Another Century of War?

Rating:
Summary: Suetoniusian History
Review:
With the attacks of September 11 says Kolko, the war has come to American shores, and will remain there. To avoid future similar catastrophes, the US should become realistic in its ambitions, recognize the limitations of military power, and end the folly of thinking it necessary to micromanage the affairs of other countries. Helpful too he says would be eliminating the breeding grounds of "terrorism" by raising the standard of living of the destitute around the world. The prognosis is not good, as the US continues to pursue in spades policies similar to those that have produced catastrophe.

In a slim, powerfully written volume of flawless prose, Kolko draws together seamlessly the many divers threads of what he shows to be disastrously misguided continued attempts of the United States to intervene militarily and meddle in the affairs of nations around the globe in a world far more complex than it was even fifty years ago. He covers whole histories of wide and disparate political domains in literally several sentences or paragraphs. His voice is unique in bringing the light of truth and understanding to US foreign affairs and the mess we're in.

Kolko's fundamnental thesis, obvious, as it so often is with genius, is that political problems have political and social, not military, solutions. With the notable exceptions of Vietnam and Korea, the US military machine is quite capable of gaining victories in its imperial adventures. Unfortunately, these more often result in concomitant political catastrophe: US "arms have not brought peace to the world even though Communism has virtually disappeared and can no longer explain the behavior of the US and its allies...we now live in an era of growing insecurity that will very probably see more trauma like (September 11) as well as (similar) responses..." writes Kolko.

Kolko points out the monstrous irony that the two nemeses the US has most demonized over the last decade, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, it has previously supported with massive military, economic, and diplomatic aid and treated as friends. Because of these and similar Machiavellian intrigues, and despite the fall of the Soviet Union, the world is a far more dangerous place. And what is new, especially for the American people.

The examples of military triumphs that have become political calamity is a long list and continues to grow; and will continue to grow under the unilateralist and militarist policies of the Bush administration. Worse, and far more ominous, is Kolko's analysis of Bush foreign policy as being ad hoc, improvised, opportunist, and confused. He documents flip-flops in Bush policy, which show the conservative ideology to be as malleable as conservatives often lament of the liberal. Kolko is very edifyingly in and out of a complex and lucid history of the petrol- and geo- politics of the Middle East like a cold bath.

The CIA, for example, sine qua non deposed the moderate but nationalist Iranian President Mossadegh in 1954 and installed in his stead the extremist Shah. He instituted policies supposedly beneficial to US interests, that is, multinational oil corporations - a military victory. With the Iranian Revolution of 1979 however, the US ushered the Shah into exile, and Khomeini came to power - a political catastrophe. Iran became far more influential in the region in a way supposedly inimical to US interests. In another Machiavellian intrigue, the US supported Saddam Hussein's Iraq in its war with Iran 1980-88. Indeed the US helped both sides against the other in that war because, as Henry Kissinger so eloquently put it, we hope they both lose. There were millions of casualties in the war, another US military triumph. But when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the US had another major political calamity on its hands, which has festered into today's crisis.

It is often mentioned as proof of Saddam being a thug and a tyrant that he launched chemical attacks on the Kurds. In a case of intentioanl amnesia, ignored is that the US continued to support him as staunchly after he did so as before. Often noted is that Saddam Hussein launched chemical attacks against Iran in the war, but, more amnesia, rarely that he did so with the help of US intelligence and Western corporation-supplied technology for WMD. These are the rule rather than the anomaly in US foreign affairs, and makes Kolko's formulation that political problems have political and social, not military, solutions, all the more urgent.

Turning his attention to Afghanistan, Kolko says despite the idealistic protestations, the US went to war out of revenge and to maintain its military "credibility." Because the US always needs help from other nations in its military adventures (and almost as often makes promises it doesn't keep to get it) the maintaining of this "credibility" now extends beyond the domains of the US itself and its troops, to a wide variety of shifting and changing alliances and coalitions, says Kolko. A political complication which often seeks, in the final analysis folly, military solution. While US power, largely unchallenged by a countervailing threat since the demise of the Soviet Union, often guarantees military victory against the Taliban and elswhere, for example, political catastrophe is much more likely to follow than solution.

In Afghanistan, the US reluctantly supported the Northern Alliance, not a far cry from the Taliban. The military action largely completed, the area now suffers the same neglect which is sure to exacerbate the poverty and political chaos that gave rise to three decades of war. Worse, and Kolko examines this in terse detail, the war in Afghanistan has brought increased destabilization to all of South Asia, and especially to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which ramifications and consequences will be of far more significance to American "interests" and security. Add in the increasing destructiveness of modern weaponry, and their proliferation, and US adventurism and unilateralism, and what do you have? Nostalgia for the simpler and more secure political times of the Cold War.


