Why it may be useless to have a great big fat army, especially if you're stupid enough to use it

1. The futility of military superiority – by Göran Rosenberg

"Something happened on the superpower's way to superpower. The wars that were to have been won were lost. The enemies to have been weakened were strengthened. The societies to have been saved were destroyed. The global security to have been increased was reduced." How long will the US continue to rely on military superiority when to do so undermines the political justification for its dominance?

Not long ago, newspapers and magazines were filled with articles about the military superiority of the one and only superpower on earth. Having counted aircraft carriers, cruise missiles, long distance bombers, and airborne divisions, everybody seemed to agree that the superiority was beyond reach or dispute. Some drew comparisons with the British Empire, others with Rome, yet others talked of an Empire that defied comparison at all.

The question, then, was not whether the US was the mightiest nation on earth, probably the mightiest nation in human history, but how it would use its superior power. The leaders of the superpower itself, among them its president, argued that after 9/11 its power should be used to bring about regime changes in evil states and wage a War on Terror. They argued that military superiority (along with "the American mission") gave the US both the right and the duty to unilaterally decide which regimes should be changed, how the War on Terror should be fought, and whether, in doing so, international institutions and conventions should be respected or not.

Robert Kagan, an influential opinion maker at the time, defended the emergent US high-handedness (unilateralism) by arguing that Americans are from Mars while Europeans are from Venus. By this he meant that the Americans, unlike the Europeans, had concluded that the world was still a jungle and the ability to win wars still integral to the ability to achieve peace.

The US National Security Strategy of July 2002 subsequently made it an express aim of US policy to maintain military superiority over all possible competitors. Military superiority would bring more security not only for the US but also for the world as a whole. It would allow for more expeditious changes of rogue regimes into US-friendly democracies and a speedier victory in the War on Terror. In the best-case scenario, evil regimes and the terrorist networks they sponsor would fall apart merely from the "shock and awe" instilled in them by American military superiority. For a brief moment, it was said that "shock and awe" had won the war in Iraq – that brief moment in which it looked like the war had been won.

But something happened on the superpower's way to superpower. The wars that were to have been won were lost. The enemies to have been weakened were strengthened. The societies to have been saved were destroyed. The global security to have been increased was reduced. Time and again, it seemed impossible to transform US military superiority into global prestige and power, let alone force an adversary "to do our will" – according to Karl von Clausewitz the ultimate aim of military superiority.

So what happened?

One thing was that the nature of the adversary had changed. The adversary that military superiority was to overcome was no longer a threat, while the adversary that was a threat could not be overcome. There were even adversaries that had been nourished by US military superiority, that had flourished in its wake, that had developed weapons and strategies which military superiority provided little defence against.

Military superiority can be used for many things, but arguably not for defeating religiously or ideologically fundamentalist movements for whom chaos is a hotbed, fear a source of energy, humiliation a source of legitimacy, provocation a calculated strategy, and terror a favoured weapon. At any rate, not if military superiority is legitimized as a means to spread and defend freedom and democracy (which is still how US military superiority is legitimized), meaning it cannot reasonably be used for the destruction of civilian populations not prepared "to do our will". What the militarily superior Rome could allow itself to do, what Tacitus described as solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant ("making a desert and calling it peace"), the militarily superior US cannot do without destroying the political foundations of its dominance.

The fact that Afghanistan and Iraq are nevertheless on their way to being turned into deserts (of the kind we call failed states) goes to show that military superiority as a means might work against freedom and democracy as a goal. And even perhaps against the more straightforward goal of increasing the global power and influence of the US. The Iraq of daily violence, civilian disorder, sectarianism, and military defeat is arguably becoming a more serious threat to US security than the Iraq of Saddam Hussein ever was. In Afghanistan, the Taliban has returned. In Iran, the regime is exploiting the limits of US superpower. All over the Islamic world, radical Jihadism is on the rise.

The strategy of military superiority has possibly had an even more self-defeating effect in Israel-Palestine, where the regional military superpower Israel (supplementing US strategy) is once again allowing itself to make a desert in order to call peace – or at least security. And where, besides yet another political and humanitarian disaster, the outcome will be less peace, less security, and more adversaries of a kind resistant to military superiority.

You don't have do be from Venus to argue that the warriors from Mars have seriously miscalculated what it takes to achieve peace and security on Earth.


2. Seeking invulnerability – by Gwynne Dyer

The three most ill-considered (and probably doomed) political enterprises on the international political scene today are the Israeli assault on Lebanon, the US campaign to force Iran to renounce its alleged nuclear weapons programme, and the similar campaign that has been mounted against North Korea. What common theme unites these three enterprises?

