Letter to Friends & Family #93: Is American Exceptionalism Dead; part-2

Notes from the underbelly: “Freedom was a word that everyone mentioned but none of us knew.”

--Colum McCann; Let the Great World Spin; page-131 (2009).

In the autumn of 1976, after a challenging four years of high school (that has rewarded me many times over), my dad and I packed up the car and headed down to Lexington, Virginia.  In picking my college, I had focussed on my sense of honor and gentlemanliness.  Washington and Lee was considered, at least north of the Mason-Dixon Line, to be the southern gentlemen’s school.  Finally, I had found my element.

Well, not really.  Aside from the fact that I was too self-involved to be a gentleman and still way too lax for honor, I had a steep learning curve – this one of character – ahead of me.  W.&.L. did restore my sense of honor, though my near-expulsion finally bred it into me as could nothing else. My peers seated on the Honor Council treated me with mercy rather than justice in allowing me to finish.

As if inward challenges were not enough, I had to navigate my way through my own hypocrisy and that of others.  The code of the southern gentleman is awfully high, far beyond the sense of honor of the average person (e.g., me). That is, since these southern boys often could not match that standard, they chose to flout it, often nastily.

Like me, many of those classmates learned the value of their values by flouting those standards of courtesy and conduct granted them at the outset.  Yet, those few southerners – and some yankees, too – who met this impossibly high standard in college were the best peer group I have ever known anywhere.  Like Vice President Calhoun’s march of progress, these gentlemen – more like the ‘natural aristoi’ of Jefferson – marched the rest of us along by their example.

The reason for this diversion is to discuss the darker side of the challenge to American exceptionalism discussed in these essays.  The previous essay looked at the symptoms – the historical indicators – of the end of the American Century.  This essay briefly touches on some inward symptoms of the cancer inside the American being.  Mine is an idiosyncratic view drawn from my particular experience and evident bias. Obviously, it is open to the three-Rs: rebuttal, resistance and rejection.

Like those few gentleman I came across in college or prep-school – literally, five or less – I remember well those public servants over the past decade who have met President Kennedy’s challenge for public service.  They are among the best men and women I know; they are all too few, like any natural élite.  To those in the military or molded by military service, I salute them. Those in the diplomatic corps do great things, superb things for our country.

While there are more such people than when I was young – because many grew into their personal honor over time and through challenges imposed by dilemmas – they are still in the minority. Of the lower ranking officers in the field and the non-coms, I have little to say.  Unless a soldier does something really dishonest or malevolent – and some certainly do – I presume him to be honorable because I have seen their humanity first-hand. 

As I stated to a U.N. official in Iraq years ago, who stated that he could not join a foot patrol because he was a ‘humanitarian official', “You know what? Ninety-eight percent of the humanitarians in this country wear that that uniform…” while pointing to a nearby lieutenant. Theirs was, and is, a telling example of American exceptionalism, not because they had the guns but because they had the caharacter.

Indeed, 98% of the humanitarians I came across wore the uniform of the U.S. Army, the Bundeswehr or the British and Australian Armies. The response of that ‘humanitarian’ official? In a sotto voce, he stated rather guiltily in French something to the effect, 'Je suis désolé mais je dois garder les apparences, bien qu'elles ne soient pas la réalité.'  At least, he was honest in saying he had appearances to keep.

Many civilian officials as well as overstayed and overstuffed staff officers, however, arrogated themselves to some exulted level that furthered their careers. Ambition blights the character of the mediocre, leading to abuses along the chain of command, civilian and military.  With each of my four tours, the overall quality of personnel seemed to decline.  Of course, there were enough exceptions to this mediocrity to make the work wothwhile. We soon networked together to keep our spirits high enough to finish the tour intact, if not unscathed. 

