Admittedly, by then American air-power films had long been in decline. In Vietnam, the U.S. had used its air superiority to devastating effect, bombing the north and blasting the south, but go to American Vietnam films and, while that U.S. patrol walks endlessly into a South Vietnamese village with mayhem to come, the air is largely devoid of planes.

Consider Top Gun an anomaly. Anyway, it’s been 25 years since that film topped the box-office — and don’t hold your breath for a repeat at your local multiplex. After all, there’s nothing left to base such a film on.

To put it simply, it’s time for Americans to take the “war” out of “air war.” These days, we need a new set of terms to explain what U.S. air power actually does.

Start this way: American “air superiority” in any war the U.S. now fights is total. In fact, the last time American jets met enemy planes of any sort in any skies was in the First Gulf War in 1991, and since Saddam Hussein’s once powerful air force didn’t offer much opposition — most of its planes fled to Iran — that was brief. The last time U.S. pilots faced anything like a serious challenge in the skies was in North Vietnam in the early 1970s. Before that, you have to go back to the Korean War in the early 1950s.

This, in fact, is something American military types take great pride in. Addressing the cadets of the Air Force Academy in early March, for example, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates stated: “There hasn’t been a U.S. Air Force airplane lost in air combat in nearly 40 years, or an American soldier attacked by enemy aircraft since Korea.”

And he’s probably right, though it’s also possible that the last American plane shot down in aerial combat was U.S. Navy pilot Michael Scott Speiker’s jet in the First Gulf War. (The Navy continues to claim that the plane was felled by a surface-to-air missile.) As an F-117A Stealth fighter was downed by a surface-to-air missile over Serbia in 1999, it’s been more than 11 years since such a plane was lost due to anything but mechanical malfunction. Yet in those years, the U.S. has remained almost continuously at war somewhere and has used air power extensively, as in its “shock and awe” launch to the invasion of Iraq, which was meant to “decapitate” Saddam Hussein and the rest of the Iraqi leadership. (No plane was lost, nor was an Iraqi leader of any sort taken out in those 50 decapitation attacks, but “dozens” of Iraqi civilians died.) You might even say that air power, now ramping up again in Afghanistan, has continued to be the American way of war.

From a military point of view, this is something worth bragging about. It’s just that the obvious conclusions are never drawn from it.

The Valor of Pilots

Let’s begin with this: to be a “Top Gun” in the U.S. military today is to be in staggeringly less danger than any American who gets into a car and heads just about anywhere, given this country’s annual toll of about 34,000 fatal car crashes. In addition, there is far less difference than you might imagine between piloting a drone aircraft from a base thousands of miles away and being inside the cockpit of a fighter jet.

Articles are now regularly written about drone aircraft “piloted” by teams sitting at consoles in places like Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. Meanwhile, their planes are loosing Hellfire missiles thousands of miles away in Afghanistan (or, in the case of CIA “pilots,” in the Pakistani tribal borderlands). Such news accounts often focus on the eerie safety of those pilots in “wartime” and their strange detachment from the actual dangers of war — as, for instance, in the sign those leaving Creech pass that warns them to “drive carefully” as this is “the most dangerous part of your day.”

When it comes to pilots in planes flying over Afghanistan, we imagine something quite different — and yet we shouldn’t. Based on the record, those pilots might as well be in Nevada, since there is no enemy that can touch them. They are inviolate unless their own machines betray them and, with the rarest of imaginable exceptions, will remain so.

Nor does anyone here consider it an irony that the worst charge lodged by U.S. military spokespeople against their guerrilla enemies, whose recruits obviously can’t take to the skies, is that they use “human shields” as a defense. This transgression against “the law of war” is typical of any outgunned guerrilla force which, in Mao Zedong’s dictum, sees immense benefit in “swimming” in a “sea” of civilians. (If they didn’t do so and fought like members of a regular army, they would, of course, be slaughtered.)

This is considered, however implicitly, a sign of ultimate cowardice. On the other hand, while a drone pilot cannot (yet) get a combat award citation for “valor,” a jet fighter pilot can and no one — here at least — sees anything strange or cowardly about a form of warfare which guarantees the American side quite literal, godlike invulnerability.

War by its nature is often asymmetrical, as in Libya today, and sometimes hideously one-sided. The retreat that turns into a rout that turns into a slaughter is a relative commonplace of battle. But it cannot be war, as anyone has ever understood the word, if one side is never in danger. And yet that is American air war as it has developed since World War II.

It’s a long path from knightly aerial jousting to air war as… well, what? We have no language for it, because accurate labels would prove deflating, pejorative, and exceedingly uncomfortable. You would perhaps need to speak of cadets at the Air Force Academy being prepared for “air slaughter” or “air assassination,” depending on the circumstances.

