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COMMENTARY
January 7, 2012
The page turner
The publicity slogan this time is, "Turning the page." In the early 1990s it was, "The peace dividend." U.S. President Barack Obama announced this week a radical downsizing of U.S. armed forces, including the elimination of perhaps half-a-million soldiers. The U.S. army and the Marine Corps are to be eviscerated; the Navy and Air Force will be maintained, though with slowdowns to their hardware procurements.There was posturing about maintaining the U.S. presence in the Pacific and Far East, but it was sleight-of-hand. U.S. forces had already been taxed in the Pacific to supply logistical needs in Iraq and Afghanistan, so that "maintaining strength" actually means locking in the diminished presence. This in turn counters a Chinese military presence that is increasing quickly, and projecting outward. Two large fiscal facts complete the picture. The first is that the president's half-trillion of cuts is in addition to the half-trillion that must be found to satisfy an act of Congress. This was automatically triggered by the (predictable) failure of the bipartisan committee charged with finding emergency cuts throughout the federal budget. The second is that neither Obama nor congressional Democrats have yet to agree to the sacrifice of a single dollar in budgetary "entitlements." National defence alone takes the hit. From the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates have long gone. Obama at first retained the Republican Gates for political cover, because he was known to be weak on defence. But in Leon Panetta, he has had since last year a reliable party hack, who earned his stars as president Bill Clinton's chief backroom "arranger." Panetta's job now is to keep that Pentagon "on message" - to provide the justifications and excuses that Democrats and sympathetic media will need, to drown out the military critics. A new "strategic vision" was required for this purpose, and supplied this week. America is "turning the page" on ground wars, such as the ones it just fought, and focusing instead on drones, cyber warfare, and other high-technology. Behind this, is the fatuous notion that there is a technological fix for every problem - a notion that has already cost the U.S. dearly, not only in defence. This is a core "progressive" dogma, which I characterize as the "labour-saving fallacy." It holds that, as technology advances, the "dirty work" that humans were once compelled to do can be either eliminated, or "outsourced." In both government and big business - in the U.S., Canada, much of Europe (except arguably Germany), even Japan - the clever people have decided that we can be the managers, inventors, designers, investors. Little things like manufacturing - or soldiering - can, when necessary, be farmed out. We shouldn't have to do stuff like that any more. (We have labour laws!) In economic terms, we have bled away whole industrial sectors, while piling up unemployment and debt. In military terms, the "vision" is now of warfare as a computer game. As for Bosnia, or Libya, or Abbottabad, we keep the assets to attack from the skies. We can rectify imbalances on the ground by pushing a few buttons. From the Oval Office, the president may decide who needs killing this morning, and be back on the golf links in the afternoon. What we found, in Iraq and Afghanistan, is what we have been finding again and again through a century of horrified surprise. We can accomplish a great deal of destruction from the air. But "war" still involves holding ground - as surely as "economy" still involves making things. Even at the high-tech end of warfare, military accomplishments in Iraq and Afghanistan depended entirely upon special forces, inserted behind enemy lines, to identify targets. From the air, and with incredibly sophisticated satellite technology, we simply do not know what they are. With the highest technology in the world, the CIA could not tell what was waiting in Iraq; or what is now waiting in Iran or North Korea. These are the crucial human skills that Obama finds no longer important. And he wantonly confuses the issue, by insinuating that "boots on the ground" were only needed for the long, wastefully bureaucratic, and mostly failed "democracy-building" operations, on which he has now "turned the page." Such reckless stupidity further depends on another "progressive" conceit: that the U.S. and allies get to choose which wars to fight, and which to pass on, as if we were looking through the offerings in an IKEA catalogue. This is not how the world works. The wars you least want, come to you. Allied with this conceit is a corollary - shared by right-wing libertarians like Ron Paul - that if we reduce our aggressive military posture, our mortal enemies will reciprocate by reducing theirs. Against which, we may oppose the entire history of the world. Tyrants, "bullies," are attracted to weakness. And there is no more effective form of war mongering, than advertising weakness. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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