Los Angeles Times March 10, 2004
For Empire or Vocation, Ever Forward!
by Karen Kwiatkowski, Lt. Col. USAF (ret.)
All 129 members of National Guard Company B, 3rd Battalion, 116th Infantry, have been called up for active duty. My Shenandoah County, Virginia, neighbors left this week for specialized training at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Most will go on to even warmer places. Probably Iraq, maybe Guantanamo Bay, maybe Afghanistan. Their motto: "Ever Forward!" http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/army/3-116in.htm
The farewell scenes are being played out, quietly, all over the country this election year. These private moments of anxiety mixed with love of country and pride in serving it are common today but they have been blessedly rare in American history. The 116th was last activated was 1944. It was another world war, another global conflict of good against evil, another war that had to be fought by Americans. Today's deployments are for police duty or insurgent suppression in Iraq or Afghanistan, or for guard duty in Guantanamo. http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/military/20040305-0002-bedfordguard.html
In 1944, the rest of the world prayed for us, and opened their hearts and homes to Americans. In 2004, much of the rest of the world sees only rapaciously bullheaded neo-colonialists. Sixty years have passed, but somehow the vision of most of its inhabitants has remained 20/20. I guess we should be grateful for that.
I missed the farewell ceremonies in the county seat, because I was in New York City to tape a segment of the History Channel's "Hard Target." In preparation, they gave me a copy of a new book that explains our neoconservative foreign policy, the same foreign policy that mobilized my neighbors for the next two years. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum and former Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle drafted a little black book and titled it "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror."
I had already reviewed this book, in jest, but the History Channel expected me to actually read it this time. http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski53.html
Other conservatives http://www.amconmag.com/3_1_04/cover.html have already suggested that the book is poorly written, poorly researched, puts forth false logic, and doesn't withstand intellectual scrutiny. http://www.lewrockwell.com/ips/lobe46.html Much like your average bumper sticker. "An End to Evil" indeed serves as a kind of populist bumper sticker aimed at producing an instant, often emotional response, from people with very little time on their hands and no inclination to read and digest serious material.
Like those representing us in Washington.
The premise of "An End to Evil" is that the United States must destroy the evil that besets the world by forcefully imposing "democracy" on the planet, starting with the hotbeds of anti-Americanism in the Middle East. Frum and Perle explain that they "can feel the will to win ebbing in Washington," thus the need to publish this book.
Conservatives innately resist this message, pointing out that America is a Republic, not an empire. Empire, of course, is a term rejected by Perle and Frum. They say instead that "it" is the implementation of "a dream ... that will be brought into being by American armed might and defended by American might, too." It is "America's vocation."
Vocation or empire, this dream is clearly contrary to the vision of the Founders, our American traditions, and our Constitution. But no matter.
Other reviewers point out that to suggest that any state any government created by man can "end evil" flies in the face of both ancient and modern Judeo-Christian ethics. I'll leave such philosophical questions for another time. But this book does offer the "why" to families of the National Guard 116th Infantry bidding goodbye to home, hearth, and community this week.
Military people, and all Americans who love this country, need to know what Perle and Frum believe, because for the past several years, they have been helping to write the war-making script for Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush.
As I read, I was continually struck by the author's astounding ignorance of, and disregard for, military strategy and military reality. Considering neither Perle nor Frum have personal experience in uniform, their blindness is understandable. But it should give the military reader pause.
Perle and Frum explain the current quagmire in Iraq that has many of our Majors and Lt Colonels bearing the title of "Mayor" in Iraq. They write that we had only two choices in Iraq: "To work with [convicted bank fraudmeister http://www.truthout.com/docs_03/081903J.shtml and 'What was said before does not matter.' Ahmad] Chalabi or rule it ourselves." http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040219-115614-3297r.htm
Two choices, you pick.
You can be sure not even the most incompetent Second Lieutenant in any army would come up with such nonsense, much less call it a strategy.
Perle and Frum insist that we will not stay in Iraq. Never intended that.
This contradicts the current military assessment of two to five years, retired Lt General Jay Garner's assessment of several decades, http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0204/020604cdam3.htm or the assessment of the military industrial complex, represented by Halliburton and Bechtel, of forever or at least till the money runs out.