From those cadets to Secretary of Defense Gates to reporters covering our wars, no one here is likely to accept the taking of “war” out of air war. And because of that, it is — conveniently — almost impossible for Americans to imagine how American-style war must seem to those in the lands where we fight.

Apologies All Around

Consider for a moment one form of war-related naming where our language changes all the time. That’s the naming of our new generations of weaponry. In the case of those drones, the two main ones in U.S. battle zones at the moment are the Predator (as in the sci-fi film) and the Reaper (as in Grim). In both cases, the names imply an urge for slaughter and a sense of superiority verging on immortality.

And yet we don’t take such names seriously. Though we’ve seen the movies (and most Afghans haven’t), we don’t imagine our form of warfare as like that of the Predator, that alien hunter of human prey, or a Terminator, that machine version of the same. If we did, we would have quite a different picture of ourselves, which would mean quite a different way of thinking about how we make war.

From the point of view of Afghans, Pakistanis, or other potential target peoples, those drones buzzing in the sky must seem very much like real-life versions of Predators or Terminators. They must, that is, seem alien and implacable like so many malign gods. After all, the weaponry from those planes is loosed without recourse; no one on the ground can do a thing to prevent it and little to defend themselves; and often enough the missiles and bombs kill the innocent along with those our warriors consider the guilty.

Take a recent event on a distant hillside in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province where 10 boys, including two sets of brothers, were collecting wood for their families on a winter’s day when the predators — this time American helicopters evidently looking for insurgents who had rocketed a nearby American base — arrived. Only one of the boys survived (with wounds) and he evidently described the experience as one of being “hunted” — as the Predator hunts humans or human hunters stalk animals. They “hovered over us,” he said, “scanned us, and we saw a green flash,” then the helicopters rose and began firing.

For this particular nightmare, war commander General David Petraeus apologized directly to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has for years fruitlessly denounced U.S. and NATO air operations that have killed Afghan civilians. When an angered Karzai refused to accept his apology, Secretary of Defense Gates, on a surprise visit to the country, apologized as well, as did President Obama. And that was that — for the Americans.

Forget for a moment what this incident tells us about a form of warfare in which helicopter pilots, reasonably close to the ground (and modestly more vulnerable than pilots in planes), can’t tell boys with sticks from insurgents with guns. The crucial thing to keep in mind is that, no matter how many apologies may be offered afterwards, this can’t stop. According to the Wall Street Journal, death by helicopter is, in fact, on the rise. It’s in the nature of this kind of warfare. In fact, Afghan civilians have repeatedly, even repetitiously, been blown away from the air, with or without apologies, since 2001. Over these years, Afghan participants at wedding parties, funerals, and other rites have, for example, been wiped out with relative regularity, only sometimes with apologies to follow.

In the weeks that preceded the killing of those boys, for instance, a “NATO” — these are usually American — air attack took out four Afghan security guards protecting the work of a road construction firm and wounded a fifth, according to the police chief of Helmand Province; a similar “deeply regrettable incident” took out an Afghan army soldier, his wife, and his four children in Nangarhar Province; and a third, also in Kunar Province, wiped out 65 civilians, including women and children, according to Afghan government officials. Karzai recently visited a hospital and wept as he held a child wounded in the attack whose leg had been amputated.

The U.S. military did not weep. Instead, it rejected this claim of civilian deaths, insisting as it often does that the dead were “insurgents.” It is now — and this is typical — “investigating” the incident. General Petraeus managed to further offend Afghan officials when he visited the presidential palace in Kabul and reportedly claimed that some of the wounded children might have suffered burns not in an air attack but from their parents as punishment for bad behavior and were being counted in the casualty figures only to make them look worse.

Over the years, Afghan civilian casualties from the air have waxed and waned, depending on how much air power American commanders were willing to call in, but they have never ceased. As history tells us, air power and civilian deaths are inextricably bound together. They can’t be separated, no matter how much anyone talks about “surgical” strikes and precision bombing. It’s simply the barbaric essence, the very nature of this kind of war, to kill noncombatants.

One question sometimes raised about such casualties in Afghanistan is this: according to U.N. statistics, the Taliban (via roadside bombs and suicide bombers) kills far more civilians, including women and children, than do NATO forces, so why do the U.S.-caused deaths stick so in Afghan craws when we periodically investigate, apologize, and even pay survivors for their losses?

New York Times reporter Alissa J. Rubin puzzled over this in a recent piece and offered the following answer: “[T]hose that are caused by NATO troops appear to reverberate more deeply because of underlying animosity about foreigners in the country.” This seems reasonable as far as it goes, but don’t discount what air power adds to the foreignness of the situation.

