[THS] Tom Hayden: Our GovIs Planning to Stay at War for 80 Years

[Peter Webster]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25126.htm

Our Government Is Planning to Stay at War for the Next 80 Years

Anyone Got a Problem with That?

Without public debate and without congressional hearings, a segment of the
Pentagon and fellow travelers have embraced a doctrine known as the Long War.

By Tom Hayden

April 01, 2010 "LA Times" - March 31, 2010 -- Without public debate and without
congressional hearings, a segment of the Pentagon and fellow travelers have
embraced a doctrine known as the Long War, which projects an "arc of instability"
caused by insurgent groups from Europe to South Asia that will last between 50 and
80 years. According to one of its architects, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are just
"small wars in the midst of a big one."

Consider the audacity of such an idea. An 80-year undeclared war would entangle 20
future presidential terms stretching far into the future of voters not yet born. The
American death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan now approaches 5,000, with the number
of wounded a multiple many times greater. Including the American dead from 9/11,
that's 8,000 dead so far in the first decade of the Long War. And if the American
armed forces are stretched thin today, try to conceive of seven more decades of
combat.

The costs are unimaginable too. According to economists Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda
Bilmes, Iraq alone will be a $3-trillion war. Those costs, and the other deficit
spending of recent years, yield "virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr.
Obama or his successors," according to a New York Times budget analysis in
February. Continued deficit financing for the Long War will rob today's younger
generation of resources for their future.

The term "Long War" was first applied to America's post-9/11 conflicts in 2004 by
Gen. John P. Abizaid, then head of U.S. Central Command, and by the retiring
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of State, Gen. Richard B. Myers, in 2005.

According to David Kilcullen, a top counterinsurgency advisor to Army Gen. David H.
Petraeus and a proponent of the Long War doctrine, the concept was polished in "a
series of windowless offices deep inside the Pentagon" by a small team that
successfully lobbied to incorporate the term into the 2006 Quadrennial Defense
Review, the nation's long-term military blueprint. President George W. Bush declared
in his 2006 State of the Union message that "our own generation is in a long war
against a determined enemy."

The concept has quietly gained credence. Washington Post reporter-turned-author
Thomas E. Ricks used "The Long War" as the title for the epilogue of his 2009 book
on Iraq, in which he predicted that the U.S. was only halfway through the combat
phase there.

It has crept into legal language. Federal Appeals Court Judge Janice Rogers Brown, a
darling of the American right, recently ruled in favor of holding detainees
permanently because otherwise, "each successful campaign of a long war would
trigger an obligation to release Taliban fighters captured in earlier clashes."

Among defense analysts, Andrew J. Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran who teaches at
Boston University, is the leading critic of the Long War doctrine, criticizing its origins
among a "small, self-perpetuating, self-anointed group of specialists" who view public
opinion "as something to manipulate" if they take it into consideration at all.

The Long War has momentum, though the term is absent from the 2010 Quadrennial
Defense Review unveiled by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February. One
commentator has noted the review's apparent preference for finishing "our current
wars before thinking about the next."

Still we fight wars that bleed into each other without clear end points. Political
divisions in Iraq threaten to derail the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops scheduled
for 2012.

As troop levels decline in Iraq, they grow to 100,000 in Afghanistan, where envoy
Richard C. Holbrooke famously says we'll know success "when we see it." The Afghan
war has driven Al Qaeda into Pakistan, where U.S. intelligence officers covertly
collaborate with the Pakastani military. Lately our special forces have stepped up
covert operations in Yemen.

It never ends. British security expert Peter Neumann at King's College has said that
Europe is a "nerve center" of global jihad because of underground terrorists in
havens protected by civil liberties laws. Could that mean NATO will have to occupy
Europe?

It's time the Long War strategy was put under a microscope and made the focus of
congressional hearings and media scrutiny. The American people deserve a voice in
the strategizing that will affect their future and that of their grandchildren. There are
at least three important questions to address in public forums:

* What is the role of the Long War idea in United States' policy now? Can the
Pentagon or president impose such war-making decisions without debate and
congressional ratification?

* Who exactly is the enemy in a Long War? Is Al Qaeda (or "Islamic
fundamentalism") considered to be a unitary enemy like the "international communist
conspiracy" was supposed to be? Can a Long War be waged with only a blanket
authorization against every decentralized group lodged in countries from Europe to
South Asia?

* Above all, what will a Long War cost in terms of American tax dollars, American lives
and American respect in the world? Is it sustainable? If not, what are the
alternatives?

President Obama has implied his own disagreement with the Long War doctrine
without openly repudiating the term. He has pledged to remove all U.S. troops from
Iraq by 2012, differing with those like Ricks who predict continuing combat, resulting
in a Korean-style occupation. Obama also pledges to "begin" American troop
withdrawals from Afghanistan by summer 2011, in contrast to those who demand we
remain until an undefined victory. Obama told West Point cadets that "our troop
commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended, because the nation that I'm most
interested in building is our own."

Those are naive expectations to neoconservatives and to some in the Pentagon for
whom the Long War fills a vacuum left by the end of the Cold War. They will try to
trap Obama in a Long War by demanding permanent bases in Iraq, slowing
American withdrawals from Afghanistan to a trickle and defending secret operations
in Pakistan. Where violence flares, he will be blamed for disengaging prematurely.
Where situations stabilize, he will be counseled it's because we keep boots on the
ground. We will keep spending dollars we don't have on wars without end.

The underlying issues should be debated now, before the future itself has been
drafted for war.

Tom Hayden was a leader of the student, civil rights, peace and environmental
movements of the 1960s. He served 18 years in the California legislature, where he
chaired labor, higher education and natural resources committees. He is the author
of ten books, including "Street Wars" (New Press, 2004). He is a professor at
Occidental College, Los Angeles, and was a visiting fellow at Harvard's Institute of
Politics last fall.

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