An excellent Tomdispatch entry has me thinking about the vaporous world of fiction in which our country's leaders are living. Here's Tom expounding his central theme:
Under the President's determined, even steely, excesses of optimism lie dystopian abysses and half-a-century-plus of history in which policy-making projections about the future, another form of reality-based fiction, and the deepest sort of end-of-time gloom have met and melded. ... By 1950, our top civilian planners had plunged with utter seriousness into fictional scenarios that seemed to outstrip the wildest science fiction novels, not to speak of leading directly into the charnel house of history – and there the Pentagon followed with alacrity. In the wake of the "stalemate" of the Korean War, throughout the rest of the 1950s, actual war-fighting ceased to be a military matter. The CIA was the outfit that fought covertly in the global "shadows," while left to the armed forces in those years was fantasy.
The very power and destructiveness of our utmost weapons rendered it impossible to use them in a real war. So the Pentagon slipped into a perpetual war-gaming mode, in which all possibilities were considered, but none actually implemented. By the time of the Vietnam War, war games were so deeply entrenched in the planning mindset that the entire war effort became a kind of game, an effort to see if we could win a war without really trying. Along the way we missed vital pieces of information from the real world, such as the depth of Vietnamese committment to self-rule, and its total superfluity to our power struggle with the Soviet Union.
After Vietnam, realism and covert operations ruled for a time. The CIA took care of business in Central America and other locations, while the Pentagon worked up its strategy of using overwhelming force: the Powell Doctrine. But all that prudent, hard-nosed realism dissolved when Bush came to power. Last week's story by Dana Priest on the new report by the National Intelligence Council revealed that the Iraq war has created a "training ground for the next generation of 'professionalized' terrorists". What's more, it created an Iraq-Al Qaeda link that previously existed only in the imagination of Bush administration officials:
Before the U.S. invasion, the CIA said Saddam Hussein had only circumstantial ties with several al Qaeda members. Osama bin Laden rejected the idea of forming an alliance with Hussein and viewed him as an enemy of the jihadist movement because the Iraqi leader rejected radical Islamic ideals and ran a secular government.
So the administration hawks, blinded by an ideology that blurred the differences and very real friction between separate groups of Muslims hostile to the US, based their rationale for war in part on ties that never existed. Their eagerness to embrace allegations of a tie between Osama and Saddam was also fueled by their realization that it was the best way to use the weight of September 11th to justify the war against Iraq. It's a sad and tragic case of committment to a fiction.
John Robb, who blogs with no little expertise about fourth-generation warfare and global guerrilla tactics, argues that the US nation-building policy in Iraq follows an upside-down version of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Maslow, of course, contended that we must meet basic, physical needs (food, security) before abstract ones (belonging, love, self-actualization). The words of Brecht prefigured this structure in a literary register: "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral" ("food first, then morality"). In Robb's view, the insurgents in Iraq are targeting the basics: simple infrastructure, security, food and water supplies. The US, on the other hand, focuses most of its effort on the abstract: elections, soverignty. This puts us in a weak position, because the goal we are trying to reach (a democratic Iraq) cannot be achieved without some basic assurances of stability and security.
Robb identifies another area of upside-down thinking in the administration's typical approach to fighting networks of terrorists. Essentially, it amounts to the old sci-fi movie standard of "kill the leader and they all disperse". Going after bin Laden or Zarqawi or "terrorist HQ" in Fallujah is almost beside the point, because their organizations are decentralized networks. They have lots of built-in redundancy, fluid hierarchies, built-in fault tolerance due to rerouting around disrupted communication channels: all the characteristics that make the Internet immune to centralized attacks also work for globalized terror networks. But the Pentagon, because it is a strongly hierarchical state-based organization, has trouble coping with the way that diffuse non-state organizations behave.
These upside-down policies are born of another fiction, an ideological outlook that conceives of the democratic process as a prerequisite to a safe society. If that were true, then authoritarian or dictatorial regimes would not have a chance at any kind of stability. But we see that -- at least in the short run -- they do manage to stand. As a man who believes that all authority vests in God -- the ultimate top-down arbiter -- George W. Bush is the perfect leader to engineer this kind of mistaken thinking. You can't just install elections on top of an insecure and shifting society and hope they will work. A free society starts with meeting basic needs and assuring basic safety. In other words, the essence of freedom starts at the bottom and trickles upward. But to a certain kind of religious worldview, it's exactly the opposite: essences come from the top and filter down.
I heard another striking example of fiction driving reality on NPR this week. Eric Westervelt had a report on the "Iraqi express", a supply convoy that runs from Kuwait to a base north a Baghdad. In the report, Staff Sgt. Jeff Drushel mocks his adversary, flippantly saying: "IEDs, mortars, RPGs, small arms -- hajji can't shoot, and hajji can't surf." This is life imitating art -- a pithy paraphrase from Apocalpyse Now brought in to capture a war whose dark origins lie in a day everyone described as being "just like an action movie".
Those action movies cited by 9/11 onlookers comforted us with a vision of American strength and glorious (though justified) violence: what else are Die Hard and Rambo if not a celebration of honorable cataclysm? And just as the action movie template follows one explosion with another with the slenderest logical thread binding them, the Iraq war grew as a response to 9/11 on the slimmest of pretenses and the most transparent of fictions. Our country's tenacious grip on fiction in the face of reality is surpassingly strange, but is also increasingly the motor of our history.