The examples are many, too many for the scope of this brief essay. The following sample of the things I saw were neither unique to my experience nor were exceptions to the norm:

1. blatant theft of intellectual property and plagiarism by U.S. foreign service officers ranging from copying verbatim the content of web-sites and the translation of the intelligence of an allied non-English speaking Army to pass along as one’s own intelligence work;
2. little to no monitoring and evaluation by over-worked officers in the Embassy, leading to routine falsification of reports in addition to fraud, waste and abuse;
3. foreign service officers dispatching translators or other subordinates to follow and monitor the activities of rivals to undermine them;
4. military officials routinely classifying information by no means confidential but embarrassing by casually conflating careers with the larger national security (that such classification is truly intended to protect);
5. civilian ‘experts’ billing the U.S. government for twelve-to-sixteen hours per day for twelve-to-sixteen hours per week of actual work, on a good week;
6. subject matter experts – so deemed – who defied sensible guidelines and specific instructions of the sovereign governments to experiment with techniques untested and often beyond their fields of knowledge; as well as,
7. Defense Department civilian and military planners charting out the course of Iraq without ever speaking with host-country nationals seriously and hardly ever leaving the base…ever.

In essence, ‘we’ (i.e., those of us serving in these war zones, mostly for the money) had disappointed our presidents and those compatriots paying our salaries through their taxes.  If the nation can not manage to summon up enough intellectually honest and financially prudent civilians and staff officers to support those younger brothers and sisters in uniform, one must wonder if ‘whole-of-government’ interventionism is an option for American exceptionalism or an excuse for a procurement boom.

Serving my country – and some of the things I did do, both small and notable – has had a supreme, if too long deferred, value in my life.  Despite my personal struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan, I really believe my country sincerely sought to do the ‘next right thing’ for those beleaguered peoples; President Bush will always be a personal hero to me.  This world is better for America being in it; America is likely better for President Bush having led it; and, America may be ever so slightly better for me being here.

Nevertheless, if the country regards its youngest warriors as the Sunday morning clean-up crews minding the detritus left behind by policy failures and poor decisions of civilian or staff military leadership; if most of the civilians who serve in these war-time capacities are mediocre or worse; if adventurism is pursued for the bottom-line of defense contractors and USAID implementing partners, the mission is already lost and it is time to re-group and re-think and not groupthink. 

Letter-92 to friends and family: Is American Exceptionalism Dead?

UPDATE: APRIL 2nd, 2017: Honor Restored
Three cheers for General Keith Alexander. While I remain sympathetic to Mr Snowden, I have been living with a cognitive dissonance for several years. General Alexander, then head of the N.S.A., apparently overstated or outright misrepresented the eventually elucidated facts about the Prism and other programs on which Mr Snowden rightfully blew the whistle.

Additionally, Glenn Greenwald documented assertions that General Alexander was a 'cowboy' who wanted to scoop up everybody's data everyday. While Mr Greenwald's arguments were persuasive, the persona and personal demeanor of General Alexander did not square with the all the nasty things being written about him.

In this testimony, General Alexander clears away that cognitive dissonance. He is an honorable man who probably over-reached in his effort to prevent terror attacks and who definitely fudged the truth at times in an effort to protect the program and his subordinates. Yet, he was humble enough to transcend his institutional hard-wiring to team-up with the head of the A.C.L.U., Geoffrey Stone, so they together could optimize liberty and security (i.e., the meta-data - akin to water meter readings - and the privacy).

The capacity to change and to stretch one's worldview at an advanced age and in a position of power is rare indeed. The good General always reminded me of my uncle and one of the relatives mightily influential for me, Thomas P. Gordon, and now I know why. Uncle Tucker and this General are each gentlemen blessed with the intelligence of a Renaissance Man; the honor of the natural aristocrat of President Jefferson; and, the affable humility of a President Ford. These things integrate into the very best of what this country can produce.