Consider what the 20-year-old brother of two of the dead boys from the Kunar helicopter attack told the Wall Street Journal in a phone interview: “The only option I have is to pick up a Kalashnikov, RPG [rocket-propelled grenade], or a suicide vest to fight.”

Whatever the Taliban may be, they remain part of Afghan society. They are there on the ground. They kill and they commit barbarities, but they suffer, too. In our version of air “war,” however, the killing and the dying are perfectly and precisely, even surgically, separated. We kill, they die. It’s that simple. Sometimes the ones we target to die do so; sometimes others stand in their stead. But no matter. We then deny, argue, investigate, apologize, and continue. We are, in that sense, implacable.

And one more thing: since we are incapable of thinking of ourselves as either predators or Predators, no less emotionless Terminators, it becomes impossible for us to see that our air “war” on terror is, in reality, a machine for creating what we then call “terrorists.” It is part of an American Global War for Terror.

In other words, although air power has long been held up as part of the solution to terrorism, and though the American military now regularly boasts about the enemy body counts it produces, and the precision with which it does so, all of that, even when accurate, is also a kind of delusion — and worse yet, one that transforms us into Predators and Terminators. It’s not a pretty sight.

So count on this: there will be no more Top Guns. No knights of the air. No dogfights and sky-jousts. No valor. Just one-sided slaughter and targeted assassinations. That is where air power has ended up. Live with it.

The unmistakable crack-crack-crack of gunfire then erupted, and most of the men scattered. Most, but not all. Video footage shows three who never made it off the blacktop. One in an aqua shirt and dark track pants was unmistakably shot in the head. In the time it takes for the camera to pan from his body to the armored vehicles and back, he’s visibly lost a large amount of blood.

Human Rights Watch would later report that Redha Bu Hameed died of a gunshot wound to the head.

That incident, which occurred on February 18th, was one of a series of violent actions by Bahrain’s security forces that left seven dead and more than 200 injured last month. Reports noted that peaceful protesters had been hit not only by rubber bullets and shotgun pellets, but — as in the case of Bu Hameed — by live rounds.

The bullet that took Bu Hameed’s life may have been paid for by U.S. taxpayers and given to the Bahrain Defense Force by the U.S. military. The relationship represented by that bullet (or so many others like it) between Bahrain, a tiny country of mostly Shia Muslim citizens ruled by a Sunni king, and the Pentagon has recently proven more powerful than American democratic ideals, more powerful even than the president of the United States.

Just how American bullets make their way into Bahraini guns, into weapons used by troops suppressing pro-democracy protesters, opens a wider window into the shadowy relationships between the Pentagon and a number of autocratic states in the Arab world. Look closely and outlines emerge of the ways in which the Pentagon and those oil-rich nations have pressured the White House to help subvert the popular democratic will sweeping across the greater Middle East.

Bullets and Blackhawks

A TomDispatch analysis of Defense Department documents indicates that, since the 1990s, the United States has transferred large quantities of military material, ranging from trucks and aircraft to machine-gun parts and millions of rounds of live ammunition, to Bahrain’s security forces.

According to data from the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the branch of the government that coordinates sales and transfers of military equipment to allies, the U.S. has sent Bahrain dozens of “excess” American tanks, armored personnel carriers, and helicopter gunships. The U.S. has also given the Bahrain Defense Force thousands of .38 caliber pistols and millions of rounds of ammunition, from large-caliber cannon shells to bullets for handguns. To take one example, the U.S. supplied Bahrain with enough .50 caliber rounds — used in sniper rifles and machine guns — to kill every Bahraini in the kingdom four times over. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency did not respond to repeated requests for information and clarification.

In addition to all these gifts of weaponry, ammunition, and fighting vehicles, the Pentagon in coordination with the State Department oversaw Bahrain’s purchase of more than $386 million in defense items and services from 2007 to 2009, the last three years on record. These deals included the purchase of a wide range of items from vehicles to weapons systems. Just this past summer, to cite one example, the Pentagon announced a multimillion-dollar contract with Sikorsky Aircraft to customize nine Black Hawk helicopters for Bahrain’s Defense Force.

About Face

On February 14th, reacting to a growing protest movement with violence, Bahrain’s security forces killed one demonstrator and wounded 25 others. In the days of continued unrest that followed, reports reached the White House that Bahraini troops had fired on pro-democracy protesters from helicopters. (Bahraini officials responded that witnesses had mistaken a telephoto lens on a camera for a weapon.) Bahrain’s army also reportedly opened fire on ambulances that came to tend to the wounded and mourners who had dropped to their knees to pray.

