The Iraq War: a repost after 10 years of war

Harry Targ : Expanding the 'Iraq Syndrome'

Image from Democratic Underground.

Cooperation over conflict:
We need to expand the 'Iraq Syndrome'

As we reflect on the 10-year anniversary of the launching of the Iraq War, the madmen inside the beltway are talking about increasing U.S. military involvement abroad.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / March 20, 2013

In a November/December 2005 Foreign Affairs article, "The Iraq Syndrome," I argued that there would likely be growing skepticism about the notions that "the United States should take unilateral military action to correct situations or overthrow regimes it considers reprehensible but that present no immediate threat to it, that it can and should forcibly bring democracy to other nations not now so blessed, that it has the duty to rid the world of evil, that having by far the largest defense budget in the world is necessary and broadly beneficial, that international cooperation is of only very limited value, and that Europeans and other well-meaning foreigners are naive and decadent wimps."

Most radically, I went on to suggest that the United States might “become more inclined to seek international cooperation, sometimes even showing signs of humility.”

-- John Mueller, “The Iraq Syndrome Revisited,” Foreign Affairs , March 28, 2011

David Halberstam reported in his important book,The Best and the Brightest, that President Roosevelt directed his State Department to develop a position on what United States foreign policy toward Indochina should be after the World War in Asia was ended. Two choices were possible in 1945: support the Vietnamese national liberation movement that bore the brunt of struggle against Japanese occupation of Indochina or support the French plan to reoccupy the Indochinese states of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

As the Cold War escalated the United States rejected Ho Chi Minh’s plea for support for independence and began funding the French in their effort to reestablish colonialism in Indochina. When the French were defeated by the Viet Minh forces in 1954, the United States stepped in and fought a murderous war until the collapse of the U.S. South Vietnamese puppet regime in 1975.

Paralleling the struggle for power in Indochina, competing political forces emerged on the Korean Peninsula after the World War. With the Soviet Union and China supporting the North Koreans and the United States supporting a regime created by it in the South, a shooting war, a civil war, between Koreans ensued in 1950 and continued until an armistice was established in 1953. That armistice, not peace, continues to this day as a war of words and periodic provocations.

Political scientist John Mueller analyzed polling data concerning the support for U.S. military action in Korea and Vietnam, discovering that in both wars there was a steady and parallel decline in support for them. Working class Americans were the most opposed to both wars at every data point. Why? Because working class men and women were most likely to be drafted to fight and their loved ones the most likely to suffer the pain of soldiers coming home dead, scarred, or disabled.

Polling data from the period since the onset of the Iraq war followed the pattern Mueller found in reference to Korea and Vietnam. In all three cases levels of support for U.S. war-making declined as the length of the wars increased and casualties rose. The American people typically gave the presidents some flexibility when the wars started and the rally-round-the-flag phenomenon prevailed. But then resistance grew.

Throughout the period from the end of the Vietnam War until the 1990s, each presidential administration was faced with what foreign policy elites called “the Vietnam Syndrome.” This was a pejorative term these elites used to scornfully describe what they correctly believed would be the resistance to foreign military interventions that they periodically wished to initiate.

President Reagan wanted to invade El Salvador to save its dictatorship and to overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. He would have preferred to send troops to Angola to defend the anti-communist forces of Jonas Savimbi of UNITA.

To overcome the resistance to launching what could become another Vietnam quagmire, policymakers had to engage in “low intensity conflict,” covert operations that would minimize what the American people could learn about what their government was doing and who it was supporting. Reagan did expand globally and sent troops to tiny Granada, but even Reagan’s globalism, militarism, and interventionism were somewhat constrained by the fear of public outrage.

President George Herbert Walker Bush launched a six-month campaign to convince the American people that military action was needed to force Iraqi troops out of Kuwait. Despite a weak endorsement of such action by the Congress, the American people supported Gulf War I because casualties were small and the war lasted only a month. During a press conference announcing the Gulf War’s end in February 1991, Bush proclaimed that “at last we licked the Vietnam Syndrome.”

