THE MAN WITH THE HAMMER

In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails.

― Ludwig von Mises

No one, in our time, believes in any sanction greater than military power; no one believes that it is possible to overcome force except by greater force. There is no 'Law', there is only power. I am not saying that that is a true belief, merely that it is the belief which all modern men do actually hold.

--- George Orwell

The other day I watched my cat lie down next to an anthill in the back yard. From the look in his evil yellow eyes I knew he could see the tiny ants swarming and scurrying beneath him on the sun-warmed stones; nevertheless he flopped down there without any hesitation and began to lounge as only cats and college students can. Within moments, however, he was crawling with outraged six-legged insects. He twitched a few times in irritation, then jumped up, walked away, and carefully removed all the ants from his body in cat-fashion, by eating them. He glared at the anthill for several seconds, walked back to it, and flopped down upon it once more, stretching out as if he intended to spend the whole day there. Needless to say, his second experience with the hill was no more comfortable than his first, though he did do great violence to the hill and destroyed several additional members of the ant colony before he fled once more.

Watching this incident over my newspaper, it occurred to me suddenly that my cat's behavior was almost perfectly analogous to America's foreign policy – to the modern American attitude toward nearly everything. Because Spike the cat was a hundred times larger and more powerful than any ant, he assumed he could settle upon the ants' territory without negative consequence to himself. When the ants fought back, however, he did not feel chastened or foolish; he did not seek a different place to while away the afternoon, or question his right to lay upon their territory. In fact he learned absolutely nothing, and returned in short order to repeat his initial mistake. All he accomplished in the end was to aggravate himself and take the lives of a certain number of ants.

At this moment, our new Secretary of Defense, “Mad Dog” Mattis, intends to ramp up the fight against the various Islamic factions presently causing havoc with our grand design in the Middle East. Indeed, he has already done so: during his brief tenure as the No. 2 man in our military establishment, America's armed forces have unloaded dozens of cruise missiles at the Assad regime in Syria, and dropped the so-called “mother of all bombs” – the largest non-nuclear weapon in our arsenal – on enemy forces in Afghanistan. Commando teams have hit various camps belonging to various terrorist factions. Drone strikes continue all across the globe with metronomic regularity. Mattis, a former commandant of the Marine Corps and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was known during his military service as a hard charger, tough and relentlessly aggressive. Recently, when asked by a congressman what kept him awake at night, he replied, “Nothing. I keep other people awake at night.” It goes without saying, though I am going to say it anyway, that Mattis is enormously popular with the fighting troops and particularly with those on “the tip of the spear” – the Rangers, SEALs, Delta Forces, etc. who do much of our killing for us while we sit safely in America, reading newspapers and watching cats fumble about on anthills.

Our soldiers seem to feel, more or less collectively, that Secretary Mattis is the sort who will “take the gloves off” and let them get down to the red business of slaughtering America's enemies wherever they may be found. One can hardly blame them for this. Since 1945 there has not been a single conflict in which America's military has been free to unleash all of its power and resources against its enemies. In Korea (1950 - 1953) and particularly in Vietnam (1965 – 1973), use of force was restricted and governed by numerous political considerations that left the men in the field feeling immensely frustrated. Even in the Gulf War (1991), politics dictated not only the way the campaign against Hussein's regime ended, but how peace terms were dictated, leaving a sensation among many that the war, while victorious in outcome, had not been a total victory (Hussein remained in power, after all, for another twelve years). And the so-called “Global War on Terror,” which has been conducted from 2001 onwards without letup, has been a strange and somewhat grotesque combination of overwhelming force and pathetic half-measures, which, if boiled down to a single descriptive sentence, might be: “Kill them – but don't offend them.” The result is that, sixteen years removed from 9/11, almost nothing has changed except the names of the enemies. Hussein gave way to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, which gave way to ISIS, which will soon give way to something else, but the conflict itself is no closer to a resolution than it was on September 12, 2001, and may actually be farther away. Military men believe that this is because they have been handcuffed by politicians and bureaucrats-in-uniform, and this is understandable. To a man with the hammer, all the problems look like nails: every human being sees reality through the perspective of their own place within it. When I was in law enforcement, the most commonly expressed sentiment among my peers in the police, corrections department and so on was how helpless they felt beneath the tangle of regulations and red tape that constricted their every movement. It was bad enough to be opposed by cunning and relentless criminals; did we have to fight “downtown” as well?

