Liberty Maven

What is an American supposed to make of this almost offhand statement by Graeme Rowley, outgoing CEO of Australia’s Fortescue Metals Group: “The world hasn’t woken up to the fact that they (the Chinese) are going to replace America” (“Australia welcomes China’s investment, if not its influence,” Washington Post, 2/14)? The imminent danger might only be that if enough people keep making such statements they’ll come true as self-fulfilling prophesies, but we might as well consider the possibility that a descent down the ladder of post-World War II hegemony might befall us. If so, we should think about our responses. I have three suggestions.

First, we should try being honest. I say this not so much as an ethical proposition, but more as a practical idea. I well remember a youthful me of the 60’s fuming at being told that the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” constituted an attack on America by a dangerous power. What a crock that was; even the networks, who bought everything else, didn’t buy that. Looking back, I see that a good part of my rage was induced not by our going to war, but by the reluctance of our leaders to speak openly about the reasons. Years later Lyndon Johnson, when safely out of office, wrote with some candor of his inner struggle as commander in chief during the Vietnam War: “If I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.” Setting aside the question of whether Johnson’s concerns were justified, at least these were credible reasons to consider war. How much less furious I and many others would have been during the war had Johnson just come out and said, “We should fight so we won’t look like wimps.”

Now consider W.’s Iraq War. Did that war make your blood boil? If so, why did it? Just because we invaded? I propose that the essentially infuriating quality of the invasion came from the blatant falsity of the justifications we were given. No one anywhere believed the WMD story, or the claimed connection to 9/11. We were left, at the end, with no explanation at all. Many people speculated that the true motivation was to secure an American grip on Iranian oil fields, said to be the largest untapped oil reserves in the world. Consider then, this hypothetical statement from the White House: “We are going into Iraq to secure our grip on oil.” Obviously such a statement would be an outrage to many people around the world, including many Americans, but it would have carried the distinct advantage of having been credible. The debate would have been far more intelligent, and the outcome probably more in America’s interest.

My second suggestion is that America start playing chess as well as poker. Going back to the Vietnam War, it must have been galling to American policy-makers that the Chinese never invaded North Vietnam while we were bombing Hanoi. Why didn’t they? They were playing chess, sacrificing their ability to look warlike (the very sacrifice Johnson refused to make) for future gain. The strategy worked: the North won, America was weakened in a more profound manner than if the Domino theory had proved valid (which it didn’t), and in the end it cost China nothing. One might argue, in fact, that China is reaping the rewards of that smart chess playing today.

Now we are fighting an escalating war in Afghanistan. Are we playing chess or poker? It may be too early to say, but some of the signs are, at the least, ambiguous. Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow and director of research in foreign policy at Brookings, expresses what might be the official view in “What the Marja Battle Costs” (Washington Post, 2/14/10). This battle, as O’Hanlon makes clear, has been executed with some of the Vietnam and Iraq War lessons in mind. The U.S. incursion into Marja was announced in advance to minimize civilian casualties, certainly a smart move, since any love felt towards our forces in Afghanistan is tenuous and short-lived. Also, U.S. commanders seem to have found a way to claim what appears to be a tactical victory: the Taliban will probably find itself ousted from this area for an extended time after the incursion. This is chess in the sense that it’s carefully thought out with some hope of success.

On the other hand, errant U.S. missiles fired at the start of the incursion killed about a dozen civilians, including several children, the exact type of event that turns the Afghan population against us. O’Hanlon acknowledges the “setback in strategy,” but then states, “I would counsel against overinterpreting the consequences of this one major mistake. Such things alas happen in war.”

Time will tell if O’Hanlon is right, if the “cost” of the hundreds of Afghan civilians we have killed in the last few years, and the attendant widespread hatred of America throughout Afghanistan, Pakistan, the middle-east, in fact just about everywhere on earth, are worth the cost, but the last 40 years of U.S. policy are not reassuring. Perhaps the battle for Marja involves some cagey chess moves, but does the overall war? Will we in fact stop terrorists from replacing the Soviet Union as our justification for being a military state? It does not seem that temporarily securing portions of Afghanistan will do the trick if in the process we fan the recruitment of thousands of would be martyrs worldwide. Let’s hope there is a deeper chess game afoot than meets the eye.

My third suggestion is that we take a refresher course in economics. O’Hanlon speaks of the “cost” of this war, but he doesn’t mean the dollar cost. That’s not a cost we should ignore. If the United States were a store, it would face bankruptcy. We only buy, we don’t much sell (beyond weaponry, that is- further food for thought). Do we have the 30 billion that Obama allocated for the current phase of the Afghan War? We’ve got it on paper, anyway. Whatever faults one finds with Chinese governance, at least their money is real.

We appear to be in perpetual political season in American, and the current blizzard of rhetoric is not very edifying for those looking for indications of smart policy. The proof will be in the pudding. If terrorism is really abated, if we really do end up leaving the scenes of our wars with a semblance of victory, if our economy starts to make more sense, and if our official announcements take into account the population’s tendency to think, then we may not have to worry so much about China.