Truthfully, in retrospect, I over-reacted toward General Alexander. I still credit Edward Snowden for being a contemporary hero. After seeing the cruel and unusual punishment toward Bradley / Chelsea Manning (i.e., months in solitary confinement with the intent of the problem 'going' away), Mr Snowden did what he had to do to blow the whistle. On the other hand, General Alexander had a fearsome responsibility of heading mass murder off at the pass. Did he over-reach? Yes, he did. Would I have in his position? Yes, I likely would have. In the end, however, decency prevailed.
ORIGINAL LETTER
As I have served the country overseas for much of the past decade, far from heroically, I have had the unanticipated privilege of hearing views about the U.S., her policy and her power from those on the outside, looking in.  Over time, I have come to acquire a more remote perspective, not only of U.S. policies and actions, but also of the right-sized place of America in the world. 
Current policies look different from out-there than they do from in-here.  The ‘American exceptionalism’, though fiercely debated at home, does not seem so evident in México – even less so in Arabia or Afghanistan. Recent developments have shaken my complaisant faith in the basic decency of America; a decency of purpose never inherent to, but persistently chosen by, us.

As long as the end of history appeared to be assured with overwhelming military power and commercial might, expressed primarily in finance, such exceptionalism seemed evident.  Polite might made right.  History has this irksome habit of not ending; of passing by the powers of the day.  Inside me, as an outsider now moderately alienated from that complaisance, uneasiness not only grows but feels painfully appropriate.

That is to say: the American Century -- a period of American disruption and exceptionalism in the affairs of the world -- appears to be coming to an end after about one hundred twenty-five years.  That ending, if true, has a large impact on the idea of American exceptionalism; if we can’t bend others to our will, how then are we exceptional? 
In my ruminating over these thoughts, my sense of this exceptionalism, in its pristine state, is one not projected by commercial interests nor protected by power.  Were both the case, one could argue that such exceptionalism was just another ‘new and improved’ version the brutal ethics of might makes right.

The symptoms or precursors of the end of the American Century abound and yet no one resists the behavioral fall-out of policy; few people seem willing to push back on morally questionable policies aside from Manning, Assange and Snowden, perhaps because the courage of those three is politically and publicly pilloried away as the deviance of faggots, rapists and traitors. 
Before issuing into these precursors, let us remember that the American Century, as we see it overtly manifesting today, started around 1950, halfway into the global preeminence of American power and prosperity. These precursors include, as examples of a wider set:

1. fiscal bankruptcy evidenced by military spending out of proportion to the base of wealth to support it and national debt levels that will dry up the capital markets eventually;
2. fiscal decline with the quantitative easing program drowning both the monetary system and the capital markets, creating asset bubbles and wrecking savings, at least in the short-term;
3. unsustainable policies with, for example, universal health care laws exerting high expenses and higher uncertainty;
4. gradual displacement over time of the dollar by the renminbi and the euro, which will divert these excess dollars created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve into a backwash-turned-tsunami onto the U.S. economy to provoke high, perhaps runaway, inflation rates in the longer-term;
5. the ‘F*ck the E.U.’ comment on the Ukraine by a senior-ranking U.S. diplomat, pointing toward an unsurprising U.S. uneasiness with the emergence of the European Union, perhaps the greatest guarantor of peace in our time, as an emerging rival to U.S. geopolitical influence;
6. arbitrary use of technology in service of expanding domestic police, commercial and domestic surveillance powers (e.g., incidental law enforcement information gathered by drones presaged by George Orwell's 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451) to infringe upon the private dignity people’s inner lives;
7. arbitrary use of weaponized drones by civilians beyond any accountability (most notably, the Uniform Code of Military Justice) away from the battle field to assassinate enemies, even U.S. citizens (albeit not pleasant ones), secretively and outside of the rule of law;
8. an apparent tendency of thought-leaders hiding behind ideologies and simplistic world-views (e.g., creationism) that fly in the face of scientific evidence or time-tested practices or civil axioms;
9. a general coarsening of the culture where there is more publicity for Kim Kardassian’s weight problem than the Ukraine or even the Olympics (not bread and circuses but all butt, no Caucasus); as well as,
10. a sense of popular exhaustion now with apprehension of what may come.

While I am a Republican, this essay is meant to look at the current snap-shot of my country from an outside, albeit conservative and admittedly cantankerous, perspective.  Consequently, as an aside, I have taken off the table those hot-button topics more likely to de-rail intellectual debate than create the climate for it. 
There are brave Democrats (Senators Udall and Wyden) and Republicans (Senator Paul and Representative Sensenbrenner) pushing back on the erosion of our cherished republican principles in the face of over-classification, excess coercion and over-incarceration.  All of these distressing trends are enabled by a climate of fear and greed preying on that fear.