I will not shock you when I say that it is the fantasy of everyone who ever carried a rifle or a badge to play either Rambo or Dirty Harry at some point in their careers. To saddle up, lock and load, and lay waste until every one of the bad guys was lying dead in a pool of broken glass and blood. This fantasy, eloquently expressed by Toby Keith in his song “Beer For My Horses,” is not rooted in enjoyment of violence; it is rooted in the belief that violence solves problems in and of itself, and that if only the restraining hand were taken away, if our latent power were unleashed, the world would be a better place. Fans of the 90s television show Home Improvement will remember that Tim “the Tool Man” Taylor's answer to any mechanical problem was, “More power!” He was constantly adding boosters and superchargers to things like lawn mowers and chain saws, and constantly dismayed when his mechanical experiments ended in fiery disaster. Like my cat, he did not learn from past mistakes, but kept applying the same methods over and over again and drawing no conclusions from their failure.

Allen's character was, of course, meant to be a caricature of the American male, but in a larger sense he was a caricature of America itself, whose answer is always “more power,” regardless of the question. Rambo made $300 million dollars not because it is a great movie per se, but because frustrated Americans just wanted to see our enemies blown all to hell, with no politician or bleeding-heart in uniform to stop them. The message of the movie was certainly simple enough: if you let American fighting men fight, victory is assured. This is almost certainly true, but it begs a very important question: why were they fighting in the first place?

To paraphrase the historian Walther Görlitz, the belief that power never fails, and that it is the solution to any and all problems, that enough bombs can settle any argument, is probably the most resilient and pernicious delusion of the modern era. It has been disproven so many times that one wonders that anyone believes in it all, and yet decade after decade it remains the basis of American foreign policy and the bedrock of American political thinking. During the afformentioned Vietnam conflict, General Curtis LeMay threatened to bomb the North Vietnamese back to the Stone Age; when someone pointed out that North Vietnam already lived in the Stone Age, LeMay had no answer. He just went on bombing. And in fact America dropped more bombs in Vietnam than all the combatants combined dropped in the whole of World War II. But the problem in that conflict was not a shortage of bombs. It was lack of strategy, both political and military, and a misunderstanding of what force alone can achieve.

In the early 19th century, the Prussian soldier Carl von Clausewitz wrote a book, On War, which remains the cornerstone of all military thought and philosophy to this very hour. He defined war as “politics carried out by other means” (war, in other words) and stated that no sane person would enter into a war without having clearly defined postwar goals as well as a concrete strategy for winning. He emphasized that no amount of tactical brilliance could win a war if that underlying strategy was false – that bad strategy, like an improper foundation, would simply cause the whole effort to collapse. After WW2, a German field marshal under Allied interrogation stated that Hitler's mistake in that conflict was to flip Clausewitz's dictum on its head, to view military victory as an end in itself, and a cure for the political problems that had started it. Stalin, too, subscribed to this theory, stating, “A dead man is not a problem. Kill the man and you eliminate the problem.” When someone asked him about moral authority, referencing the Pope, the Soviet dictator famously sneered, “The Pope? How many divisions does he have?” To Stalin the idea of an underlying moral authority was nonsense. What mattered were how many planes, tanks, guns and troops you could muster, and whether or not you were willing to use them. Somehow, since 1945, we Americans have come to believe roughly the same thing as a nation. We are the world's foremost military power; our missiles can strike anywhere on earth, and our troops can be deployed within a matter of days to almost any point of the compass from the Arctic Circle to the South Pole. Furthermore, we are almost completely immune from retaliation. Abraham Lincoln's observation that “all the armies of Europe and Asia could not water their horses in the Ohio river” remains true today. It simply doesn't compute in our collective brains that groups of what we consider to be murderous savages, tucked away in places like Yemen and Nigeria and Indonesia, could defy us for any long period of time. If final victory in the “Global War on Terror” hasn't been achieved after close to two decades, then the answer must be simple – we aren't bombing them hard enough. What we need is...more power!