Rating:
Summary: Another Century of War?
Review: An intelligent, if windy and repetitive, critique of US foreign policy and the pox it has brought upon the American people. Terrorism is not some spontaneous morph. It has roots that go way back, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist, says Kolko (Vietnam, 1997, etc.), to understand that those roots have often enough been nourished by an ad hoc, selfish American foreign policy. When it comes to economic interests and questions of credibility, the US has shown a willingness to intervene-whether by direct military action or through surrogates and proxies propped by up American money and weapons-anywhere around the globe. In a complex world, such unilateralism might find temporary military success, but the "repeated political failures only confirmed that the world had problems about which the United States could do nothing and it was to everyone's interest that it avoid getting involved." Kolko advocates not isolationism, but rather a coherent foreign policy that strives for political solutions and addresses such basic issues as poverty, human rights, and illiteracy. In particular, and relative to the war on terrorism, US meddling in the Middle East has been so convoluted and opportunistic-support Saddam, revile him; virtually create al-Qaeda, then seek to destroy it-is it any wonder that its people find the US a big problem? The US might as well train the terrorists themselves, which in Afghanistan we did. Kolko's critical assessment covers the bases, and then covers them again in what could have been a pamphlet. It comes down to reaping what you sow; in this case, political hubris and folly have grown havoc. "The United States itself is now on war's front line-and it will remain there"-until unilateral military adventurism and skullduggery are replaced by a just, thoughtful political agenda, which, the author suggests, may be never.

Rating:
Summary: An important book
Review: Few historians understand US foreign policy as well as Gabriel Kolko. Normally, he writes massive books packed with footnotes, drawing information from stacks of declassified government documents. But this time, he's used his decades of research to briefly summarize his thoughts on the post-9/11 world.

Fortunately, his opinions are kept to an absolute minimum. This book is full of historical information that backs up his point of view. He covers the US response to 9/11 in Afghanistan, the history of the conflict there with the Soviet Union, and its connections to oil reserves and political influence. Then he describes the connections between the KLA in Kosovo, Osama bin Laden, and Pakistan. It's amazing how he can condense so many facts into so few pages. He makes it easy to understand and impossible to forget.

He goes on to describe the failures of US foreign policy. This part of the book will get under the skin of some Americans, as Kolko shows that US plans for stability in the Middle East have failed miserably. He finishes up with a quick look at economic ties to foreign policy, pointing out that the military-industrial complex is unable to promote peace.

There is a lot of essential information in this book. Kolko knows what he's talking about. His conclusions are unsettling (to the say the least). He concludes that the world cannot survive another century of war, so the imperial ambitions of the US must change. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand what's happening in the world at the beginning of the 21st century.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Frankly, this slender volume is a disappointment. Too much is repetitive, such as commentaries on the Afghan war and the Northern Alliance in particular. I get the impression of a work written in too much haste, while the editors didn't attend to needed revisions. More significant is a rather superficial misevaluation of post-WWII American foreign policy, made all the more surprising because of the author's sterling credentials. The gist is that an over-reliance on military intervention has made the world including Americans less safe, and that we all would be better off had our policy been to stay out of other nations' affairs. He bolsters this conclusion with numerous instances of what Chalmers Johnson calls 'blowback', or unintended consequences that cause as much damage as the problem the intervention was supposed to fix. Because of accumulated blowback, he argues, America is more vulnerable than ever. On the whole, interventionism as a tool of national policy thus stands discredited (pps. 138-139). Granted, he has room to make a case here, though probably not a popular one.

My misgivings are two-fold. First, intentionally or otherwise, Kolko sometimes sounds as though interventions as a matter of internal logic must produce failure. It's easy enough to find instances where intervention did in fact produce debacle: Iran,1953; Vietnam, 1965-75; Afghanistan,1980-88. But must intervention fail. It seems to me there are many more instances of intervention that on a pragmatic scale did in fact succeed with little blowback: Central America 1980-91; Dominican Republic, 1965; Indonesia, 1965, are a few examples. On a humanitarian scale, all may have been failures, but nation-states are not moralists; they operate on pragmatic grounds. More importantly, he sees no apparent pattern in these interventions. He points out numerous contradictions such policies have exhibited over the years, but attributes them to ad hoc decisions and a militarized foreign policy. Thus, little light is shed on rational causes behind a policy of interventionism, making the policy and its execution appear irrational. This, I believe, points the reader in exactly the wrong direction. As other commentators have observed, interventionism in its instances may be carried out with varying degrees of effectiveness and intelligence, but there is a pattern to it -- namely, defense of empire (free world) over which the US presides. What may appear irrational on the surface because the government can't disclose its true imperial reasons, becomes understandable on this approach. I don't necessarily fault Kolko for not taking up this particular theory. There are others. But I do fault him for mischaracterizing interventionism as overall irrational. That amounts to a failure to look beyond the surface.

