‘Rogue Countries’ and ‘Failed States’: America Does Not Know the Difference
By Melvin GOODMAN
It would be easy to blame Donald Trump for the disarray in the transatlantic alliance, but twenty-five years of American exceptionalism is the real offender. The aggressive expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the Clinton and Bush administrations over the objections of our West European allies started a duration of discontinuity that still exists. Bush deepened the disarray in 2002 with his “axis of evil” speech that set the phase for the invasion of Iraq. Bush and Barack Obama considered Afghanistan the “great war,” which brought two full decades of mayhem throughout Southwest Asia. President Joe Biden contributed to the geological fault within the transatlantic alliance with his failure to consult our allies on the Afghan withdrawal.
A constant feature of the disharmony between the United States and Europe is Washington’s fascination with making use of force against so-called “rogue” states in the Third World. The past five U.S. administrations, including Biden’s, do not know the difference in between a “rogue” state and a “stopped working” state. The hegemonists in the Bush administration were consumed with the notion of rogue states, the so-called “axis of evil” that consisted of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Then-Senator Hillary Clinton supported Bush’s rhetoric by highlighting that “every country needs to be either with us, or versus us,” which carried such Cold Warriors as the Dulles siblings in the 1950s or the siblings Rostow and Bundy in the 1960s.
U.S. and Israeli military force has actually developed havoc the world over. The removal of Saddam Hussein caused the development of the Islamic State; Israel’s invasion of Lebanon caused the creation of Hezbollah; U.S. intervention in Afghanistan caused the Haqqani and Hekmatyar networks and higher violence; the use of force in Libya in 2011 led to turmoil in North Africa. U.S. wars since 9/11 have actually cost trillions of dollars and have resulted in 10s of millions of refugees, which has actually cultivated unsafe nationalism in European politics. There have actually been countless U.S. combatant deaths in the wars given that 9/11, countless severely injured survivors, countless suicides by veterans and active-duty workers, and tens of countless civilian fatalities.
If decision making had actually been left to the expert military, the United States would not have actually fought in backwaters such as Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, where more than 60,000 Americans passed away. Our “finest and brightest,” paraphrasing David Halberstam, sent us into those godforsaken locations. It is generally civilians who believe that military force can fix geopolitical problems; general officers frequently know better.
Alternatively, the Pentagon has become too popular in decision making in part due to the vacuum of power created by the decrease of the Department of State and a generation of weak Foreign Service Officers. Ryan Crocker functioned as ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Kuwait; he is a skilled bureaucrat. He is likewise an exceptional example of the State Department’s irrelevance. He argued in the New York Timesthat our Afghan withdrawal was due to an absence of “tactical patience.” A twenty-year commitment to a Southwest Asian country without any strategic relevance to the United States wasn’t sufficient for Ambassador Crocker. (In a Washington Postoped, George Will similarly called Biden’s decision “unsteady” and “impulsive.”)
Crocker argues that in 2001 the “Taliban picked to combat rather” of turning over al Qaeda’s leadership. In actual truth, the turning point in Afghanistan occurred twenty years back when we permitted Osama bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora since of the Bush administration’s deceitful fixation with Iraq and its aversion to allow Taliban representation at the Bonn Conference in 2001. When members of the Taliban gave up, we imprisoned them at Bagram and Guantanamo, rather of coopting them for a possible future role in an Afghan federal government. U.S. administrations have lied to the American public since about the war effort. We’ve been negotiating covertly with the Taliban with one foot out the door, yet Crocker didn’t recognize up until recently that the Doha talks were not “peace negotiations,” however “give up talks.” We lost, Ambassador Crocker. Your charge that Biden lacks the “capability to lead our country as commander in chief” is outrageous.
Crocker’s unrestrained observations are matched on the military side by General David Petraeus who ensured President Obama that our military mission was making development in Afghanistan and continues to argue that the United States must have preserved a military existence there. Petraeus thinks a policy that had the “Afghans doing the fighting on the front lines and the United States offering help from the air would have been sustainable in terms of the expense of blood and treasure.” Petraeus fails to acknowledge the limits of the Afghan armed force (which folded quickly) and the function of airpower in handling a revolt, typically eliminating more civilians than contenders.
Petraeus concludes that an ongoing U.S. existence would “roll back some of the Taliban gains recently.” This is the same four-star general who told the Bush and Obama administrations that the Taliban were merely “unexpected guerrillas” who would ultimately straighten and join the Afghan government. The failure of the Pentagon to acknowledge the Taliban’s discipline and cohesion was main to our failure in Afghanistan. Crocker and Petraeus are ideal examples of the hubris that got the United States into a feckless twenty-year war; yet my preferred neocon, Robert Kagan, was provided three pages in Sunday’s Washington Postto argue that hubris played no part in getting us into Afghanistan.
I don’t remember Ambassador Crocker or General Petraeus ever pointing out the CIA’s torture routine in Afghanistan; the civilian deaths from our drone strikes; the narco-state that Afghanistan became under the Karzai program; or the amazing corruption that dominated life in Kabul. General Douglas Lute, who coordinated technique for Afghanistan in Obama’s National Security Council, got it right: “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didn’t understand what we were doing.”
Unfortunately, the mishandled U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan puts the Biden administration on the defensive, assuring a continuation of a military psychosis that will stymie efforts to lower the U.S. military presence overseas or making use of force, not to mention the bloated U.S. defense spending plan. The extension of Bush’s “international war on fear” will hinder bipartisan congressional efforts to rescind the permissions in 1991 and 2002 to utilize force versus Saddam Hussein’s regime and to restrict the war powers of the White House. Congress likewise should reconsider the 2001 permission to greenlight the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda, the legal structure for hostilities against numerous terrorist companies. The disorderly withdrawal operation makes complex these jobs.
Finally, U.S. national security officials should find out the difference between rogue states and failed states. Using military force versus failed states such as Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya generally finds the United States combating without allies, let alone an allied federal government. Real experts on Iraq at the State Department and CIA were cynical about the war effort since they knew that Iraq was a house of cards and that the elimination of Saddam Hussein would reduce the whole apparatus, which is what transpired. Biden’s critics are already treating the Taliban as heading a rogue state, although its management has no interests beyond its own borders.
European security authorities have had higher tolerance for the ayatollahs in Iran or the Islamists throughout the Middle East and frequently refuted U.S. use of force in their failed states. But successive U.S. administrations have actually pursued the idea of “perfect security” ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. U.S. leaders mendaciously conceal their decision making failures from the American public and overemphasize dangers to justify policies that depend on increased defense costs and usage of force.
Vice President Joe Biden cautioned President Barack Obama in 2009 not to get “boxed in” by the armed force. Sadly, there does not appear to be anyone in his administration to encourage President Biden to stop the “forever wars” of the previous thirty years. A single suicide bomber must not stop the United States from discussing the errors that were made in using force in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, Cold War warriors in and out of federal government are already arguing that the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan allows the United States to direct its planning and materiel towards countering Chinese power across Asia. Cold War hysteria remains alive and well.