National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster and White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly await the arrival of President Donald J. Trump, August 2017. CNP/SIPA USA/Press Association. All rights reserved. It was bloody and
brutal, a true generational struggle, but give them credit. In the
end, they won when so many lost.
James Comey was axed. Sean Spicer went
down in a heap of ashes. Anthony Scaramucci crashed and burned instantaneously.
Reince Priebus hung on for dear life but was finally canned. Seven months in,
Steve Bannon got the old heave-ho and soon after, his minion, Sebastian Gorka,
was unceremoniously shoved out
the White House door. In a downpour
of potential conflicts of interest and scandal, Carl Icahn bowed out. Gary Cohn
has reportedly been at the edge of resignation.
And so it goes in the Trump administration.
Except for the generals. Think of them
as the last men standing. They did it. They took the high ground in
Washington and held it with remarkable panache. Three of them: National
Security Advisor Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, Secretary of Defense and
retired Marine General John Mattis, and former head of the Department of
Homeland Security, now White House Chief of Staff, retired Marine General John
Kelly stand alone, except for President Trump’s own family members,
at the pinnacle of power in Washington.
Those three generals from America’s
losing wars are now triumphant. One of them is the ultimate gatekeeper
when it comes to who sees the president. All three influence
his thoughts and speeches. They are the “civilians” who control the military
and American war policy. They, and they alone, have made the president go
against his deepest urges, as he admitted in his address
to the nation on the war in Afghanistan. (“My original instinct was to
pull out and historically I like following my instincts.”) They’ve convinced
him to release
the military (and the CIA) from significant oversight on how they pursue their
wars across the Greater Middle East, Africa, and now the Philippines.
They even convinced him to surround their future actions in a penumbra of
secrecy.
Their wars, the ones that began almost
16 years ago and just keep morphing and spreading (along with a proliferating
assortment of terror groups), are now theirs alone to fight and… well, we’ll
get to that. But first let’s step back a moment and think about what’s
happened since January.
The winningest
president and the losingest generals
The most surprising winner of our era
and possibly – to put ourselves fully in the Trumpian spirit – of any era since
the first protozoan stalked the Earth entered the Oval Office on January 20 and
promptly surrounded himself with a set of generals from America’s failed wars
of the post-9/11 era. In other words, the man who repeatedly promised that
in his presidency Americans would win
to the point of tedium – “We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so
sick and tired of winning, you’re going to come to me and go ‘Please, please,
we can’t win anymore’”– promptly chose to elevate the losingest guys in
town. If reports are to be believed, he evidently did this because of his
military school background, his longstanding crush on General George Patton of
World War II fame (or at least the movie version
of him), and despite having actively avoided
military service himself in the Vietnam years, his weak spot for four stars
with tough monikers like “Mad Dog.”
During the election campaign, though a
general of his choice led the chants
to “lock her up,” Trump himself was surprisingly clear-eyed when it came to the
nature of American generalship in the twenty-first century. As he put it,
“Under the leadership of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton the generals have
been reduced to rubble, reduced to a point where it is embarrassing for our
country.” On coming to power, however, he reached into that rubble to
choose his guys. In the years before he ran, he had been no less
clear-eyed on the war he just extended in Afghanistan. Of that conflict,
he typically
tweeted in 2013, “We have wasted an enormous amount of blood and
treasure in Afghanistan. Their government has zero appreciation. Let's get
out!”
On the other hand, the careers of his
three chosen generals are inextricably linked to America’s losing wars.
Then-Colonel H.R. McMaster gained his reputation in 2005 by leading the 3rd
Armored Cavalry Regiment into the Iraqi city of Tal Afar and “liberating” it
from Sunni insurgents, while essentially inaugurating the counterinsurgency
tactics that would become the heart and soul of General David Petraeus’s 2007 “surge” in Iraq.
Only one small problem: McMaster’s
much-publicized “victory,” like so many other American military successes of
this era, didn’t last. A year later, Tal Afar was “awash in sectarian
violence,” wrote
Jon Finer, a Washington Post reporter who accompanied McMaster into that
city. It would be among the first Iraqi cities taken by Islamic State
militants in 2014 and has only recently
been “liberated” (yet again) by the Iraqi military in a US-backed campaign that
has left it only partially in
rubble, unlike so many other fully rubblized cities in the
region. In the Obama years, McMaster would be the leader
of a task force in Afghanistan that “sought to root out the rampant corruption
that had taken hold” in the American-backed government there, an effort that
would prove a dismal failure.
