Fighting the Wrong War

Rarely do we get a look at the process of history through the promiscuous confusion of each day's news. Over the past year, however, events have moved so dramatically that we've been able to see the thing itself. From hour to hour, we've witnessed the unraveling of that postwar world to which many of us grew up and in which we've lived most of our lives.

If there is a unifying minor key, it is the abridgment of possibility for the superpowers, a suggestion that limits are being set to the variety of their options for effective action. Against history's landscape, it's possible to imagine the echoes of Kipling's celebrated Recessional, the poem he wrote for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897.

Far-called, our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget--lest we forget!

One need not be religious to understand that fear of the Lord, so to speak, is the beginning of wisdom. Nor should the sentiments in the poem be mistaken for self-pity or despair. Kipling, as great a patriot as ever was, was implicitly pointing out that nations must be prepared to outlive their superpower status, and that a decent sense of proportion is a priceless national asset.

The poem concludes:

For heathen heart that puts her trust

In reeking tube and iron shard,

All valiant dust that builds on dust,

And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,

For frantic boast and foolish word--

Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

Increasingly now, our concerns will be with domestic issues and our politics will divide itself around them. One of the most visible of our domestic problems is drug-taking. Because it's so visible and so easily politicized, the present Administration has seized on it as a means of ingratiating itself with a public it has reason to believe is naive and easy to manipulate. This is not to say that George Bush, William Bennett and the rest are not genuinely concerned about the plight of addicts. It's just that the drug issue, with its sumptuary aspect and suggestion of swarthy foreign villainy, ideally lends itself to filibustering.

Why do we have this drug problem? Why is there so much more drugging going on in this country than in other industrial nations? No one has ever answered these questions. Has anyone ever tried? In any case, part of the price we have had to pay for the relentless social and economic changes since World War Two has been a certain amount of poverty and a certain degree of nihilism. In the U.S., poverty and nihilism find their expression in violent crime and drug-taking. The problem is real enough and touches many of our people. It must be taken seriously. This, I submit, has not been done, even by those who imagine they are doing it.

In place of a serious examination of the subject, we have something called the war on drugs. And what is the object of this war? Why, presumably, victory. And what is victory? A drug-free America. These words are vehicles of illusion. They suggest the same infantilizing of public discourse that made the last Presidential election campaign such a disgrace.

What we seem to be currently declaring is that if we can't get our people to stop taking drugs, we'll put them all in jail. If we can't get the rest of the world to stop selling us drugs, we'll put it in jail, too! Never mind that, short of turning the western third of the country into a penal colony, there is no way to incarcerate the numbers of people involved with illegal drugs. Forget the fact that, in reality, our courts are incapable of dealing with universal prosecution. What matter that our country, like no other country in the world, teems with high-priced criminal lawyers who specialize in springing contrabandists? Ignore the fact that our constitutional guarantees against improper search and seizure are the most restrictive in the world and that our scrutiny of defendants' rights is the most rigorous (with the right lawyers on the job). Paradox? The suggestion of some contradiction? Not in God's country. The Administration behaves as though its resources to combat the illegal drug market were limitless and its options endless. That is simply not so.

Apparently, it is once again necessary to haul out George Santayana's old bad news: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." In this war on drugs, we sometimes seem to be sleepwalking into a repetition of the most disastrous event of our recent history: the war in Vietnam.

If we intend to maintain our country's well-being in the present changing world, it is essential that we examine today's events against the background of past errors. Twenty-five years ago, because the limits of national power were not understood in Washington, our country embroiled itself in a struggle that poisoned its internal political civility and damaged its international prestige forever. Those who remember the American war in Vietnam will recall the peculiar lack of insight with which it was conducted. It seemed to express a commitment to ignorance--a refusal to consider the realities of postwar Asia but also, more perversely, a refusal to consider any limit to the effective possibilities of American economic and military power. This refusal was the root of disaster.

During that war, because our options were taken to be limitless, no careful examination of our goals and interests was seriously undertaken. As we now realize, our forces were committed to battle with the most amorphous of missions. They were to destroy, under the direction of a leadership 10,000 miles from the scene, an intricate social, political and military movement that had grafted itself by hook and crook to Vietnamese national identity.

Such was the empty faith in sheer weaponry, in "reeking tube and iron shard," that, morality aside, we never asked what we required of the place. The idea was that somehow we didn't have to. Prevailing, as the contemporary term had it, nothing less, would do as a goal.

