We’re still lying to ourselves about American military power

We’re still lying to ourselves about American military power

Opinion by 

Paul Waldman

Columnist

Yesterday at 1:03 p.m. EDT

On Monday morning, we learned that a U.S. drone strike targeted at a car bomb “killed 10 civilians in Kabul, including several small children,” and that “the dead were all from a single extended family and were getting out of a car in their modest driveway when the strike hit a nearby vehicle.”

Unlike most such events — and there have been hundreds over our two-decade War on Terror — this one will get a bit of notice in the U.S. media. But only a bit. Neither these deaths, nor the deaths of 13 U.S. servicemembers at the Kabul airport, nor the difficulties of our withdrawal from Afghanistan, are likely to puncture the lies we have been telling ourselves about the way we use our bristling machinery of war all over the world.

In the debate we’re now having about that withdrawal, you can see all those lies repeated and polished anew. Let’s consider a few of them:

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U.S. wars are just and noble, undertaken for all the right reasons. This is always part of the story we are told about any war; if it’s not the primary justification, it comes in a close second.

We invaded Afghanistan to exact revenge for 9/11, but arguments quickly followed about how we’d liberate Afghan women, banish the cruel Taliban, and help move the country into the 21st century. We made the same case in Iraq: Yes, that war was sold on lies about weapons of mass destruction, but we were also going to free the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein’s despotic rule. Thus it is with every country we invade, bomb, or cripple with economic sanctions: We’re doing this not for ourselves, but for them.

People in other countries appreciate that our motives are good. This is a particularly vital lie we tell ourselves: Though we are aggressively ignorant about other countries and often unable to see things from anyone else’s perspective, we assume that our good will is self-evident to everyone, even in places where we have brought misery and destruction.

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Americans literally cannot imagine what it would be like to have a foreign power bomb their streets, let alone watch a foreign military overthrow their government and occupy their country. Yet we assume that people will respond to it by saying “These are some hard times, but the Americans are only trying to help.”

When we say, as a military spokesperson did about that drone attack, “We would be deeply saddened by any potential loss of innocent life,” we think they’ll believe us, although it happens with such regularity and everything we do communicates that we don’t value their lives at all.

Our anger is righteous and deserved; anyone else’s is not. When President Biden says of those who ordered the Kabul airport attack, “We will hunt you down and make you pay,” people elsewhere know what we prefer not to think about: that in the execution of this payment, it’s almost certain that significant numbers of innocent civilians will be killed. We see that as unfortunate but necessary; those in the places where the missiles are landing may not be so understanding.

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If we don’t demonstrate “strength” and “resolve” there will be more terrorism. This is already a key part of the Republican criticism of the withdrawal. “The chance of another 9/11 just went through the roof,” says Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) says our withdrawal has “emboldened” terrorists.

Remember that word? We used to hear it constantly from Republicans, who insisted that every military escalation would make terrorists less bold, while any sign of weakness would supercharge their boldness.

But 9/11 didn’t happen because we allowed terrorists to become bold, and it didn’t happen because Afghanistan was a “safe haven” for al-Qaeda. It didn’t require enormous training camps or large swaths of land. Terrorism is a tool the weak use against the strong; the idea that a longer, more destructive U.S. military presence in far-off lands makes terrorism less likely is positively deranged.

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The tools we use to force other countries to bend to our will, including but not limited to military power, are effective. Every time we plan another military action or ramp up a new sanctions regime, it’s as though we just had our brains wiped of the memory of all the mistakes we made, the unintended consequences of our decisions, the liberation we failed to bring, and the suffering we caused. This time it will work, we say — then it doesn’t, and we say it again.

Not all of us, of course. But millions of us think that we’ve really helped the people of Cuba, and if we just keep that embargo on for another few decades everything will work out. They think that Iraqis and Afghans appreciate all we’ve done for them. They think that anywhere there’s a dictatorship, people are saying, “What we need is an American invasion.” They think that if a drone strike killed their child, they’d say, “That was regrettable, but they were trying to do the right thing.”

In many ways, we’re still in thrall to the (simplified) story of World War II, that we saved the world and helped it rebuild. But that war ended 76 years ago, and what has happened since shouldn’t give us any faith that tomorrow we can repeat what we did in 1945. The sooner we come to terms with that, the better off we — and the rest of the world — will be.