ideological criminal

I slept in late yesterday and woke up to the sounds of On Point with Tom Ashbrook on my radio. Hearing Ashbrook’s weaselly questions brought back fond memories of cruising down Route 2 and I-89 with Aaron, heading into Burlington from our poorly insulated barn in Richmond, VT. We would catch Ashbrook’s show whenever we got a late start on the commute, which was often. The show was unrivaled in its ability to get us to yell obscenities at the dashboard—Aaron was always better at resisting the temptation than I was. More times than I can recall, we spent the entire drive in dismay at the equivocating comments of Ashbrook, only to spend our lengthy walk from wherever we could find a parking spot to the UVM campus recalling the absurd discussions we had heard on the radio.

I had slept in long enough to miss the first guest, the ever ignorant über-hawk, William Kristol, but since I decided to write this, I thought I should have a listen to his segment, which is essentially a recapping of his recent editorial in the Weekly Standard, titled “It’s Our War.”

Kristol believes that the war between Israel and Lebanon is our—that is, the US’s—war. There is some veracity to that, after all it is American made shells falling on southern Lebanon, delivered in American made, American supplied, General Dynamics Abrams tanks and McDonnell Douglas F-4, F-15, and Lockheed Martin F-16 planes. The onslaught has been perpetrated under the US administration’s apologetics and encouragement from politicians and media. But Kristol believes that this is, at its core, a war between the U.S. (representing liberal democratic civilization) and Iran (representing Islamic fundamentalism). I feel silly pointing out the absurd schizophrenia of such an analysis. Israel = US, Lebanon = Iran. Good work, Billy. (It must be a comforting view that keeps one from feeling any sense of loss when both Israeli and Lebanese civilians are claimed by the war). I don’t really care about the hallucinations of the ideologues over at the Standard, but unfortunately Kristol’s schizophrenia is reflective of the administration’s and we can see his tortured logic at work in US foreign policy and the dreadful consequences it engenders. And for Kristol, the answer is always more war. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a Arab fundamentalist terrorist hell bent on destroying the infallible West; milk factories, highways, apartment buildings, electric plants, schools, men, women, children, you name it.

By the time I woke up though, the guest was Lieutenant General William Odom (Ret.). Odom was the senior intelligence officer in the Army from 1981-1985 and then became the director of the National Security Agency. Odom is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and adjunct political science professor at Yale.

His interview was just a recapping of his recent editorial “A reverse domino theory may be playing out in the Middle East,” which appeared on the Nieman Watchdog Journalism Project. It is worth quoting in full:

Recently on national television, Vice President Cheney warned that withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq would prompt the collapse of governments in other countries in the region, namely Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, putting them in the hands of radical Islamist rulers.

Cheney has it exactly backwards. Our continued entanglement is what is destabilizing the region.

The escalating conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Hamas could become a new Arab-Israeli War. And it is precisely our actions in Iraq that have opened the door for Iran and Syria to support Hezbollah and Hamas actions without much to fear from the U.S.

Cheney’s assertion is a new version of the old domino theory which was invented to justify the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. Were the Communists to win there, it was claimed, a series of other countries in Southeast Asia would also fall, like dominos, to the Communist bloc, making China extremely powerful and menacing. Laos and Cambodia did fall, more or less, to China’s sphere, while Vietnam stayed with the Soviet Union. But the larger U.S. aim, the containment of China, was achieved, in spite of the United States, by Soviet and North Vietnamese actions against China. And the dire consequences of the domino theory that were so widely proclaimed by hawks at the time never came to pass.

We should have learned a number of things from the Vietnam War, but most of all that unintended consequences are often the most significant outcomes. Our well-intended policies in Vietnam soon rendered the United States incapable of accomplishing anything positive in the region. Massive use of American combat power justified all of the extremism that North Vietnam used in pursuing its course, and most important, it removed all doubt about who could claim the banner of “national liberation” in Vietnam. The Saigon government was soon seen as no more than America’s lackey. Thus withdrawal from Vietnam actually improved America’s strategic position for turning the tide against the Soviet Union, beginning during the Carter administration and accelerating during the Reagan administration.

In the succinct language of military strategy, strategic withdrawals often involve tactical defeats but open the way to counteroffensives and “strategic success.” The domino theory, invoked to avoid “tactical defeats,” can easily obscure the wisdom of a strategic withdrawal and instead pave the way to “strategic defeat.”

Is the domino theory valid for the Middle East? No, not any more than it was in Vietnam. But a reverse domino theory is. The longer the U.S. stays in Iraq, the more likely the collapse of the secular regimes in those Muslim nations, and the more likely a full-scale war between Israel and its neighbors. It’s American departure from Iraq that could prevent it.

