Rule No. 8
The Mission Is Everything
No mission should ever be compromised by diplomatic punctilio. That sounds obvious, and at the same time is often impossible to implement. But here is what happens when this rule is broken.
In the late 1990s Nigerian soldiers deputized by the international community were in Sierra Leone, not only to keep the peace but also, if truth be told, in some cases to steal alluvial diamonds. Like other African peacekeeping contingents in Sierra Leone, the Nigerians weren't always paid by their own government, even though the government was getting money from the international community to provide peacekeeping. Some of these contingents were openly incompetent; the Zambians, for instance, were a battalion of mechanics, cooks, and clerks. But the United Nations said little about any of this; instead it officially accepted the obvious falsehood that all national armies are roughly equal. Diplomatic nicety had completely compromised the mission. The result: the peacekeeping effort nearly collapsed as demoralized and incompetent peacekeepers surrendered without a fight to murderous teenage paramilitaries, who closed in on the capital of Freetown. Order was restored only after the British government dispatched commandos to Sierra Leone. Mounted on rooftops at the airport, a contingent of those commandos shot and killed any rebel who emerged from the bush. For the British, only the mission mattered.
When Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, demonstrated little enthusiasm for bringing Iraqi scientists and their families out of Iraq (even though other Iraqi scientists, once outside their country, had in the past provided valuable intelligence to the West) he revealed that for the UN, yet again, the mission was not everything.
Unfortunately, for the United States the mission is not always everything either. It is often hamstrung by diplomacy and domestic public opinion. The Special Forces are allowed to train and advise local counterparts, but because of restrictions imposed by the United States and, often, the host country as well, they typically have to wave good-bye when local troops take to the field to fight. This can be demoralizing to our elite units, whose members are not draftees serving out their time but professional warriors prepared daily to take measured risks—risks that may seem incredible to timid politicians and other outsiders. And when host-country soldiers are wounded, we should not be prohibited from helping them get to our field clinics, as is sometimes the case. Our elite units should be allowed to provide air cover for local allies, and to help direct operations on the ground. There are no such limits in Afghanistan; ideally that would be the case everywhere. Successful imperial militaries have traditionally fought alongside indigenous troops.
Moreover, arbitrary troop limits set by Congress, known as "force caps," which have restricted Green Beret trainers to fifty-five in El Salvador and our troops in Colombia to 400, should be more flexible. Also, embassy Marines and Army support staff should not be part of the calculation; force caps should apply only to the advisers and training teams in the field. Every one of our Green Berets is a force multiplier, to the extent that an extra ten or twenty of them could make an exponential difference in the success of a mission. If a cap needs stretching a bit, the U.S. ambassador and the U.S. military commander in the host country should be able to stretch it on their own. To think that any of this would risk another Vietnam is alarmist.
Compromising the mission, moreover, can mean needlessly compromising our soldiers' safety. Since the destruction of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, and of military apartments at Khobar Towers, in Saudi Arabia, in 1996, our generals and politicians have needed a commandment: Thou shalt not be sitting ducks. U.S. troops should never be concentrated in a place where they cannot aggressively patrol the surrounding area. Yet that was the situation I observed near the town of Saravena, in northeastern Colombia: because the rules of engagement set by our policymakers and the Colombian government did not allow for aggressive patrolling, a few dozen Green Berets and their support staff were concentrated there in barracks vulnerable to a possible attack by cylinder bombs. That may be politically sound, but it is tactically dumb. And it is morally wrong, because it denies our warriors the means of self-defense. In Saravena the mission was not everything.
Rule No. 9
Fight on Every Front
n their recent article "An Emerging Synthesis for a New Way of War," published in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Air Force Colonels James Callard and Peter Faber describe what they call "combination warfare"—a concept derived from a 1999 Chinese text by two colonels in the People's Liberation Army, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. In the twenty-first century a single conflict may include not only traditional military activity but also financial warfare, trade warfare, resource warfare, legal warfare, and so on. The authors explain that it may eventually involve even ecological warfare (the manipulation of the heretofore "natural" world, altering the climate). Because combination warfare draws on all spheres of human activity, it is the ultimate in total war. It "seeks to overwhelm others by assaulting them in as many domains ... as possible," Callard and Faber write. "It creates sustained, and possibly shifting, pressure that is hard to anticipate."
