[R-G] Obama Steps on the Pentagon Escalator

[Anthony Fenton]

February 23, 2009
Will He be Able to Get Off?
Obama Steps on the Pentagon Escalator
http://counterpunch.org/spinney02232009.html
By FRANKLIN SPINNEY

Marmaris, Turkey.

Perhaps the greatest weakness in any foreign policy is the temptation  
to shape it according to the dictates of domestic politics. This  
seduction corrupts the synthesis of a sensible grand strategy as well  
as the formulation of sound military strategies. Although the  
temptation afflicts all nations, recent history has shown the United  
States to be dangerously prone to seeing and acting on the world  
through the disorienting lens of domestic politics. One need only  
recall Bush's asinine grand-strategic assessment that the terrorists  
hate us, because they hate our way of life, to realize how dangerously  
misleading this kind of self referencing can become.

Bush's inward focus was no anomaly, however. One of JFK's most  
successful campaign tactics in presidential campaign of 1960, for  
example, was his phoney allegation of a missile gap between the Soviet  
Union and the United States, when in fact he knew the opposite was the  
case. JFK's reckless campaign rhetoric unnecessarily intensified the  
cold war and reinforced militarists in both political parties. No  
doubt, his "bear any burden" rhetoric encouraged an atmosphere that  
helped to pave the way to Vietnam.

Ronald Reagon played the same game in 1980, with the same effects,  
using a phoney assertion of a "window of vulnerability," together with  
equally spurious claim that the so-called hollow military of the  
Carter years was the product of budget cuts made by Democrats, when in  
fact the hollow military was a self-inflicted wound created by a  
perverse pattern of decision making within the Pentagon. The success  
of Reagan's gambit intensified the Cold War in the early 1980s and  
launched an unprecedented "peacetime" spending spree that not only did  
not fix the Pentagon's decision making pathologies, but put the US  
defense budget on a budget escalator that now can only be justified by  
continuing wars after the USSR had collapsed, much as George Kennan  
had predicted it would (i.e., due more to its internal contradictions  
than Reagan's spending spree). That the continuing addiction to cold- 
war level defense budgets needs continuing war to justify the high  
spending levels can be seen clearly in the obsessive predilection  
toward bullying coercive diplomacy punctuated by the use of military  
force, especially bombing, exhibited by President Clinton and  
especially President George W. Bush.

Fast forward to 2008. During the last election, Candidate Barack Obama  
chose to attack President Bush's catastrophically flawed grand  
strategy of belligerent warmongering (you are either with us or  
against us) by portraying Iraq, correctly in my opinion, as an  
unnecessary war that distracted attention away from Al Qaeda. But to  
shore up support from the "pro-military" parts of the democratic and  
independent electorates, Obama contrasted Iraq, the bad war, to  
Afghanistan, the good war. To that end, he pledged to draw down troops  
in Iraq and increase troops in Afghanistan, implicitly buying into  
Bush's grand strategy of an open-ended, militarized, global war on  
terror -- where al Qaeda remains forgotten but with the anti-Taliban  
war mutates into a far more dangerous anti-Pashtun war. Pointedly,  
Candidate Obama never called for reductions in the defense budget.

Candidate Obama's domestic politicking is now coming back to haunt  
President Obama's foreign policy and military strategy.

Specifically, Obama's promise to focus on the "good war" is  
undermining his formulation of a sensible grand stategy as well as a  
sound military strategy, particularly with regard to the question of  
escalating our war in Afghanistan and intervening in Pakistan, which  
is clearly destabilizing Pakistan, the world's only Muslim nation with  
atomic weapons.

To wit -- Obama just approved an increase of 17,000 troops for  
Afghanistan, which is in line with his campaign promise, but far less  
than the 30,000 increase requested by the military. According to an  
unnamed source interviewed by Gareth Porter, the reason he reduced the  
military's request is because the commander in Afghanistan, General  
McKiernan, could not tell Obama how the increased force would be used,  
and the Joint Chiefs of Staff could not tell him what the end-game in  
Afghanistan would be. In other words, the leaders of the military told  
Obama they have no strategy in Afghanistan, except doing more of the  
same, which everyone agrees is not working, and therefore, echoing the  
peculiar logic found in the Pentagon Papers, the military wants to  
redeem failure by escalating.

Rather than just saying no and telling the military to go back to the  
drawing board, Obama chose to make good on his campaign pledge by  
approving a smaller increase than requested (domestic politics),  
perhaps thinking he could keep his options open by buying himself a  
little time while he did a strategy study. However, in so doing, he  
bought into an admittedly strategy-free escalation decision (foreign  
policy), without understanding the future consequences of that  
decision. Straddling the fence may make sense in the context of day-to- 
day domestic politics, but Mr. Obama needs to understand Pentagon  
plays long-term bureaucratic politics, and over in Versailles on the  
Potomac, the stakes are high, because careers, budgets, and contracts  
are at stake.

Porter is right, President Obama has made a crucial mistake that could  
very well come back to haunt him, like the initial decision to  
escalate in Vietnam, made in 1965 against his better judgement, came  
back to haunt Lyndon Johnson. That is because, with his approval of a  
partial escalation in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama is now a vested party in  
General McKiernan's strategy of mindlessness escalation. And Obama  
knows it is not good domestic politics to unring the bell. So, Mr.  
Obama will be under tremendous pressure and temptation to construct a  
strategy ex-post facto to justify his decision. Moreover, given his  
approval of an initial escalation, the priniciple of escalation is now  
an agreed-to option and he will soon learn that his credibility is at  
stake. You can be sure the milcrats understand this, because Front  
Loading decisions (i.e., getting politicos to commit to things before  
they understand the future consequences of their approval) has been  
raised a high art form in Versailles on the Potomac. It is now  
virtually certain the milcrats will try to use Obama's initial  
escalation decision as the thin edge of the wedge to lever in a "new  
strategy" that will include sending even more troops into the Afghan/ 
Paki meatgrinder.

So, is Obama repeating the mistakes of the Americans in Vietnam or the  
Russians in Afghanistan? General McKiernan apparently doesn't think  
so, because the arrogantly dismissed analogies to the Russian  
experience in Afghanistan at a news conference on February 18 by  
saying, "There's always an inclination to relate what we're doing with  
previous nations ... I think that's a very unhealthy comparison." Old  
timers, however, will remember, however, this is exactly how  
McKiernan's predecessors blew off the warnings of Bernard Fall in the  
early 1960s, when they dismissed France's experience in Indochina.

The sooner Obama realizes that studying and learning from past  
mistakes is a good idea, the easier it will be for him to jump off the  
Pentagon's escalator, but he is just where the apparat wants him to  
be ... alone. He has no George Ball in the Ms. Clinton's State  
Department to act as the canary in the coal mine. And as for the  
dilletentes he appointed to sub-cabinet levels in Mr. Gate's Pentagon,  
the milcrats know it will be far easier to roll over them that it was  
for their predecessors to successfully roll the best and the brightest  
in Mr. McNamara's Pentagon.

Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the  
Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and  
can be reached at chuck_spinney at mac.com