Quagmire In Italian Free Download
Henri Amazona
(English pronunciations of quagmire from the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus and from the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary, both sources Cambridge University Press)
Assistant Professor of Political Science Dominic Tierney's talk, based on a forthcoming book, explores the American experience of war since the Revolution. The project explains why people back some conflicts, but not others, how the United States fights, why Washington wins and loses, and how Americans remember and learn from war. His talk contrasts the American experience of war in two types of military conflict: interstate war (where we fight against other countries) versus nation-building (where we fight against insurgents). Inspired by idealism and vengeance, we view interstate wars like World War II as a glorious crusade to overthrow tyrants. These same cultural forces, however, mean that we see nation-building in places like Somalia or Afghanistan as a wearying quagmire. In other words, Americans are addicted to regime change and allergic to nation-building.
Meanwhile, concealed under trees to the left is a testament to America's tragedy in Vietnam from 1965 to 1973. This is what war ought not to look like. The United States spent years engaged in a futile nation building effort in South Vietnam, trying to stabilize a weak government, while battling a shadowy insurgency. With each step forward Washington seemed to get further bogged down in the quagmire.
I will argue that American's are addicted to regime change and allergic to nation building. In other words, the type of war that we are comfortable fighting is incredibly narrow. The enemy must be a state and not an insurgency, and we need to march on the enemy's capital and topple the government. As soon as Washington deviates from this model, the glue binding together public support for the war effort starts to come unstuck. This insight explains why we back some conflicts but not others, how we fight, why we win and lose, and how we learn from war. Now, of course, when I refer to Americans, we are describing a general tendency rather than an absolute rule. The United States of course is an incredibly diverse society which has changed in fundamental ways over time. In every conflict there are exceptions to the crusade and quagmire traditions, that as you will see, these traditions represent very powerful sets of beliefs.
Now, the rest of the talk has five sections. First, I'm going to discuss the crusade tradition. Second, I'm going to introduce the quagmire tradition. Third, I'm going to show how these traditions help us understand American history and current politics. Fourth, I'll explain the causes of the traditions. Fifth, I'll describe some of the cost and benefits associated with these schools of thought.
The most popular image, however, is quagmire, meaning an area of boggy ground whose surface yields under the tread. Back in 1900, Mark Twain described the U.S. nation building mission in the Philippines as, quote, "A quagmire, from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater." In 2009, fast forward a little bit, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert entitled his piece quote, "The Afghan Quagmire", depicting a war that quote, "long ago turned into a quagmire."
I call the American response to nation building the quagmire tradition. Put simply, we just don't like nation building. Opinion polls consistently show that the public is much more comfortable with the idea of battling against an enemy state rather than using force to combat insurgents, or build democracy inside another country. The American military is also a traditionally skeptical about nation building, and crucially, when the United States does begin nation building, Americans almost always see the outcome as a failure.
Since the nineteenth century, the United States has launched literally dozens of diverse nation building missions, everywhere from South Carolina to South Vietnam, but they have one striking feature in common. Almost every operation was viewed as a disastrous quagmire. Over time, perceptions of failure erode support for a mission, encourage withdrawal, and make us weary about future interventions.
Victory in the Civil War prompted America's first nation building mission, which you can see here on the right. Southern reconstruction. Congress placed the southern states under military rule. Federal troops acted like modern day peace keepers, maintaining order, setting up new governments, monitoring elections, and overseeing the welfare of the freed blacks. Reconstruction was soon viewed in the north as a quagmire with no end in sight. Southern republican governments were perceived as corrupt and bumbling, while the carpet baggers, those northerners who had gone south as a part of reconstruction, were seen as sullied charlatans who packed their few belongings in a carpet bag and headed south to exploit the exhausted dixie. Not a single popular hero emerged from the entire decade long mission in the south. The London Observer noted the change in mood since the Civil War. Quote, "People who risk their lives and property for a cause which they believed to be holy now talk dubiously and hesitatingly of the results of emancipation." In its ark of hope and disillusionment, the mission established a template for future nation building operations through Iraq and beyond. Quagmire was in turn followed by crusade.