And more power is precisely what we are applying. Though the Trump administration is still wet behind the ears, we've already been told that there may be a need to put “boots on the ground” in Syria to tackle the threat of ISIS; that a military strike can't be ruled out against North Korea; and that we will stand no more nonsense from Iran. This, in addition to continuing U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and Niger, daily drone strikes in Yemen, and, almost incredibly, another surge of troop strength in Iraq -- a war which, at this point, is nearly as old as the soldiers fighting it. Confidence runs high that more drone strikes, more commando raids, more cruise missile attacks, more bombs and more boots will somehow succeed where previous military action has failed; and that more money – endless torrents of taxpayer dollars, running into the hundreds of billions – will put some starch into the flaccid American puppet regimes in the Islamic world, or the so-called “friendly” Islamic states of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Surely, the logic goes, if we just combine larger carrots with larger sticks, we will finally hit upon the formula to exterminate Islamic terror groups, establish democracy everywhere, and keep the Mideast pipelines open and flowing into American combustion engines. The “Global War on Terror” will come to a victorious conclusion, and we can resume traveling by airplane without feeling like inmates in minimum security prisons.

As I have stated, there is a great deal of sincerity behind this belief, and it comes from a total misunderstanding of history; but this misunderstanding can work two ways. It would be wrong to say that violence never solves anything. America won its independence through violence. Slavery was abolished by violence. German, Italian and Japanese fascism were destroyed by violence. Violence was and remains a tool which can be used to settle important problems. But like any other tool, it is useless and can even be self-destructive if it is employed without intelligence. One will note that in the examples I just used, the objective of our government was always simple and clear-cut, and all military, economic and political considerations were subordinated to achieving it. In 1776 the objective was the end of British rule in America. In 1861 it was the restoration of the Union and later, the abolition of slavery (as a means of restoring said Union). In 1941 it was the destruction of fascism and the establishment of democracy throughout the world. But as I noted above, our military efforts subsequent to WW2, our record of success has been much worse even though our expenditures of money and bombs have been much higher, because our objectives have been nebulous or uninspiring, and we were therefore unable to unify our military, economic and political efforts. This applies especially to the endless “Global War on Terror.” In the beginning, of course, it seemed an easy thing to understand. We had been attacked on our own soil. Thousands were dead. Our greatest city had been symbolically emasculated. Naturally we wanted revenge. But amidst the cries for vengeance very few people asked why this terrible thing had happened. What was the motivation of the attackers? What were their strategic aims? What was it they hoped to accomplish through such a massacre, knowing that our retaliation would be swift and terrible?

Then-President Bush supplied convenient answers. “They hate freedom,” was one. “They want to destroy our way of life,” was another. On several occasions he simply wrote off the entire attack as an act of “pure evil,” as if the motivations of Osama bin Laden's gang were simply mustache-twirling villainy for its own sake. One man who rejected these explanations was Ron Paul, who stated that 9/11 was simply a consequence of America's interventionalist foreign policy. It was, in essence, the revenge of the ants on the cat who sat on their anthill. For decades, America has dropped bombs almost without number throughout the Middle East – in Libya, in Syria, in Iran, in Afghanistan, in Yemen, in Somalia, in Iraq. At the same time we have pursued a policy of arming, funding and enabling the Israelis to behave as they please toward more or less subject populations who are predominately Islamic in faith. And on top of this we have not only arranged for violent “regime changes” against inconvenient leaders, but constantly backed, with both money and arms, ruthless dictators who imposed stifling oppression on their own people. The story of American meddling in the Middle East would require a multi-volume book series of its own to tell in full, but the point is simply that our own hands are not clean and haven't been since before most of us were born. Much of the anger and hatred expressed toward us in that part of the region is quite frankly justified, and if you doubt that, take a look at the kill statistics vis-a-vis American drone strikes in the last few years – the proportion of terrorists definitely killed versus that of innocent bystanders who had the bad fortune of being a half-block away when the bomb went off. In many cases we are killing as many as five civilians for every terrorist, and in many documented instances the missiles have missed the terrorists entirely and wiped out dozens and in some cases hundreds of totally blameless people. This sort of thing may not bother the fat-bellied wannbe warlords you encounter in American bars and barber shops who don't give a damn how many ragheads we have to grease to get at the bad ones, but it bothers me, because I can put myself in the place of a hard-working husband who comes home to find his inconveniently-located house a smoking hole in the ground, and his family nothing more than bloody garbage smeared over the rubble. You have to be pretty cold in the heart and pretty thick in the head not to realize that every time we create this situation, we make the job of the terrorist recruiter that much simpler.

