The blabosphere is chattering about why vastly superior military power isn't reaping much in the way of victories these days. While pundits are focused on Israel's war on Lebanon, Iraq and even Afghanistan are failures from the point of view of the Goliath. The ostensive enemies in these cases end up looking like Davids. And everyone loves the rock-slinging David who fells the giant with a simple stone. The giants haven't fallen, yet, but they're waging wars that could end up with David simply keeping his stand while Goliath trips over a stone.
So goes the misplaced fetish for security by way of domination. If you've been following Phronesisaical, you know that we here place a heavy emphasis on legitimacy in international affairs. Not legitimacy of the old-timey realist stripe. But realists do have this one point right: as Henry Kissinger wrote, "legitimizing principles triumph by being taken for granted." A central problem in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan is that the flimsy excuses for war and destruction have shifted uncertainly in the winds of various military contingencies. Nobody really knows why Iraq and why Lebanon except, presumably, the leaders of the US and Israel and their cronies. As Martha Finnemore writes, "the goal being pursued by force must be seen as legitimate, and force must be viewed as a legitimate means to that goal." Simple, and true.
Legitimacy of an international cause may indeed be based entirely in self-interest but it must at least resonate with those one seeks to convince and those one seeks to defeat. Indeed, defeat itself requires that the enemy views himself as having lost. A historically significant defeat requires that the enemy views himself as having lost to a more compelling entity or set of principles. These have to be compelling for reasons having nothing to do with military force and domination. They have to be compelling by the force of their sense of justice or equity. Given that neither Iraq nor the US have offered up, or can offer, such legitimizing principles for their disastrous escapades, it is they who have lost. David - a compelling figure - defeats Goliath.
Americans fear "death and taxes." Wait, that's too cavalier (journalese). Americans, entranced by latest nightly news cholesterol-to-egg reports, fear death and they fear the loss of economic security or, rather, the kind of economic security that sustains over-inflated lifestyles. Christian Americans have their Heaven, but there's good reason to fear rejection at the pearly gates, what with 50% of Christian men addicted to porn. The ostensive enemy in the US's wars does not fear death and there's very little in the way of economic comfort to lose. What they fear is the loss of courage and the loss of innocent family. These are compelling reasons to fight. The US's and Israel's self-assuredness in their respective causes has led them towards unquestioned absolutism about their destinies. Worse, it has led them to presume that some settled legitimacy to their vaunted guiding principles is enough reason to behave in even the most execrable ways in the international sphere. The problem - as any Philosophy 101 professor knows - is that it's increasingly difficult to articulate just what these guiding principles and values are without resorting to platitudes. The US president certainly can't do it. He resorts simply to a grade-school "freedom" without giving any concreteness at all to that highly abstract and otherwise vapid notion. Legitimacy, on the other hand, isn't static - it is fluid and evolving and has to be won over and over through dialogue and international behavior and standards worth emulating.
As a military matter, however, I want to make one main point here. That is, the US and Israel have constructed a massive war apparatus - the largest by far in the world - as well as a philosophical conception of military and economic might that premises the ongoing buildup. That conception is that victories and security and values/principles are secured by military domination. You cannot, however, create such an apparatus and such a conception of the very nature of war without, yes, legitimizing principles, but also without any framework through which the ostensive enemy might see itself as having lost. The US fears losing where losing is framed in terms of death and economic status. Its war machine reflects these fears. The ostensive enemy does not have such fears. Indeed, it thrives and grows in the legitimacy of its causes and values with each death and each destruction of material wealth.
This is all not merely a strategic or tactical matter. The question is more far-ranging, I believe. It runs to the very heart of global power. That is, is the very conception of war, of the war apparatus, of the war economy, and of legitimate uses of military (and economic) power shared by the Americans and Israelis the core of Goliath's downfall?
4 comments:
Suicidal zealot warriors are insane. As individuals we isolate them in asylums. Whatever happened to the strategy of containment and piped in VOA? Anyway, the Israeli campaign was never about coercing the crazies to do anything. The main rationale we got was that it was about making life in Lebanon hell for everybody, in the hope that the crazies' basically unarmed and unorganized hosts would cease "supporting" them morally and/or materially, and so somehow this would do away with the crazies, bottomless pit of oil money and hi-tech weapons stockpile from Iran notwithstanding. That explanation hardly cuts the mustard either, except as motivation for an adventure, collateral damage, regional stability, global economy and prospects of WWWIII be damned. I can't wait 'till it starts up again.
I think we have to be careful about how we understand suicide bombers. It's a completely different context in which our American notions of normality pretty much don't apply. If we call others insane because they're beyond that sphere of normality, that's certainly how we understand things. But it doesn't lead us toward any further understanding of what's outside of that sphere.
Foreign relations is pragmatic, as is dealing with an approaching asteroid. You try to understand, but economics and practicalities limit how far you can afford to get. That's why Freud doesn't provide us a solution for social problems. Not everybody can be in psychoanalysis. Somebody has to grow the food. Not everybody can afford the expense or the time. So the practice of policy making at all levels proceeds largely as if Freud never lived. I agree "insane" tends to end the effort to understand, and that we have to watch out for ending these efforts prematurely. If I wanted to kill everybody in Hezbollah, I suppose I'd try a lot longer and harder. I just think they aren't worth the time and anguish of a lots of us until they change their attitudes, and I imagined it was geopolitically feasible to spare ourselves by pursuing "containment." Of course, sanctions under Hussein killed Iraqis, and blockades and embargoes generally are acts of war. But I think such measures are worth distinguishing from bomb dropping.
I think it is practical to understand suicide bombers. I mea, after decades of relations in the Middle East only becoming worse and the US and Israel taking increasingly violent and slef-defeating approaches, it would serve us well to figure out what we want to do there and how we're going to get to what we want to do. That's going to involve really looking at the roots of the problem rather than pronouncing our own values superior and then bombing the inferior ones. History shows that attempts at oppressing the problem fail miserably in the Middle East.
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