The Second Term Foreign Policy Curse; Cultures of War and Obama’s War of Choice
Against Syria
For the past century, almost
every second term of an American president has been dominated by a foreign
policy disaster.
Woodrow Wilson, after winning
re-election on the slogan, “He kept us out of war.” promptly took the United
States in in April, 1917.
Only the three terms of
Harding-Coolidge-Hoover escaped the foreign policy curse, but ended in the
economic collapse of the Great Depression.
Franklin Roosevelt,
re-elected in 1936, faced the outbreak of civil war in Spain and the Japanese
invasion of China in 1937, culminating in the outbreak of war in Europe in
1939.
Harry Truman had the Korean War in the fifth year of his
reign. Eisenhower’s only foreign
deployment of troops, the Marines in Lebanon, came in 1958, the sixth year of
his two terms.
Vietnam
heated up at the beginning of the second term of the Kennedy-Johnson
interregnum, while the sixth year of that Democratic administration saw the
outbreak of the Six Day War, the consequences of which are still with us. Nixon resigned in the sixth year of his two
terms. Reagan had the Iran-Contra
scandal in the sixth year of his two terms.
Bush I had his foreign policy
disaster, the war with Iraq, in his first term, so he never even got a second
term. Clinton, like Eisenhower, had a
minor foreign policy skirmish, Kosovo, in the middle of his second term. And by the second of Bush II’s terms, the
invasion of Iraq was turning into a Vietnam style quagmire.
Now it looks like Obama is going to have a foreign policy disaster of his
own. For years I have been seeking an
explanation for this pattern, without success.
Now, I may have found it.
John W. Dower, a now retired
professor of Japanese History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has
written a powerful, important, brilliant book called Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9/11, Iraq. The basic premise of this book is that the decision-making
process that led the Japanese into the tactically brilliant but strategically
stupid attack on Peal Harbor was identical to the Bush administration’s
decision to attack Iraq which succeeded brilliantly in the beginning before
degenerating into a disaster.
There is a lot of great
scholarship in this book. It should be
required reading for anyone who deals with foreign or military policy in any
capacity. Dower contends that one
purpose of all organizations is to reward agreement and cooperation while
punishing and ostracizing dissent. This
can easily lead to groupthink, with disastrous consequences.
Once an American president wins
re-election, a pall of infallibility seems to descend on the administration and
disasters tend to follow in short order.
Because domestic policy is shared with the Congress, it is only in
foreign policy where the power of the president is relatively unfettered that
the mistakes appear most readily. The
re-election itself seems to strengthen the yea-sayers
and repudiate the nay-sayers, so the mistakes flow
thick and fast.
Now, President Obama is poised
to attack Syria to punish it for its use of chemical weapons against its own
people. This is not the first time Syria
has used such weapons, with no notable response from either the United States
or the world community. Also, this
sudden outrage at the Syrians is in marked contrast to the benign response the
previous month to the Egyptian Military Junta’s gunning down hundreds of people
who turned out to demonstrate for the reinstatement of Mohamed Morsi, the first popularly elected president in Egypt’s
history. In the latter case, the
killings are called “restoring democracy.”
More significantly, Dower makes the case for American
hypocrisy. Without in any way condoning
the Syrian use of chemical weapons, the United States still remains the only
nation in the world ever to use nuclear arms on hundreds of thousands of
civilians; the consequences of which endure to this day. The United States also dropped 8 million tons
of bombs on an enemy that had no real air force, plus another 8 million tons of
artillery shells; not to mention mines. Five percent of these bombs and shells
were duds, meaning they are still around waiting to be triggered
accidentally. Over 100,000 Vietnamese
have been killed or wounded by these explosives in the forty years since the
end of the war.
And finally, there is the United
States’s own use of chemical weapons: 88 million
liters of Agent Orange, a dioxin laced compound that lasts for centuries, gets
into the food chain causing cancer and birth defects, not just for the
Vietnamese, but for the American soldiers and their offspring.
So yes, the United States
should do whatever it can to prevent Syria, or any other nation, including
itself, from using chemical and nuclear weapons; but that does not give it the
right to use other weapons which will inevitably kill more innocent civilians
to, as the saying goes, send a message.
One of Dower’s more cogent
points is that people who speak in terms of good and evil are usually in denial
of their own contribution to the conflict at hand. Almost all military deployments by the United
States in the Middle East in the past half century have been basically to
enable Israel to keep the land and water it has taken from the Arabs by force
in violation of international law.
Until Israel settles with the Palestinians, the cycle of
violence in the Middle East will just continue, with potentially devastating
global economic consequences, if not environmental ones also. Anyway, Dower’s book is important to read, if
only because Israel and the Middle East conflict is
almost completely absent from the book, yet the lessons it cites certainly
apply there as well.