The American pie is no longer big enough or expanding quickly enough, if at all. No longer can the economic engine permit a growing middle class, indulge costly industrial age military structures and subsidize a predilection toward imperialism, if not overt colonialism.  The evidence for this unwelcome change is persuasive, at least to me.  Many of my countrymen now see America's best days as behind her; I disagree. 
In actuality, ruminating over a return to some contrived 'golden age' is corrosive to the national spirit for three reasons.

• It implies permanent decline, which will be a self-fulfilling prophecy if we refuse to adapt to the realities of things beyond our control that defy the linear beauty of engineering; an inhospitable age as fluid with opportunity as fraught with peril.
• The things we cherish but often take for granted – liberty, freedom of thought as well the desire to improve our lives and those of our loved ones – seem less and less attainable; thus people struggle to keep what they have at the expense of welcoming the future and helping others along.
• If some golden era has indeed passed, and America finds herself truly trapped in irrevocable decline, people are going to want to know why it has passed and who is responsible for that loss; concomitant with the blame-game, will be the continued politicization of everything, ranging from what we believe to how we should act on, and manifest, those beliefs.

While I am my characteristic snaggle-puss self, the next letter (perhaps few) will lay out an alternate way of looking at our situation to prescribe, in foreign policy, what Dr Lincoln Bloomfield forty years ago fittingly called the humane use of power.

In Mexico, I re-read Dr Bloomfield’s book, In Search of American Foreign Policy: the Humane Use of Power, one of the two poli-sci books that captured my interest in college.  (The other treasured tome was Free Government in the Making: Readings in American Political Thought by Alpheus T. Mason; published fifty years ago).

Dr Bloomfield wrote in a simpler time politically and, perhaps, geopolitically, during the fall of Viêt Nam and the Watergate crisis. Nevertheless, those days had their perils and anxieties, too, as many of us can recall.  Heroically, as an ‘establishment thinker’, the hawkish M.I.T. Cold War policy wonk pushed himself – and his readers – to think hard about America’s place in a changing world.

Dr Bloomfield laid out his thoughts on renovating mainstream thinking to keep the American exceptionalism going forward, by preserving the best of the evolving political theory documented by Dr Mason. America could make this change, Dr Bloomfield seemed to argue, not through the excess use of power but through the judicious application of those republican ideals that had made the United States exceptional in the first place. 
But where to start?  For me, it would be in the area of foreign and military policies since so much of national thinking and resources are bound up in these arenas of thought; since people want these resources directed to domestic growth; and, well, since I find that topic to be more interesting.

Letter-91: Marketing doth make cowards of us all...

This essay discusses an interesting interview by Thomas Ricks, in Foreign Policy magazine (http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/02/12/kilcullen_speaks_on_coin_going_out_of_style_his_recent_book_syria_and_more), with David Kilcullen, the not-quite-through guru of counter-insurgency (COIN).  Please pardon my sarcasm.  While this practitioner’s answers, my friends, seem to be “blowin’ WITH the wind”, permit me to make some observations. 

1. The recent Kilcullen tome, Out of the Mountains (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/10548968/Books.html), is brilliantly timed to make a market in the shape of COIN to come against the likely NATO garrison of 10,000 troops in 2015.  That is, the police and army training crew left behind will cluster in the cities (i.e., Kabul, Mazar i Sharif and Kandahar) plus Bagram. Such placement will draw the Taliban and other anti-occidental (if not accidental) guerillas out of hiding in the hills and into the cities.  And, pray tell, just who will be the guy who thought of this seismic shift of guerrilla tactics? You guessed it: David Kilcullen, brandishing his new 300+ page marketing brochure in one hand and his ABA cash-transfer routing information in the other, followed closely behind by over-educated war-wonks falling all over themselves to proclaim his palatably profitable genius.

