5000 Pretexts for War

My working assumption about international affairs is that people in mortal peril are careful and clever.  On the other hand, people with plenty of money, power, and impunity are often arrogant and sloppy.

This outlook colors my perspective on various US dustups with adversarial nations, most recently Syria.

That’s why I’m unwilling to rule out the possibility of a false flag chemical weapons attack.  Assad might be stupid enough to order an attack with the UN inspectors in Damascus; but as more details emerge concerning Saudi Arabia’s determination to bring down the Syrian regime pronto, the circumstantial case for Prince Bandar organizing the atrocity is strengthened.

I must say I have not been particularly impressed with the public dossier, which leans on the “panicky” exchanges and the interception of a conversation between the last Hezbollah higher-up clueless enough in this post-Snowden era to use an unsecured landline to dish dirt on Assad with his Iranian compadre.

When I look at Syria, I think about the PRC, with the caveat that if and when the United States tries to take down China, China will also have plenty of money, power, and impunity and the US will have to be more careful and clever than it has been.

The issue of red lines and casus belli was very much on my mind when I wrote my recent piece for Asia Times Online on Air Sea Battle, the think tank recipe for massive conventional war with the PRC.

What interested me was the fact that China has counterprogrammed asymmetrically against the United States in Asia in order to deny the US the justification and opportunity to enter the lists on behalf of Japan and The Philippines as a military power.  The PRC advances the maritime conflicts as strictly civilian affairs, using maritime survey vessels and so on, keeping the disputes as much as possible on a bilateral, law-based basis.

The PRC has been careful and clever, in other words.

However, over recent decades the United States has not stood idly by as the PRC, Russia, and other antagonists/competitors of the United States have tried to shield themselves from the full-spectrum exercise of American power.

Through a combination of doctrine and dirty tricks, the United States has done its best to be able to go to war when it wants to.

In my Air Sea Battle post, I highlight an exchange between two U.S. Senators in 1968:

Senator CASE: Mr Chairman, I think one of the suggestions, I do not know that it has quite been put into these words, is that the Defense Department, for purposes which it considered most patriotic and necessary, decided that the time had come to stop shillyshallying with the commies and resist, and this was the time, and it had to be contrived so that the President could come along, and that the Congress would follow. That is one of the things.

Senator HICKENLOOPER: I think historically whenever a country wants to go to war it finds a pretext. We have had 5,000 pretexts historically to go to war.

Or, in other words:

Senator Case and Senator Hickenlooper’s thoughts were recorded in an executive session of the Foreign Relations Committee convened to discuss a staff report concerning the Gulf of Tonkin incident.  The transcript was declassified in 2010 through the efforts of John Kerry.

The takeaway from the staff report was that the Johnson administration was very, very keen to escalate US involvement in the Vietnam War.  Therefore, it brushed aside worrisome details of the August 4, 1964 incident in order to rush through a retaliatory attack (the first bombing attack against North Vietnam by the US, signaling that the entire country was in play and the US would no longer limit its involvement to propping up the strongman du jour in Saigon against the assault of the Viet Cong) and pass the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.

The immediate context for Senator Hickenlooper’s ruminations is that the staff report made a very strong case that no attack had actually occurred on August 4, 1964 (the Maddox and the Turner Joy were chasing their own tails, not North Vietnamese PT boats); nevertheless questions about the true character of the incident were hurriedly brushed aside in order to launch the retaliatory attack and push through the resolution.

By contrast, the committee was wrestling with the current issue of the sigint vessel USS Pueblo’s capture by North Korea and also remembering the attack on another US signals intelligence vessel, the Liberty by Israel in 1967 (quick note: Wikipedia needs to take a look at its article on the Liberty incident, which was apparently written by the public relations office of the IDF; interested readers may refer to the NSA’s declassified report on the incident, in which an NSA deputy director is quoted as dismissing the Israeli investigation as “a nice whitewash” .)

Since the United States was not interested in going to war with North Korea or Israel, those genuine attacks on US sigint vessels were not casi belli; but a spurious attack attributed to North Vietnam provoked a retaliatory attack, a congressional resolution, and a great big war.

Hence Senator Hickenlooper’s musing.

The U.S. has worked to sweep aside barriers to armed intervention with remarkably vague and non-legalistic invocations of red lines, universal values, human rights, global norms, the delicate sensibilities of the international community, etc.  Of course the Bush administration attempted to broaden the legal basis for military action with the doctrine of pre-emption of potential threats (basically anything and everything) instead of imminent threats (the maniac cutting through your door with a chain saw).  

