The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, 1974 St. Martin's Press hardcover first edition. Wikicommons. Fair use.In his inaugural address, President
Trump described a dark and dismal United States, a country overrun by
criminal gangs and drugs, a nation stained with the blood seeping from
bullet-ridden corpses left at scenes of “American carnage.” It was more than a
little jarring.
Certainly, drug gangs and universally
accessible semi-automatic weapons do not contribute to a better life for most
people in this country. When I hear the words “American carnage,” however, the
first thing I think of is not an endless string of murders taking place in
those mysterious “inner cities” that exist only in the fevered mind of Donald Trump.
The phrase instead evokes the non-imaginary
deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in
real cities and rural areas outside the United States. It evokes the conversion
of millions of ordinary people into homeless refugees. It reminds
me of the places where American wars seem never to end, where new conflicts
seem to take up just as the old ones are in danger of petering out. These sites
of carnage are the cities and towns, mountains and deserts of Iraq,
Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, and other places that we don’t even find out about unless we go
looking. They are the places where the United States fights its endless wars.
During the 2016 election campaign,
Donald Trump often sounded like a pre-World War II-style America First
isolationist, someone who thought the United States should avoid foreign
military entanglements. Today, he seems more like a man with a uniform fetish.
He’s referred to his latest
efforts to round up undocumented immigrants in
this country as “a military operation.” He’s similarly stocked his
cabinet with one general still on active duty, various retired
generals, and other military veterans. His pick
for secretary of the interior, Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke, served 23 years as a Navy SEAL.
Clearly, these days Trump enjoys the
company of military men. He’s more ambivalent about what the military actually
does. On the campaign trail, he railed against the folly that was – and is –
the (second) Iraq War, maintaining with
questionable accuracy that he
was “totally against” it from the beginning. It’s not clear, however, just
where Trump thinks the folly lies – in invading Iraq in the first place or in
failing to “keep” Iraq’s oil afterward. It was a criticism he reprised when he introduced Mike Pompeo as his choice to run
the CIA. “Mike,” he explained, “if we kept the oil, you probably wouldn’t have
ISIS because that’s where they made their money in the first place.” Not to worry,
however, since as he also suggested to Pompeo, “Maybe we’ll have another
chance.” Maybe the wrong people had just fought the wrong Iraq war, and Donald
Trump’s version will be bigger, better, and even more full of win! Maybe the wrong people had just fought the wrong Iraq
war, and Donald Trump’s version will be bigger, better, and even more full of
win!
Perhaps Trump’s objection is simply to
wars we don’t win. As February ended, he invited the National Governors Association to share his
nostalgia for the good old days when “everybody used to say ‘we haven’t lost a
war’ – we never lost a war – you remember.” Now, according to the president,
“We never win a war. We never win. And we don’t fight to win. We don’t fight to
win. So we either got to win, or don’t fight it at all.”
The question is, which would Trump
prefer: winning or not fighting at all? There’s probably more than a hint of an
answer in his oft-repeated campaign
promise that we’re “going to win so much” we’ll
“get tired of winning.” If his fetish for winning – whether it’s trade wars or
shooting wars – makes you feel a little too exposed to his sexual imagination,
you’re probably right. In one of his riffs on the subject, he told his audience
that they would soon be pleading they had “a headache” to get him to stop
winning so much – as if they were 1950s housewives trying to avoid their
bedroom duty. But daddy Trump knows best:
“And I'm going to say, ‘No, we have to
make America great again.’ You're gonna say, ‘Please.’ I said, ‘Nope, nope.
We're gonna keep winning.’”
There’s more than a hint of where we’re
headed in Trump’s recent announcement that he’ll be asking Congress for a nearly 10%
increase in military spending, an additional annual $54 billion for the
Pentagon as part of what he calls his “public safety and national security
budget.” You don’t spend that kind of money on toys unless you intend to play
with them.
Trump explained his reasoning, in his trademark idiolect, his unique
mangling of syntax and diction:
“This is a landmark event, a message to
the world, in these dangerous times of American strength, security, and
resolve. We must ensure that our courageous servicemen and women have the tools
they need to deter war and when called upon to fight in our name only do one
thing, win. We have to win.”
So it does look like the new president
intends to keep on making war into the eternal future. But it’s worth
remembering that our forever wars didn’t begin with Donald J. Trump, not by a
long shot.
