The collapse of the Qaddafi Regime was heralded by the Left as a triumph of “soft power” which was somehow a vast improvement over the “hard power” we employed in Iraq. Just what soft power is was not well explained, although it seemed to boil down to “not Bush.” Although it was embarrassing to think that “leading from behind” is anyone’s idea of leadership, it certainly was refreshing to see the Europeans take the lead on a military venture.
One result of soft power is that we have no idea who will take over Libya. Oh, The New York Times is gah gah over the quality of the front men for the transitional party, but given the track record of The New York Times, that is more a cause of concern than comfort. There are reports that the CIA had a team with some of the rebels in Benghazi, but the CIA has shown itself all too often to be vulnerable to a peculiar form of xenophilia which makes them fall prey to the con jobs of fast talking foreigners.
One thing is clear: the current unity of the anti-Qaddafi crowd is already falling apart and that we have no influence over who will come out on top of the internecine battles to come. With no troops on the ground and with no visible role in liberating Libya, we will have to “lead from behind” again as the Europeans, who are practitioners of hard power even as they have gutted their own armies. They will get Libya’s oil and we will get the bill.
In truth, we have not practiced real “hard power” since the Spanish American War, when we took over Spain’s colonies as one of the fortunes of war. Since then we have only had versions of soft power, no matter how much blood and treasure we committed to a war. Hard power was the Soviet Union, dismantling East Germany’s industrial plant brick by brick and moving it to the USSR. Soft power was our building up West Germany, creating a formidable competitor to our own industry.
Today, as we scramble to abandon Iraq, a fragile but real democracy in the heart of the Middle East, we are committing to staying in Afghanistan until 2024 even though – or perhaps I should say precisely because – the United States has no national interest there and the current structure of government (a centralized state which is the opposite of what a decentralized tribal society needs) is fundamentally flawed.
The Arab Spring is already shaping up to be more momentous and less favorable to the West than we would like. The Egyptian Army is delaying elections, probably in an attempt to replace Mubarak with another dictator instead of a real election. The State Department has been begging Libya’s neighbors, apparently without much success, to police their borders to reduce the flood of arms that our “allies” in the war against Qaddafi are sending to Al Qaeda. Someone is launching sophisticated missiles at Israel from Egyptian territory. And this is just the beginning.
The Middle East will develop without much influence from us, but given our track record over the last fifty years, perhaps it is best that the Europeans take the lead on nation building. We used to be great at it. The Philippines today is a proud democracy and the US turned the warrior dictatorships of Japan and German into peace loving democracies. The brilliant reconstruction of Germany and Japan tend to be disregarded these days as critics claim that nation building there was easy, because they had been industrial economies, but those critics tend to forget that Japan thought its Emperor was God and was willing to commit mass suicide to protect him. Compared to that attitude, even the most fanatical Muslim country looks like a nascent democracy.
It is the US which has changed, not the rest of the human race. We took a curious collective shift in our mentality in the late 1950’s and one of the unexpected side effects was that we lost the knack for nation building. The splendid ability to make the rest of the world want to be more like us has disappeared. This may be because the world has developed alternative visions which we have been lax in countering. It may be because we have lost faith in our myths, always a sign of a declining culture. It may just be because we have reordered the way we do things to our detriment.
Whatever the underlying cause, one of the other symptoms of that sea change in America’s attitude can be found in the public’s attitude toward the U.S. Army. Not the other services, but the Army in particular. In my experience, even the most strident leftists usually have a soft spot for the Navy and the Air Force, as well as for the Marines and the elite units like the Navy SEALS and the Special Forces. It is the line Army, the average Americans converted into effective soldiers, that bears the brunt of the anti-military feelings. Even today, now that the Ivy League has lost their excuse to ban ROTC, they are falling all over themselves to create Navy ROTC units, not Army ROTC.
This is odd, because the Army has always been the most democratic of all of the services. It has always been easier in the Army than in the other services for an enlisted man to be promoted into the officer ranks. After the Civil War, the African American treated the Army as one of the best jobs available to their community and to this day, African Americans still speak proudly of their children “in the service.” The integration of the Army went a lot more smoothly than the integration of the Navy.
The Army’s democratic values were reflected in national politics. Until 1960 every President with a military record came from the Army. Since 1960, eleven candidates for President from the two major parties had Navy experience, six had an Air Force (or Air Corps) record, seven had no military service and only two had Army experience. Among those elected, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter and the first George Bush were Navy veterans and Reagan and the second Bush had an Air Force record (Air Corps in the case of Reagan). Clinton and Obama have no military experience.
Why is this important? Because the basic fighting unit of the U.S. Army is the individual. In the Navy and the Air Force, it is a machine. There is a difference in attitude and in an organization’s approach to education, and structure if your most important unit is a ship or an airplane than if it is a human being. All of the elite units, of course, are based on highly trained individuals, but they are very small and very specialized individuals and their organizational structure is not a model for organizing a large number of people.
It is this democratic attitude – of individuals making up the fundamental building block of society – which we have lost. Politics today is a matter of constructing a coalition of power blocs – the Black community, the Unions, the evangelical Christians – big enough to get elected and assuming that everyone in those power blocs lack the individuality to think outside that bloc. National politics is more like the old fashioned urban machines of the late 19th Century than of the politics that won World War II. Not coincidently, nation building has been taken from the Army and given to a professional group of humanitarians, with dismal results.
Another reason this is important is because the Army has always borne the brunt of warfare. It is easy to be for war when you fly over foxholes rather than live in one and easier to be against war when you haven’t liberated any death camps. The loss of the Army as the primary service among the national political and business elites has meant that our decision making process has lost touch with reality.
One of the things that struck me most in my year in Afghanistan was the degree to which 24 year old infantry sergeants with high school educations were more sensitive to the local culture than Ivy League educated diplomats. It reminded me of Mark Twain’s dictum that the problem with schooling is that it interferes with your education.
And we as a country can only be the loser.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
