Carter to undertake this initiative. And I think your key point here is you made reference to the appearing on TV in a cardigan sweater,

but more important than that, he had appeared on television in the summer of 1979, making his famous Malais speech, a term that, of course, he doesn't use in his speech, but making a speech that basically says to the American people, hey, look, we're going down the wrong path. We've gone on the wrong path in a moral sense. We need to recover our values need to return to where we were when we launched this American experiment. And Carter said, and the way to do that is to wean ourselves from this dependence upon foreign oil to turn away from a way of life that hinges on the acquisition of material goods. I mean, it was a call for a great awakening. It was an argument saturated, really, in religiosity, in a, in a,

a summons of a spiritual renewal, and frankly, it just didn't sell. And I think Carter ultimately accepts that. So his state of the union address in January really is a capitulation, a recognition that he's not going to get the American people to change their way of life. The American people want more, not less. They don't want to sacrifice. Ergo, the now new imperative, the recently discovered imperative of fighting for the Persian Gulf. And again, one last point, it begins with the definition of U.S. interests focused on the Persian Gulf, but of course, there's a geographical expansion so that it's not simply fight for the Persian Gulf. It ultimately ends up being a willingness to fight for an attempt to impose our will on a pretty large swath of the Islamic world.

Why? How did we, maybe this is too big of a question, but how did we go from that place? like the way you describe it from Carter's perspective and from the American people's perspective, that makes sense to me. The history there. How do we then go spend the next four decades getting ourselves further

entangled in there, especially now when it seems like we perhaps don't need the energy assets as much as we used to? Oh, bingo, that's certainly a key point. If indeed we need oil and natural gas to maintain the American way of life, then we probably ought to be defending Canada and Venezuela rather than worrying about Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

But your question is, how do we go, how do we get from there to here? I think the best explanation lies in the expectations entertained both by policymakers and by the American people with regard to the effectiveness of American military power. Now, let me get to some specifics here. You remember, just as the Cold War was winding down at the end of the 19th, 1980s, an outcome that was widely attributed by Americans to American military superiority. In other words, the argument was that the Soviets gave up because they recognized that they no longer could compete with us, particularly in the realm of military technology.

I don't buy that argument, but that was an argument commonly made at the end of the Cold War. More to the point, as soon as the Cold War ends, Saddam Hussein invades and annexes Kuwait, George Herbert Walker Bush, mounts the response in the form of Operation Desert Storm. The perception is that Operation Desert Storm is one of the great victories of all of history and an emphatic demonstration of American military supremacy. Again, I suggest in the book that that's an oversimplified interpretation, but certainly that's the way it's seen. My point here is that as we enter into the post-Cold War period, this period of great American triumper, We had won. Our system had proven to be superiority. Compounded by these inflated expectations

about the effectiveness of American military power, there was an absence of appreciation for the complexities of the situation that we were wading into. There was an unwillingness to learn lessons that were, frankly, obvious. I'll give you an example. The example would be Somalia in 1992 and 1993. Somalia is part of the Islamic world. It's certainly not, I mean, it's part of the Persian Gulf in a rather broad sense, but there's an example of how interventionism is going beyond the places where the oil is located, undertaken for what it would argue to be humanitarian purposes.

It ends in a disaster. It ends in the Mogadish firefight of October 1983, a humiliating defeat that's where Bill Clinton takes the blame, pulls the plug, leaves, we actually learn nothing from that. You know, what might we have learned from Somalia in 1993? What we might have learned is that the vaunted American military machine when facing guerrilla forces in an urban environment don't do very well, but we forgot Mogadishu and basically simply moved on. So I think there was just the mood of the moment, the mood of the post-Cold War era did not invite serious critical thought, either with regard to U.S. interests or with regard to what military power can do and cannot do. But then after the Gulf War, I mean, if the

objective was simply to get Iraqi soldiers out of Kuwait, it was a success as far as that went. I mean, again, if you've really simplified the objective to what was stated publicly. But, you know, after that, we had the oil embargo. Iraq was, I don't know if pushed to the brink, but I mean, there was certainly a lot of suffering inside Iraq. But Saddam Hussein wasn't budged, right? But then we're right back there again. Let me complicate your narrative just a little bit. Sure, sure.

That's not what you said. It's wrong. So we liberate Kuwait, we liberate Kuwait 1991. The unstated expectation is that somebody, within Iraq is going to solve the Saddam problem. Of course, that doesn't happen. Saddam survives. To some degree, he survives because of misjudgments made by the United States at the end of Operation Desert Storm. You know, don't need to go into the details, but we facilitated inadvertently a Saddam survival. Well, that causes great anxiety that the bad guy is still there, leads to the policy of so-called dual containment.

a policy of trying to contain Iraq and Iran, who are mutual adversaries, how do we contain Iraq? Well, we begin by now stationing U.S. forces on a permanent basis in the region to include stationing U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia. From a point of view of Muslims, an exceedingly sensitive place. So the 1990s, and Americans, by and large, are oblivious to all this. The 1990s really become a period of continuing the Gulf War of 1991. We spend the entire decade flying combat air patrols in Iraqi airspace frequently, frequently bombing Iraqi targets. We ourselves begin to sustain attacks, Cobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the embassies in Tanzania,

in Kenya, the attack on the USS coal. Osama bin Laden has declared war on the United States, this new entity called al-Qaeda. 1998, the Clinton administration is launching cruise missile attacks against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. My point here is that the war that we have now waded into up to our hips continues in the wake of Operation Desert Storm. and by that very fact calls into question whether or not Desert Storm deserves to be viewed as a victory. Victory means you conclusively achieve your political purposes, not that you just go kill a bunch of bad guys. So the war continues during the 1990s, particularly on the American political right, there are complaints about Saddam Hussein's survival.