The forever wars
Joe Haldeman’s 1974 novel, The Forever
War, which won the three major science fiction prizes, a Hugo, a Nebula, and
a Locus, was about a soldier involved in a war between human beings and the
Taurans, an alien race. Because of the stretching of time when traveling at
near light-speed (as Einstein predicted), while soldiers like Haldeman’s hero
passed a few years at a time at a front many light-years from home, the Earth
they’d left behind experienced the conflict as lasting centuries. Published
just after the end of the Vietnam War – fought for what seemed to many
Americans like centuries in a land light-years away – The Forever War
was clearly a reflection of Haldeman’s own experience in Vietnam and his return
to an unrecognizable United States, all transposed to space.
In 1965, Haldeman had been drafted into
that brutal conflict, probably one of those that Donald Trump thinks we
didn’t “fight to win.” It certainly seemed like a forever war while it lasted,
especially if you included the French colonial war that preceded it. But it did
finally end, decisively, with an American loss (although, in a sense, it’s
still being fought out by the thousands of Vietnam
veterans who live on the streets of our
country).
After the attacks of 9/11 and George W.
Bush’s declaration of a Global War on Terror, some people found the title of
Haldeman’s novel a useful shorthand for what seemed to be an era of permanent
war. It gave us a way of describing then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s
vision of a new kind of war against an enemy located, as he told NBC’s Meet the Press on September 30, 2001,
“not just in Afghanistan. It is in 50 or 60 countries and it simply has to be
liquidated. It has to end. It has to go out of business.”
More than 15 years later, after a decade
and a half of forever war in the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa,
al-Qaeda and the Taliban are still in business, along with a set of new
enemies, including Boko Haram in Nigeria, Chad, Niger, and Cameroon; al-Shabaab
in Somalia; and ISIS, which, if we are to believe the president and his
cronies, is pretty much everywhere, including
Mexico. In a war against a tactic (terrorism)
or an emotion (terror), it’s hardly surprising that our enemies have just kept
proliferating, and with them, the wars. It’s as if Washington were constantly
bringing jets, drones, artillery, and firepower of every sort to bear on a
new set of Taurans in another galaxy.
Decades before Haldeman’s Forever
War, George Orwell gave us an unforgettable portrait of a society
controlled by stoking permanent hatred for a rotating cast of enemies. In 1984, the
countries of the world have coalesced into three super-nations – Oceania,
Eurasia, and Eastasia. Winston Smith, the novel’s protagonist, recalls that,
since his childhood, “war had been literally continuous, though strictly
speaking it had not always been the same war.” Smith joins thousands of other
citizens of Oceania in their celebration of Hate Week and observes the slick
substitution of one enemy for another on the sixth day of that week:
“…when the great orgasm was quivering
to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such
delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the two thousand
Eurasian war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of the
proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces – at just this
moment it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war with
Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.”
Except that there is no actual
announcement. Rather, the Party spokesman makes the substitution in
mid-oration:
“The speech had been proceeding for
perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried onto the platform and a scrap
of paper was slipped into the speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read it without
pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the
content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without
words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at
war with Eastasia!
And it had always been thus. “Oceania
was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”
1984 is, of course, a novel. In our perfectly real country,
human memories work better than they do in Orwell’s Oceania. Or do they? The
United States is at war with Iraq. The United States has always been at war
with Iraq. Except, of course, when the United States sided with Iraq in its
vicious, generation-destroying conflict with Iran in the 1980s. Who today
remembers Ronald Reagan’s “tilt toward
Iraq” and against Iran? They’re so
confusing, those two four-letter countries that start with “I.” Who can keep
them straight, even now that we’ve tilted back toward what’s left of Iraq –
Trump has even removed it from his latest version of his Muslim ban list –
and threateningly against Iran? They’re so confusing, those two four-letter countries that start with
“I.” Who can keep them straight, even now that we’ve tilted back toward what’s
left of Iraq.
Many Americans do seem to adapt to a
revolving enemies list as easily as the citizens of Oceania. Every few years, I
ask my college students where the terrorists who flew the planes on 9/11 came
from. At the height of the (second and still unfinished) Iraq War, when many of
them had brothers, sisters, lovers, even fathers fighting there, my students
were certain the attackers had all been Iraqis. A few years later, when the
“real men” were trying to gin up a new opportunity to “go to Tehran,” my students were just as sure the terrorists had
been from Iran. I haven’t asked in a couple of years now. I wonder whether
today I’d hear that they were from Syria, or maybe that new country, the
Islamic State?
