At some point during its six-year run, from 1957-63, my father was offered a position as writer for the TV show Leave It to Beaver. I can’t be more specific since he never thought to mention anything about it. Deductive logic would suggest, however, that he did in fact turn it down.
The show, in a very real sense, was emblematic of the era, featuring a happy suburban middle-class family living in a stable post-WWII society. It was the Boomer heyday. We grew up on this stuff. And though it may appear today overly sentimentalized, even corny, at the time it fit with the reigning zeitgeist of an emergent, dynamic, civic-minded, and, yes, patriotic America.
The show reflected the happy resolution of the heroic struggles borne by our parents’ generation during the Great Depression and World War II. Life was good. Society and its institutions had survived and appeared strong. The future looked bright.
As a kid, it was impossible not to be influenced by this. It was all we knew, after all. The returning G.I.s had come home to a grateful nation that responded with not just accolades but unprecedented economic and cultural opportunities. The economy boomed. Housing boomed. Churches boomed. And so did the birth rate. Confidence was in the air.
As I say, having spent our formative years within this historic anomaly, our perspective on life couldn’t help but be shaped by it. In surveying the political and cultural landscape of America today, however, I’m struck by the degree to which many of my generation still think it’s 1959. Subconsciously, that is, Boomers seem to be in denial about how much America has changed since the time of Wally and the Beav.
Nowhere is this more apparent than my generation’s response to the current war in Iran. Which is to say, it still seems we perceive America as the proverbial knight in shining armor riding in on a white steed, confident of his mission to advance the unquestioned righteousness of the American way, and slaying evil demons wherever they may be found – solely for the good of the world, that is.
As the Cold War developed, it was understandable enough that the American public might accept the wars in Korea and Vietnam as necessary evils. After all, we were the guys in the white hats fighting against the alarming challenges of Communism and the Soviet Union.
Over time, however, a new kind of empire-building ethos became ascendent. The proponents of this undertaking are generally known by the label, “Neoliberal/Neoconservatives.”
Perhaps the lead mind-shaper of this agenda was Robert Kagan who, in 2008, described neoconservatism as “a belief in the rectitude of applying U.S. moralism to the world stage, support for the U.S. to act alone, the promotion of American-style liberty and democracy in other countries, the belief in American hegemony, confidence in U.S. military power, and a distrust of international institutions.” Not a lot of gray area there.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, this neoliberal/neocon impulse increasingly drove U.S. foreign policy decisions. With a big assist from the CIA, the U.S. initiated various “color revolutions” around the world to help realize, as it were, Kagan’s ambitious globalist dreams.
Color revolutions were the result of a CIA project initially conceived by Gene Sharp, long-time Harvard researcher, which involved using “soft power” or “strategic nonviolent resistance,” rather than direct military power, to undermine “regimes” seen as unfavorable to U.S. interests. Such regime change operations were to be achieved through covert psyops, boycotts, strikes, protests, and the promotion of parallel institutions. Not coincidentally, this strategy also fit comfortably within one of the CIA’s most cherished tenets, as formulated at its inception: “plausible deniability.”
From 1989 to 2019, these covert color revolutions were attempted in Czechoslovakia, Mongolia, Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Belarus, Moldova, Myanmar, Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, China, and Ukraine (again), and Armenia. Whew!
Then, after the attacks on 9/11, the U.S. initiated what it called the “War on Terror,” which opened up a whole new can of worms. The idea was that America needed to fight the terrorists “over there” before we were forced to fight them over here.
Ironically, it was this precise folly that had motivated Osama bin Laden to plan the 9/11 attacks in the first place! For you see, bin Laden and al Qaeda had been among the “freedom fighters” working on our side against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 80s. It is generally accepted that the Soviet’s abject failure in this Afghan quagmire proved a significant factor in its eventual downfall, having effectively drained its storehouse of both blood and treasure.
Bin Laden’s plan, simply put, was to inflict the same fate on the U.S. 9/11, in other words, according to an interview bin Laden gave in 2004, and as reported in Scott Horton’s exhaustive study, Enough Already, “was to give the U.S. a crisis to exploit, to provoke an overreaction that would encourage our government to invade,…and to ‘bleed us to bankruptcy,’” as bin Laden himself phrased it.