Combination warfare has already begun, though it has yet to be codified in military doctrine. The most important front, in a way, may be the media. Like the priests of ancient Egypt, the rhetoricians of ancient Greece and Rome, and the theologians of medieval Europe, the media constitute a burgeoning class of bright and ambitious people whose social and economic stature can have the effect of undermining political authority. The media increasingly, and dramatically, affect policy yet bear no responsibility for the outcome.
In terms of U.S. national interests, media attitudes have gotten both worse and better in recent years. American leaders deal less and less with strictly American media and more and more with global ones, as elite U.S. news organs increasingly make use of foreign nationals and global cosmopolitans with multiple passports. The new, global media think in terms of abstract universal principles—the traditional weapon of the weak seeking to restrain the strong—even as the primary responsibility of our policymakers must be to maintain our strength vis-à-vis China, Russia, and the rest of the world. On the other hand, it is impossible to ignore the resurgence of patriotism among American journalists; the political divide between Europe and the United States in the buildup to the war in Iraq, and during this war itself, was mirrored by a divide between the European and the U.S. media. Still, this trend may be ephemeral.
Because the consequences of attack by weapons of mass destruction are so catastrophic, the United States will periodically have no choice but to act pre-emptively on limited evidence, exposing our actions to challenge by journalists, to say nothing of millions of protesters who are increasingly able to coordinate their demonstrations worldwide. The enormous anti-war demonstrations on several continents last February revealed that life inside the post-industrial cocoon of Western democracy has made people incapable of imagining life inside a totalitarian system. With affluence often comes not only the loss of imagination but also the loss of historical memory. Thus global economic growth in the twenty-first century can be expected to create mass societies even more deluded than the ones we have now—the very actions necessary to protect human rights and democracy will become increasingly hard to explain to those who have never been deprived of them. The masses "show no concern for the causes and reasons" behind their own well-being, observed the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses (1929), a book that was equally prescient about the Fascist rallies of the 1930s and the youth rebellion of the 1960s. Indeed, the peace demonstrators last February appeared to have no idea whatsoever that their very freedom to demonstrate had been won by war and conquest in the service of liberty—precisely what the U.S. and British governments were proposing to do in Iraq. Of course, the masses are uninterested, as Ortega noted. "Since they do not see, behind the benefits of civilization, ... they imagine that their role is limited to demanding these benefits peremptorily, as if they were natural rights."
A nation whose businesses can regularly sell products that people neither want nor need should be able to market a foreign policy better than it usually does. Just as leading companies harvest the best former government officials, our government will have to find the budget and the will to hire away the best communicators for this marketing effort. We also need diplomats who are fluent in local languages and dialects and whose sole job is to appear on foreign talk shows (in the Middle East and elsewhere) and be available to local journalists for interviews, so as to better represent our point of view. This occurs too infrequently at the moment. Here, too, we desperately need more area experts; and we need more hyphenated Americans and language specialists inside government. Moreover, it is now a strategic imperative that the United States Information Agency, gutted by the Clinton Administration under pressure from Senator Jesse Helms, be reinvented.
Some may argue that an effective information strategy is largely a matter of telling and spinning the truth. But the truth needs lots of help in societies marked by mass illiteracy, where rumors and conspiracy theories are the rule rather than the exception. That is because where few of the men and almost none of the women can read, news can be communicated only orally; thus it is even more quickly subject to distortion. In the context of mass illiteracy, the growing array of CNN-like networks in Arabic and other languages creates the conditions for a tidal wave of hysteria to be generated by a single inaccurate news report. Destructive rumors and conspiracy theories need to be countered quickly.