I don’t blame my students for not
knowing that the 9/11 attackers included 15 Saudis, two men from the United
Arab Emirates (UAE), one Egyptian, and one Lebanese. It’s not a fact that’s
much trumpeted any more. You certainly wouldn’t guess it from where our military
aid and American-made weaponry goes. After
Afghanistan ($3.67 billion) and Israel ($3.1 billion), Egypt is the next
largest recipient of that aid at $1.31 billion in 2015.
Of course, military aid to other
countries is a windfall for US arms manufacturers. Like food money and other
forms of foreign aid from Washington, the countries receiving it are often
obligated to spend it on American products. In other words, much military
“aid” is actually a back-door subsidy to companies like Boeing and Lockheed
Martin. Being wealthy oil states, the Saudis and the UAE, of course, don’t need
subsidies. They buy their US arms with their own money – $3.3 billion and $1.3
billion worth of purchases respectively in 2015. And they’re putting that
weaponry to use, with US connivance and – yes, it should make your head spin in
an Orwellian fashion – occasional support from al-Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula, by taking sides in a civil war in Yemen. US-made fighter planes and
cluster bombs have put more than seven million Yemenis in imminent
danger of starvation.
Joe Haldeman at Finncon 2007 in Jyväskylä, Finland – July 2007. Wikicommons/Mikko Aarnio. Some rights reserved.
War without end, when
did you begin?
When did our forever war begin? When did
we start to think of the president as commander-in-chief first, and executor of
the laws passed by Congress only a distant second? Instead of outright declarations, we’ve
had weasely, after-the-fact congressional approvals, or Authorizations
for the Use of Military Force, that fall short of actual declarations of war.
Was it after 9/11? Was it during that
first Iraq war that spanned a few months of 1990 and 1991? Or was it even
earlier, during the glorious invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada
in 1983, codenamed Operation Urgent Fury? That was the first time the military
intentionally – and successfully – kept the press sequestered from the action
for the first 48 hours of that short-lived war. They did the same thing in
1989, with the under-reported invasion of Panama, when somewhere between 500
and 3,500 Panamanians died so that the United States could kidnap and try an
erstwhile ally and CIA
asset, the unsavory dictator of that country,
Manuel Noriega.
Or was it even earlier? The Cold War was
certainly a kind of forever war, one that began before World War II ended, as
the United States used its atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to, as we
now say, “send a message” to the Soviet Union. And it didn’t end until
that empire imploded in 1991.
Maybe it began when Congress first
abdicated its constitutional right and authority to declare war and allowed the
executive branch to usurp that power. The Korean War (1950-1953) was never
declared. Nor were the Vietnam War, the Grenada invasion, the Panama invasion,
the Afghan War, the first and second Iraq wars, the Libyan war, or any of the
wars we’re presently involved in. Instead of outright declarations, we’ve had
weasely, after-the-fact congressional approvals, or Authorizations
for the Use of Military Force, that
fall short of actual declarations of war.
The framers of the Constitution
understood how important it was to place the awesome responsibility for
declaring war in the hands of the legislative branch – of, that is, a
deliberative body elected by the people – leaving the decision on war neither
to the president nor the military. Indeed, one of the charges listed against
King George III in the Declaration of Independence was: “He has affected to
render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.”
Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and the
others who met in the stifling heat of that 1776 Philadelphia summer, close
enough to battle to hear the boom of British cannon, decided they could no
longer abide a king who allowed the military to dominate a duly constituted
civil government. For all their many faults, they were brave men who, even with
war upon them, recognized the danger of a government controlled by those whose
sole business is war. They were brave men who, even with war
upon them, recognized the danger of a government controlled by those whose sole
business is war.
Since 9/11, this country has experienced
at least 15 years of permanent war in distant lands. Washington is now a
war capital. The president is, first and foremost, the commander-in-chief. The
power of the expanding military (as well as paramilitary intelligence services
and drone assassination forces, not to mention for-profit military contractors
of all sorts) is emphatically in presidential hands. Those hands, much discussed in the 2016 election campaign, are
now Donald Trump’s and, as he indicated in his recent address to Congress, he
seems hell-bent on restoring the military to the superiority it enjoyed under
King George. That is a danger of the first order.
This piece is reposted from Tom.Dispatch.com on March 7, 2017 with that site's permission.