Military Deification of America, Cont'd

Almost three years ago I wrote a post about the deification of the American military that generated a fair amount of controversy when I crossposted it around the blogosphere.

The United States obviously has enemies in the world, and enemies sometimes must be engaged militarily. But I see too many signs that the pendulum in this country is swinging away from Athens and toward Sparta. Our soldiers are not just heroes anymore, but infallible gods who are only on the side of righteousness. Such belief, the endless replaying of "support the troops" over and over again, complicates the relationship between military policy and military action. If the troops are always right, it's a slippery slope to the belief that the policy is always right, and if you're not on the side of the policy, you're against the troops. And in such moral anarchy, you end up in places like Abu Ghraib, or in the mosque with Kevin Sites, watching the downed insurgent being shot at point blank range. And then you get the rebuke from the faithful truth-supporters, that "you don't know what it's like over there" and "you don't know what these kids are going through" and "you hate the very soldiers that guarantee your freedom." These are the very people who would never consider the fact that doctors help guarantee life, the law enforcement officers help guarantee liberty, that teachers and social workers help guarantee the pursuit of happiness. But nobody worships at their collective altars. Soldiers are heroes, not gods, and the difference is crucial.

The difference is crucial because societies that deify the military find it hard not to also deify militarism, and it leads to more war, more death, and more destruction. All societies that laud state power in this way become imperial. There simply is nowhere else to go. It wasn't too long ago that the Founders of America were wary of a standing army, which if you think about it, is the very basis of the Second Amendment. They almost certainly would frown at the thought of a "volunteer" army that preys on the poor who have no other outlet if they want to seek higher education or a decent job. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, "Where there is no oppression there will be no pauper hirelings." But today we not only perish the thought of abolishing the Army (and consequently have every citizen ready to serve if needed), we see that as heretical as abolishing religion. There are three organizations in this country that display the same hierarchial, top-down, just-follow-orders-or-be-expelled structure: the military, the church, and the Republican Party.

In 2007 we are seeing the fruits of what we have been sauntering toward for years. Because the soldiers are indisputably good warriors on the side of truth and light, and any small dissent from that universal goodness is tantamount to treason, then anybody dressed up in camos simply must be telling the truth, even when those people are essentially political operatives who are running a PR offensive to absolute perfection.

I've been thinking about the whole David Petraeus issue for the past couple of days, and what I've been thinking about is how badly the liberal blogosphere and the liberal establishment have been outplayed here. While we've spent the last six months snarking about Friedman Units and complaining aimlessly about spineless Democrats, Petraeus has been slowly and methodically carrying out an extremely disciplined military campaign with a very precise goal: gaining support for David Petraeus and the surge.

In retrospect, this is hardly a surprise. Petraeus is a four-star general, by all accounts a brilliant man, and a professional student of counterinsurgency. He's keenly aware of the value of both the media and public opinion, and he did what any counterinsurgency expert would have counseled in his circumstances: he unleashed a hearts-and-minds campaign aimed at opinion makers and politicians. For months the military transports to Baghdad have been stuffed with analysts and congress members, and every one of them has gotten a full court press of carefully planned and scripted presentations, tightly controlled visits to favored units, and assorted dollops of "classified" information designed to flatter his guests and substantiate his rosy assessments without the inconvenience of having to defend them in public.

And it's worked. Even though there's been no discernable political progress, minimal reconstruction progress, and apparently no genuine decrease in violence, he's managed to convince an awful lot of people that the first doesn't matter, the second is far more widespread than it really is, and the third is the opposite of reality.

This includes reports on military progress completely at odds with the truth, and the continued recitation of that progress without any facts or figures to back it up. This includes sliming Democratic members in the Green Zone, and denying them anything but the most tightly controlled access to reality. This includes playing the media to such a degree that they know they're being played and yet report through the same rose-colored glasses anyway. And this is all, in my view, because the words are coming out of the mouth of a General and not some actual PR flack like Dan Senor. We know that GOP lawmakers are untrustworthy; they could get shot at in Iraq and still declare the surge a success - literally. But Petraeus has been prepping for this PR offensive for 5 months, knowing that he could manipulate America's love affair with the troops and essentially make himself unassailable. Watch the Democrats pull punches when he testifies on Capitol Hill. Watch for the news item that "Democrats were weary of attacking Petraeus' views too strongly for fear that they would be seen as anti-military."

David Petraeus is a partisan Republican. He may be brilliant, and so is John Roberts. His reputation depends on filling the shoes of savior that have been created for him by the Republican Party and the Bush Administration. If he can pull it off, or at least make it somehow seem like the war could have been won if only the Democrats didn't pull the plug (books on that narrative have probably already been written) there could be an Oval Office waiting for him. It's not like there's anyone else on the horizon. And his military credentials give him the leeway to say the nuttiest, most partisan things without anyone batting an eyelash. He also can say the exact opposite to antiwar Democrats and come off as credible, too. And we're all to blame for making ridiculous qualifiers like "even General Petraeus says" like he has the wisdom of Solomon. We never acknowledge his self-interest in reporting from Iraq in a biased way.

The military provides a great service but they are not gods. They make mistakes and cover things up and have an agenda that serves the defense contracting industry to an uncomfortable degree. They should never be seen as preferable to policymakers, or even as more trustworthy than them. It lays the groundwork for the kind of thing we're seeing with the Petraeus PR surge, right before our eyes.

UPDATE: Make me puke. Why do I need to hear about some student's field trip with Petraeus? Is this in a national newspaper or a military press release?