On what planet are the neoconservatives living? Or are these just soothing lies told by a civilian elite to calm the families of those sent forward to the occupation battlefields?
Demonstrating the neoconservatives' deep understanding of Middle East history and politics, they entertain only a single democratic Iraq, and broker no serious discussion of an Iraqi ethno-religious divide on three fault lines.
Yet, with unusual perspicacity, they pose the probability that our erstwhile ally Saudi Arabia will split into two provinces, a western one with no oil but a lot of princes, and an eastern one with all the oil and a need for leadership. They playfully suggest that these eastern oil fields, the largest in the world, will be "secured" by U.S. troops, conveniently garrisoned in Iraq and Kuwait, and already familiar with the concept of securing oil fields. http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=1181
For Perle and Frum, it is all just a chess game, static and two dimensional.
They leave the bloody and dynamic three-dimensional reality to the soldiers in the field, and the generals who walk a fine line between doing the right thing for the Republic and trying to please their Neronian masters. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10752c.htm
In terms of the fight against terror, Perle and Frum insist that to fight terror, it must be force on force, a global military war. For these neoconservatives terror is not an act, a method, a tool of political change, but is instead "the great evil of our time."
Funny, I thought maybe Hitler's state-sponsored genocide of over seven million people, or Stalin's murder of over 25 million during his first twenty years of power, or even Pol Pot or Mao's cultural genocides in Cambodia and China might be considered the great evil of our time. Globally ignored cyclical genocides in Rwanda and Burundi might qualify. Perhaps King George shared the Perle-Frum perspective, as he read reports of what was happening in the American colonies. For him, General Washington and his misfits a few centuries ago might have been "the great evil" of his time, not fighting fair and resisting his dominance.
The recent, important Army War College-sponsored analysis of our fight against terrorism by Dr. Jeffrey Record puts the whole discussion on a more rational plane, but I fear rationality is not a place Perle and Frum have visited recently. http://www.carlisle.army.mil/ssi/pubs/2003/bounding/bounding.pdf
"An End to Evil" contains several worthy conservative ideas, including a healthy criticism of the waste and corruption of the United Nations bureaucracy, and a strong pro-Taiwan position. Perle and Frum seem to recommend a traditionally conservative, non-interference approach to India and most of South and Central America. Of course, traditional conservatism is denied with the Perle-Frum loyal defense of the USA PATRIOT ACT, their only complaint that it fails to go far enough.
The big government adoration, big government solutions, and the blind militarism of the Bush foreign policy team is scary enough, especially given that some of these un-American ideas have already led to the deaths of over 550 American soldiers in Iraq alone, and the serious wounding of several thousand more. The Perle-Frum ideological team, including Vice President Cheney and the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, scamper blithely around the hard military reality of what their ideas have done and are continuing to do.
These ideas have delivered military and fiscal overextension, making us less able to deal with a concurrent proliferation of terror, in a more target-rich environment that now includes our sitting-duck soldiers in Iraq and elsewhere. It is sadly comical, and brings to mind the rearrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic. Except, it is all of the rest of us who are rearranging the chairs on the deck, as our treasured, responsible, respected Republic sinks in a sea of neoconservative dreams.
The wives and husbands of the members of the National Guard 116th Infantry will wake up in coming days, looking for their significant other, before they remember, yes, they're really gone. Children here and all over the country will call out for Mom and Dad, before they stop abruptly and remember it wasn't a dream, they really shipped out to a place we don't understand for reasons never explained to us. Undoubtedly, some of my neighbors aren't ever coming back.
There may be cause for a bit of optimism that rational and traditional American wisdom will ultimately prevail in our foreign policy. Frum remains a "former" speechwriter for President Bush, and Perle recently removed himself from the Defense Policy Board, in theory no longer advising the administration. One can only hope.
Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski can be reached at karen@militaryweek.com.
Without Reservation
A biweekly column by Karen Kwiatkowski, Lt. Col. USAF (ret.) http://militaryweek.com/kwiatkowski.shtml
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