America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History by Andrew J. Bacevich Read Free Book Online Page A

armed might of the United States, made manifest in the presence of airplanes, warships, and fighting troops, serves as an irreplaceable facilitator or catalyst in moving history toward its foreordained destination. True, not every problem lends itself to a simple and straightforward “military solution.” But no problem of any consequence is likely to yield a tolerable solution absent some application of U.S. military power, whether direct or indirect. That the commitment of American armed might could actually backfire and make matters worse is a proposition that few authorities in Washington are willing to entertain.

    A final assumption counts on the inevitability of America’s purposes ultimately winning acceptance, even in the Islamic world. The subjects of U.S. benefactions will then obligingly submit to Washington’s requirements and warmly embrace American norms. If not today, then surely tomorrow, the United States will receive the plaudits and be granted the honors that liberators rightly deserve. Near-term disappointments can be discounted given the certainty that better outcomes lie just ahead.
    None of these assumptions has any empirical basis. Each of the four drips with hubris. Taken together, they sustain the absence of self-awareness that has become an American signature. Worse, they constitute a nearly insurmountable barrier to serious critical analysis. Yet the prevalence of these assumptions goes far toward explaining this key failing in the U.S. military effort: the absence of a consistent understanding of what the United States is fighting for and whom it is fighting against.
    When Jimmy Carter initiated America’s War for the Greater Middle East, this had not been a problem. Then the mission seemed clear: Ensure U.S. access to Persian Gulf oil. The enemy had a name and an address. Indeed, President Carter identified two mutually antagonistic adversaries—Iran in the throes of revolution and an increasingly sclerotic Soviet Union, its own revolution a fading memory. Washington perceived each as posing a looming threat to the Persian Gulf. But if the Gulf’s apparent vulnerability offered a proximate rationale for militarizing U.S. policy in the Islamic world, that preliminary assessment soon enough gave way to something more expansive.
    This was hardly an unprecedented occurrence. Back in April 1898, the Spanish-American War began as a crusade to liberate Cuba. When in the ensuing months the United States occupied and annexed Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, that crusade had pretty clearly morphed into something else. So too with America’s War for the Greater Middle East. It began as a project centered on protecting Persian Gulf oil. Yet by the time Ronald Reagan sent Marines into Beirut and secret emissaries to Tehran while picking fights with Colonel Gaddafi, U.S. purposes were clearly changing—even if those purposes remained murky to Reagan himself.

    Already in the 1980s, in other words, clarity regarding the nature of the mission and the identity of the enemy was evaporating. By fits and starts, America’s War for the Greater Middle East was expanding. Increasing its scope undermined its strategic coherence, however, with purposefulness of effort inversely related to the number of countries in which U.S. forces were operating. More meant less. As for “shaping,” that remained a mirage, a figment of overheated imaginations back in Washington.
    To mask this loss of definition (and perhaps their own confusion), successive presidents framed the overarching problem in generic terms, referring to adversaries as militants, terrorists, warlords, rogue states, or, most recently, “violent extremist organizations.” 5 Alternatively, they followed Reagan’s example in focusing their ire on specific bad actors. By implication, removing the likes of Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, Slobodan Milo š evi ć , Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and Abu