As Horton writes, bin Laden hoped to “end American dominance of the Middle East through imperial overstretch and self-destruction, along with the further political radicalization of the region, increased division between the West and Islamic societies, destabilization of U.S.-supported dictatorships and an increase in the terrorists’ own power and influence over the future.”
As one former chief of the CIA’s al Qaeda unit put it, the U.S. policy, post-9/11, was a gift to al Qaeda. It was as if they had “hit the lottery,” he said.
Curiously, contrary to popular belief, not all the 9/11 attackers were radical Islamists. Some were simply reacting to the fact that, as bin Laden was quick to point out, the U.S. had seeded their country with its military bases. In the case of Saudi Arabia, bin Laden’s homeland, these bases were being used in a war against a neighboring Arab country, Iraq.
Thus, many of the terrorists simply thought of themselves as patriots standing up to an illegitimate foreign power occupying their native lands. At the time of the 9/11 attacks, in fact, there were relatively few radical jihadists in the Middle East. But as the U.S. ramped up its “War on Terror” campaign, radical Islam metastasized, just as bin Laden had hoped and, in so doing, also helped destabilize the more secular states throughout the region, as he also had hoped.
Since the “War on Terror” began, the U.S. has been involved in countless military operations, both directly and indirectly through covert proxy wars, often working with terrorist groups. One needs a scorecard to keep track of them all. A partial list includes operations in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, etc. I’m sure I’ve missed a few, but you get the point.
Interjecting ourselves into the bewildering maelstrom of ancient hatreds and intrigues that is the Middle East has surely been a fool’s errand. Indeed, the results speak for themselves.
Perhaps we should ask ourselves: are we actually safer now than before these many decades of bloodshed and subterfuge? Has the Middle East become a beacon of “American-style liberty and democracy,” as Mr. Kagan boldly foresaw? And what about our image around the world? Do others still think of us as a shining city on a hill? Has our image, in other words, been burnished or tarnished in the intervening years?
My admittedly naive hope has always been that our greatest export – as a nation founded on noble principles – might be to serve as an example for others wishing to emulate our way of life. Sadly, it seems more and more nations today are looking elsewhere for hope and inspiration. In short, we seem to have squandered our goodwill in pursuing our seemingly endless military aggression. Our default instinct is force rather than persuasion.
Which brings me back to our latest misadventure, or “excursion,” into Iran. As I understand it, a significant portion of the American public (particular among the younger generations) opposes this war, with the notable exception of a fair number of my fellow Boomers.
As I see it, this “war of choice” is nothing more than yet another foolhardy foreign venture having little or nothing to do with our vital national interests. [And don’t get me started on the requirements of Just War theory.]
But even if one could argue that it is in our vital interests, it’s important to remember that, prior to hostilities, the Pentagon and all eighteen intelligence agencies strongly advised against it. Even Israel’s IDF thought it was a bad idea.
Their considered assessment was that Iran was not close to obtaining a nuclear weapon (nor, in their view, was it necessarily planning to build one) and that the likelihood of military success was, by some estimates, less than 10%.
Not only that, but a potential conflict with Iran has been the most studied, war-gamed scenario in military history by experts at the Pentagon and Langley. Among other obvious problems, Iran’s closing of the Strait of Hormuz and its other “asymmetric warfare” strategies were entirely predictable.
[I have many other concerns about this war, militarily, economically, and in both foreign and domestic terms, but such are beyond the purview of this post.]
In any event, whether my reading of the situation is correct or not, I’m still saddened by what I consider to be an overly simplistic, black vs. white, good guys vs. bad guys mentality held by many. For decades now, our nation’s shameful use of the dark arts of subterfuge and warfare worldwide does not appear to have sullied the somewhat cavalier, triumphalist confidence so many Americans have today, particularly, as I say, among my fellow Boomers. Maybe it will take a child to lead us into a better future.
For too many, that is, the U.S. is seen uncritically as fighting always on the side of the righteous and the good, as if a kind of benign, archetypal June and Ward Cleaver guiding a wayward world with wise and ethical parental counsel.
in the end, it seems to me, we ought to at least pause and reflect for a moment before we blithely endorse the killing of thousands upon thousands of human beings, while at the same time destabilizing and destroying whole communities and nations. Exit question: how would we feel if the roles were reversed?
Meanwhile, the world is watching. And so, I might add, is God.