Infinite War

In the last couple of weeks, national news coverage has been mostly concerned with rapid developments in the Mueller investigation and the related hubbub concerning the imminent release of former FBI Director James Comey's memoir. The far more important news has come from Syria, where it has been claimed that the regime of Bashar al-Assad has once again directed a chemical attack on a civilian population. Assad as well as his Russian and Iranian allies deny the claim, and have invited an international organization to investigate the claim.

Assad, if he is indeed innocent on this occasion, has not made himself seem so by using chemical weapons repeatedly in the course of the civil war that has gone on for seven years. Presidents Trump and Putin have engaged in some unusually intense saber-rattling, making a US-Russian conflict seem uncomfortably possible.

Yet the President is known to be ambivalent about US involvement in Syria and the Middle East in general. The Washington Post featured a fascinating piece of reporting detailing the tension his position has produced between him and high ranking military officials. Its description of the Pentagon's position left me slack-jawed, and for that reason I will quote it directly.

For America's generals, more than 17 years of combat have served as a lesson in the limits of overhwelming force to end wars fueled by sectarian feuds, unreliable allies and persistent government corruption. "Victory is an elusive concept in that part of the world," said Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, who led troops over five tours of Iraq and Afghanistan. "Anyone who goes in and tries to achieve a decisive victory is going to come away disappointed..."

 ...His remarks reflected a broader Pentagon consensus: In the absence of a clear outcome, winning for much of the U.S. military's top brass has come to be synonymous with staying put. These days, senior officers talk about "infinite war."

"It's not losing," explained Air Force Gen. Mike Holmes in a speech earlier this year. "It's staying in the game and... pursuing your objectives." 

Infinite war. Even saying the words in seriousness is an act of hubris. In a way though, it is the only possible conclusion from the premises given by current US foreign policy. If the lesson of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan etc is that no amount of external force can destroy an effective insurgency short of destroying the population itself, and if the policy of the United States is that neither withdrawal nor wholesale destruction of the population is acceptable, then the position taken above is the only one still available.

The problem, of course, is that the policy is bad. In spite of the fact that the military is openly admitting that "winning" these conflicts is not really feasible, in the last ten years our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan has expanded to Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. We are continually pouring resources into a region-wide conflict which we admit cannot be won in the traditional sense in a vain attempt to maintain some sort of control over the situation for as long as possible.

This is not to say that the shape of our involvement hasn't evolved. The full scale occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq under George W. Bush were anathema to his successor President Obama, who nonetheless failed to abandon either the logic or practice of the open-ended, conceptually preposterous War on Terror. Since then we have instead engaged in widespread localized use of special forces, and an exponential increase in the use of lethal drones.

This makes the United States a faceless, looming, frequently deadly presence in countries already plagued by violence. Aside from significant questions about the morality of military intervention in the first place, our approach is unlikely to temper anti-American sentiment region-wide. The unavoidable conclusion is that Trump's reservations about military action in the Middle East are, whatever his reasons for harboring them, correct.

Infinite war, the constant application of violence in a region for no greater purpose than to bend the local political arc somewhat more in the image of the United States, is an atrocity. It is an act of imperial hubris sufficient to strip the United States of whatever moral credibility it retains on the world stage.

At some point, we are going to have to acknowledge that our fears cannot justify the human cost of our actions. The impermeability of the US is not a goal for which the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and the distruption of tens of millions is a reasonable price to pay. The turbulence of our domestic politics notwithstanding, we bear a responsibility as citizens to do what we can to police the use of force in our name abroad, especially when it is unjust.