Americans are often frighteningly ignorant of the way they are perceived in other countries, but this myopia is not universal. I once encountered here in Los Angeles an old but vigorous retired businessman who regaled me with tales of his travels as a youth. One point he wanted to press home in particular was how lucky he was to have traveled extensively in North Africa and the Middle East in the early-mid 1960s. Americans, he said, were treated "like kings" by the Arabs back then. "They trusted us and believed us to be good-hearted people who didn't interfere in other people's affairs," he said. "And they remembered how well we treated them when our armies were in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia during WW2. How we had respected their laws and customs. How we left without a fuss when the war was over and how we later opposed the European colonial powers when they tried to steal back their empires in the 1950s." Now, he said, he wouldn't travel to the Middle East if you paid him. Generations of dropping bombs, toppling inconvenient regimes and propping up bloodthirsty tyrants has burned up all their goodwill. They see us not only as an enemy but as a bully, and a vicious one at that. The cheers, actual or secret, that went up in much of the Islamic world when the Twin Towers fell down were driven as much by a feeling that America's chickens had finally come home to roost as by any so-called “hatred of freedom.” The stark fact is that, rightly or wrongly, America is viewed by much of the population on this planet as simply a more up-to-date version of the old British Empire. We may be somewhat more sophisticated than our British cousins were about how we administer that Empire, preferring economic exploitation under the guise of trade to naked conquest; but in the end, when the economic hit-men fail, the troops go in, bringing the corporations behind them. Whether you agree with this assessment is immaterial and irrelevant; the perception has become the reality.

This year there was a tremendous wave of terrorist attacks throughout Europe and Africa – this despite the fact that ISIS has been almost as thoroughly wiped out as al-Qaeda, and that there are no longer a plethora of save havens for terrorists to train. These attacks keep coming, too: the latest was in New York just a few days ago. These are carried out by different groups with different methods, and in many cases these groups do not even get along with each other, but their ultimate goal is the same – get the cat off the anthill, to get the United States out of their countries – militarily, culturally, economically, and politically. It is a simple, clear-cut strategy, and it does not require much in the way of advanced technology or even organization. As we have seen, in the right circumstances, a fanatic with a car and a kitchen knife can do as much or more damage as a bomb or a machine gun; and such people, hiding in plain sight, are much harder to fight than a large, armed band which can be located, identified and exterminated by our military. We can throw Hellfire missiles at suspected terrorists in Yemen, but we cannot do it in Kansas City or Rome or Barcelona. And while we can and do arrest and convict terrorists and would-be terrorists in those places using conventional law enforcement methods, we cannot, using such methods, stop people from choosing to become terrorists in the first place. One cannot cure a disease by treating the symptoms. The limits of purely force-based solutions to political problems are once again looming unpleasantly upon us. Like the Roman army at Masada, we have come face to face with the limits of military power. The problem which brings our men and women to arms has come full circle and landed back in the laps of our politicians.

