I have held off writing something about 9/11. I listened to much of the commentary about it on that day on media sites, in print, and on NPR. (Not on television; I find video news to be a time waster - vapid, opinionated spin talk, not news – so do not watch. Not on social media; even more vapid, opinionated and uninformed, designed to spin everybody up. I stay off it.) I found even what I did hear and read empty, full of sonorous solemnity at some ceremonies and stupid patriotism-pushing at others. Thanks for reading Sheathed Sword! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Among others, I listened to Steve Hadley (Bush National Security Advisor), Mark Morell (CIA Acting Director), Jane Harman (former Congresswoman), and John McGlaughlin (Deputy Director CIA) on National Public Radio opining to reporter Mary Louise Kelly about the meaning of the 25th anniversary. I knew and worked with some of these people while in government; respected their knowledge; learned a good deal. And yet, listening now I was struck at how unimaginative and out of touch they were with what caused 9/11 and what its lessons were. There is an attitude among policy-makers, one I encountered frequently: you the general public do not understand this important stuff; we have access to information that says you are wrong; you are still wrong 25 years later. Anything anyone else says about these events, especially people without security clearances or who are not US citizens, is ill-informed. On NPR, they showed a lack of curiosity, of willingness to “not know,” to be curious about the views of those who disagree. An arrogance and attitude of certainty; arguments marshalled with information to which others, they say, do not have access. And a “short-term-ness” of thinking – the tic tock of events leading to 9/11 had no precedent, no history that might have informed policy, no clear expectations about the ways the actions they proposed might have severe down-stream consequences. J. William Fulbright called this decades ago the “arrogance of power.” I saw it in action for five years in the 1990s in the Situation Room, the assumption that the US view had to be correct, that we had a right, even a responsibility, to intervene; it went without saying. And an a-historicism that found it inconvenient, even wrong, to argue against that right, its historical antecedents, and the potential for unhappy outcomes. Day-by-day there was a happy assertion that things would work out the way the intervenors said it would. I know I am talking in generalities here. I am not writing a scholarly tome on where we have encountered this attitude before. But all of us have seen it. The War in Vietnam is the biggest example in my lifetime. For more than a decade, policy-makers argued that the war was winnable, we would just turn the corner and Ho Chi Minh would fold like a cheap suit. Those who argued otherwise, history now tells us, were sidelined, unheard. And yet, the policy-makers were wrong, leading to a wrong-headed policy that was a major strategic mistake and cost millions of Vietnamese lives, 58,000 American ones, and hundreds of thousands of damaged souls who returned from the war and could never recover. But senior policy-makers, self-assured of their rightness, go back to the Situation Room and do it again. See Afghanistan, where what seemed sensible – air and intel support for indigenous forces with a small US military footprint on the ground – to be followed by significant international funding to support economic and internal governance afterwards – was replaced by withdrawing almost all civilian support. That was followed by a series of disastrous decisions to send back more forces on the ground and dump millions of dollars into trying to create governance and a functioning economy, which it was always clear, we could not do. Just read the reports of the Special Investigator General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, led by John Sopko, who regularly scrutinized the American failures as they were happening and was routinely ignored by policy-makers. Or Iraq, well, need I say more, where thousands died in an ill-fated effort to do the same thing. I despair of even itemizing the disaster there, for the Iraqi people, the American military, and for Middle East stability and security. Or, dare I say it, the current conflict with Iran, built on the same arrogance and certainty, this time inside the Trump regime. We may criticize the current regime; I hold no proxy for it. But I see poor Vice-President Vance desperately scurrying around trying to fix the policy failure, defend it in public, all while skirting the reality that the decision to go to war was stupid and self-destructive. The NPR panel skirted around it, too, in a desperate attempt to appear sober, smart, and certain, even while very gently dissenting. Let’s get real. A lot of us knew in 1963-65 that the Vietnam War was stupid and self-destructive. But the arrogance of power let policy-makers to continue until it failed. Many of us knew that the Iraq invasion was stupid and self-destructive, at the time. But the Bush policy-makers knew better, of course, and we were ill-informed. Afghanistan was going south almost from the very start, but people were listening to the arrogance of Gen. Dave Petraeus, who helped drive it south. Iraq was a disaster from the get-go; it should never have happened. (I was involved in the Gore campaign issues staff in 2000 and it was pretty clear to me he would never have invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein.) In contrast to the tone of the NPR panel, many of us knew that the Global War on Terror (GWOT) was a big mistake very early on. It created a huge and dangerous set of government institutions like DHS and legal precedents like the Patriot Act that were bound to be trouble downstream. The Washington Post told us so decades ago. Miles Taylor, who was at DHS in Trump’s first term and blew the whistle to the NY Times as “Anonymus” now criticizes the Trump policies. He appears surprised that the oppressive homeland defense bureaucracy he helped strengthen in the first Trump term has been used to turn the federal government toward internal political oppression. Lucy and the football is what we have here. Fooled you in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, the GWOT, and now Iran. Trust us, we didn’t know it would go wrong, and let’s try it again. Meanwhile, the rest of the world laughs and worries. Laughs because they see the self-deluding arrogance of our policies and policy-makers. Worry, because this lumbering American bull is so big it may break the china in the rest of the world just by stumbling around. Meanwhile, be happy, foreign policy has-beens; you are still being invited to share the mythology about being right while the rest of us “don’t know.” Thanks for reading Sheathed Sword! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. |