Remember the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which Clinton signs committing the United States, to finding ways to overthrow Saddam Hussein. When you fast forward to 2001 to 9-11, an attack by al-Qaeda, but an attack that with the George W. Bush administration now in power seems to offer an opportunity to solve the Saddam problem once and for all and to begin to transform the region as a whole in order to remove the conflict. giving rise to organizations like al-Qaeda. That's the driving force behind the Iraq War of 2003, again informed by expectations of American military supremacy. It's supposed to lead to a decisive victory.

Guess what? It doesn't, and we're stuck in a quagmire. It would be easy to argue that the United States is actually stuck in two quagmars, right? I mean, you have the Gulf and you have Afghanistan as well. I think that a lot of people who were just sitting at home actually didn't know that the U.S. even had troops in Saudi Arabia during that whole period. And on top of that, I think some people might have been surprised at the idea that, you know, I think the narrative was that U.S. troops had been invited to Saudi Arabia, and therefore, why would anyone be unhappy that U.S. troops were there? Yes. I think one of the key issues here,

here is the American people are oblivious to those events prior to 9-11. The American people, and I think here the media and our political leadership reinforces this notion that the war, whatever the war is, that the war began on 9-11. And my argument is, no, the war began much earlier in 1980, and in order to understand why 9-11 occurred and the events subsequent to 9-11, it's very important to take on board, the U.S. military experience in the region from 1980 up to 2001. We were already in a situation that we did not understand, and the response of the George W. Bush administration was basically to dive in more deeply as a result of 9-11. Why don't we just cut and run? Why don't we just leave now? Well, because the place is a mess.

I would argue strongly that simply trying harder is not going to produce any more positive results than we've achieved as far, that there is a requirement to demilitarize, to move toward the demilitarization, to move forward to move toward a disengaging the U.S. military from the region, but it can't be done overnight. We can't just sort of walk away from it. I think that to the extent that they're, first of all, I would argue strongly that there are alternatives. I mean, to some degree it seems to me that the public discussion of our ongoing military involvement in the region seems to be premised on the assumption that we have no choice. We have to keep doing what we're doing. I'd argue that the most powerful country in the world ought to have choices. power confers choices. We are powerful. We're not, we're not doomed to simply continue down a

misguided path. So what is the solution? I think the solution is to begin moving the powers in the region to accept responsibility for policing the region, for restoring some element of stability. The proximate threat to stability, of course, is ISIS. But when you think about it, ISIS is a probably has, what, 30,000 maybe, 30,000 fighters, no Navy, no Air Force, very few heavy weapons, no significant resource base, no allies to speak of. They are certainly vicious killers, but we're not talking to Vermeck here. And my argument would be that were the those parties for whom ISIS is an existential threat. And that's Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, were those countries to recognize

that they have a common interest to deal with that threat, they could do so? And we, having made a hash of things, could begin to extricate ourselves militarily. Now, that is a tall order, and it's a tall order because those countries I just ticked off for the most part, have gripes with one another, related to geopolitical interests, related to sectarian differences, various factors. And so the diplomatic challenge of the United States is to get them to set aside those differences and to recognize that there is a transcendent common interest. And again, I'm not trying to suggest that that's somehow easy, and we could do it by next Tuesday,

but I would argue strongly that simply doubling down on this U.S. military commitment, now going on four decades long without showing signs of success, simply trying harder isn't going to get us the outcome we want. But that makes absolute sense to me. There is one thing. I don't know that it's a counterpoint. It's just an interesting sort of to the side is that the U.S. It's not that everybody wants the U.S. out of the region either, right? I mean, Saudi Arabia, while it's a complicated ally, and there's certainly arguments we made about just how much Saudi Arabia might be undermining the U.S. welfare, but they also count on the U.S. for all of the equipment. I assume we do enormous amount of their training, too. all of the Gulf states seem to, I mean, they're actually happy to have U.S. forces in the region, right? I mean, they're more scared of Iran than they are of having us around. Basically, that's probably true.