The book has strengths. The chapter on the Afghan war, though repetitive, contains a number of insights. But overall, coming from a historian of Kolko's calibre, the work stands as an unexpected disappointment.

Rating:
Summary: America's Greatest Historian
Review: Gabriel Kolko is America's greatest living historian. Beginning with Wealth and Power in America at the beginning of the 1960's(the "hard data" version of Michael Harrington's Other America), continuing through his pioneering work on the Progressive Era (in the specialized literature called the "Kolko Thesis," beloved by Ayn Rand and inspirational to New Left historians), through to the central and most thorough works of the "revisionist" school of Cold War historians (The Politics of War and (w/Joyce Kolko) The Limits of Power), Kolko combines original research and laser-like insight. His Politics of War, in particular, virtually rearranged the way the politics of World War II was viewed by historians(this according to Hans Morgenthau - one of Henry Kissinger's teachers - in his review in the New York Review of Books in 1968). Noam Chomsky used to cite Kolko frequently as the best source on American foreign policy, and still writes the dust-jacket blurbs for his books, including this new one. Yet Kolko is too little known in his native country (he migrated to York University in Toronto in the 1960's), but many of his books sell and stay in print. The Kolko's were at Harvard in the late-'50's and early 60's, where they were intellectual partners with the great Barrington Moore, Jr., who wrote a whole book in friendly response to their discussions.

Another Century of War is brisk and to the point, written in response to 9/11. For the prequel, get the far more thorough Century of War (1994). There you will find an analysis of the troubles with America's intelligence establishment, for example, that seems to have been cribbed by the experts working for the Congressional committees looking into the intelligence failures around 9/11.

One of Kolko's thesis, frequently "discovered" by the punditry, is that the US is militarily strong overseas, but politically weak. This insight is fundamental, and its consequence, without correction, cannot but be dire. Following 9/11, he writes in Another Century of War, the U.S. "has not embarked on a new policy. Instead, it is trying to put other labels on its actions while relying on the remnants of its traditional approaches and ideas, of which the massive reliance on technology and firepower is the single most important. The Bush Administration does not have a coherent foreign policy strategy."

You will find in Kolko a mastery of military and political issues rare among historians, combined with a humane and elemental acknowledgement of the devastation of war and the hubris of national leaders who believe they can control it for their purposes.

Rating:
Summary: A Much Needed Book
Review: In these days of flag-waving incoherence and jingoism, it's nice to see a new book from Kolko, especially one written in a succinct style highly-accessible to all. Mr. Quinn's review really covers the work well so I don't have a lot of additional information to add. Kolko's seminal CENTURY OF WAR will offer a great deal of background information, and anyone who thinks Kolko is out of his mind with the assertions he makes in this book should check it out, along with his finest work, POLITICS OF WAR. The latter is by far the best work I have ever read on the formation of postwar U.S. foreign policy, all the more so due to its almost total reliance on primary documents instead of secondary sources, which were practically non-existent at the time (mid 1960's). What's refreshing about ANOTHER CENTURY OF WAR? is its reluctance to pull any punches in the face of 9-11, its refusal to perhaps go a little easy on the architects of U.S. foreign policy and recite the childish idiotic sentiment that those responsible for the tragedy are just "jealous" of the United States. Instead, Kolko pinpoints the active role of the post-WWII West in fostering an atmosphere of instability in the Middle East and its justifications for doing so, not all of which are oil related. The examples are plentiful and the research meticulous. After reading his work, it's a mystery to me why Kolko isn't better known in this country, even among the Left. Perhaps it's because he keeps a relatively low profile and focuses mainly upon war and its impact upon social dynamics.

Rating:
Summary: " . . . neither realistic nor ethical . . . "
Review: It's easy to dismiss this book as a "military history." That view is too limited in scope. What Kolko describes is the American propensity use military thinking in the development of that nation's foreign policies. In a tightly written analysis, he shows how the United States is confronting a vast arc - reaching from the Persian Gulf to Southeast Asia. The inhabitants of that extensive area have been watching the world's sole superpower stumbling about ineptly. He declares American foreign policies in this critical area confused and self-contradictory, based on superficial morality and military adventurism. The roots of their thinking, he contends, is the uneradicable notion held by the American military that technology reduces the duration of wars. No amount of practical experience has been able to dispel that faith.

In Kolko's view, the worst event in American foreign policy history was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the elimination of communism. No matter how badly the United States dealt with the misconceived idea that Moscow dominated the politics of discontent, it was at least a point of focus. With the Cold War over, America is floundering about seeking ways to assert its unilateral power over the same group of nations. After spending enormous sums to shore up Afghan resistance to the Soviet Union, America launched a war to demolish its government. Right next door, Pakistan's resentment of American restoration of the Afghan Alliance and warlord governments is palpable, leaving the current government teetering.