Marine General Mattis led Task Force 58
into southern Afghanistan in the invasion of 2001, establishing
the “first conventional US military presence in the country.” He repeated the
act in Iraq in 2003, leading the 1st Marine Division in the US invasion of that
country. He was involved in the taking of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, in 2003;
in the fierce fighting
for and partial destruction of the city of Fallujah in 2004; and, in that same
year, the bombing of what turned out to be a wedding party, not insurgents,
near the Syrian border. (“How many people
go to the middle of the desert… to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest
civilization?” was his response to the news.) In 2010, he was made head of US
Central Command, overseeing the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan until 2013
when he urged
the Obama administration to launch a “dead of night” operation to take out an
Iranian oil refinery or power plant, his idea of an appropriate response to
Iran’s role in Iraq. His proposal was rejected and he was “retired” from his
command five months early. In other words, he lost his chance to set off yet
another never-ending American war in the Middle East. He is known for his
“Mattisisms” like this piece of advice to US
Marines in Iraq in 2003: “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill
everybody you meet.”
Retired Marine General John Kelly was
assistant division commander in Iraq under Mattis, who personally
promoted him to brigadier general on the battlefield. (Present
head of the Joint Chiefs, General Joe Dunford, was an officer in the same
division at the same time and all three reportedly remain friends.) Though
Kelly had a second tour of duty in Iraq, he never fought in
Afghanistan. Tragically, however, one of his sons (who had also fought in
Fallujah in 2004) died there
after stepping on an improvised explosive device in 2010.
McMaster was among the earliest figures
in the Pentagon to begin speaking of the country’s post-9/11 wars as
“generational” (that is, never-ending). In 2014, he said,
“If you think this war against our way
of life is over because some of the self-appointed opinion-makers and
chattering class grow ‘war weary,’ because they want to be out of Iraq or
Afghanistan, you are mistaken. This enemy is dedicated to our destruction. He
will fight us for generations, and the conflict will move through various
phases as it has since 9/11.”
In short, you could hardly pick three
men more viscerally connected to the American way of war, less capable of
seriously reassessing what they have lived through, or more fully identified
with the failures of the war on terror, especially the conflicts in Iraq and
Afghanistan. When it comes to the “rubble” of American generalship in
these years, Mattis, McMaster, and Kelly would certainly be at the top of
anyone’s list. You could
hardly pick three men more viscerally connected to the American way of war,
less capable of seriously reassessing what they have lived through, or more
fully identified with the failures of the war on terror, especially the
conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Think of them, in fact, as the ultimate
survivors of a system that at its upper levels is not known, even in the best
of times, for promoting original, outside-the-box thinkers. They are, in
other words, the ultimate four-star conformists because that’s the character
trait you need to make it to generalship in the US military. (Original
thinkers and critics never seem to make it past the rank of colonel.)
And as their “new” Trump-era Afghan
policy indicates, when faced with their wars and what to do about them, their
answer is invariably some version of more
of the same (with the usual, by-now-predictable results).
All Hail the Generals!
Now, let’s take one more step back from
the situation at hand, lest you imagine that President Trump’s acts, when it
comes to those generals, are unique to our time. Yes, two retired generals
and one still active in posts previously (with the rarest
of exceptions) reserved for civilians do represent something new in American
history. Still, this Trumpian moment should be seen as the culmination of,
not a departure from, the policies of the two previous administrations.
In these years, America’s generals have
failed everywhere except in one place, and that just happens to be the only
place that truly matters. Call Afghanistan a “stalemate”
as often as you want, but almost 16 years after the US military loosed the
power of “the finest
fighting force the world has ever known” (aka “the greatest
force for human liberation the world has ever known”), the Taliban
are ascendant
in that benighted land and that’s the definition of failure,
no matter how you tote things up. Those generals have indeed been losers in
that country, as they and others have been in Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and
someday undoubtedly Syria (no matter what immediate victories they might chalk
up). In only one place did their generalship work effectively; in only one
place have they truly succeeded; in only one place could they now conceivably
proclaim “victory at last!”
That place is, of course, Washington,
D.C., where they are indeed the last men standing and, in Trumpian terms,
absolute winners.