When United States locked horns with Spain in 1898. As in the Civil War, a crusading spirit overtook the nation, and U.S. objectives became increasingly majestic over time. A conflict that began with the goal of regime change in Cuba ended with the annexation of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. The United States went to sleep a republic, and it woke up an empire. But the victory over Spain landed the United States in another nation building mission. A sustained counter insurgency war against Filipino nationalists. As with southern reconstruction, Americans increasingly perceive nation building in the Philippines as a quagmire. Even cheerleaders of expansion like Theodore Roosevelt were soon disillusioned. Quote, "In the excitement of the Spanish War, people wanted to take the islands. They had an idea they would be a valuable possession. Now, they think they are of no value." Roosevelt eventually called the Philippines "our heel of Achilles in the Pacific, our liability that should be made independent at an early date."
The great crusade of World War I was not the only military campaign in this era. Disillusionment with the mission in the Philippines had put pay to American imperialism. But the United States did not abandon nation building entirely. From 1898 to 1934 there were over two dozen interventions in the Caribbean, known as the Banana Wars. Like southern reconstruction and the Philippines, nation building in the Caribbean became widely seen as a futile quagmire. The Denver News described the exit of U.S. forces from Haiti quote, "Neither the Haitians, the American public, nor the Marines themselves, will feel very badly about it if they never go back."
The perfect crusade was followed by the perfect quagmire, Vietnam, but Vietnam is actually a very interesting case. Perceptions of the Vietnam war in the United States were complex and confusing, with many Americans backing an escalation of the war effort, while millions of anti war activists marched in favor of withdrawal. This is no surprise, because unusually, Vietnam invoked both traditions. The first interpretation saw Vietnam as an interstate war between the United States and North Vietnam, supported by communist Russia and China. Similar to the World Wars, this framing of the conflict heightened support of the war effort, and produced a preference for escalation, putting more ground troops, more bombing, and in some cases demands for a march on Hanoi, but over time Americans began to see Vietnam, not as an interstate war, but as a nation building and counter insurgency mission inside South Vietnam.
This second perspective was far more troubling for Americans. Prompting fears of a quagmire, with no clear progress in which the United States would only get bogged down. The rule is that anybody who describes Vietnam as a civil war is always a critic of the war. In other words, American were motivated to fight in Vietnam, and fight to win, against an external state aggressor, but they cared little about the internal politics of the country. The dueling crusade and quagmire interpretations helped to explain why supporters and critics of the war often seemed to be talking past each other. They were looking at two different wars, and they were influenced by two different traditions.
The [paxom 00:24:38] of crusade and quagmire also played out as part of the war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq. The public was confident and supportive during the interstate war phase as U.S. forces overthrew the Taliban and marched on Baghdad to eliminate Saddam Hussein's government, but then of course, suddenly, we're in the midst of the greatest nation building operation since Vietnam. As U.S. forces began fighting insurgents and overseeing elections, the entire tone of America's thinking about this war has changed, and the public grew profoundly gloomy.
So, what about the quagmire tradition. Why do U.S. nation building missions end in tears? Well, of course, there's a very simple explanation. These interventions are depressing, because in reality they always fail, and of course there have been several very real debacles, like Vietnam, and to a lesser extent Iraq. But Washington doesn't always fail. America's first nation building mission, southern reconstruction, broke the chains of slavery and transformed the lives of black citizens. The missions in post World War II Germany, Japan, Italy, Austria and South Korea were all notable successes. The intervention in Somalia in the early nineteen nineties, infamous of course for black hawk down, partly because of the movie of the same name, but this intervention saved by some estimates 100 thousand or more lives. The peace keeping operations in Bosnia and Kosovo in the nineteen nineties stabilized war torn Balkan provinces with, by the way, zero American deaths. If perceptions of failure don't always reflect reality, then it means that nation building ends in tears because we are allergic to it.
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