2. Of course, the Sons of Iraq – the Sunnis in Anbar and Ninewa provinces that rose up against Al Qaeda-Iraq in 2007 – were “huge” in the success of the U.S. troop surge of 2008. But they were not fortuitous.  COIN depends upon, as David Kilcullen correctly implies in the interview, the legitimacy of the host government.  Well, shucks, it is not that simple. In the case of Iraq, neither the governing Constitution, with its seeds of an eventual ethnic civil war unintentionally sewn into its fabric by AMB Bremer, nor the government were ever legitimate in our traditional sense of that word.  Yet al Qaeda-Iraq, under the blood-drunk leadership of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, managed to make itself even less legitimate than the government in the eyes of the rightly frightened Sunni minority.  General Petraeus was smart in understanding that nuanced shift of relative legitimacy. Although we paid a cpnsiderable price in younger Americans lost, General Petraeus leveraged a 30,000 troop surge commissioned bravely and morally by President Bush with 100,000 Sons of Iraq to carry the day in Iraq. 

(As a quick aside, the current violence engulfing Iraq is NOT the loss of the peace by America, much as I would enjoy scape-goating the current U.S. leadership. People ultimately are responsible for their own fates.  I remain convinced that, notwithstanding the flawed Constitution and the ever more flawed straw-dictator, Iraq's moderate Muslims now understand democracy and its limitations as well as appreciate their God-endowed liberty sufficiently not to forfeit the liberation granted to a beleaguered people by the U.S.-led coalition. Obviously, only time will tell.)

3. No one whom I know argues for street fighting in Syria as Mr Kilcullen ‘wisely’ advises against our so doing.  Such advice to an audience versed in the subject under discussion seems as vacuous as recommending that people not drink sulfuric acid.  In this case, Mr Kilcullen plays the same trick as does President Obama with respect to Syria by collapsing the menu of options into a binary choice: nothing versus everything, with the latter being bloody house-to-house fighting in Damascus and Aleppo (David Kilcullen) or another invasion in the Middle East (President Obama).  It is important to note that Mr Kilcullen states as near-fact what many of us have sadly supposed all along: that many, probably most, of the humanitarian supplies are not getting through to the intended beneficiaries.  My suspicion is that those missing necessities are being purloined and re-sold at inflated process.  Many are likely finding their way to fighters on both sides.

(In another aside, the 'nothing-doings' can no longer fall back on the humanitarian assistance as a relatively just response to an absolutely appalling slaughterhouse. Going-forward, all interested parties should reasonably understand that, with or without a care-package, inaction will necessarily lead to increasingly dire conditions for millions of innocents, as that policy already has.  That is to say: to do nothing knowing evil will continue unabated undercuts the just intentions inherent in sending the aid.  The civilized world is on the hook, now -- like or not, we are already involved.)

4. The fighters we support in Syria do not wage a counter-insurgency but, as many in the ‘Small Wars’ community rightfully argue, a proxy war between Al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia arrayed against Iran and Shi’ite death squads shipped in from Iraq.  Christian, Druze, Kurd and other minorities are caught in the cross-fire together with the great majority of moderate Muslims.  Unfortunately, given the lethality and ubiquity of modern weaponry, the West can not simply wash its hands clean on the rationale, “We had these sectarian growing pains, let them have theirs…” These simmering superstitions currently boiling over pit one side having loads of chemical weapons in Syria (violent Shi'ites) and the other (i.e., radical Sunnis) with 150+ nuclear weapons in Pakistan.  Needless to say, with the Taliban wreaking havoc in Pakistan and Al Qaeda usurping leadership of the opposition in Syria – yes, even nastiness abhors a vacuum – we live in the most dangerous time in my own lifetime.

(As yet another aside, I wish people would contain the bellicose rhetoric against Iran about a hypothetical and approaching nuclear weapons capacity as well as the irredentist vituperation of Israel.  Unfortunately, with the exception of a Jordan increasingly under stress, these two societies may well be the two most advanced in the region.  Neither is likely to use a presumed or imminent capability.  Israel, if anything, can be the example of what civilized countries can do through that worst of all types of government -- save all others -- democracy.  That will require honouring the right of return and a one-state solution, both topics of which are comfortably beyond the scope of this essay.)