The Administrations conducting the Vietnam war soon became more concerned with appearances than with reality. Indeed, they resisted reality, resisted it fatally. The fact was that they never stopped to analyze either the range of their achievable objectives or the limits of their power. Not until the whole thing turned to dust, until the last exhausted dregs of effort limply trickled down the forearms of our war leaders, were we compelled to address the grim principle of possibility. What followed was improvised and not always honorable. That is how things go when policies of know-nothing perfectionism prevail, when the American can-do spirit is equated with an absolute refusal to examine ends and means.

We must do now what we failed to do in Vietnam. Serving the national interest in the matter of illegal drugs requires a thoughtful match-up of power and possibility. Frantic boasts of the sort emanating from Washington are the very last things we need.

In the ideology of the war on drugs, no choices, no examination of options, no determination of what can really work, no examination of the possible are allowed for. The very word possible can be made to seem defeatist, part of the diction of nervous Nellies. Once again, perfectionism, all or nothing. Once again, for those charged with doing the job, a hopelessly open-ended mission uninformed by any truck with the idea that national power has its limits.

More and more stridently, the impresarios of the war demand a national consensus. Journalists and others who question what emanates from the leadership are referred to as defectors. Consensus in America has often meant an uncritical getting on board, a refusal to consider complexity or to closely consider the national interest in other than bombastic, perfectionist terms. Now, in its name, we are being asked to forget what a previous generation learned the hard way--that making national policy means practicing the art of the possible and always involves hard choices. We are being told again that somehow, mystically, America's limitless options will keep us immune from the necessity for decisions. And how convenient for politicians when a false myth of boundless power enables them to promise everything to everyone.

Troops fighting a nonspecific, endless war become demoralized. In the case of the war on drugs, most of our troops are policemen of one sort or another. The presence in our cities and towns of large numbers of demoralized policemen, charged with enforcing unenforceable laws, may have extremely unpleasant and quickly visible results. The high prices illegal drugs command have corrupted members of nearly every police force on earth, from the DEA to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The last mindless, guileless attempt to establish a drug-free America, Prohibition, succeeded in institutionalizing the richest and most powerful criminal syndicate of modern times, one that's every bit as close to most of us as the nearest junkie. And we might remind the public that law-enforcement officials who build their empires on tough talk and empty promises have never done the country much good. This is, after all, the country of Al Capone and of the White House "plumbers" and of the late J. Edgar Hoover, who, as much as he got around, never believed in the Mafia. Our attempts to fecklessly oversimplify our problems have always compounded them.

Internationally, we have had examples of the military aspect of the war. Special Forces teams abroad, working as they must with the local military, have descended on the jungle redoubts of traficantes to find the premises abandoned. They have suspected that notice of their arrival may have been given by the forces of the host country. Is that reminiscent of another land far away? We will undoubtedly be able to bribe and bully some allies into suiting up for expensive search-and-destroy operations. As any Third World general knows, a man can make a great deal of money out of counterinsurgency. That is especially true when playing one side off against another, the more so when both sides, like the traficantes and the gringos, have enormous sums at their disposal. The war on drugs can be good business for the right army: Just ask the fellow who was helping us out in Panama. What was his name, anyway?

Increasingly, the Administration has sought military options in its war on drugs. Right now, our military presence in Peru is being increased. "America's forward outpost in the war on cocaine," a facility that will require ever-increasing protection, is being expanded in the heart of territory controlled by the Shining Path guerrillas.

This is extremely dangerous business. Has the Bush Administration really familiarized itself with the situation in Peru, in Colombia, in Bolivia and elsewhere? It had better, if we're putting our people in there. Is our military, presently geared for a massive positional European war, really equipped to handle the trouble we may be getting ourselves into?

During the attack on Panama, a lot of us held our breath for a while. In the first daylight hours of day one, when it appeared that Noriega had escaped, when fire fights were still raging all over Panama City and heavy weapons were being brought to bear in its miserable slums, students of modern American military operations experienced a few unpleasant flashes from the past. At their worst, things looked as though some of the familiar criticisms of our military style might be grimly validated. There was fear that the operation would prove technologized to the point of unwieldiness. There was anxiety that our procedures, in an operation of some political sensitivity, might be lacking in political sophistication. Some observers suspected that our forces might go in dependent on (concluded on page 167) The Wrong War (continued from page 70) electronic intelligence to the exclusion of the human variety, heavy on quantifiable data and short on savvy. Traditionally, we've been better at some things than at others.

