War! Huh...Why bother declare it, yeah...

Thanksgiving, 1993 (I think), in our
Astoria, Queens apartment.

A colleague and friend of mine, Andy Grossman, had an interesting take on Representative Doug Lamborn's (R-CO) suggestion that generals who disagree with Obama's response to ISIS (or ISIL) should resign en masse.

Before I relate what Grossman said, a word about him.  And this will be quite a digression.  I first met Andy in grad school, in a survey course on International Relations.  We soon got the nickname "reactionary corner," apparently because we took realist positions among students who tended to be far left, and for whom realism is anathema (I should add that this label was given and received with good humor, and I'll say that we both shared, and share, the most unrealist concern with the impact of warmaking on democratic practices).  Anyway, Andy and I became friends, and we and a cluster of others began doing Thanksgiving together and summer croquet parties.

Andy finished his PhD long before I did, and secured a position at Albion College (Albion, Michigan), where he still teaches today.  He soon turned his dissertation into a book, Neither Dead nor Red, a very fine account of the origins of Civil Defense, framed as a strand of US political development.

I finally finished in 2000 and took a visiting position at Wabash College (Crawfordsville, IN). This one-year position turned into an extended one, and there was talk of converting my position to tenure-track.  In my fourth year, it became clear this wasn't going to happen.  I wasn't cut out for an institution with the unspoken rule that if you can't cheerlead for all male education, then keep your trap shut (its laughable slogan back then was "Boys go to college, men go to Wabash).  That said, I learned a great deal from fellow faculty there about teaching, the college fully supported my efforts to develop innovative curriculum, and I got to work with many fine students.  Still, I was out of work in the summer of 2005.  I'd been on market for a tenure-track position almost every year while there, had landed some interviews, but no luck.

2012.  A little party at Kim Geiger's home to
celebrate AG's promotion to full professor and
my successful bid for tenure.

This is where Andy Grossman comes back into the story.  He basically saved my academic ass.  One of the faculty in his department--political science--was moving to another institution, and he was able to offer me a visiting position.  That turned into a three year stint.  They were three great years of almost daily chats with Andy and others in the department about teaching and our research interests.  Still, it wasn't tenure-track.  So I was back on the market for three more years (a grueling process, let me tell you).  When I finally got an offer from Grand Valley State University (GVSU), Albion College countered with its own offer.  What a conundrum.  Take a position that allows me to be a Latin Americanist again, or stay with colleagues I really enjoyed?  After much deliberation, I accepted the GVSU offer.  Serendipitously, this turned out to be the right move.  Albion College, struggling financially, soon thereafter released numerous tenure-track faculty.

So, a shout out to Andy Grossman for resuscitating my professional life.  And now back to the topics of this posting: War, the US military, the Commander-in-Chief.

Another friend from grad school days, Kim Geiger, sent Andy Grossman a short piece titled "GOP congressman says he's urging American generals to resign rather than follow president's orders" (see also Tom Ricks' relevant commentary here). Here's what Grossman had to say in response.

I had not heard about this. A nice spin on this would be as follows. If generals disagree with the commander in chief, they should first resign. After said resignation, these now retired generals then can do as they please since they are now a citizens. They cannot disobey the President (in most cases--an order to commit genocide or other "crimes against humanity" would be grounds for disobeying the President) in uniform.

So here is what I think this Congressman and others are saying: if you are given an order or mission to "degrade and destroy" X--and if you deeply believe as a member of the military that this cannot be done in the fashion or within the guidance of the civilian leadership's parameters, you must resign. To carry out a policy you do not believe in is dangerous for a number of tactical and strategic reasons. From what I hear and read, almost nobody among officer corps believes it is possible to carry out the President's goals (as he enumerated them a few weeks ago) without actually using a lot of US military forces in Syria on the ground. So in this sense, generals that do NOT agree with the President must resign. What they cannot do--and if they do they should be relieved of duty and subjected to courts martial ASAP--is to disagree IN UNIFORM or to engage in the subversion of the civilian leadership's orders.