“We call on restraint from the government,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in the wake of Bahrain’s crackdown. “We urge a return to a process that will result in real, meaningful changes for the people there.” President Obama was even more forceful in remarks addressing state violence in Bahrain, Libya, and Yemen: “The United States condemns the use of violence by governments against peaceful protesters in those countries, and wherever else it may occur.”

Word then emerged that, under the provisions of a law known as the Leahy Amendment, the administration was actively reviewing whether military aid to various units or branches of Bahrains security forces should be cut off due to human-rights violations. “There’s evidence now that abuses have occurred,” a senior congressional aide told the Wall Street Journal in response to video footage of police and military violence in Bahrain. “The question is specifically which units committed those abuses and whether or not any of our assistance was used by them.”

In the weeks since, Washington has markedly softened its tone. According to a recent report by Julian Barnes and Adam Entous in the Wall Street Journal, this resulted from a lobbying campaign directed at top officials at the Pentagon and the less powerful State Department by emissaries of Bahraini King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa and his allies in the Middle East. In the end, the Arab lobby ensured that, when it came to Bahrain, the White House wouldn’t support “regime change,” as in Egypt or Tunisia, but a strategy of theoretical future reform some diplomats are now calling “regime alteration.”

The six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council include (in addition to Bahrain) Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, all of which have extensive ties to the Pentagon. The organization reportedly strong-armed the White House by playing on fears that Iran might benefit if Bahrain embraced democracy and that, as a result, the entire region might become destabilized in ways inimical to U.S. power-projection policies. “Starting with Bahrain, the administration has moved a few notches toward emphasizing stability over majority rule,” according to a U.S. official quoted by the Journal. “Everybody realized that Bahrain was just too important to fail.”

It’s an oddly familiar phrase, so close to “too big to fail,” last used before the government bailed out the giant insurance firm AIG and major financial firms like Citigroup after the global economic meltdown of 2008. Bahrain is, of course, a small island in the Persian Gulf, but it is also the home of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which the Pentagon counts as a crucial asset in the region. It is widely considered a stand-in for neighboring Saudi Arabia, America’s gas station in the Gulf, and for the Washington, a nation much too important ever to fail.

The Pentagon’s relationship with the Gulf Cooperation Council countries has been cemented in several key ways seldom emphasized in American reporting on the region. Military aid is one key factor. Bahrain alone took home $20 million in U.S. military assistance last year. In an allied area, there is the rarely discussed triangular marriage between defense contractors, the Gulf states, and the Pentagon. The six Gulf nations (along with regional partner Jordan) are set to spend $70 billion on weaponry and equipment this year, and as much as $80 billion per year by 2015. As the Pentagon looks for ways to shore up the financial viability of weapons makers in tough economic times, the deep pockets of the Gulf States have taken on special importance.

Beginning last October, the Pentagon started secretly lobbying financial analysts and large institutional investors, talking up weapons makers and other military contractors it buys from to bolster their long-term financial viability in the face of a possible future drop in Defense Department spending. The Gulf States represent another avenue toward the same goal. It’s often said that the Pentagon is a “monopsony,” the only buyer in town for its many giant contractors, but that isn’t entirely true.

The Pentagon is also the sole conduit through which its Arab partners in the Gulf can buy the most advanced weaponry on Earth. By acting as a go-between, the Pentagon can ensure that the weapons manufacturers it relies on will be financially sound well into the future. A $60 billion deal with Saudi Arabia this past fall, for example, ensured that Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and other mega-defense contractors would remain healthy and profitable even if Pentagon spending goes slack or begins to shrink in the years to come. Pentagon reliance on Gulf money, however, has a price. It couldn’t have taken the Arab lobby long to explain how quickly their spending spree might come to an end if a cascade of revolutions suddenly turned the region democratic.

An even more significant aspect of the relationship between the Gulf states and the Department of Defense is the Pentagon’s shadowy archipelago of bases across the Middle East. While the Pentagon hides or downplays the existence of many of them, and while Gulf countries often conceal their existence from their own populations as much as possible, the U.S. military maintains sites in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, and of course Bahrain — homeport for the Fifth Fleet, whose 30 ships, including two aircraft carriers, patrol the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, and the Red Sea.

Doughnuts Not Democracy

Last week, peaceful protesters aligned against Bahrain’s monarchy gathered outside the U.S. embassy in Manama carrying signs reading “Stop Supporting Dictators,” “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death,” and “The People Want Democracy.” Many of them were women.

Ludovic Hood, a U.S. embassy official, reportedly brought a box of doughnuts out to the protesters. “These sweets are a good gesture, but we hope it is translated into practical actions,” said Mohammed Hassan, who wore the white turban of a cleric. Zeinab al-Khawaja, a protest leader, told Al Jazeera that she hoped the U.S. wouldn’t be drawn into Bahrain’s uprising. “We want America not to get involved, we can overthrow this regime,” she said.