These worries were not altogether misplaced. In the weeks after the invasion, Americans were reading about miscalculations (one senior official in the Pentagon called it "bungling"). In the end, God took care of us. The Pineapple Pimpernel was run to ground to the satisfaction of most of his people. Our losses were, as they say, acceptable. Nevertheless, it would seem unwise to draw the wrong moral from our success in Panama.

The egregious phoniness of this war on drugs does not mean that there is nothing to lose. On the one hand, the Administration carries on the same weary game of cops and robbers, running down tips, turning informers, bribing hit men for testimony. In other words, it tacitly accepts the status quo in the hope that the problem will generate sufficient political capital and then go away. Meanwhile, on the streets, where the real problem is being lived out, the user--the person most in trouble--has nowhere to turn.

Anyone who talks with drug users knows how desperately many of them would like to quit. Ask any street junkie or crackhead if he knows anything about where to get help. For the overwhelming majority of users, there is no treatment available. Even people with money to spend on therapy have to wait months for space in programs. This situation is the direct result of the Administration's deliberate refusal to assign realistic priorities. Does it make sense to talk billions of dollars, diplomatic pressures, armies of cops, aircraft carriers, paratroopers and Cigarette boats and make no remotely comparable provision for the street junkie who wants to get straight?

This is not, per se, an argument for legalizing, decriminalizing or Federally regulating the importation and manufacture of presently illegal drugs. But it is an insistence that no Federally financed band wagon be permitted, unopposed, to steam-roll inconvenient opinions and deprive the people of their right to thoughtful counsel. If we elect to deal massively and effectively with drug use, we are going to have to begin by taking the issue seriously. As presently marketed, the war on drugs stands to become a parochially political false crusade, and its warriors already display that mixture of naivete and cynicism that characterized the war in Vietnam. What we require instead is deliberate, depoliticized, depropagandized examination of our needs and options in this matter. Law-enforcement people in a number of places have already requested such a study.

Let's remember the past and not repeat it. During the Vietnam war, our Government promised the people not only military victory but an absolute solution to our domestic difficulties. This was to be provided simultaneously, without any reference to possible contradictions. The results, guaranteed, were to be threefold. We would maintain the tremendous economic power that had accrued to us after World War Two. We would win the war on poverty, which was what Lyndon Johnson's Administration called its social program. At the same time, in Vietnam, we would prevail.

Everything declared desirable was to be available at once. There was to be no reasoning of need, no economy of objectives whatsoever. It was not to be admitted that any of these results might be obtainable only in part and at the relative expense of others. It was as though no one in the entire country had ever heard of the Aesop fable of the dog and the bone. Remember it? A dog with a bone in its mouth goes to the river, sees its own reflection in the water, thinks, There's a nice bone. I'll take that one, too. Guess what happens?

Maybe we should remind ourselves now, in this fortunate hour, that none of Johnson's goals were achieved. Our relative wealth began to decline during his Administration for reasons directly connected to the war. The results of our war on poverty can be seen today in the streets of any ghetto. In Vietnam, the war was lost.

There is a Rolling Stones song titled You Can't Always Get What You Want. One of its refrains goes, "But if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need." There's more horse sense in that little ditty than in 90 percent of the official utterances regarding drugs. Maybe it should be incorporated into our collective wisdom. Of course, it may be argued that the song emanates vaguely from the direction of the drug culture. But why should the Devil have all the good tunes?

If we go on believing in our unlimited power to do everything at once, we will have missed the point of the past year's events entirely. In Europe, the Russians may have lost little by playing it safe. In the U.S., our success in Panama produced fits of triumphalism. How ironic it would be if our late competitors in the Kremlin ended as the real beneficiaries of what happened at last year's end. Whose days are numbered--those who are capable of correctly determining history's direction or those who allow good fortune to reinforce their complacency and their illusions?

In the winter of 1990, we Americans were not the lords of creation, any more than the Soviets or the great powers of the past were. Neither our resources nor our will is limitless. The sky overhead is as narrow for us as for any people and the span of history as wide. We will make our future out of who we are and we shall have to take the world as it is. Nothing is free, not even for America. It is as true of the drug problem as of everything else.

"As presently marketed, the war on drugs stands to become a parochially political false crusade."