Nor is Pakistan the only internally threatened state in the "arc." Thousands of American troops reside in Saudi Arabia. That nation's internal "containment" policy led it to send hordes of disaffected young men to Afghanistan and funded the Al Queda movement. Now, many of those young men, militarily experienced, have returned or are secluded and training others. Kolko argues this situation has rendered Saudi Arabia vulnerable to an Islamic uprising. Such an event would spread to many places, leaving American military forces isolated and surrounded.

America's interventions in foreign countries, ranging from supplying and training police forces to outright occupations, have been based on the belief that military solutions are quick and final. Kolko demonstrates that fifty years of adventurism have shown they are neither. The wars, such as Viet Nam and Kosovo, have shown them to be neither. The human costs are simply ignored or dismissed by American policy makers. The result is that now the United States has been directly assaulted and will remain a combat zone for years. Clearly, his purpose in writing this book is to alert Americans to their danger. Even if the American voting public forces administrations to abstain from ad hoc interventions in other nations, the time it will take for foreign resentments to subside will be a duration of generations.
However, the start must be made, and made now. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Rating:
Summary: Intelligent writing, reasonable analysis
Review: Kolko gives us a useful perspective on the way the world currently works. Read it and think.

Rating:
Summary: Justified, prophetic, a little repetitive
Review: Regarded as the "foremost modern historian of war" by the Guardian, scholar Gabriel Kolko is the author of many books on American history and its policy of foreign intervention. His 1994 opus, Century of War, covered the 20th century's destructive and almost cataclysmic pattern of conflicts worldwide. The sequel, a long time coming and according to the author, previously unplanned, takes a look at the US' pattern of interventions- operations that were sometimes covert and never described in terms of the real dangers they represented for the future.

In Another Century of War?, Kolko takes his cue from the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, and spends a considerable effort on the Afghan war that followed (as can be inferred from the remarkable cover photo of Aghans watching US aerial bombardments from a far-off mountaintop). Writing a year before the Iraq imbroglio, Kolko nevertheless sums up the enormity of the menace awakened by America's interventionist policy. Since the well-known events documented in Century of War, says Kolko,

"...the world has become far more complex, and much more unstable politically. The cold war is over, but the dangers and reality of wars are ever present. There are, especially, more civil wars. Weapons of every sort are more destructive and also more widely distributed. (p. vii).

...Such conflicts are the inevitable consequences of weapons becoming more freely available, and here the United States, the single most important arms exporter, is contributing to much of the future disorder that the world is likely to experience... the principal (but surely not exclusive danger the entire world confronts is America's capacity and readiness to intervene virtually anywhere." (p. ix).

Kolko's breadth of vision and ability to synthesize temporally and geographically disparate events alike are remarkable. He discusses the pre-history of the Iraq conflict, the US' relations with Saddam and Iran, the potential destabilizing effect that the Afghan war will have on key ally Pakistan, as well as the legacy of Cold War presidents' military spending and much more besides. A real strength of the book, in fact, is its characterization of the role of military spending in motivating American interventions abroad. This practice, begun shortly after WWII, has been stepped up in recent years. And it is impervious to political party or administrative control. Charges Kolko:

"...the Clinton administration encouraged the Pentagon's insatiable demands. In Jauary 2000- with an eye on the November presidential election- it added $115 billion to the Pentagon's five-year Future Years Defense Plan, extending to 2005, far more than what the Republicans were calling for.

...Not counting the ballistic missile defense system, at the beginning of 2001 the Pentagon had over a half trillion dollars in major weapons systems in the pipeline, all of which the Clinton administration had approved. It accounted in 1995 for nearly two-thirds of the world's spending on military research and development and its share of global military spending increased from 31 percent in 1985 to 36 percent in fiscal 2000- and today it is even higher. Along with its close allies, it accounts for about two-thirds of all military spending. In reality there was no foreign military threat to even remotely justify these expenditures, only politically powerful contractors who would disappear if the Pentagon did not buy their wares." (p. 111).

If there would be one flaw with Another Century of War?, it might be a certain stylistic repetitiveness. The point is driven home again and again that American interventionism is a dangerous and counterproductive policy- if the reader is not convinced the first nine times, will the tenth make any difference? Given Kolko's obviously deep knowledge of events, it would have been more interesting to see him delve deeper into the details of specific interventions and save the conclusions really for the conclusion.

Another potential drawback, in light of events since 2002, is that Kolko does not give much warning of a war in Iraq. This perhaps may be due to an apparent minimization of the influence of neoconservative thinkers in the White House, which Kolko seems to view as something of a passing fancy. In the grand sweep of American history, he is probably right; however, their power since even before Iraq was sufficiently demonstrated for the author to have taken into account. In keeping with Kolko's rather gloomy conclusion, we will have to read an even darker future into current events...

{Full review available at Balkanalysis.com)