The United States is, however, already deeply involved. To one side it’s given a box of doughnuts; to the other, helicopter gunships, armored personnel carriers, and millions of bullets — equipment that played a significant role in the recent violent crackdowns.

In the midst of the violence, Human Rights Watch called upon the United States and other international donors to immediately suspend military assistance to Bahrain. The British government announced that it had begun a review of its military exports, while France suspended exports of any military equipment to the kingdom. Though the Obama administration, too, has begun a review, money talks as loudly in foreign policy as it does in domestic politics. The lobbying campaign by the Pentagon and its Middle Eastern partners is likely to sideline any serious move toward an arms export cut-off, leaving the U.S. once again in familiar territory — supporting an anti-democratic ruler against his people.

“Without revisiting all the events over the last three weeks, I think history will end up recording that at every juncture in the situation in Egypt that we were on the right side of history,” President Obama explained after the fall of Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak — an overstatement, to say the least, given the administration’s mixed messages until Mubarak’s departure was a fait accompli. But when it comes to Bahrain, even such half-hearted support for change seems increasingly out of bounds.

Last year, the U.S. Navy and the government of Bahrain hosted a groundbreaking ceremony for a construction project slated to develop 70 acres of prime waterfront property in Manama. Scheduled for completion in 2015, the complex is slated to include new port facilities, barracks for troops, administrative buildings, a dining facility, and a recreation center, among other amenities, at a price tag of $580 million. “The investment in the waterfront construction project will provide a better quality of life for our Sailors and coalition partners, well into the future,” said Lieutenant Commander Keith Benson of the Navy’s Bahrain contingent at the time. “This project signifies a continuing relationship and the trust, friendship and camaraderie that exists between the U.S. and Bahraini naval forces.”

As it happens, that type of “camaraderie” seems to be more powerful than the President of the United States’ commitment to support peaceful, democratic change in the oil-rich region. After Mubarak’s ouster, Obama noted that “it was the moral force of nonviolence, not terrorism, not mindless killing, but nonviolence, moral force, that bent the arc of history toward justice once more.” The Pentagon, according to the Wall Street Journal, has joined the effort to bend the arc of history in a different direction — against Bahrain’s pro-democracy protesters. Its cozy relationships with arms dealers and autocratic Arab states, cemented by big defense contracts and shadowy military bases, explain why.

White House officials claim that their support for Bahrain’s monarchy isn’t unconditional and that they expect rapid progress on real reforms. What that means, however, is evidently up to the Pentagon. It’s notable that late last week one top U.S. official traveled to Bahrain. He wasn’t a diplomat. And he didn’t meet with the opposition. (Not even for a doughnut-drop photo op.) Secretary of Defense Robert Gates arrived for talks with King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa and Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa to convey, said Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell, “reassurance of our support.”

“I’m convinced that they both are serious about real reform and about moving forward,” Gates said afterward. At the same time, he raised the specter of Iran. While granting that the regime there had yet to foment protests across the region, Gates asserted, “there is clear evidence that as the process is protracted — particularly in Bahrain — that the Iranians are looking for ways to exploit it and create problems.”

The Secretary of Defense expressed sympathy for Bahrain’s rulers being “between a rock and hard place” and other officials have asserted that the aspirations of the pro-democracy protesters in the street were inhibiting substantive talks with more moderate opposition groups. “I think what the government needs is for everybody to take a deep breath and provide a little space for this dialogue to go forward,” he said. In the end, he told reporters, U.S. prospects for continued military basing in Bahrain were solid. “I don’t see any evidence that our presence will be affected in the near- or middle-term,” Gates added.

In the immediate wake of Gates’ visit, the Gulf Cooperation Council has conspicuously sent a contingent of Saudi troops into Bahrain to help put down the protests. Cowed by the Pentagon and its partners in the Arab lobby, the Obama administration has seemingly cast its lot with Bahrain’s anti-democratic forces and left little ambiguity as to which side of history it’s actually on.

Now, Mr. Known Knowns, etc., is duking it out on Facebook, Sarah-Palin-style, with “the chief gossip-monger of the governing class,” the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward. Amusingly enough, Woodward has just savaged Rumsfeld for pulling a Woodward in his memoir by playing fast and loose with reality. He posted his review at the Best Defense (as in, you know, a good offense), the war fightin’ blog of former Washington Post reporter and bestselling author Tom Ricks. Small world down there in Washington!

It’s enough to make you nostalgic for… well, I have no idea what.

