The insanity of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results* …

Posted by Joshua Holland at 10:18 AM on January 13, 2007.

Interesting column today by WaPo style writer (?) Henry Allen, who argues that we should give Bush enough rope to hang not only himself, but also American military adventurism for years to come …

The problem, if we lose in Iraq, is that America is apt to keep on doing what it's been doing for decades when it loses, which is to say learn nothing and have years of hissy fits about who's to blame. And set itself up for another fiasco someplace else. […]

… our combat fiascos are coming to define America both to the world and to itself. They are also demonstrating that we are incapable of winning ground wars against some of the poorest people on Earth, if those wars last more than a week.

After Vietnam, one hoped that we could salvage pride in the courage with which our soldiers fought, and in the knowledge that we had learned our lesson well enough that we would never again send them to die in such a doomed cause.

As we watched our helicopters abandon our terrified allies on the roof of our Saigon embassy, it seemed reasonable to assume that the shame of that moment would lead to a new sanity.

I've read three Op-Eds just this morning that reference helicopters evacuating people from the roof of the embassy in Saigon. "Embassy," "roof" and "Saigon" nets you 100,000 hits on Google. But, interestingly, nobody was ever actually flown off of the U.S. embassy's roof -- the iconic image was of a random apartment building in downtown Saigon where CIA employees were housed.

Just a little trivia; now let's return to our column already in progress…

Instead, our failed ground combat interventions and nation building continue like a sort of neurosis, the kind that has been defined as doing the same thing over and over in expectation of a different result, in the manner of France fighting and losing one colonial war after another after World War II.

In America, however, this syndrome is a legacy not of colonialism but of World War II itself -- of a triumphalism of the sort John Kennedy perpetuated when he boasted of being from the generation born of that war, and said that the lesson to be learned was that we should pay any price, bear any burden, to assure the success of liberty.

How good we feel about ourselves, sharing this dream. Without the illusion that we can make it come true, we would be like Britain without its empire, like France without its mission civilatrice, a nation tinged by shabby resentment and existential resignation. The problem is that reality may leave us with nothing better in the end.

As part of our thought experiment, think now of our mind-set as an American sickness, an addiction in the form of a belief.

If it were an addiction, we would create a 12-step program to cure it. The first step would be recognizing that our governing establishment is powerless over it, and that our attitude toward our role in the world has become unmanageable.

Recovering alcoholics will say that they didn't begin their recovery until they "hit bottom." It turns out that it was a mistake to believe we hit bottom while watching those helicopters in 1975, or any of the smaller failures that have followed. And so, the proposal here is to make sure that this time we hit bottom hard enough to prove to ourselves once and for all that the very nation-building that George W. Bush swore off before the 2000 election still has him -- and, more important, us -- helpless in its grip.

I appreciate what Allen's trying to say here. The problem, somewhat obviously in my book, is that Iraq isn't part of some huge game of Risk and real people are really being slaughtered over there. In other words, we don't have the luxury of giving Bush free reign to escalate the conflict in Iraq and further destabilize the region in the hope that a strategic class addicted to a belligerent foreign policy will see the light after he fails miserably yet one more time.

And there's also little to suggest that a dismal failure in Iraq would result in some kind of grand re-evaluation of the utility of American hard power, or at least in a re-evaluation likely to last for more than a few years.** What's to prevent some smiling moron ten years hence from smashing the next insignificant little Grenada in the name of restoring the American military's "lost glory," as Reagan did in 1983?

Having said that, I think Allen's is as strong an argument against American militarism as you're likely to find in the pages of the Washington Post. But that brings us to its other central flaw; he argues within an analytical framework that: A) accepts that our various adventures have in fact been inspired by a desire to engage in nation-building, rather than less selfless purposes, and B) embraces the idea that the first stage of nation-building is to blow some shit up.

Allen accepts rather than challenges our Orwellian definition of the term and goes on to argue that we should abandon the concept altogether. In fact, when you start out shocking and awing it should more accurately be called "nation-breaking" -- it's somewhat deranged to believe that launching stealth bombers is a rational first step in building a nation.

It's a false dichotomy; the truth is that there's plenty of bad governance out there (and here at home, but that's another matter), and there are constructive ways for the wealthiest country on the planet to engage that problem. Let's try expanding rather than rejecting nonviolent nation-building through aid, educational and cultural exchanges, various forms of technical assistance and by supporting rather than almost obsessively tearing down regional and international institutions.

That's not to say that using force is never a necessary part of the whole; sometimes it certainly is. But viewing its use as a failure of diplomacy by other means is not only entirely appropriate, it also leads to a radically different approach to failed and failing states. For an excellent example of what I mean, check out the article "Doing it the Dutch Way in Afghanistan."

It's a hell of a lot smarter than the smartest smart bombs, and it doesn't involve so many damn body-bags.

* That quote about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is variously attributed to Albert Einstein (who I always believed was its author), Benjamin Franklin (AlterNet boss Don Hazen's pick), Rudyard Kipling, Rita Mae Brown and an ancient Chinese proverb.

** Then again, maybe I'm too cynical ...

Tagged as: iraq, militarism, nation-building

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.