From the archives:
"Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura?" (June 2003)
An object lesson in the incendiary power of an icon. By James Fallows Indeed, the best information strategy is to avoid attention-getting confrontations in the first place and to keep the public's attention as divided as possible. We can dominate the world only quietly: off camera, so to speak. The moment the public focuses on a single crisis like the one in Iraq, that crisis is no longer analyzed on its merits: instead it becomes a rallying point around which lonely and alienated people in a global mass society can define themselves through an uplifting group identity, be it European, Muslim, anti-war intellectual, or whatever.
Nevertheless, although media coverage of the war in Iraq was unprecedented, many wars will continue to be fought with few journalists in sight, and consequently with little public awareness. Look at the Congo, where more than three million people have died in conflict since the late 1990s without any significant peace protests in the West. Military conflicts in Colombia, the Philippines, Nepal, and other places may as well be happening in secret. Our intelligence officers, backed by commando detachments, should in the future be given as much leeway as they require to get the job done, so that problems won't fester to the point where we have to act in front of a battery of television cameras.
Rule No. 10
Speak Victorian, Think Pagan
s noted, imperialism in antiquity was in many respects a strain of isolationism: the demand for absolute security at home led powers to try to dominate the world around them. That pagan-Roman model of imperialism contrasts sharply with the altruistic Victorian one, exemplified by Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone in his comment about protecting "the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan." Americans are truly idealistic by nature, but even if we weren't, our historical and geographical circumstances would necessitate that U.S. foreign policy be robed in idealism, so as to garner public support and ultimately be effective. And yet security concerns necessarily make our foreign policy more pagan. The idealistic shorthand of "democracy," "economic development," and "human rights," by means of which the media make sense of events in distant parts of the world, conceals many harsh and complicated ground-level truths. Remember that even Gladstone's vision was more effectively implemented by the realpolitik of statesmen such as Lord Palmerston, Benjamin Disraeli, and the Marquess of Salisbury, who kept illiberal empires like Germany and Russia at bay, sometimes through sheer deviousness, and also arranged for the retaking of Sudan from Islamic extremists.
By sustaining ourselves first, we will be able to do the world the most good. Some 200 countries, plus thousands of nongovernmental organizations, represent a chaos of interests. Without the organizing force of a great and self-interested liberal power, they are unable to advance the interests of humanity as a whole.
And there is this coda: Just as, following the explorations of Portuguese and other mariners, the oceans became a new arena for great power struggles, so will outer space. We have recognized this by creating a U.S. Space Command, which is now a part of the U.S. Strategic Command. The only question now is whether the United States will invest enough in the military technology required to dominate space. If a less liberal power such as China does so instead, then American dominance will be particularly short-lived, no matter how successful the war on terrorism.
No doubt there are some who see an American empire as the natural order of things for all time. That is not a wise outlook. The task ahead for the United States has an end point, and in all probability the end point lies not beyond the conceptual horizon but in the middle distance—a few decades from now. For a limited period the United States has the power to write the terms for international society, in hopes that when the country's imperial hour has passed, new international institutions and stable regional powers will have begun to flourish, creating a kind of civil society for the world. The historian E. H. Carr once observed that "every approach in the past to a world society has been the product of the ascendancy of a single Power." Such ascendancy allows all manner of worldwide connections—economic, cultural, institutional—to be made in a context of order and stability. There will be nothing approaching a true world government, but we may be able to nurture a loose set of global arrangements that have arisen organically among responsible and like-minded states.
If this era of reluctant imperium is to leave a lasting global mark, we must know what we are up to; we must have a sense that supremacy is bent toward a purpose and is not simply an end in itself. In many ways the few decades immediately ahead will be the trickiest ones that our policymakers have ever faced: they are charged with the job of running an empire that looks forward to its own obsolescence.
Winston Churchill saw in the United States a worthy successor to the British Empire, one that would carry on Britain's liberalizing mission. We cannot rest until something emerges that is just as estimable and concrete as what Churchill saw when he gazed across the Atlantic. |