 Remarkably, the Obama administration, through Susan Rice, has signaled its determination to expand this doctrine beyond threats to the United States or its allies with the doctrine R2P—responsibility to protect the citizens of an adversary.  R2P would give a green light for the United States to intervene when some local slice of humanity, not just US citizens, was exposed to threat from an unsavory government.  

In fact, that’s pretty much what we did in Libya, albeit through a UN resolution and with a lot of cajoling by France.

The queasy character of the US intervention doctrine is on full display in Syria, where the Obama administration has reserved for itself the role of judge, jury, and executioner (and for that matter, legislator, by unilaterally promulgating the chemical weapons red line) in the matter of Bashar al Assad’s alleged transgressions in the matter of weapons of mass destruction.  Since the US anticipates that the UN Security Council will be unwilling to authorize action against Syria, President Obama reserved the right to act independently.  Even as he submitted the question of a resolution to the US congress, his spokespeople reserved the right for the president to order an attack even if the resolution didn’t pass.

A fine kettle of fish.

This got me to thinking that a lot of American wars start with a lie.  Not because the United States is especially mendacious or wicked, but because when it comes time to start a war, its designated enemies have probably done a pretty good job of establishing plausible factual and legal rebuttals to the popularly accepted legal justifications for war.

Like Saddam.  He dealt with the demand to get rid of his WMDs by getting rid of his WMDs.  But President Bush figured out a way to deal with Saddam!

 Like Gaddafi.  He declared a ceasefire to comply with UN Resolution 1973.  Didn't help him!

The PRC government has deployed all of the stratagems that America’s adversaries have deployed in order to keep from getting bombs dropped on them: non-military management of disputes that might impinge on the US, legalistic adherence to international law, a reliance on the restraining factor of a useful veto in the UN Security Council, and advocacy of the principle of sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs.

If China is throwing its weight around in a manner that the United States deems unacceptable, how does the United States bring into play its most important great power asset—the ability to threaten and carry out military attacks on a recalcitrant state?

It occurs to me that a prime directive of US military planners and diplomats must be the issue of how and when to start a war with the PRC if we want and need one.

I think about that in the conclusion of the Asia Times Online article, where I dig through the history of the Gulf of Tonkin incident made available by government declassification over the last decade or so, and how the Johnson administration was able to conjure up a war out of a clusterf*ck in the Tonkin Gulf.

I also think about it when the western press credulously amplifies spurious claims that “China is flying fighter jets through Japanese airspace” and “China is preparing to erect structures on the Scarborough Shoal.”

Starting a war with China, if the US wants one, is really not going to be terribly hard.

Which brings me back, by a long and circuitous route, back to my even longer and more circuitous article about Air Sea Battle at Asia Times Online.

Air Sea Battle (or ASB) makes the case for a massive upgrade of US military capabilities in the West Pacific in order to successfully handle one rather improbable scenario—a simultaneous attack against all US military and security interests in the region within reach of the People’s Republic of China.

This is not a likely scenario for a variety of reasons. 

But not impossible, I suppose, if China’s Brezhnev fights his way to the top of the political pile in the CCP with a divine mandate to resurrect the COMECON bloc and convinces the PLA that the key to China’s future is obliterating its economic relationships with the United States, Japan, and Western Europe and cutting itself off from Middle Eastern energy so the PRC can monopolize the economic opportunities of The Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam and lap up all that sweet, sweet crude that apparently lurks under the South China and East China Seas.

Could happen, I guess.  I’m not holding my breath.

The closest thing to a real-world justification for ASB is that it will prevent or at least delay the Finlandization of China’s smaller neighbors--even though the PRC seems to have enough economic and enforcement levers and legal and diplomatic cover to create a lot of problems for the Philippines and Vietnam (and to a lesser extent, Japan) without running afoul of the US military.

But, as I point out in the article, the United States needs to be at war with the PRC if it wishes to bring full US power to bear.  And the chances that the PRC will initiate a full-spectrum attack against the US military and give the United States a justification to destroy all of the PRC’s military assets and much of its economy in a prolonged campaign are pretty small.

So I think if and when war comes, it will come courtesy of one of Senator Hickenlooper’s 5000 pretexts, in response to a US policy decision, perhaps a decision by that the US policy makers decide that China is getting stronger and more assertive and less cooperative, US military dominance is a wasting asset, and it better be wielded to cut China down to size before the PRC becomes a genuine peer competitor.

War with China is, to me, a remote contingency.  But ASB makes it more likely, by holding out the promise that the war is winnable and increasing the temptation to figure out the best way to start one.

The ATOl piece is below the jump.  It can be reposted if Asia Times Online is acknowedged and a link provided.