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Saturday, December 29, 2007

Wars in Iraq and Vietnam: the more-imperial-than-ever-Presidency

This installment of my posts on the book Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: Or, How Not to Learn from the Past (2007), Lloyd Gardner and Marilyn Young, eds., is about the essay by Andrew Bacevich, "Gulliver at Bay: The Paradox of the Imperial Presidency."

Bacevich is very good at seeing complex and contradictory dynamics at work in institutions. In discussing the power of the Presidency, he reviews the history that is largely familiar to those who have paid some attention to the subject of how the Presidency has acquired a very much disproportionate role in foreign and military policy than that envisioned by the Framers of the Constitution. And also disporporationate to what had been actual practice up until basically the time of the Second World War.

The comparison he makes between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War here is on Presidential power, and most of his discussion focuses on the Cheney-Bush administration. Lyndon Johnson's deceptive use of the Gulf of Tonkin incident to gain an open-ended authorization to use force in Southeast Asia was part of the abuse of power that has often been seen in the imperial Presidency.

But, as Bacevich writes, the Joint Congressional Resolution of 09/14/01 which gave a far broader mandate to the President to use force "against those nations, organizations, or persons" involved in the 9/11 attacks and also directed the President "to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States." Bacevich observes, "The notorious Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964 was a straitjacket compared to this spacious grant of authority."

He doesn't make an argument that the 2001 resolution somehow authorized the Iraq War, which would not be accurate. His point was that Congress in practice became even more passive in relation to the Executive than it had even in its less commendable moments in the past. Even later, after the stunning incompetence of the Cheney-Bush administration had become clear and various acts of illegality like the torture program became known, "the White House had little difficulty fending off legislative meddling."

After the 2006 election, the White House has had more difficulty fending off such Congressional interventions. But it has still been largely successful in doing so. Joe Conason has just provided us an example and explanation of one aspect of Congressional weakness in Obama's European problem Salon 12/29/07.

Bacevich regards the rapid seizure of additional Presidential power after the 9/11 attacks as "in essence a rolling coup." From a less serious historian than Bacevich, this might be dismissed as hyperbole. But he describes in more detail what he means. And the short version is: Dick Cheney.

He expands on what he means by a "rolling coup" by describing the process in which Cheney, Rummy and their various allies set out to override institutional barriers within the Executive branch. Although he doesn't go into it in this essay, Cheney also played a key role in gutting the balancing power of Congress by asserting direct leadership over the Republican caucus in Congress to an unprecedented degree. Bacevich even describes the process as a "military coup", but he uses the term to make a particular point:

This was not true in the sense that the intent was to empower the officer corps - quite the contrary - but rather in the sense that the coup leaders [Cheney, Rummy, Paul Wolfowitz, et al] all subscribed to the conviction that armed might held the key both to advancing U.S. global ambitions and to investing supreme power in the president/commander in chief. Indeed, to persuade Americans to see this president's principal identity or function as being commander in chief was to remove encumbrances on his power (and by extension on their own power).

The 9/11 attacks gave them an excuse to declare their famous Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). Cheney, Bush, Rummy and their allies "seized upon that opportunity with alcrity. These men did not fear a 'Global War on Terror.' They welcomed it, certain of their ability to bend war to their purposes."

Cheney and his crew, Bacevich writes, saw two principle enemies in the GWOT. One was the various unfriendly regimes in the Middle East, first of all Iraq. Here their approach was the neocon/Trotskyist idea of wars of liberation to install friendly regime, foolishly believing it was be easy.

Their second set of opponents, as they saw it, were various obstacles at home. Rummy even said at one point, "the adversary's closer to home. It's the Pentagon bureaucracy." But not only consolidating the power of the Executive Branch but creating alternative channels to bypass institutional restraints like the vetting of intelligence by professional analysts, they eventuall swept that obstacle aside. Congress, sadly, was less of a problem to sideline.

Bacevich focuses on an aspect of the current administration whose results in the future are perhaps more unpredictable than most. For all their contempt for democracy, part of what Cheney and Rummy had to do to achieve their power goals was to establish a more firm civilian control over the military. It's not as though the generals were in a state of rebellion against civilian control. They weren't. But for a variety of reasons, some having to do with the personnel involved and (more importantly) broader institutional processes, Rummy and Wolfowitz perceived that during the Clinton administration "the Joint Chiefs of Staff had gotten too bigh for their britches. Civil control of the military had grown tenuous [in their view]. The new secretary of defense and his deputy took office intent on putting the generals in their place."

Civilian control of the military in itself is a good thing. And one challenge that the Clinton administration faced was that something like 90% of the officer corps was Republican. And, as Bacevich himself has described in his book The New American Militarism (???), the Christian Right has long regarded the officer corps as a mission field and Christianist influence among military officers has increased significantly over the past two decades.

Rummy's reassertion of civilian authority was ham-handed in many ways. And it certainly didn't guarantee that only good policies would be produced. But it did re-emphasize the importance of civilian control over the military. And it has shown the military vividly that the Republican Party previously favored by their officers can do a lot of damage with foolish, misguided and reckless policies. There is substantial evidence of increasing Democratic sympathies within the military and military families. Hopefully, this will facilitate the job of a new Democratic administration.

But, for all the increased concentration of power in the Executive Branch during this administration, it hasn't meant that Cheney and Bush could impose their will on the Middle East by force. Not even on Iraq. Bacevich concludes his essay with these two paragraphs, in which he asks what Bush can do to get the US out of Iraq:

Remarkably little, it turns out. Apart from incessant jawboning - promising success just around the corner, touting the latest "turning point," and warning against the dangers of insurgent "isolationism" should popular support for the war flag—the Most Powerful Man in the World has demonstrated an inability either to win the Iraq War or to extricate the United States from Iraq in a timely way. Having chosen after 9/11 to fight his Global War on Terror without mobilizing the country - neither increasing the size of the armed forces nor changing U.S. domestic priorities — he finds himself unable today to raise the additional resources that "victory" would require. He has yet to identify the "second front" that will seize the initiative from the enemy. He has yet to devise the Manhattan Project that will deliver decisive results. He has yet to form the Grand Alliance that will rally the world in support of the cause. In terms of shaping the course of the Iraq War, the photographer who recorded the abuse of Iraqi detainees by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib has wielded greater influence than has President Bush.

By the summer of 2006, political observers were transfixed by the slow but steady decline in the president's approval rating as measured by the opinion polls, as if the number reported actually meant anything. What mattered was not that George W. Bush had become the least popular president since Richard Nixon or Harry Truman. What mattered was that neither he, nor his administration, nor the vast apparatus of the federal government could do anything to get the nation out of its fix. Here lay the ultimate expression of what the rolling coup of 2001-2003 had wrought.

The current Republican Party line, of course, is that our Savior-General Petraeus has fixed everything. But that's as phony as the previous Party lines about our unending victories in the Iraq War. What Bacevich wrote as of the summer of 2006 still holds true at the end of 2007.

Tags: andrew bacevich, authoritarianism, bush administration, dick cheney, iraq war

posted at 7:08:00 PM by Bruce Miller

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