It's not clear to me that the policy of the United States needs to hinge on trying to make Saudi Arabia happy. I mean, you described them as an ally, a complicated ally. I don't even know that I would accept that judgment. Saudi behavior in promoting radicals, Islamism, as I understand it, doing that in order to try to export their own domestic problems, in many respects, has helped to create this mess. I guess it's in diplomatic circles, it's a little bit impolite to say that out loud, but the evidence seems to be overwhelming. They're not our ally. They're not our friend. Now, you know, they have a right to exist. They have

legitimate interests, to the extent that their interests coincide with ours, then we should try to be helpful or supportive. But the notion that somehow the United States needs to maintain its military presence in the region because the royal family in Saudi Arabia finds it convenient is something I personally wouldn't buy into. I mean, if it were a no-cost proposition to us, in some senses, I guess it was, during the 1950s, 1960s, a relatively no-cost, then maybe you could do it. But, and this is, you know, this is one of the things that strikes me about this war, as I, as I call it, and that is the remarkable reluctance to tote up the costs and the implications of those costs.

I mean, we've lost thousands of soldiers. In one war, Iraq that was utterly unnecessary and in another war, Afghanistan, which, frankly, has been mismanaged. We've got tens of thousands of young Americans who've had their lives. shattered, damage beyond repair, whether we're talking about physical wounds or psychological wounds, there is no question that by the time the final bill is paid, we will have spent trillions of dollars for our post-9-11 wars. Trillions of dollars, for what? And I didn't even mention the so-called collateral damage that we have inflicted on peoples in the region for who

we were supposedly trying to liberate or to protect. This has been a moral catastrophe. So that's a consideration, it seems to me, that very much deserves to be weighed in the balance as we think about what we should do moving ahead. One of my frustrations related to the, I think, our political scene is that there really is no willingness on the part of either party to engage in

a larger accounting of what U.S. military involvement in the region has produced and at what cost. There's plenty of sort of rhetorical, hey, elect me president, and I'll double down on getting ISIS. But there's no willingness to consider what a prior U.S. military involvement has produced and at what cost. And there ought to be. After all of these years of war, what kind of shape is the U.S. military in at this point? Forget about powerful, not powerful. It's more a matter of, is the military tired? I mean, is this a grinding thing for them, or is it just, this is business as usual now? I don't have particularly great contact inside the military. I mean, I've been out of the Army

longer than I was in the Army. I just gave a talk a couple days ago at the Naval War College in Newport down the road from where I live, auditorium full of serving officers and and some number of civilians. And I sort of gave my overall critique of a policy that is wrongheaded. And quite frankly, I got a sense that my talk was well received. So my guess, based on limited evidence, very impressionistic, is that there is an awareness within the officer corps that their enormous sacrifices haven't necessarily produced much in terms of positive outcomes.

Now, whether that leads to disenchantment or resentment or a hunger for understanding about why and how things went wrong, I don't know. Frankly, given the absence of any serious willingness to take on board what we have been doing militarily, I very much hope that within the officer corps there will be this willingness to assess. critically, to learn, to go beyond the platitudes of thank you for your service. And I think that it would be healthy for the officer corps, it might even be healthy for the public at large, were the officer corps to undertake that kind of an accounting. Going forward, we're obviously in the middle of a presidential campaign. What do you think is possible? Do you see a chance of a situation improving? And I'm not asking you to pick a candidate. Trust me, that's that's, that's, that's, your business. So the debate over U.S. national security policy is remarkably narrow. There is a,

there has been and continues to be a consensus. Call it the consensus of the indesensible nation, that the famous phrase coined by Madeline Albright. It's a consensus that insists that there is no alternative to U.S. global leadership and a consensus that insists that that the primary mechanism or instrument for leadership is military power. And Republicans and Democrats alike have been committed to that proposition. Certainly, Secretary Clinton is committed to that proposition. And therefore, should she win the presidency, I would expect very little change and very little willingness, even to ask first-order questions about how we got to the situation we're in and whether or not there might be alternatives. If Mr. Trump wins, you know, it's

it's kind of a who knows. His statements are so inconsistent that on one day he sounds like more of a hawk than Hillary Clinton, and then the next day he sounds like somebody who is something of a skeptic of the record of U.S. policy in the region. So he's just a very, very difficult read, the very inconsistency that seems to be part of his temperament, has ought to give people pause because, you know, what he's going to do on Wednesday might be the inverse of what he said he was going to do on Tuesday, and that cannot be a good thing for us, and it cannot be a good thing for our allies, quite frankly, cannot even be a good thing for our adversaries if they don't have a consistent understanding of our intentions as likely

to lead them to go off and do something exceedingly foolish. Actually, we've talked to someone not long ago from Naval War College, Jim Holmes, who was talking about how uncertainty is really one of the most dangerous things that there is. That when a military or another nation doesn't know exactly what you're going to do, that's more dangerous than even a hostile posture. So I thought that was kind of interesting. It sounds like you're echoing that thought. Yes.

All right. Well, thank you so much for your time. You bet. Thanks a lot for arranging this. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this week's show. If you're listening to War College via SoundCloud, you may want to hear other episodes about hardware, strategy, and tactics.

So try subscribing. The show's available on iTunes. You can reach us at any time by tweeting at us. We are at War underscore College. If you do, you can criticize us, praise us, or just send in ideas for shows you'd like to hear. War College was created by me and Craig Heedek. Matthew Galt co-hosts the show, and our producer this week was Bethel Hampton, whose ears are so sensitive. She knows whether a tree, falling in the forest with no one around to hear it, actually makes a sound.