The 50-Year War and The Greatest Power in America

I just finished reading an article by Jonathan Schell, The Fifty-Year War: We Learned So Much, At Such Cost, In Vietnam. Why Must We Learn It All Again In Afghanistan?

Schell ends with a question concerning the greatest power in America. He asks: “What is the source of this raw power [over] presidents, Congresses and public opinion? The person who can answer these questions will have discovered one of the keys to a half-century of American history--and the forces that, even now, bear down on Obama as he considers what to do in Afghanistan.”

What power is Schell talking about? He's talking about the power that causes American democratic presidents to get involved in and maintain wars that they know cannot be won.

Schell begins by invoking what has now become a cliché, a purported lesson of Vietnam, that “you can't win a guerrilla war without winning the "hearts and minds" of the people.” Even General Petraeus says about Afghanistan, “the decisive battle is for the people's minds.”

But Schell argues, the Democratic presidents and advisers who led us into Vietnam and who are now keeping us in Afghanistan have known in advance that this is an impossible objective, an unwinnable battle. Occupying a country to fight a war on its behalf itself undermines the possibility of winning the hearts and minds of the people. Schell: “The art of victory has to be to try to set up a government that can both survive US withdrawal and serve US interests. The circle to be squared is getting the people of a whole country to want what Washington wants. The trouble is that, left to their own devices, other peoples are likely to want what they want, not what we want.”

The remarkable fact, Schell says, is that Vietnam wasn’t simply a mistake in hindsight. It was already known to be a mistake in foresight – but our Democratic presidents did it anyway.

So the question is, why? Why do we go into and maintain wars that we already know are unwinnable, given the self-defeating aim of creating stable self-government for others through violence?

The reason and motivation of the democratic presidents, Schell says, has little to do with either the logic of foreign affairs (e.g. the domino theory or what have you) or an unfailing optimism concerning fighting strategies (if we could just fight it better, we might win) -- but lies instead within domestic politics itself.

Lyndon Johnson "didn't want to listen" to doubts about the war because he “was afraid that if he did anything to ... appear to appease the North Vietnamese, he would be severely criticized by the right wing of American politics."

Similarly, the resounding defeat of McGovern “seemed to confirm [the Democrat] fears that had haunted Johnson: those who oppose or lose wars lose elections.”

Our foreign wars are “really a matter of domestic politics” -- the Democratic leaders’ fear of the right.

Democratic presidents go to war, and presumably do many things that are counter to their beliefs, because they are afraid of the right wing, and the power the right wing has to sway the mind of the electorate.

Interestingly, this takes us back to the opening focus of Schell’s essay. In other words, foreign wars are indeed about “a battle for the mind and hearts of the people” -- but “the people” is us.

The "great power" that Schell is seeking to understand -- whose "source" Schell calls a "key" to American history -- is this presumed power that the right has over the left and over the American people itself.

I’m led to reflect on a politics structured as a competition among representative “leaders” to achieve (by any devices available) popular support (however blind and superficial). We have a politics based on manipulations of appearances, of representatives making representations -- a politics of illusion.

I also notice that, while Schell points to a weakness in Democratic leaders, which is above all the fear of appearing weak (leading ironically to an assertion of "strength" in war), Schell doesn’t seem to account for right-wing hawkishness itself, which would seem to be the “origin,” in his framing, of this entire dynamic.

I find myself wondering if Schell is invoking two interdependent halves of the American psyche, linked by something in common that runs very, very deep: On one side are the right-wing accusers; on the other, the tail-between-the-legs, appeasing left-wing wimperers — who choose, ironically, to cover up their own weakness by going to war. I wonder if this might point to the underlying psychology of the right as well: posturing hawks who posture to cover up their own weakness.

If so, maybe this melds with the thought that we have a politics of illusion: we are all citizens of a country based on creating the illusion of its own power, a country whose trajectory is the trajectory of an assertion of power and control based on an underlying experience — that must be hidden at all costs — of weakness and vulnerability.

The main players in this whole scenario are neither the leaders of the left nor those of the right, but "the people" whose "hearts and minds" each side is engaged in trying to win over. Apparently, both sides come together in one belief: of all the things that the people at large cannot accept, it is this thing called "weakness." We are a nation unified, it would seem, in our readiness to point our collective finger at "weakness." We will not be taken advantage of, we will not be threatened, we will not be dominated.

I wonder if politics and the media in which it subsists has become above all a playground for the personal fantasies of a dominated, powerless public.

Perhaps we are profoundly afraid of weakness because weakness means relaxing the pressure of domination that is constantly being felt and replicated by the great majority of individual psyches.

Schell's question of this "power" might hide a more fundamental question: when, in our collective history, in our individual and aggregated personal histories, were we subjected to a fear that became so fundamental that we daily carry it in our being and in our orientation to the world and one another?

If the "source" of the power Schell is after is neither in the leaders of the right nor of the left, but in the American people itself, in our deep fear of weakness, or in our collective attempt to cover up the sense of our own powerlessness, then what is the appropriate action for us to take? If America was in Vietnam, and is now in Iraq and in Afghanistan for reasons having more to do with the domestic political psyche than in circumstances external to us, then what is the appropriate action for us to take as a people?**

One thing I know is that fear rigidifies the heart and the mind, obstructing the flow that is necessary to experience love, healthy thinking and authentic power.

**People who know me will know the remedy I advise, taking my cue from Thomas Jefferson: create a national system of elementary republics capable of reuniting the people, at the grassroots level outside of partisan politics, in the discovery and cultivation of common vision, agreement and coordinated action. This is my vision for a national system of neighborhood assemblies. Find out more at:
http://sfnan.org/iotc/navlist/gen_page_main.php?id=65&navlist=left