5. Mr Kilcullen’s critical re-examination of COIN, in this interview with Mr Ricks, and the current applicability of his 'new' thinking smacks of opportunism.  Admittedly, I have not read the new book; truth is, I got through only a half of The Accidental Guerrilla before I sobered up, tuckered out, and realized I was reading a 400 page résumé. In The Accidental Guerrilla, Mr Kilcullen made a  facile stutter-step from the traditional guerrilla strategy (of winning the country-side to choke the cities) to saying counter-insurgencies need to woo the population over to the embattled régime (i.e., win back the hearts-and-minds).  How do we do that? By making the government legitimate.  That is to say: win the counter-insurgency by removing its animating cause. 

6. At least Mr Kilcullen has the transparency to mention his private start-up in the interview. His re-think, however, is not a new-and-improved COIN doctrine but a brilliant political reversal FOR fortune.  His consulting group, Caerus, is evidently named for the god-let of youthful opportunity in Greek mythology (http://www.theoi.com/Daimon/Kairos.html). Thus everything falls into place.  Marketing doth make cowards of us all.  Far from a change of heart in Mr Kilcullen, we are seeing a marketer’s change in response to a new market climate defined by the current Administration and a war-weary electorate.  Mr Kilcullen’s rhetorical legerdemain almost echo the binary, and bogus, choice presented by President Obama.  Both solution-sets sound intelligent, except that innocents die by the thousands while millions more are displaced in a country that has had closer historical ties with the U.S. than most people realize (see AMB Michael Oren’s most readable book, Power, Faith and Fantasy; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/10548968/Books.html).

7. There is one point that Mr Kilcullen makes with which I agree: the need seriously to debate Syria in the public discourse.  Mr Kilcullen is a good man – of that, I have little doubt. Nevertheless, the existence of a consulting firm for so delicate a question as Syria shows why the debate over contingency operations (i.e. civilian-military or CivMil operations) – especially in their discussion and planning stage – may not be well-served by the private sector. 

(As a final aside, perhaps much of the implementation of that planning will end up being out-sourced. A permanent COIN force would make overwhelming the temptation to use counter-insurgency field-hands to bail out bungled civilian leadership. Additionally such an elite force, all dressed up with nothing to do most of the time, could, over a generation or two, degenerate into a praetorian guard smashing any threat calling out a naked emperor.)

8. H.R.-2606, The Stabilization and Reconstruction Integration Act of 2013 (http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/whole-of-government-support-for-irregular-warfare-how-a-new-law-will-make-a-map-hit-the-roa), which fixes the CivMil responsibility clearly in the U.S. government, ought to be expedited into law so that the government, acting on behalf of its citizenry, can start to debate what to do, if anything, about situations like those unfolding in Syria, Mexico and elsewhere.  We, the people, deserve to have the full story, detailed with possible consequences of each option, presented intelligibly to us and debated in a public forum.  At least, then, we can take ownership of the position pursued by the U.S. government.  This CivMil capability could be amplified by an active commitment to that segment of special operations that permits the existence of U.S. military observers on call with the United Nations. Such a deployment of observers makes sense since many situations – including, as many seem to think, Syria and Mexico – lie outside of national security interests and do not embody existential threats.

Some voices calling for action have turned shrill these days with an increasing number of critics implying that President Obama is pusillanimous.  What to do in response to catastrophes that pose foreseeable long-term risks to U.S. security interests that simply are not yet existential threats to our country remains a mystery to me.  If anything rises to the level of cowardice, for me at least, it is not a perceived failure of President Obama to intervene militarily directly into Syria; indeed, such an action could be foolish. What is perplexing, again in my mind only, is the failure to discuss options on Syria honestly and openly.  Doing so would begin to voice the outrage of civilized peoples the world over toward the unapologetic savagery toward innocents displayed by both sides. If nothing else, jaw-boning would represent a start.