The quest for invulnerability for one side, at the expense of total vulnerability for the other.

Between 1945 and about 1970, the United States went through one of the most difficult intellectual and emotional transitions in history. The US began that period as the home of almost half the world's surviving industrial capacity and the sole possessor of the ultimate weapon, the atomic bomb. It was unchallengeable and invulnerable. Yet by 1970 it was ready to concede nuclear weapons parity to the Soviet Union, an openly hostile totalitarian state, and was negotiating arms-control agreements that limited missile numbers but guaranteed the Soviets the ability to destroy the United States.

That was logical and necessary, because you couldn't stop the Russians from building more and bigger nuclear weapons. America's military thinkers had grasped the essential fact that no number of nuclear weapons on their side, however large, could stop an enemy with the ability to deliver even a few hundred nukes from effectively destroying their country.

The enemy would also be destroyed by US retaliation, of course, so let's work with that fact. Let us stabilise the US-Soviet relationship by accepting this unavoidable situation of mutual vulnerability - Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), as one critic of the policy named it - and even enshrining it in international treaties. It made good strategic sense, and it may well have saved the world from a nuclear war.

Accepting America's vulnerability was so emotionally repugnant that many leading politicians and generals spent the rest of their careers promoting new technologies like Star Wars that they hoped might restore US invulnerability, but most of the US political and military elite had the wisdom and maturity to support the policy. America could use theirs like today. So could Israel.

Israel's period of invulnerability began later, after the 1973 war, and has lasted far longer. No combination of Arab armies can defeat Israel in war, or even inflict major casualties on it. And should Israeli generals ever prove so incompetent that Arab armies did make a little headway, Israel still has its regional nuclear weapons monopoly 40 years after developing the things. (America lost its own nuclear monopoly after only four years in its confrontation with the Soviet Union.)

Israel faces a bigger "terrorist threat'' than the US, but it is still a pretty marginal concern. Hezbollah's activities on Israel's northern borders were an occasional nuisance, but until Israel's quite deliberate over-reaction to its hostage-seizure operation on July 12 - bombing targets all across Lebanon - it had not fired rockets at Israeli towns in years. Hezbollah had the capability to do that, so Israel was theoretically vulnerable (though not very, since the rockets hardly ever hit anyone), but it wasn't actually doing it.

In one sense, this war is an absurd attempt to eliminate that last little vulnerability by grossly disproportionate means. In a more serious sense, it is driven by the Israeli military's desire to "re-establish deterrence'': that is, to demonstrate anew that Israel can respond with grossly disproportionate violence to any provocation, spreading death and destruction far beyond the location of the original offence.

But that is another way of saying that it wants to show that everybody else in the region is completely vulnerable to its power, completely insecure. There is no stability in such a relationship, as the past 40 years have amply demonstrated, and in any case, this time deterrence will not be re-established. Israel is unable to eliminate Hezbollah, and its attack merely highlights the limitations of Israeli military power when deployed against non-state opponents.

Now come to the United States and its flailing pseudo-diplomatic attempts to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons -or, indeed, its equally ham-fisted attempts to force North Korea to give up the nukes it claims to have already built. The tactics it has adopted are as ignorant of the opposing side's psychology as they are revealing of its own.

The US has made blocking the nuclear weapons ambitions of these two countries an absolute priority in its foreign policy, because it will no longer accept even the slightest vulnerability to countries or forces it sees as hostile. In these two cases, it may well be an achievable goal, since their putative bombs are probably just bargaining chips. You can't be sure, but it's certainly worth finding out.

The US is not negotiating with 75 million Iranians or 25 million North Koreans. It is (or rather, it should be) negotiating with the senior clerics around Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran, and with the senior people around Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il in Pyongyang, both of whom are primarily interested in regime survival, not in nuclear weapons. Yet the Bush administration seems oblivious to the fact that they feel insecure.

America's vulnerability is tiny; theirs is almost total. It would be worthwhile to offer both of them a commitment that the US will stop trying to overthrow their regimes, and leave their fate in the hands of their own peoples, in return for renouncing their nuclear weapons ambitions. It worked with Libya's Gaddafi, after all. What is truly astonishing is that this approach has simply not been tried with either North Korea or Iran.

(Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.)


