这是我在 XNUMX 世纪对这个国家的经验法则:如果你必须一遍又一遍地说,它可能不是这样。 这就是为什么每次我们被告知“非常”或“不可缺少” 美国是。 对于像我这样的人来说,他们仍然记得美国人认为是这样的时刻,但没有现任总统、总统候选人或政治家觉得你必须说出显而易见的事情,这样的台词回荡着防御。 他们似乎融入了其他声音,你几乎可以听到这些声音在窃窃私语,说我们越来越不特别,越来越可有可无,不再(到 报价 根据他自己的估计,他们中最伟大的)“最伟大的”。 在这种情况下,考虑一个 平凡 线 跑来跑去 华盛顿(因为它有 多年):美军是“世界历史上最优秀的战斗力量”。 呃,伙计们,如果是这样,那为什么它在 14 多年后不能赢得该死的东西呢?
如果你不介意上一堂假设性的历史课,那么事件的结果可能会有所不同,而不是无休止地重复“最优秀的战斗力”这些东西,我们的领导人可能真的相信它。 毕竟,在 9/11 袭击之后,布什政府仅用了一个月的时间就让中央情报局、特种部队顾问和美国空军对塔利班和奥萨马·本·拉登在阿富汗的支持者放松了。 结果令人沮丧。 从破坏性的角度来说,那届政府夸张地(不祥地)标榜为“全球反恐战争”的最初时刻是光荣的。
如果您想了解这些部队及其阿富汗代理人的镇压程度,请阅读记者阿南德·戈帕尔 (Anand Gopal) 的文章 生活中没有好人:美国,塔利班和阿富汗人的战争,这是迄今为止关于反恐战争如何(以及有多快)绝望地、灾难性地出错的最好的书。 与戈帕尔共事的阿富汗人之一是一名塔利班军事指挥官,绰号是毛拉凯布尔(因其选择的鞭子),他精彩地讲述了美国对这场运动的空袭是多么果断。 在回忆他在阿富汗内战前线的日子时,他描述了他第一次看到美国炸弹的威力:
“他把车开进盆地,转过拐角,然后下了车。 哦,我的上帝, 他想。 有无头的躯干和无躯干的手臂、煮熟的头皮碎片和剥落的皮肤。 石头是深红色的,所有的血都变成了沙色。 煤黑色的熔化钢块和塑料块标志着他朋友车辆的残骸。
“闭上眼睛,他稳住了自己。 在五年的战斗中,他目睹了自己的死亡,但从未如此轻易、如此彻底、如此无情地在短短几秒钟内将生命处理掉。”
第二天,他向他的部下讲话。 “回家吧,”他说。 “你们自己离开这里。 不要互相联系。”
“没有人抗议,”戈帕尔写道。
毛拉凯布尔听取了自己的建议,前往阿富汗首都喀布尔。 “如果他能以某种方式活着出来,他向自己保证他将永远放弃政治。” 他是典型的。 正如戈帕尔报道的那样,塔利班在与地球上最后一个超级大国的战争压力下迅速崩溃。 它的步兵放下武器,像凯布尔毛拉一样,逃回了家。 它的领导人开始试图投降。 按照阿富汗的方式,他们准备好回到自己的家乡,缔造和平,重新洗牌,并希望有更美好的时光。 几个月之内,换句话说,一切都结束了,或者至少应该、会、本来可以结束,甚至连喊叫声都结束了。
美国军方及其阿富汗代理人,如果你还记得的话,相信他们已经在多山的托拉博拉地区的某个地方困住了奥萨马·本·拉登和他的基地组织战士。 如果当时美国把所有资源都集中在他身上,很难相信他不会早早被美国拘留或死去。 那就是那样。 美军本可以胜利回家。 塔利班和本拉登一起成为历史。 将摄像机停在那里,肯定会讲述一个胜利的故事。
应该,会,会。
保持相机转动
There was, of course, a catch. Like their Bush administration mentors, the American military men who arrived in Afghanistan were determined to fight that global war on terror forever and a day. So, as Gopal reports, they essentially refused to let the Taliban surrender. They hounded that movement’s leaders and fighters until they had little choice but to pick up their guns again and, in the phrase of the moment, “go back to work.”