Secretary Mattis promises to take the fight to the bad guys, to keep them in constant fear, to wipe them off the face of the earth. Doubtless he is a skilled tactician and can accomplish much in this direction. But I submit that tactics alone cannot win the “war on terror.” We must have a strategy, and it must consist of more than destroying one terror cell only to watch two more spring up, mushroom-like, in its place. It must consist of more than giving hundreds of billions in aid to a loathsome regime like Saudi Arabia's in hopes that an even more loathsome regime won't come along and take its place. It must consist of more than keeping the flow of money, weaponry and moral support to Israel continuous and ignoring the stark reality that the gratitude of a few million Jews is paid for by the unrelenting hatred of two billion Muslims. It is perhaps this last point is perhaps the most important, for our politicians must recognize that the supply of potential terrorists is never going to run out. No matter how many times we return to the anthill and start stomping, fresh ants will continue to emerge from their hole, ready to bite and sting. The trick is not to find more and more sophisticated ways of killing them but to take away their motivation for doing this in the first place. And the way to go about this, or at least to begin going about this, is to understand that some – not all, but some – of their grievances against us are legitimate and need to be addressed. Our foreign policy is a clumsy butcher job and has been for generations. It is driven by greed, arrogance, and special interest, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the ideals laid down by our Founding Fathers, or with true patriotism. Americans would not tolerate for a day what we've routinely done to other countries all across the planet for generations, and we ought to start by acknowledging this fact. Should we do so, I think we will discover that the necessity for American bombs is often much lower than we have been led to believe, just as the arguments to keep troops in over 100 nations are thinner and more self-serving that most of us would care to admit.

Many people would say that my attitude is defeatist and another way of advocating surrender. But it seems to me our surrender is already underway, for we are playing directly into the strategy of our opponent. And to understand that, it is necessary to understand what a terrorist really is, and what he wants.

All terrorists (or "freedom-fighters," if you happen to agree with their aims) fight the same way. They employ high-profile terror tactics to effect political change. But the use of these tactics and the emotions they create -- terror and rage -- are means and not ends in themselves. By inciting fear across a whole nation or planet, they give themselves a power out of proportion to their numbers. By provoking rage, they ensure the victim government will retaliate. And as odd as it may sound, terrorists actually wantto be retaliated against. Their hope, often openly stated, is that the enemy government will employ such indiscriminate and violent means of repression that they will end up slaughtering innocent people as well as terrorists. The relatives of these slaughtered innocents will then become sympathetic to the terrorist cause and in many cases actively support or even join it. The very act of trying to destroy a terrorist organization thus, in many cases, empowers that organization. But the insidious genius of terrorism doesn't end there. By virtue of the terrible nature of its crimes -- shooting up schools, blowing airliners to bits, slaughtering concertgoers or tourists, killing even women, children and old people -- it tends to cause the societies it attacks to abandon its own democratic traditions – to opt for security over safety. When I look at how the country has changed in the last sixteen years, how many of our freedoms have been compromised in the name of “national security,” I am continuously reminded of Benjamin Franklin's words, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." The brutal truth is that in spite of all of our military successes, in spite of heaps of immolated terrorist corpses scattered all over the globe, in spite of huge new sums voted by Congress to flow into the military's already bulging coffers, we are losing this fight, and losing it badly. Americans have willingly exchanged hard-won freedoms for a sense of temporary safety. We have set up a surveillance state in which we are told “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” We have vindictively prosecuted whistle-blowers and hurled them into prisons, not for betraying secrets to our enemies, but for blurting terrible truths the government didn't want us to hear. We have allowed the persecution of unpopular minorities to satisfy our momentary resentment and anger. We are beating America into a grim new shape, and we are doing it at the behest of vile murderers who want to drag the entire planet back into the Dark Ages. Isn't that the real surrender?

Contrary to popular belief, there is a way to break the cycle of violence in which we presently find ourselves, and to do so without compromising a single principle; but to understand how we can escape, we must understand how we became trapped in the first place. And this is precisely what I aim to do in the next installment of this blog, "America: From Republic to Empire (and Back Again)."