The Long What?

Has the Pentagon lost its mind? In February, they released their 92 page Quadrennial Defense Review, which included talk of a ‘Long War on Terror,’ and laid out a 20-year defense strategy. The Joint Chiefs of Staff then released a document called ‘Fighting the Long War -- Military Strategy for the War on Terrorism,’ which discussed the main reasons for permanent global war. Now, the ‘Long War’ has become the central way the administration is trying to endow its foreign policy with a sense of purpose. The documents, and talking points, are a morass of confused analogies and precedents. In press conferences, the Joint Chiefs grimly remind us of the dangers of appeasement in the 1930s, their document itself explicitly draws parallels to the Cold War, and their spokesman actually presented ‘a map that shows the bin Laden-style caliphate conquering North and East Africa, the entire Middle East and Central and South Asia.’

Come again? Bin-Laden was barely able to organize a shadowy network of terrorists, let alone anything like a proper force capable of conquering a country. Not to mention, what organization he did have is essentially defunct. The few training bases are destroyed, and most of the leadership is dead or captured. Bin Laden, at most, is able to produce the occasional video press release, which makes headlines only because of the way the Bush administration has transformed the two-bit terrorist into a global statesman. There is no enemy. At most, there is a band of international outlaws.

Of course, the Pentagon knows it has lost its mind. It consistently undermines its own case. Recall that, originally, Pentagon officials wanted to eliminate any military connotations to their operations at all, instead preferring to name their activity the ‘Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism’. While Bush killed that idea, the Pentagon has continued, in practice and theory, to reject the notion that, practically speaking, this is a war. General Kimmit, the leading figure behind the new ‘Long War’, says, “making better use of "soft power" - diplomacy, finance, trade and technology - is the key to this new ‘fourth-generational warfare.'” Soft power? Isn’t this a liberal idea? And isn’t ‘diplomacy, finance, trade and technology’ the way you deal with the mafia, not a political enemy? How has the Pentagon ended up in such a bath of confusion? Without real enemies to fight the Pentagon is creeping into the territory of Interpol and the Department of Justice. With Vietnam, successive administrations tried to dress down a war as an international police action, with the new ‘Long War’, the administration is trying to dress up an international police action as a war.

The stumbling quest for a defining war metaphor is a strange kind of confusion. It does, of course, have the effect of creating a permanent global state of exception in which, in the name of wartime emergency, the administration and military claims freedom to do what they like. But there is no clarity about what they would like to do with such freedom. From the start, the use of violence in this phantom war wasn’t centrally about the pursuit of hidden interests, but rather an attempt to create a war and a sense of national purpose where none existed. Bush and his advisors seem to have thought that war could regenerate the collective energies of a decadent liberal public caught in the throes of relativistic, moral lassitude. That is why they have been long on metaphor, short on substance. Metaphor wasn’t the sign under which they were allowed to use violence for ‘other means’; violence was the means by which they hoped to make the metaphor stick. The confusion about with whom we’re supposedly at war, what kind of war this is, or where the battlefield is located, stems from the fact that, first and foremost, the administration is ‘at war’ with the political tendencies of its own society.