Betty Ford started it. Southern California ran with it. This is the land of the celebrity rehab center. They’re everywhere, from the Betty Ford Clinic out in Palm Springs to New Horizons out in Malibu, with hundreds in-between, fed by Hollywood and the courts. If a troubled young starlet doesn’t check herself into one of these places on her own, which does happen, she usually does something stupid and the courts send her there anyway, and it’s the same with brooding young Hollywood hunks strung out on this or that. These places cure addictions, or so they say. It just takes a lot of time and money to do that, which makes them absurdly profitable, even if it never seems to work – which feeds another highly profitable industry out here, the tabloids and their television versions. The relationship is symbiotic. The sweet young thing shaves her head and drives her pink Benz into a tree and is sent to rehab – it’s shocking and sad and that’s what folks want to know about this kid who seemed so nice – and then she does her six weeks at the fancy rehab place, or bags it after two days and walks out the door – and then she’s caught shoplifting, in a drunken stupor. That’s big news too, and the cycle starts again – back to rehab and falling off whatever particular wagon is involved, again – and everyone makes a lot of money all along the way. The sweet young thing doesn’t – her career is in shambles – but at least she’s keeping the local economy going. It’s not all about making movies out here.
This economic model, however, only works if addiction cannot be cured and can only be managed, which seems to be the case. That was always the central premise of Alcoholics Anonymous – you’ll always be an alcoholic, but with the right support system and the right attitude, you can “stay sober” for long stretches of time, even if you’ll always be a damned drunk. They even hand out pins for that – six months sober and clean or whatever – but from the start you have to admit you’re an alcoholic and will always be an alcoholic. That generates a lot of self-righteous bullshit – insufferable people who claim that at least they’re more honest about who they are then the rest of us, and thus more honest about everything else in the world – but at least they’re not drunk in a ditch every day. It works well enough, and Gamblers Anonymous and Overeaters Anonymous work the same way. Overeaters Anonymous is big out here by the way – there are a lot of binge-and-purge bulimic young women in Hollywood, at the edges – the wannabes who want to be discovered and have heard that the camera adds thirty pounds. That’s the least of their problems. They’re addicted to unlikely possibility of fame, just as compulsive gamblers are addicted to the unlikely possibility of fortune. Delusion does lead to addiction.
At least there’s a way to manage this, and the first step in all these programs and at the fancy rehab centers is to admit you have a problem, and it could be argued that the nation had a problem. Two books in 2010 sounded the warning, Andrew J. Bacevich with Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War and Reasons to Kill: Why Americans Choose War – by Richard E. Rubenstein, a professor of conflict resolution at George Mason University. There was also one from Peter Beinart – The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris – all three at the start of the tenth year of continuous war by the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq, and roughly a dozen secret military campaigns against terrorist groups based in other countries around the world. Add in previous wars and military operations in the past thirty years – Nicaragua, Grenada, Libya, Panama, Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and so on. Something was up, perhaps an addiction, and in the Chronicle of Higher Education at the time, Michael Nelson reviewed one key argument about how this happened:
Bacevich regards the start of the cold war in the late 1940s as the beginning of an era of perpetual war in which, for the first time, “military might emerged as central to the American identity.” The “Washington rules” that he says dominate the nation’s elected government and permanent security apparatus are based on a “credo” – namely, that the United States alone must “lead, save, liberate, and ultimately transform the world.”
This credo, Bacevich argues, is made manifest in a “trinity” of operational imperatives: “maintain a global military presence” of bases and fleets around the world, “configure its forces for global power projection” to enable rapid military action anywhere, anytime, and “counter existing or anticipated threats by relying on a policy of global interventionism.” Remarkably, the end of the cold war made no difference at all in either credo or trinity. “Once the Soviet threat disappeared,” he observes, “with barely a whisper of national debate, unambiguous and perpetual global military supremacy emerged as an essential predicate to global leadership.”
Some of us saw that happen close up, but maybe you had to be there. West Point, on the first day of June, 1990, was pretty cool. The setting is stunning, high on the bluffs on the west side of the Hudson, just up the river from New York City, and the cadets were fine young men and women – and there was the graduation speaker – Colin Powell saying the appropriate nice things about all the new Second Lieutenants, but then adding something odd. He told them all that the Cold War was over, so a giant army at the ready at all times was kind of pointless. It wasn’t that we’d study war no more, it’s just that there would be more studying war and far less waging war – but he assured the graduates there would be plenty of honorable and useful and amazing things for them to do. Of course, back then, Saddam rolled into Kuwait soon enough and we were at it again – Iraq, then Afghanistan, and then Iraq again – and the nephew is now a full-bird Colonel, at the Pentagon with the planners and thinkers, after years and years in theater, as they say.