So a benign reading of the congressman's claims can actually be made, and I would support them. But is the Congressman thinking along these line of civil-military relations in a liberal democracy? I have no idea. I think to go war based on AUMF [Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists] passed on October 12, 2001 is illegal. I support the goal of destroying ISIL militarily and with brutal force, and no apologies, but as of now we are, in my view, in an extra-constitutional war that has two parties responsible: The President of the United States and the Congress of the United States. I care more about the Constitution being followed than a supposed existential threat to national security when we go to war. I also believe in a draft, higher taxes to fight such wars, and most important, an official declaration of war. Absent that, no war.

I so agree.  And I'm reminded of President Johnson's presidency.  Of course Barack Obama's presidency won't end like Lyndon Johnson's--a one-term residency due to the justly vilified Vietnam war.  But I truly, truly hope we won't end up with the same tragedy.  As the GOP Eisenhower administration initiated our involvement in Vietnam, with the Demorats Kennedy and Johnson deepening it, so has GOP George W. Bush planted us in a Middle East quagmire, with the Democrat Obama unable or unwilling to extricate us.  Where is Congress on this?  Where are ordinary Americans? Shopping, partying, etc.

Innocent Americans

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.  That's basically Andrew Bacevich's message in his new essay in the recent edition of World Affairs (you can find an interview and a link to the essay here).  It's something William Appleman Williams--one of my professors at Oregon State, and a source for Bacevich's writings--argued 30 years ago.  "Empire as a way of life," was Williams' term for the US worldview in which Americans act like an empire, deny they are an empire, refuse to acknowledge the sins of empire, and foist the costs of empire onto the backs of their soldiers and their families, as well as peoples in other lands that we, with our innocent good intentions, are determined to save from themselves.

Bacevich's essay is a review of Graham Greene's marvelous book, The Quiet American. Published in 1955, it was one of the earliest accurate gauges of the style and consequences US involvement in Vietnam.  We apparently learned little from that bloody fiasco now memorialized on a simple, somber wall with the names of 58,195 dead.  I remember hearing some NSA analyst at a 2003 International Studies conference--as Bush pushed our country willy-nilly to war, with many Americans marching in lockstep--blithely arguing that we needed to win the "hearts and minds" of the Iraqis.  My god, I thought, what's next? Strategic hamlets?  In The Quiet American  Greene says "Innocence is a kind of insanity."  It can also be a kind of stupidity.

Bacevich argues that

Those who conceived the Iraq War, the cheerleaders who promoted it from the sidelines, and critics of that war who have now succeeded to positions of power share a common interest in wiping the slate clean, refurbishing the claim that the United States meant well because the United States always means well. No doubt mistakes were made.  Yet America's benign intentions expiate sins committed along the way--or allow those in authority to assign responsibility for any sins to soldiers who in doing Washington's bidding became sources of embarrassment.

It's not only expiation we seek.  We deny the costs of our imperial sins.  Guantánamo is a good example. President Obama made a campaign promise to shut down the prison there, a place chock-full of victims of the notion that good intentions trump egregious violations of our Constitution and international human rights law.  Yet he can't.  Americans and their state governments all refuse to have the prisoners resettled on their presumably innocent turf.  Congress has cut off funding for the closure (see story here).  All those Americans who backed the Bush Administration's war and other 'global war on terror' actions now don't want to pay for the consequences of those policies.  I guess that's the privilege of empire.

But it's not like President Obama is innocent of innocence.  As Bacevich suggests, the President's Afganistan-Pakistan gambit is evidence that his administration has learned little from the past, for all his allusions to Lincoln, FDR, and Kennedy.  While the tone and style differ dramatically from those of Bush, Obama shares Bush's fervor, or perhaps fever.  We can do this thing in Afghanistan, as if he's stumbled on to the magic warring-while-nation-building formula that no previous administration has ever been able to produce.  I guess that's another privilege of empire--the ability to say without a qualm that, this time, we'll get it right, we can "destroy a village in order to save it."