Clinton knew better. He limited direct U.S. military action to supporting NATO bombing in the former Yugoslavia in 1995, bombed targets in Iraq in so-called “no-fly zones in 1998,” bombed Serbia in a defense of Kosovo in 1999, and used economic embargoes to weaken so-called “rogue states” throughout his eight years in office.

It was President George Walker Bush who launched long and devastating wars in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. The Bush administration used the sorrow and anger of the American people after the 9/11 terrorist acts to lie, deceive, aggress, and qualitatively increase the development of a warfare state.

As Mueller has suggested, an “Iraq Syndrome” had surfaced by 2005 as the lies about that war became public, the war costs were headed toward trillions of dollars in expenditures, and troop deaths and disabilities escalated. And of course an historically repressive society, Iraq, was so destroyed that U.S. troops left it in shambles with hundreds of thousands dead, disabled, and in abject poverty.

As we reflect on the 10-year anniversary of the launching of the Iraq War in March 2003, the madmen inside the beltway are talking about increasing U.S. military involvement in Syria, not “taking any options off the table” in Iran, and threatening North Korea.

Meanwhile the United States is beefing up its military presence in the Pacific to “challenge” rising Chinese power, establishing AFRICOM to respond to “terrorism” on the African continent, and speaking with scorn about the leadership in Latin America of recently deceased Hugo Chavez.

The American people must escalate commitment to its “syndromes,” demanding in no uncertain terms an end to United States militarism. Mueller’s call for a U.S. foreign policy that emphasizes cooperation over conflict motivated by humility over arrogance is the least the country can do to begin the process of repairing the damage it has done to global society.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University and is a member of the National Executive Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, and blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

THE FUTURE OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY (AND ELECTORAL POLITICS) MAY BE DETERMINED BY THE PATH IT TAKES IN 2018

Harry Targ

A Progressive Agenda is a Requirement for Victory

In a March 16 essay by Robert Borosage (“Opening a New Way for Democrats to Run and Win,” Our Future.Org) the author assessed the significance of the election victory of Democratic candidate Conor Lamb in Pennsylvania’s special election in House District 18.

Borosage reported on the competing interpretations of the surprising Lamb victory in a Congressional District that carried for Presidential candidate Donald Trump by twenty points in 2016. Mainstream spokespersons for both political parties argued that Lamb won because of growing criticisms of Trump’s presidency and because he campaigned on the issues like a Republican.

For House Speaker Paul Ryan, the message to Republicans was not to worry because successful Democrats see the handwriting on the wall and embrace the Republican agenda. For him, political discourse and advocacy in the country is moving in a conservative direction.

More troubling for progressives, many Congressional leaders in the Democratic Party (and many CNN/MSNBC pundits) argued that Democratic success in District 18, and presumably in the 2018 election season will come to those candidates who “fit their districts.” Borosage claims this interpretation is really a rationalization for Democrats to shift from the left to the center because it is assumed most voters are centrist.

In Lamb’s case, the candidate criticized the legislative leadership of Nancy Pelosi, personally opposed abortion, and supported gun-ownership. But, Borosage suggested, Lamb campaigned for universal health care and opposition to the tax cuts, and cuts in social security. He supported a woman’s right to control her own body and gun regulation. He fully embraced worker rights and unions.

Borosage points out that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), contrary to the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), supports the Paul Ryan/CNN/MSNBC interpretation of the possibilities of Democratic success. They prefer candidates who are mirror images (minus overt racism and sexism) of their Republican opponents. They accept the old shibboleth of party politics that the independents who are centrists control the outcome of elections. The DCCC also supports candidates who can raise money from wealthy liberals.