Ironically, a “democratic domino theory” was one of the rationales Cheney invoked for the invasion of Iraq. In the mid-1990s, a small group of neoconservatives invented the idea of upending the entire Middle East region by imposing democracy in Iraq. They argued that other countries would follow. Now that elections in Iraq have stimulated civil war – and put a Shiite majority in the position to revenge the wrongs they suffered at the hands of Saddam Hussein and to give Iran great influence in Iraq – the vice president has changed tunes. His enthusiasm for a “democratic domino theory” has also been dampened by recent election gains by Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah’s voting potential in Lebanon.

Now, according to this new theory, how does Mr. Cheney propose to stop these dominos—Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia—from falling? By keeping U.S. troops in Iraq indefinitely. This is perverse.

The U.S. forces in Iraq opened the country to al Qaeda cadres, and democratic elections have cleared the way for radical rulers. The longer U.S. forces stay, the more likely it is that their radicalizing impact will reach beyond Iraq to Egypt and Saudi Arabia—and perhaps to Pakistan. Not the other way around!

Tied down and strategically immobilized by its entanglement in Iraq, the administration has no credibility with most of its major allies. Only after it withdraws from Iraq and admits its own complicity in this spreading crisis will it be able to help stem the tide it has set in motion. Why? Upon our withdrawal, our allies will be far more likely to respond constructively to a U.S. bid to design a joint strategy for restoring regional stability in the Middle East. Decreasing the likelihood of more radical (and possibly undemocratic) regimes emerging in the Middle East requires a coalition of the major states of Europe and East Asia. It is beyond U.S. power alone.

The longer the United States keeps troops in Iraq, the greater that challenge will be.

The first caller during Odom’s segment praised him as having “spoken more common sense about the situation in the Middle East over the last 10 minutes than frankly I’ve heard from our leaders in the last 5 years.” Of course the caller is correct (never mind how easily the criteria is satisfied). Listening to Odom talk, I found that I agreed with most of his analysis. He is, after all, calling for a withdrawal; he views the American occupation as a cause rather than solution to the escalating violence. He was on the record as being against the war on Iraq in February 2003. He became the highest ranking retired general calling for withdrawal in May 2004. In August 2005, he addressed the still common critiques of withdrawal in his article, “What’s wrong with cutting and running?” I agree with almost all of his points. However, I suspect we reason from far different bases. Odom founds his reasoning on the “US interests,” mine are humanitarian in nature. Of course, nothing precludes the two from coinciding, but rarely has US history demonstrated a correlation.

From what I can tell from reading reviews and synopses of Odom’s latest book (co-authored with Robert Dujarric), America’s Inadvertent Empire, his analysis seems to be not so much that US empire is bad—quite the opposite—but that the policies of the Bush and Clinton administrations have undermined its effectiveness and have done much to corrupt US imperial power and interests. His critiques of the Iraq war and the Israeli-Lebanese war lay on similar foundations.

So the question that occupied my thoughts on the train ride to work was, what does it mean to agree with Odom? Does it make me an imperialist? Perhaps his imperial analysis is wrong, or perhaps my humanitarian analysis is wrong. Could they both be wrong? Could both be right?

Whether Odom’s is correct with respect to US empire is a question I cannot really answer. Just entertaining the thought makes me uneasy. Maybe Odom’s conception of US empire is so far from my own that I support Odom’s “empire”. I believe it is in the interests of the US people to end the occupation of Iraq, just as I believe it is in the interests of Israeli Jews to end the occupation of Palestine—these things seem self-evident to me. So perhaps Odom simply means US popular interests when he speaks of empire. I just don’t know enough of his position to say.

But let’s suppose Odom really does mean US imperial interests and that his analysis is correct, i.e. the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Lebanese war are harmful to US empire. What then? Should I reconsider my own parallel conclusions based on humanism? Of course not. I’m willing to walk in lockstep with Odom, so long as I believe the conclusions support a peaceful, humanistic stance. Should his conclusions conflict with that, well then there we would part ways, but I haven’t reached that point yet (granted, all I know of William Odom comes from a couple articles, the On Point interview, and transcripts from his few appearances on Democracy Now!).

What I can say for sure is that Odom, whatever his basis, is saying, and has been saying, the right things. So many who supposedly stand on strong humanitarian ground, including many past and present Democratic presidential candidates, argue for the use of violence and force and tell us that the way to create peace is to destroy peoples. I’ll take Odom over these “doves” any day.