In Washington, their generalship has
been anything but rubble. It’s always been another kind of more – more of
whatever they wanted, from money to surges to ever-greater power and
authority. In Washington, they’ve been the winners ever since President
George W. Bush launched his Global War on Terror.
What they couldn’t do in Baghdad, Kabul,
Tripoli, or anywhere else across the Greater Middle East and Africa, they’ve
done impressively in our nation’s capital. In years when they unsuccessfully
brought the full power of the greatest arsenal on the planet to bear on enemies
whose weaponry cost the price of a pizza,
they continued to rake in
billions of dollars in Washington. In fact, it’s reasonable to argue that the
losing conflicts in the war on terror were necessary prerequisites for the
winning budgetary battles in that city. Those never-ending conflicts – and a
more generalized (no pun intended) fear of (Islamic) terrorism heavily promoted
by the national security state – have driven funding success to staggering
levels in the nation’s capital, perhaps the single issue on which Repubicans
and Democrats have seen eye to eye in this period. In fact, it’s reasonable to argue that the losing conflicts in the war
on terror were necessary prerequisites for the winning budgetary battles in
that city.
In this context, Donald Trump’s decision
to surround himself with “his” generals has simply brought this reality more
fully into focus. He’s made it clear why the term “deep state,” often used
by critics of American war and national security policies, inadequately
describes the situation in Washington in this century. That term brings up
images of a hidden state-within-a-state that controls the rest of the
government in some conspiratorial fashion. The reality in Washington today is
nothing like that. Despite both its trove of secrets and its desire to cast a
shadow of secrecy over government operations, the national security state hasn’t
exactly been lurking in the shadows in these years.
In Washington, whatever the Constitution
may say about civilian control of the military, the generals – at least at
presen – control the civilians and the deep state has become the
all-too-visible state. In this context, one thing is clear, whether you’re
talking about the country’s panoply
of “intelligence” agencies or the Pentagon, failure is the new success.
And for all of this, one thing continues
to be essential: those “generational struggles” in distant lands. If you
want to see how this works in a nutshell, consider a single line from a recent piece
on the Afghan War by New York Times reporter Rod Nordland. “Even
before the president’s [Afghan] speech, the American military and Afghan
leaders were laying long-term plans,” Nordland points out and, in that context,
adds in passing, “The American military has a $6.5-billion plan to make the
Afghan air force self-sufficient and end its overreliance on American air power
by 2023.”
Think for a moment about just that
relatively modest part (a mere $6.5 billion!) of the US military’s latest plans
for a more-of-the-same future in Afghanistan. As a start, we’re already
talking about six more years of a war that began in October 2001, was
essentially an extension of a previous
conflict fought there from 1979 to 1989, and is already the longest war
in American history. In other words, the idea of a “generational
struggle” there is anything but an exaggeration.
Recall as well that, in January 2008, US
Brigadier General Jay Lindell, then-commander of the Combined Air Power
Transition Force in Afghanistan, was projecting
an eight-year US
plan that would leave the Afghan air force fully staffed, supplied,
trained, and “self-sufficient” by 2015. (In 2015, Rod Nordland would check
out that air force and find it
in a “woeful state” of near ruin.)
So in 2023, if that full $6.5 billion is
indeed invested in — perhaps the more fitting phrase might be squandered on –
the Afghan air force, one thing is a given: it will not be
“self-sufficient.” After all, 16 years later with not $6.5 billion but
more than $65 billion
appropriated by Congress and spent on the training of the Afghan security
forces, they are now taking terrible
casualties, experiencing horrendous desertion rates, filled with
“ghost” personnel, and anything but self-sufficient. Why imagine something
different for that country’s air force $6.5 billion and six years later?
In America’s war on terror, such things
should be considered tales foretold, even as the losing generals of those
losing wars strut their stuff in Washington. Elsewhere on the planet, the US
military’s plans for 2020, 2023, and beyond will undoubtedly be yet more landmarks
on a highway to failure. Only in Washington do such plans invariably work
out. Only in Washington does more of the same turn out to be the ultimate
formula for success. Our losing wars, it seems, are a necessary backdrop
for the ultimate winning war in our nation’s capital. So all hail America’s
generals, mission accomplished!
This piece is reposted from TomDispatch.com with that site's permission.