Meanwhile, present Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, officially preparing to fade away later this year, hit the news as well. His much-hinted-at retirement now seems like the Titanic looming on the military-industrial horizon. (Take note, New York publishers and literary agents: Gates wrote a memoir the last time he faded away as CIA Director. That was back in the Neolithic Age of the elder Bush. It came out in 1996 and was titled From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War. Still, chalk that effort up to another century and start preparing the contracts for Into the Shadows, The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Two More Presidents and How They Didn’t Win Much of Anything.)

To be exact, Gates made news by going to West Point to speak to the cadets in what was plugged as the first of a number of “farewell” addresses. (The second came a week later at the Air Force Academy.) In the process, he made the headlines for quoting — somewhat oddly — General Douglas (the original fader) MacArthur.

Now, give Gates credit. The man has superb speechwriters who channel both his obvious intelligence and his sometimes-mordant sense of humor. (Hint for Hillary: When he leaves the scene, you should grab any wordsmiths he lets loose. It would help if you laced some self-deprecating humor, however borrowed, into those statements of yours that blank [fill in the country, tyrant, or protest movement] must do what you say and then that you just repeat when whoever or whatever predictably doesn’t…)

Examined Heads

…Oh sorry, I dozed off. What was I saying?

Something about old soldiers?

Anyway, here was the eye-popping quote that everyone picked up and highlighted from Gates’s address: “But in my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”

“Have his head examined”: strong words indeed, not to say strong advice for his successor! As quoted, it did sound like a late-in-term awakening on America’s wars. After all, the Secretary of Defense had to know that it would be the money paragraph, the one reporters would carry off, in a speech significantly about other matters.

Quoted by itself, it also had to seem like a mix of a mea culpa, a j’accuse aimed at his former boss, President George W. Bush, and his predecessor Rumsfeld, and a never-again statement about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan he’s been overseeing since 2006 and, in the case of Afghanistan, expanding since 2008.

Those four words from MacArthur seem to tell the only tale worth telling. Supreme Commander, southwest Pacific area, during World War II, “emperor” of occupied Japan, and commander of United Nations forces in the Korean War until cashiered by President Harry Truman, MacArthur later urged President John F. Kennedy not to get involved in a “land war on mainland Asia” — that is, in Vietnam.

As Christian Science Monitor reporter Brad Knickerbocker typically wrote, Gates’s “recollection of Gen. MacArthur’s famous warning — given to President John F. Kennedy in 1961 as the U.S. buildup in Vietnam was beginning — was a sober message for the young men and women about to become the next generation of U.S. military commanders.” Gates, in other words, was citing a “famous” example of how MacArthur used his hard-won experience in a terrible, stalemated war in Asia to try to stop another disastrous war a decade later. A flattering analogy, one might say.

There’s only one problem: it just wasn’t so. MacArthur’s “famous warning” came not in 1961, but in 1950. As Michael D. Pearlman explains in his book Truman & MacArthur: Politics, Policy, and the Hunger for Honor and Renown, MacArthur made that comment soon after North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea. He believed they were only conducting a “reconnaissance-in-force.” On June 26th, 1950, MacArthur, writes Pearlman, “was ‘astonished’ to receive directions to resist the invader. ‘I don’t believe it. I can’t understand it.’ John Foster Dulles, who favored a prompt military response, recorded him saying that anyone thinking of throwing American forces into the breech ‘ought to have his head examined.’”

MacArthur’s urge, then, was prospective, not retrospective — a gut reaction that has, in the last decades, Gates’s decades, been notably absent in Washington. There’s no way of knowing whether this was clear to Gates or his speechwriter, but under the circumstances it was an odder phrase to quote than the reporters covering his address imagined, for it highlighted an essential problem with Gates and the rest of Washington’s global wrecking crew. For them, the idea of going in has seldom been an alien one. It’s going in the wrong way that bothers them — and the problem (as Gates essentially admitted in his speech) is that you only know it’s the wrong way afterwards.

That striking quote of his, read in the context of his full speech, leaves a somewhat different taste behind. Even the assumed prohibition against future Iraq- and Afghan-style wars is more cryptic than you might imagine. The best Gates can do is this: “The odds of repeating another Afghanistan or Iraq — invading, pacifying, and administering a large third world country — may be low.” Low, but not evidently nil in a world where all options always remain “on the table.”

Of course, his real focus at West Point was on quite a different kind of conflict. He was there, in a sense, on a business trip to the future as the deliverer of prospective bad news to the future officers of the U.S. Army. Their leaders, he wanted to tell them, were about to lose an intra-service struggle for the fruits of the still-growing but increasingly embattled Pentagon budget in economically fierce times.