那是关塔那摩胜利的时刻, and it went to everyone’s head. Among those in power in Washington and those running the military, who didn’t believe that a set of genuine global triumphs lay in store? With such a fighting force, such awesome destructive power, how could it not? And so, in Afghanistan, the American counterterror types kept right on targeting the “terrorists” whenever their Afghan warlord allies pointed them out — and if many of them turned out to be local enemies of those same rising warlords, who cared?
这将是第一次,但绝非最后一次,在杀害大量人员的过程中,美国军方参与创造了自己的 未来的敌人. In the process, the Americans managed to revive the very movement they had crushed and which, so many years later, is at the edge of seizing a 军事优势地位 在国内。
And keep in mind that, while producing a recipe for future disaster there, the Bush administration’s top officials had far bigger fish to fry. For them and for the finest fighting force etc., etc., Afghanistan was a hopeless backwater — especially with Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein there in Baghdad at the crossroads of the oil heartlands of the planet with a target on his back. As they saw it, control of much of the Greater Middle East was at stake. To hell with Osama bin Laden.
And so, in March 2003, less than a year and a half later, they launched the invasion of Iraq, another glorious success for that triple-F force. Saddam’s military was crushed in an instant and his capital, burning and looted, was occupied by American troops in next to no time at all.
Stop the cameras there and you’re still talking about the dominant military of this, if not any other century. But of course the cameras didn’t stop. The Bush administration had no intention of shutting them off, not when it saw a Middle Eastern (and possibly even a global) 和平美国 在它的未来,并希望 驻军伊拉克 until hell froze over. It already assumed that the next stop after Baghdad on the Occident Express would be either Damascus or Tehran, that America’s enemies in the region would go down like ten pins, and that the oil heartlands of the planet would become an American dominion. (As the 新保守主义俏皮话 of that moment had it, “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.”)
It was a hell of a dream, with an emphasis on hell. It would, in fact, prove a nightmare of the first order, and the cameras just kept rolling and rolling for nearly 13 years while (I think it’s time for an acronym here) the FFFIHW, also known as the Finest Fighting Force etc., etc., proved that it could not successfully:
*击败坚定的、轻武装的少数民族叛乱。
*打一场基于伊斯兰教宗派版本的战争或一场思想战争。
*创造很多东西,但 失败状态 和 腐败严重 该地区的统治精英。
*炸弹 投降的起义运动
*无人机杀戮 恐怖领袖,直到他们的团体崩溃。
*以几乎任何方式通过陆路或空中干预大中东的任何地方,并最终建立一个世界 以任何方式 随心所欲。
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可能准确地说,在一个过程中 失望或灾难 after another from Afghanistan to Libya, Somalia to Iraq, Yemen to Pakistan, the U.S. military never actually lost an encounter on the battlefield. But nowhere was it truly triumphant on the battlefield either, not in a way that turned out to mean anything. Nowhere, in fact, did a military move of any sort truly pay off in the long run. Whatever was done by the FFFIHW and the CIA (with its wildly 适得其反 整个地区的无人机暗杀行动)似乎只会制造更多的敌人和更多的问题。
To sum up, the finest you-know-what in the history of you-know-where has proven to be a clumsy, largely worthless weapon of choice in Washington’s terror wars — and increasingly its leadership seems to know it. In private, its commanders are clearly growing anxious. If you want a witness to that anxiety, go no further than “华盛顿邮报” columnist and power pundit David Ignatius. In mid-January, after a visit to U.S. Central Command, which oversees Washington’s military presence in the Greater Middle East, he 写 a column grimly headlined: “The ugly truth: Defeating the Islamic State will take decades.” Its first paragraph went: “There’s a scary disconnect between the somber warnings you hear privately from military leaders about the war against the Islamic State and the glib debating points coming from Republican and Democratic politicians.”