Nothing changed – sure, the Berlin Wall fell and then the Soviet Union just up and disappeared, and Francis Fukuyama had also written about “the end of history” in a 1989 essay that he turned into a book three years later – explaining the end of history as “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
Get it? Everything was settled. The Cold War was over. Communism was dead – in fact, every other system of organizing human society for the greater good was dead too. The job now was to find a way to have everyone settle down and deal with the inevitable – everyone was going to be just like us. They might not like that but they’d eventually see the light, or we’d help them see the light – for their own good, because we’re nice guys and do have the only proven way to run things. That’s what was in the air. That was the premise of the whole neoconservative thing that eventually gave us eight years of war in Iraq and thirteen years of war in Afghanistan, after all the other reasons for those wars fell apart. If delusion leads to addiction, that particular delusion further enabled our addiction to war. Francis Fukuyama was what they call an enabler, although he later decided to take it all back. History didn’t end – the players just changed – and Fukuyama admitted as much and went on to split with the crew who hadn’t figured that out. There would be no New American Century after all. Nothing is inevitable. History is never settled, once and for all.
It was too late for that. America’s addiction to war had been fed, once again, even if on that sunny June afternoon in 1990, Colin Powell, like a therapist at some fancy Malibu rehab clinic, had decided he wouldn’t be an enabler but would break the cycle of delusion, even if rather subtlety. He told those cadets, soon to be former cadets, that there were things other than war, fine and noble and honorable things – embrace them.
That wasn’t to be. The world’s a nasty place, and we had long ago decided it was our job to fix that, with our military – but it was worth a shot, and it’s still worth a shot. Addictions can be managed, and twenty-four years later, President Obama went to West Point to try again:
President Obama on Wednesday laid out his vision for a comprehensive post-9/11 foreign policy after more than a decade of war overseas, arguing for a new form of American leadership that strikes a balance between interventionism and avoiding “foreign entanglements.”
Speaking in front of 1,000 cadets here at the U.S. Military Academy’s commencement ceremony, Obama articulated an approach that he said would employ targeted force in a responsible fashion, including a new initiative aimed at responding to terrorist threats. He sought to blunt growing criticism from political rivals who have called his administration feckless in its response to global crises in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere.
Yeah, well, he didn’t give those addicts their fix:
Obama stressed the importance of nonmilitary options in addressing the world’s challenges, as well as collective international action. Coming more than six years into a presidency devoted to winding down the wars, the speech featured a firm defense of his administration’s handling of foreign crises – including those in Nigeria, Syria and Ukraine – and a suggestion that many critics are out of step with a nation tired from 13 years of war.
“Here’s my bottom line: America must always lead,” Obama said. “If we don’t, no one else will. The military that you have joined is and always will be the backbone of that leadership. But U.S. military action cannot be the only – or even the primary – component of our leadership in every instance.”
Cue the guy addicted to war, all he know and will ever know:
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Obama’s presidential challenger in 2008 and one of Capitol Hill’s most vocal hawks, attacked the West Point address as an insufficient response to global threats and argued that Obama mischaracterized his foes as clamoring for military conflict.
“It is unfortunate that the president once again fell back on his familiar tactic of attacking straw-men, posturing as the voice of reason between extremes, and suggesting that the only alternative to his policies is the unilateral use of military force everywhere,” McCain said in a statement. “Literally no one is proposing that, and it is intellectually dishonest to suggest so.”
McCain was the one who sang Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran to the Beach Boy’s Barbara Ann melody, and who said, when Russia moved into Georgia in 2008 for five days, and left, that “we’re all Georgians now” so something had to be done. There’s no straw-man here, there’s McCain, who calls for war two or three times a month, wherever, and then when asked if we really should send the Marines to Quito or wherever, says no, he didn’t exactly mean that. When asked what he did mean, he never quite says. He knows what’s what in America, as does Obama:
Polls show public support waning for direct U.S. military intervention in international conflicts, and parents applauded Wednesday when Obama noted that the cadets in attendance may not have to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan. At the same time, public approval of Obama’s handling of foreign affairs also has dropped in recent polls.
Critics have charged that the administration has not projected a clear and strong response to the Russian invasion of Crimea, Syria’s use of chemical weapons and a terrorist group’s abduction of hundreds of schoolgirls in Nigeria.
The public wants that clear and strong response to everything, and they don’t want any more wars, so they’re not quite sure what that clear and strong response should be, but Obama isn’t doing it, whatever it is, which they don’t know.
Right, so Obama offered this:
In response, Obama called on Congress to support a new $5 billion “Counterterrorism Partnerships Fund” to respond to evolving terrorist threats around the world, emphasizing that “for the foreseeable future, the most direct threat to America at home and abroad remains terrorism.” …
A counterterrorism strategy “that involves invading every country that harbors terrorist networks is naive and unsustainable,” Obama added. “I believe we must shift our counterterrorism strategy – drawing on the successes and shortcomings of our experience in Iraq and Afghanistan – to more effectively partner with countries where terrorist networks seek a foothold.”
Obama made clear that he has long since moved past his initial skepticism about the United States’ role as an “indispensable nation” – a position that drew Republican attacks early in his administration. On Wednesday, he declared that “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.”
But he said that “what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it’s our willingness to affirm them through our actions.”
