Politics

War by Accident

~ John ~ 1 Comment

As the world sighs with relief that Iran’s counterstrike against Iraq’s Ain Al-Asad air force base appears to have ended the most recent cycle of US-Iran escalation, many are now confident that there will be no war between the two countries — because neither seems to want it. But the question arises – can a war start by accident?

Accidental events can certainly drive us to the brink of war – or away from it. Nobody intended Iran’s shootdown last week of the Ukrainian jetliner that claimed 176 innocent lives – and yet this accident was the direct result of the escalated tensions between our two countries. Iran’s retaliation for the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani appears to have been accidentally bloodless – the post-strike analysis shows that it was only through happenstance and evasive action by the Americans that deaths were avoided.

So we were good — and also lucky — enough to avoid going over the edge this time. Other episodes haven’t gone so well. A recent New York Times article mentions the 2016 debacle when 2 American gunboats accidentally strayed into Iranian waters and were captured by Soleimani’s Revolutionary Guards. The article also recounts the sorry state of US Naval readiness, leading up to two 2017 peacetime collisions that killed 17 sailors, and a 2018 Marine midair crash that killed another 6. Such accidents are bad enough. But under conditions of military escalation with casualties involving a hostile power, their consequences can be another thing altogether. In 1988, US warship Vincennes shot down an Iranian jetliner, killing all passengers, over Iranian airspace during a period of international tension related to the Iran-Iraq war. In order to repair the damage from that episode, President Reagan, not commonly thought of as a weakling, was obliged to express “deep regret” and ultimately pay Iran $68 million in compensation. It is difficult to imagine our current president exerting the self-control necessary to pull that one off. After all, in his world, being American means never having to say you’re sorry.

It is much easier to imagine a scenario like that of February 15, 1898, when the USS Maine, docked in Havana harbor, struck a mine, exploded, and sank, killing all 260 officers and men. The ensuing public furor, abetted by the bellicose “yellow journalism” of William Randolph Hearst, resulted in the Spanish-American War. Given how our current president reacts to the power of suggestion from the more extreme strands of conservative media today, the parallels are interesting indeed.

The contrary view to all this is that wars may result from miscalculation, but never from true accident. The Spanish-American War, on this view, was a happy little “blunder” that nicely satisfied American strategic goals. World War I may have been a mistake in its dimensions and consequences, but its fateful initial steps were all taken on purpose. As this thinking goes, nobody truly trips and falls into a war.

I wish it were so. Today, our weapons systems are so complex, and the windows of time within which decisions must be made are so infinitesimally short, that the possibilities of error are far greater than they were in the past. Cold War leaders understood and sought to control this risk with the advent of nuclear weapons. They developed elaborate, ceremonious protocols to protect against accidental launches, as well as layers of tactical bureaucracy to assess and evaluate threats, consider options, calibrate responses, and avoid false moves. It’s one of the business ends of the “deep state.” Unfortunately, we know how our current leader feels about all that. As a result, we are just a banana peel away from war.

Calmly to Armageddon

~ John ~ 1 Comment

With the assassination of Iranian General Qassim Soleimani, people are anxiously debating whether the situation will spin out of control. It already has.

We talk about “spiraling conflict” and “escalation” as though, at a certain point, leaders simply lose their minds and start blindly pushing buttons. But that’s a false view: history offers a pageant of men marching calmly and rationally on to Armageddon. All it takes is the failure to think five, or ten, or fifteen moves ahead. If your decisions are too near-field, you will consider only the options visibly before you. Choosing one – in today’s world, usually the least bad one – will immediately present a new set of options, like the turns of a maze. If you proceed rationally choice-by-choice, or worse, on the belief that you must always turn one direction, you will soon hit a place where your choices narrow to none – the wall that forces you to turn around. And if the maze in question is a corridor down which your enemies are pursuing you, and you have been running with the confidence inspired by a grenade in your pocket, then when you hit that wall you will have no choice but to throw it, even if the shrapnel is likely to kill you too. 

The most famous example is World War I. A Serbian radical assassinated an Austrian Archduke, causing Austria to declare war on Serbia. Russia was obliged by treaty to defend Serbia and thus declared war on Austria. This provoked Germany to declare war on Russia and its ally, France. Germany invaded Belgium as part of its attack on France, obliging Britain to enter the war in defense of Belgium. In due course, Bulgaria, Romania, Japan, British colonies as far flung as Australia, and the US entered the war as well. In four years, 19 million people lost their lives, 21 million were wounded, and a worldwide influenza epidemic was killing millions more – results intended, surely, by nobody. Nor were the leaders war-mongering madmen or even, by contemporary accounts, particularly cheesed off. They were mostly just incompetent, bungling their way into global catastrophe.

Fast forward 102 years. After a time of ratcheting tensions, Iranian militia killed an American contractor in Iraq. So we ordered airstrikes against those Iranian militia and killed a bunch of them. Pro-Iranian militants then attacked our embassy in Baghdad. And Trump, according to reporting in today’s New York Times, chose the most extreme menu option his generals presented – and not the one they realistically wanted – assassinating the second most powerful man in Iran.

While everyone ponders what Iran will do next, here’s how this act has already transformed our strategic landscape. Soleimani’s work in fostering alliances with Shiite groups from Afghanistan to Yemen has put American troops and civilians at risk everywhere across the region. Since the killing, there have been major protests in Baghdad, with renewed efforts to approach the embassy. The State Department has ordered civilians to evacuate Iraq as a result of these tensions. Thousands of Shiites also demonstrated today in Islamabad, Pakistan, making an unsuccessful run at the US embassy, putting more American civilians at risk. The Sunni terrorist group al-Shabaab launched an attack on US troops in Kenya, killing three Americans. Although the timing may be coincidental given that Sunnis did not love Soleimani, it’s also possible that the assassination may be creating opportunistic alignments that bridge the most enduring chasm in the Middle East, between Sunni and Shiite, as they unite against a common enemy, the United States. 