Borosage correctly pointed out that the DCCC model is a recipe for failure. And this is largely because, as data-based reports underscore, large sectors of the potential electorate, working people, are concerned about their economic futures. For Borosage the CPC People’s Budget, which supports “major reinvestments in our country through  infrastructure, education,  and wage growth to increase opportunity for all” can address the needs of the vast majority of those who live in the United States. And candidates’ support of a progressive agenda will not only affect the choices voters make but their likelihood to turn out to vote as well.

Studies of Financial Hardship

The economic circumstances of large percentages of Americans have been reflected in a variety of surveys. Take for example surveys conducted by United Way agencies in 13 states (two more underway) called “ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) Study of Financial Hardship.” ALICE began as a pilot study in New Jersey in 2009 and by 2016 examined household income in 15 states with 40 percent of the population of the United States.  

In one state, Indiana, for example, an Association of United Ways issued a 250 page report called the “Study of Financial Hardship.” The study, paralleled at that time (2014) similar studies in five other states. It was prepared by the ALICE research team at Rutgers University. It introduced the core idea, Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed or (ALICE). ALICE refers to households with incomes that are above the poverty rate but below “the basic cost of living.” The startling Indiana data revealed that:

-more than a third of Hoosier households could not afford adequate housing, food, health care, child care, and transportation.

-specifically, 14 percent of households were below the poverty line and 22 percent above poverty but below the threshold out of ALICE, earning enough to provide for the basic cost of living.

-912,947 households (of Indiana’s 2.5 million households) were either within the ALICE status or below the poverty line.

-68 percent of all jobs in the state paid less than $20 an hour (75 percent of these paid less than $15 dollars an hour).

Those Indiana men, women, and children who come from the 36 percent of households who earned less, at, or slightly above the poverty line probably have a negative view of their futures. It is reasonable to assume that for them tax breaks for the rich and the austerity policies for the poor are not viewed positively. 

More recently (2017), ALICE reported on results from 13 states (including 711 counties) for which data was available (since the report was issued projects were initiated in Ohio and Virginia). ALICE reported that “…across the United States-in cities, suburbs, and rural communities alike-American families struggle to afford the basic necessities of life.…at least 31 percent of households in each state cannot afford the bare minimum to live and work in the modern economy. In some states, the proportion is as high as 44 percent.”

For ALICE a “household survival budget” is “a basic budget that includes the cost of housing, child care, food, transportation, and health care.” ALICE household measures include the percentage of households living in poverty in each state plus those households that exist somewhere between poverty and living on a household survival budget.  

The United Way studies make it clear that those living below a household survival budget (categorized as ALICE), are “young and old, single and married, with and without children, and is every race and ethnicity. Many hold jobs, pay taxes, and provide services that are vital to the local economy. They are child care providers, retail salespeople, customer service representatives, health care aides, and laborers and movers. And some are underemployed, unemployed, disabled, or retired.”

The executive summary of the ALICE Report suggests four fundamental reasons why households live below the household survival budget. These include low wage jobs, in 12 of 13 states, one-half the work force earns less than $20 an hour. In addition, the cost of living, adjusted for local differences, makes it difficult to provide for households. Further, in every state studied, majorities of households lack savings to help them maintain their living expenses during periods of unemployment. Finally, what, the report called “economic challenges” include increased threats to household survival budgets such as affordable housing near places of work.

Given these factors, in 13 states studied from 2009 until 2016, the percentage of households living below the ALICE threshold increased from 4 percent (Washington) to 40 percent (Maryland). In each state the cost of a livable budget increased and many families faced reduced income because of unemployment, fewer hours worked, or newer jobs with less pay.

Therefore, the Indiana story was being replicated everywhere. Household threats to economic survival continued to grow. In this context any candidate for local, state, or national office who does not address in a convincing way pathways to overcoming the profound economic crisis that millions of people face, while the rich get richer, is likely to fail. This is particularly the case for any political party that claims to represent the vast majority of the population. In addition, many potential voters will not show up on election day if they perceive the available candidates are representing Wall Street interests and not their own.