In terms of future funding, and so future war-fighting, their service, he was there to tell them, was not well positioned. “The Army,” he said, “also must confront the reality that the most plausible, high-end scenarios for the U.S. military are primarily naval and air engagements — whether in Asia, the Persian Gulf, or elsewhere.”

(Note to journalists in a collapsing industry: it’s not often that a long-gone beat comes back, but that’s the case here. In the 1950s, the services fought bitterly for shares of a far more limited military budget. In fact, for a funds-starved Army in the early 1960s, Vietnam was, in budgetary terms, its breakout moment. Now, budgetary war in Washington, missing-in-action for decades, is back, so the Secretary of Defense insisted.)

At West Point, but not at the Air Force Academy, think of Gates, then, as the Grim Reaper of military careers, telling the cadets that their future wouldn’t be in giant, never-to-be-used tank forces and that he was worried about just how they would indeed be employed. As if to emphasize his point, on the very same day, another fading warrior, retiring Army Chief of Staff General George W. Casey, Jr., was in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, even though dreaming of a future “sipping Coronas [and] watching sunsets on the beach in Scituate [Massachusetts].” There, he was to give his own valedictory to the Association of the U.S. Army and the “Defense Industry,” while making a most un-Gatesian plea for that same pot of gold.

Wielding an infamous Vietnam-era phrase, the general worried that unnamed government types already “think they see the light at the end of the Afghanistan tunnel” and so were clamoring to cut the Army’s budget, even though the U.S. remains in an “era of persistent conflict.” He then issued this warning:

A Nation weary of war, struggling to get its domestic economy going again, looks to cash in on a “Peace Dividend” and drastically cut back on defense. But, we’ve seen time and again that a “Peace Dividend” is, at best, a mirage and, at worst, a danger to the long-term security of our Country, our allies and our interests… [W]e simply cannot afford to dismantle this incredible Army that we have so painstakingly built over the past decade.

“We Have Never Once Gotten It Right”

Let’s assume that, after so many years overseeing the Afghan War, Gates may, in fact, be a somewhat chastened man. Perhaps there is evidence of this in his carefully articulated reluctance (as well as that of Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen) to do the American thing and throw the U.S. military at any problem — in this case, a no-fly-zone over Libya. It’s certainly evidence that General Casey and the Secretary of Defense agree on one thing: they are dealing with a “stressed and tired” force. After two wars in a single decade, with a Global War on Terror thrown in, the thought of launching yet another campaign “in another country in the Middle East” might well leave any Secretary of Defense feeling sour.

Of course, given the twin disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan, who on Earth would want to repeat them? Gates does seem, however provisionally, to be sidelining the recent Holy Grail of the U.S. Army and its key commander, General David Petraeus: counterinsurgency, or COIN. If there are to be no more major land wars in Asia, then evidently U.S. soldiers won’t be spending much time “protecting the people” and “nation-building” either.

However briefly, Gates offered the cadets a glimpse of a different war-fighting future (one that sounded eerily reminiscent of Donald Rumsfeld’s once bright and shiny vision of a faster-than-lightning, “net-centric” Army lite). “The strategic rationale for swift-moving expeditionary forces, be they Army or Marines, airborne infantry or special operations,” Gates said, “is self-evident given the likelihood of counterterrorism, rapid reaction, disaster response, or stability or security force assistance missions.”

In other words, instead of “shock and awe,” “regime change,” and long-term occupations, he now imagines “counterterror” as well as air force and naval operations against “terrorists, insurgents, militia groups, rogue states, or emerging powers” that would be so decisive and effective as to “to prevent festering problems from growing into full-blown crises which require costly — and controversial — large-scale American military intervention.”

It sounds brilliantly un-Afghan, doesn’t it?

In other words, Gates seems to have a better idea of how, in the future, to go in. What his speech lacked was any suggestion, no less analysis, of how to get out of the war that remains, for the months to come, his responsibility.

Recently, journalist Dexter Filkins wrote a review of Bing West’s new book, The Wrong War, in the New York Times. As much as anything else, it offered a devastating portrait of counterinsurgency (“a new kind of religion”) in Afghanistan as a failed faith. Filkins, who covered both Iraq and Afghanistan for the Times, concludes that counterinsurgency has failed big time in the Afghan context, creating only a “vast culture of dependency: Americans are fighting and dying, while the Afghans by and large stand by and do nothing to help them.” Gates may well agree.

Filkins also seems unconvinced that slipping more COINs in the Afghan slot machine will improve the situation significantly. (“[N]othing short of a miracle will give [Americans] much in return.”) For all we know, Gates may agree with this, too.