This is in fact happening in Iraq, its government until last week deeply divided and unpopular, now riding a wave of universal anti-Americanism that has led to a parliamentary vote, supported by both sects, to expel US forces from the country. Recall that we had to rely on our military presence in Iraq to stabilize the situation on the Turkish-Syrian border after Trump’s surprise withdrawal of troops there. Were it not for our Iraqi bases, our military commanders would not have been able to salvage that presidential fiasco. If we are ordered out of Iraq, the Kurds, once betrayed by our withdrawal in Syria, will be fully and finally abandoned. They will have no choice but to ally with Russia and Assad against Turkey. Meanwhile, any efforts to combat the resurgence of ISIS in the region will likewise be abandoned, if they have not been already – the Defense Department announced today that it is “pausing” all operations against ISIS in Iraq and focusing solely on protection of US forces.

If the outgoing Iraqi Prime Minister approves Parliament’s withdrawal request — which he publicly supports – the US will have the choice of allowing all of these short-term consequences to become permanent. Iraq will then likely become a terrorist haven controlled by Iran-backed militias, as well as a haven for a resurgent ISIS in the north. Or, the US can defy Iraq’s expulsion, in which case we become an occupier in violation of international law. Did I mention that there are US battlefield nuclear weapons stationed just 50 miles from the Turkish-Syrian border, where ISIS fighters were allowed to escape from their prisons following the US Syrian pullout?

All of this is the best-case scenario, involving only a few known, self-inflicted consequences of our actions thus far, with Iran taking no retaliatory steps at all. If, as is virtually inevitable, Iran and/or its proxies retaliate and react through their interlocking series of alliances and rivalries, each following long-and short-term objectives that align and collide like little cluster bombs, then any policy-making decision-tree exercise explodes into a horrifying fireworks display.

And in charge of it all is Donald Trump. Not only is he incapable of the kind of long-range thinking required for survival in these times – he’s actively hostile to it. He tweets, and perhaps even believes, that no matter what blind alley he drags us down, we’ll be fine because he’s got nukes in his pocket.

I wrote after the Syria debacle that he needed to go. It is more urgently true today.

Let’s End Our Fear of Wanting

~ John ~ Leave a comment

In my family mediation practice, I often encounter an inexperienced, fearful, person – frequently but not always a woman — who is trying to negotiate against someone perceived as a bully, over marital property or child support.   I will ask what her goal in the mediation is.  She will tell me, and then hopelessly shrug: “but there’s no way he’ll agree to that.”

I respond: “I’m not asking you what he will or won’t agree to.  My question is, what do YOU want?”

A light flickers in her eyes.  It seems almost a novel concept that she could WANT something, and be entitled to have it, without her desire being fundamentally limited by the boundaries set by her ex.

It’s my job to strive for fairness in the process.  That begins by each party defining what they fundamentally want, irrespective of what will “sell” in the other room.  The crucible of negotiation comes second, and it will always involve tradeoffs and compromise.  But unless each person comes to the table with at least a basic handle on themselves, then the conversation will be one-sided, and the outcome skewed.

The current debate among Democrats about whether our candidates are veering too far to the left reminds me of that person coming into mediation too scared to say what she wants.  Our concerns over “electability” are clouding our ability to have an honest discussion about more fundamental issues of income inequality, health care, immigration, the environment, and racial justice, that should drive our search for a candidate that can arouse the passions of the party.  And our hunt for a candidate palatable to a wide cross-section of voters distracts us from finding the person who, first and foremost, has a clear sense of themselves.

There’s new data to suggest that a bold agenda consistent with Democratic policy ideals has broad public support.  A New York Times/SurveyMonkey poll from early July showed majority nationwide support for a wealth tax on households worth over $50 million, Medicare for all, and free college tuition.  Of course these proposals are controversial, subject to withering attacks from the right, and endlessly mocked by you-know-who.

But that is how he sets the agenda in advance of the debate.  Trump is nearly the ideal type of what sociologist Max Weber called “charismatic” authority: “charisma is self-determined and follows its own limits. Its bearer seizes the task for which he is destined and demands that others obey and follow him by virtue of his mission. …  He does not derive his claims from the will of his followers, in the manner of an election; rather, it is their duty to follow his charisma.”

Our negotiating alternatives against this type of opponent are stark.  The most relevant historical examples are the efforts to deal with Adolf Hitler before World War II.  Neville Chamberlin attempted one approach, in which he let Hitler fundamentally define the discussion before it began.  The result came to be known as “appeasement.”  It is not fondly remembered.  Winston Churchill epitomized the other approach.  In 1938, he famously articulated the case for collective action against Nazi aggression: “You must have diplomatic and correct relations, but there can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power, that power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force.  … Between submission and immediate war there is this third alternative, which gives a hope not only of peace but of justice.”  Many thought the speech reckless when he gave it.  But Churchill, who had known many failures in his professional life, also knew himself, and knew who he was dealing with.  The rest, as they say, is history.  If you want an overdramatized, but basically accurate, refresher, dial up “The Darkest Hour” on Netflix.

I’d love to say this is our darkest hour, except that it is getting darker by the day.  Now is not the time to appease, nor to allow a bully to define the agenda, nor to craft an agenda that we think will least displease the greatest number.  We must know our own minds, hew to the truth of our own traditions, speak from our own hearts, and reclaim the country — and the planet — that we want to see survive this ordeal.  Future generations, who depend on us to make it to the farther shore, will not look sympathetically upon our fear.