For Ignatius, channeling his high-level sources in Central Command (whom he couldn’t identify), things could hardly have been gloomier. And yet, bleak as his report was, it still qualified as an upbeat view. His sources clearly believed that, if Washington was willing to commit to a long, hard military slog and the training of proxy forces in the region not over “a few months” but a “generation,” success would follow some distant, golden day. The last 14-plus years suggest otherwise.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at what those worried CENTCOM commanders, the folks at the Pentagon, and the Obama administration are planning for the FFFIHW in the near future. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that, with almost a decade and a half of grisly military lessons under their belts, they are evidently going to pursue exactly the kinds of actions that have, for some time, made the U.S. military look like neither the finest, nor the greatest anything. Here’s a little been-there-done-that rundown of what might read like past history but is evidently still to come:
阿富汗: 在布什政府向该国释放美国空军及其特种作战部队并“解放”该国多年之后,据最新指挥该战区的美国将军说,情况是“恶化.” Meanwhile, in 2015, casualties suffered by the American-built Afghan security forces reached “不可持续的” levels. The Taliban now control 更多领土 than at any time since 2001, and the Islamic State (IS) has established itself in parts of the country. In response, more than a year after President Obama 公布 美军在那里的“战斗任务”结束后,最新的计划是进一步减缓美军撤离,同时 发送 美国空军和特种作战队,特别是针对新型 IS 战斗机。
利比亚: Almost five years ago, the Obama administration (with its NATO allies) dispatched overwhelming air power and drones to Libyan skies to help take down that country’s autocrat, Muammar Gaddafi. In the wake of his death and the fall of his regime, his arsenals were looted and advanced weapons were dispatched to terror groups from 马里 到 西奈半岛. In the ensuing years, Libya has been transformed not into a thriving democracy but a desperately 失败的状态 充满了相互竞争的教派民兵、伊斯兰极端主义组织和 快速生长 Islamic State offshoot. As the situation there continues to deteriorate, the Obama administration is now reportedly 考虑 一项涉及“果断的军事行动” 这将集中在……你猜对了,空袭和无人机袭击以及可能对伊斯兰国行动的特种作战突袭。
伊拉克: 又一个局势因油价暴跌而再次恶化的国家——石油钱弥补 90% of the government budget — and the Islamic State continues to hold significant territory. Meanwhile, Iraqis 该 每月在 惊人的数字 在战争和恐怖的血腥行为中,什叶派-逊尼派的不满似乎只 磨. It’s almost 13 years since the U.S. loosed its air power and its army against Saddam Hussein, disbanded his military, 熟练 另一个(其中很大一部分在面对相对较少的伊斯兰国战士时倒塌了) 2014 和 2015),并将伊斯兰国未来的大部分领导聚集在一个 美军监狱. It’s almost four years since the U.S. “ended” its war there and 左. Since August 2014, however, it has again loosed its Air Force on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, while dispatching at least 3,700 (并且可能 几乎4,500) 军事人员前往伊拉克帮助训练该国军队的新版本并在它重新夺回时支持它(或者实际上 变成瓦砾) cities still in IS hands. In this context, the Obama administration now seems to be planning for a kind of endless mission creep in which “hundreds more trainers, advisers, and commandos” will be 寄去 that country and neighboring Syria in the coming months. Increasingly, some of those advisers and other personnel will officially be considered “在地上的靴子“ 还会 专注于 helping “the Iraqi army mount the kind of conventional warfare operations needed to defeat Islamic State militants.” It’s even possible that American advisers will, in the end, be allowed to engage directly in combat operations, while American 阿帕奇直升机 飞行员可能会在某个时候开始 飞行 close support missions for Iraqi troops fighting in urban areas. (And if this is all beginning to sound strangely familiar, what a surprise!)