Cue the other addicts:
Columnist Charles Krauthammer called President Obama’s foreign policy address at West Point Wednesday “literally pointless,” adding it was “weak and defensive” and questioning using the platform of the U.S. Military Academy’s graduation to answer his critics.
“I think the speech was literally pointless,” he said on Special Report. “It was a defensive speech. It was an answer to the chorus of criticism, even from his side of the aisle, that it’s been a weak, leaderless, rudderless foreign policy, which it has been … He set out this ridiculous contrast between extreme isolationism on the one hand and almost a caricature of intervention on the other … There’s not a person in American who’s asking for boots on the ground in Syria or in Ukraine … I think it was a very weak and defensive speech and there was no response from any of the cadets. It was quiet as a mouse.”
Krauthammer said a congressional source who served in the armed forces thought there was a “real pettiness and personalization” to Obama’s address…
The Weekly Standard’s Steve Hayes simply said Obama’s echoes of criticism of former President George W. Bush’s policies were a sign he “doesn’t really know what he’s doing.”
Krauthammer also added this:
Conservative analyst Charles Krauthammer offered a scathingly personal view of President Obama’s announcement Tuesday that U.S. troops are pulling out of Iraq, accusing Obama of a “personal narcissism” that literally endangers American lives for political benefit…
Krauthammer acknowledged that a final withdrawal from the country would likely benefit the Democrat Party, but highlighted the folly of planning wars for a president’s legacy
“I mean, is that how we’re now setting the strategy of the United States of America – a war zone where so many have died and so much treasure and blood has been spent so a president can leave office looking good?” he asked.
Slate’ Fred Kaplan tries to address some of this:
Obama’s point was not (contrary to some commentators’ claims) to draw a “middle-of-the-road” line between isolationism and unilateralism. That’s a line so broad almost anyone could walk it.
The president’s main point was to emphasize that not every problem has a military solution; that the proper measure of strength and leadership is not merely the eagerness to deploy military power; that, in fact, America’s costliest mistakes have stemmed not from restraint but from rushing to armed adventures “without thinking through the consequences, without building international support and legitimacy for our action, without leveling with the American people about the sacrifice required.”
He drew one other distinction. On the one hand, there are “core interests” – direct threats to America and its allies – which we would absolutely defend with military force, “unilaterally if necessary.” On the other hand, there are crises that may “stir our conscience or push the world in a more dangerous direction” but don’t threaten our core interests. In those cases, “the threshold for military action must be higher”; and if force is used, “we should not go it alone,” for the practical reason that “collective action in these circumstances is more likely to succeed, more likely to be sustained, and less likely to lead to costly mistakes.”
To those addicted to war and bold leadership, that’s parsing things too finely. Do or don’t do. There is nothing else. Don’t argue with an addict, but that may have been what happened here:
It’s a fair bet that the most propelling motive behind this speech was sheer exasperation.
Obama cited Ukraine as an example of where and why his critics are, as he starkly put it, “wrong.” When Russian President Vladimir Putin forcibly annexed Crimea, amassed troops near eastern Ukraine, and sent agents to rile secessionist fever across the border, many of Obama’s critics urged him to send American troops to Kiev, buzz the border with the most advanced combat planes, even put Ukraine on a fast track for NATO membership. When he didn’t do these things, he was denounced, once again, as weak, tepid, feckless, and an unreliable ally.
But Obama in his speech listed several things he did do, and they undoubtedly had an effect. Sanctions isolated Russia; reinforcements to Eastern European NATO members shored up their confidence; officials from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe monitored the May 25 election (and exposed the ethnic-Russian separatists’ obstructions in the east). And as a result of all this, the Ukrainians elected a new president who seems capable of bridging the west and the east, of moving gradually toward the EU while staying steady in Russia’s orbit, and it seems that the crisis is winding down. Troubles remain, but the prospects of a violent East-West confrontation have receded. Obama said in his speech that all this happened “because of American leadership … without us firing a shot” – a boast that’s hard to dispute.
That may be a boast that’s hard to dispute, unless that’s nothing to boast about, and Kaplan sees the real problem here:
If many of Obama’s critics had their way, there would still be American troops in Iraq, there wouldn’t be a drawdown in Afghanistan, and shipments of fresh new recruits would be fighting in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and who knows where else.
Does this mean, as his critics charge, that Obama has an aversion to war? I suppose. But what exactly is wrong with that?
That is what Colin Powell had said twenty-four years earlier at the same spot, and he had come up with his “Powell Doctrine” – the Vietnam War had formed his views. Go in at the beginning of a war with overwhelming forces to achieve clearly defined political objectives, achieve them, and then get the hell out, quick. And best example of the Powell Doctrine in practice was that hundred-hour war we waged against Saddam Hussein in 1991, where we easily defeated the Iraqi army that had occupied Kuwait, with relatively few American casualties. Done – so both Powell and Obama said the same thing about war – if you have to do it, do it right, but don’t do it if you don’t have to do it. That last thing you want to do is become addicted to it – even if the cycle of addiction and talking about it keeps the economy humming along.
Let’s see. The first step is to admit that you have a problem. We’ve been working on that for years. One day we’ll get that, or we never will.