3. Conspicuous Force and Verminization (by Mark at k-punk.abstractdynamics.org). Warning: this is an intellectual piece - if your brain hurts easily, skip this and move on to the Lebanon stuff

The paradoxical War on Terror is based on a kind of willed stupidity; the willed stupidity of wishful thinking. Only the logic of dreamwork can suture 'War' with 'Terror' in this way, since terrorists were, by classical definition, those without 'legitimate authority' to wage war. However, it is horribly evident for some while that a new, frighteningly facile, definition of Terrorism has come into play. What makes Terrorists terrorists is not their supposed lack of legitimate authority but their inherent Evil. We are ontologically Good; Good by our very nature, no matter what we do. We belong to an 'alliance of moderation' against the Axis of Evil. So when 'we' 'accidentally' level an appartment block full of children with our moderate bombs, we do not cease to be moderate. The difference between They, the Evil and We, the Good is, of course, intent; the Terrorists deliberately target civilians. This is their only aim, because they are Evil. Although we kill vastly more civilians, we do not intend to it, so we remain Good.

For the libidinal roots of this wishful thinking, we have to look beyond the foibles of individuals to the political unconscious of the hyper-militarized State. It is geared to deal with threats if they come from other armed States, so it pretends - deceives itself, and then attempts to deceive us - that this is in accord with the actual geopolitical situation. Condi's crocodile tears notwithstanding, the US, needless to say, is no position to condemn Israel's air strikes, since the Israeli bombings followed the War on Terror script to the letter. The conflict with Hezbullah turned into a destruction of Lebanese people and infrastructure, just as the struggle with Al Qaeda became a war on Afghanistan and Iraq. For the hyper-miltarized State, assymetry can only be thought of as an advantage: we have more and better weaponry than them, therefore we must win.

The stupidity here is evident, and multi-levelled. First of all, it involves a literal occlusion and suppression of Intelligence. Terrorism is a problem to be met with brute force rather with intelligence. Successfully defeating Terrorist groups is a long-term business, dirty, but above all, stealthy, invisible. But the War on Terror is inherently and inescapably Spectacular; it arises from the demands of the post 9/11 Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex: it is not enough for the State to do something, it has to be seen doing something. The template here is Gulf War 1, which as both Baudrillard and Virilio knew, could not be understood outside logics of mediatization. Gulf War 1 was conceived of a kind of re-shooting of Vietnam, with better technology, and on a videogame desert terrain in which carpet bombing would be industrially effective. This is the kind of assymetry that the Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex likes: no casualties (on our side).

The bringing to bear of what, following Veblen, we might call conspicuous force presupposes a second stupidity: the verminization of the Enemy. Before Gulf War 1 had even happened, Virilo saw the logic of verminization rehearsed in James Cameron's Aliens wherein the 'machinic actors do battle in a Manichean combat in which the enemy is no longer an adversary, a fellow creature one must respect in spite of everything; rather, it is an unnameable being that it is more appropriate to exerminate than to examine or analyse.' In Aliens, Virilio ominously notes, attacks on the 'family [form] the basis of ... necolonial intervention.' The teeming, Lovecraftian abominations which can breed much faster than we can are to be dealt with by machines whose 'awesome appearance is part of [their] military effectiveness.' Shock and awe.

Aliens was the moment in which a new mode of the Military-Industrial-Entertainment became visible. Virilio argued that Aliens' privileging of military hardware 'could only lead in the end to the extinction of the talking film, its complete replacement by film trailers for hardened militarists'. In fact, the talking film has been replaced by the shoot-em-up videogame whose picnoleptic delirium is flat with the prosecution of the Sega-Sony-CNN war. 'Realists' who attacked Baudrillard and Virilio for their insistence upon the fact that war is now constitutively mediatized missed the point that hyperrealization is precisely what permits the production of very real deaths on a mass scale.

Verminization not only transforms the Enemy into a subhuman swarm that cannot be reasoned with, only destroyed; it also makes 'us' into victims of its repulsive, invasive agency. As Virilo perspicaciously observed, Aliens itself operated 'a bit like a Terrorist attack. Women and children are slaughtered in order to create an irreversible situation, an irremediable hatred. The presence of the little victim has no theatrical value other than to dispose us to accept the madness of the massacres...'

While 'we' have 'families' who are being senselessly killed, vermin have neither memory nor motive; they act unreflexively, autonomically. Their extermination is a practical problem; it is simply a matter of finding their nests and using the right kind of weapon. Applying this thinking to Hezbullah or any other group is appalling racism, naturally, but also astonishingly poor strategy, implying no understanding of Terrorism whatsoever. Destroy all the infrastructure, kill all the operatives: but you will have only created more Images of atrocity; indestructrible and infinitely replayayble repositories of affect, which, by demanding response and producing (a usually entirely justified) recrimination, act as the best intensifiers and amplifiers of Terror.