叙利亚: 把一件事归功于叙利亚。 它不能归类为三连冠甚至重复表演,因为 FFFIHW 在过去的 14 年里不存在。 尽管如此,我们仍然很难不觉得我们以前经历过这一切:美国空军对伊斯兰国的打击(其影响是毁灭性的,但 以某种方式不要破坏 华盛顿渴望的对象), 灾难性的尝试 按照美国模式训练代理人力量, 到来 特种部队在现场,等等。
In other words, everything proven over the years, from Afghanistan to Libya, not to bring victory or much of anything else worthwhile will be tried yet again — from Afghanistan to Libya. Above all, of course, a 近宗教信仰 in the efficacy of bombing and of drone strikes will remain crucial to American efforts, even though in the past such military-first approaches have only helped to spread terror outfits, chaos, and failed states across this vast region. Will any of it work this time? I wouldn’t hold my breath.
宣告失败回家
At some point, as the Vietnam War dragged on, Republican Senator George Aiken of Vermont suggested — so the legend goes — that the U.S. declare victory and simply come home. (In fact, he 从不做 such a thing, but no matter.) Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and their adviser Henry Kissinger might, however, be said to have done something similar in the end. And despite wartime fears — no less rabid than those about the Islamic State today — that a Vietnamese communist victory would cause “骨牌” to “fall” and communism to triumph across the Third World, remarkably little happened that displeased, no less endangered, the United States. Four decades later, in fact, Washington and Vietnam are allied increasingly closely against a rising China.
In a similar fashion, our worst nightmares of the present moment — magnified in the recent Republican debates — are likely to have little basis in reality. The Islamic State is indeed a brutal and extreme sectarian movement, the incarnation of the whirlwind of chaos the U.S. let loose in the region. As a movement, however, it has its limits. Its appeal is far too sectarian and extreme to sweep the Greater Middle East.
Its future suppression, however, is unlikely to have much to do with the efforts of the finest fighting force in the history of the world. Quite the opposite, the Islamic State and its al-Qaeda-linked 分身 still spreading in the region thrive on the destructive attentions of the FFFIHW. They need that force to be eternally on their trail and tail.
There are (or at least should be) moments in history when ruling elites suddenly add two and two and miraculously come up with four. This doesn’t seem to be one of them or else the Obama administration wouldn’t be doubling down on a militarized version of the same-old same-old in the Greater Middle East, while its Republican and neocon opponents call for 制造 沙子“在黑暗中发光”, 发送 海军陆战队(所有人),以及 轰炸 该死的一切。
Under the circumstances, what politician in present-day Washington would have the nerve to suggest the obvious? Isn’t it finally time to pull the U.S. military back from the Greater Middle East and put an end to our disastrous temptation to intervene ever more destructively in ever more repetitious ways in that region? That would, of course, mean, among other things, dismantling the vast structure of 军事基地 华盛顿已经在波斯湾和大中东其他地区建立起来。
Maybe it’s time to adopt some version of Senator Aiken’s mythical strategy. Maybe Washington should bluntly declare not victory, but defeat, and bring the U.S. military home. Maybe if we stopped claiming that we were the greatest, most exceptional, most indispensable nation ever and that the U.S. military was the finest fighting force in the history of the world, both we and the world might be better off and modestly more peaceful. Unfortunately, you can toss that set of thoughts in the trash can that holds all the other untested experiments of history. One thing we can be sure of, given the politics of our moment, is that we’ll never know.
Tom Engelhardt是该联合创始人 美国帝国计划 和作者 美国的恐惧 以及冷战史, 胜利文化的终结。 他是国家研究所的研究员, TomDispatch.com,本文首次出现的地方。 他的最新书是 影子政府:监视,秘密战争和单一超级大国的全球安全状态.
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1 评论
Our military has become nothing more than a beta testing vehicle for new military hardware and freakish social engineering experiments. Where else can you “taste the rainbow” while incinerating innocent people?