Here’s the catch: nearly 10 years into our second Afghan War, Filkins simply can’t seem to imagine a way out of the failed effort, or much else but more of the same. It’s there that the discussion simply ends for him, as it does for the Secretary of Defense, as it does, generally speaking, for Washington.

Gates himself is now preparing to depart (some might say jump ship) with his war still at a boil. At West Point, he had advice galore for the next Secretary of Defense, and yet it’s striking that his speech avoided a serious look at Afghanistan and how to end his war. He was perfectly willing to offer the cadets a window into the future on a range of subjects — on almost anything, in fact, but that war.

When it came to his primary responsibility, however, all he offered was this fragment of a sentence, a reference assumedly to American contingency-based drawdown plans to remove “combat troops,” but not tens of thousands of trainers and other forces by the end of 2014: “…after large U.S. combat units are substantially drawn down in Afghanistan…” (In his subsequent address to the Air Force Academy, he denied that anything he said at West Point was an attack on “the wisdom of our involvement in Afghanistan.”)

The Secretary of Defense was clear on one thing: it’s a joke to imagine that you can predict the future trajectory of war, American-style. “And I must tell you,” he said in his second most quotable set of lines, “when it comes to predicting the nature and location of our next military engagements, since Vietnam, our record has been perfect. We have never once gotten it right, from the Mayaguez to Grenada, Panama, Somalia, the Balkans, Haiti, Kuwait, Iraq, and more — we had no idea a year before any of these missions that we would be so engaged.”

And yet he still dreams of those future “swift-moving expeditionary forces” heading towards places which will surely maintain that “perfect record.”

Of course, it’s worth remembering that not everybody got everything wrong. In response to most of those wars, there were antiwar movements, large or small, that said: wrong place, wrong time, wrong idea, get out. And not all of this happened retrospectively either. In the specific case of Iraq, for instance, an enormous antiwar movement preceded the war and offered this piece of clear advice in no uncertain terms: don’t do it!

That movement was right. The war-makers were wrong. Yet no one from that movement is taken seriously in the mainstream media or in Washington to this day.

Here’s something important to remember: Vietnam did not start out as “Vietnam,” nor Iraq as “Iraq,” nor Afghanistan as “Afghanistan.” The fabulous dreams of doing it right always precede the horrific wars and, time after time, those in power never seem to feel MacArthur’s urge not to do it. Somehow, they never imagine that, sooner or later, disaster and blowback will be in the offing, though based on recent history that’s the only reasonable prediction to make in such circumstances.

Almost a decade after we invaded Afghanistan and “triumphed,” our latest “wise men” — in Washington and in the media — are still at a loss. The inability to win or be reasonably successful over so many years has, by now, penetrated almost, but not quite, never quite, to the core, leaving them bereft of solutions, except for continuing without serious hope. And when it comes to this, too, for those who remember Vietnam, there’s nothing new under the sun.

Unexamined Heads

The problem isn’t that no one can predict the next war. It’s that so many heads in Washington go unexamined. As a result, our leaders are desperately behind the learning curve of Americans generally.

Perhaps this is the moment to offer a simple future lesson for the Secretary of Defense — if not the one who will leave office in 2011 with the Afghan War still roaring along, then the next one — and here it is: it doesn’t really matter whether you go in big with tanks and counterinsurgency-style nation-building on the brain or small with a counterterror-lite footprint backed by air power.

The issue Gates, like his peers, still focuses on is how to go in better. The issue that needs to be focused on isn’t the “how to” but the going in.

The lesson that Washington still seems incapable of drawing from its endless experience of such wars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is this: don’t go in, because the Age of Intervention is over.

It really doesn’t matter whether ours is “the finest military in the world,” as Gates assured the cadets, or “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known” as our presidents have taken to saying. It doesn’t matter that the U.S. Army is battle-hardened and that it has years of counterinsurgency experience under its belt. It doesn’t matter whether we favor the Navy and the Air Force over the Army in our future wars. What matters is going to war. What matters is the illusion that military power is our key problem-solver, our go-to position of choice.

It’s time, once and for all, to lock the gates. It’s time to use the U.S. military only in the genuine defense of this country.

It doesn’t seem like the hardest lesson in human history to grasp, but it has been: don’t go in. This isn’t a utopian’s recipe, but a realist’s. You just have to remind yourself that your intervention will never turn out the way you fantasize or plan, no matter what your fantasies or plans may be.

Let me say it one more time because I know no one’s listening: don’t do it.

Afterward, write your 832-page books, enjoy your honors, duke it out with journalists, but when you’re Secretary of Defense, your job is to defend America against the urge to intervene. Intervention doesn’t work. Not in the long run, often not in the short one either. Not these days. Not at all.

Your job is somehow, in a Washington that can’t imagine such a thing, to turn ever again into never again.