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Book review: ‘The Spoils of War’
By: []
Date: 2021-11
Andrew Cockburn, ‘The Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine’(Verso)
Why is Joe Biden claiming that America’s ‘forever wars’, have ended? He withdrew 2,500 troops from Afghanistan and allowed the Taliban to take over the country, but the US continues to send drones to kill alleged terrorists in Afghanistan and in large parts of Africa and the Middle East.
Why does Biden claim to have made America safer when extremist Islamist groups increasingly occupy large parts of the world? Is not the ‘war on terror’, the largely hidden-from-view, long-distance campaign of assassinations conducted by the US for many years, the ultimate forever war? And why are Biden and Boris Johnson hailing a new defence pact to provide nuclear-powered submarines to Australia as a security triumph, when its main consequence is to provoke China and alienate European allies?
Andrew Cockburn’s book offers a guide to understanding these irrationalities. His central argument is that American foreign and defence policy decisions are neither based on what is happening in the world, nor on a measured view of the national interest. Rather, they are based on what Alexander Hamilton called private passions, which is to say money or domestic political advantage.
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The book is a collection of articles originally published in Harper’s Magazine. Together they comprise a devastatingly convincing account of the runaway nature of a powerful grouping of interests – the defence, intelligence and financial sectors in the US. Since 2001, what used to be called the military-industrial complex has evolved to include thousands of private contractors, vast intelligence networks, and an inexorable drone campaign. Now, in Cockburn’s words, it is better described as a “malignant virus”.
The book uses two themes to illustrate the argument. One is the air force lobby’s claim that air power can be used autonomously to police the world, without risk to the lives of (Western) soldiers on the ground. The claim dates back to the theories propounded by the Italian strategist Giulio Douhet in the period between the two world wars. In the US, what was then called the Army Air Corps developed a victory plan to win the Second World War by means of air power. The Corps, incidentally, was lobbying at the time to be an independent service.
Air power is immensely destructive but it cannot do what American strategist Thomas Schelling calls “compellence”: making the enemy submit to your will. This was demonstrated in the Second World War, which was won by armies; and in Korea, where every town and village in the north was incinerated; and in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Yemen. Yet these lessons have never been learned and the narrative of autonomous airpower is revived over and over again.
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