General H. R. McMaster — mindlessly — bleated perpetual war's trumpet in Foreign Affairs

© 2020 Peter Free

 

02 July 2020

 

 

What do you do with a college student who is so metaphorically intellectually inept . . .

 

. . . that he cannot reliably even tie his own shoes?

 

In the United States, you give these dunces four stars.

 

And have them start (and maintain) wars all over the place.

 

 

General and National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster . . .

 

. . .  as an example of such.

 

(Dr-General-Advisor) McMaster holds a history PhD from Princeton.

 

His doctorate sadly presents a good cover for McMaster's failed strategic mind.

 

This example also indicates how useless even elite universities can be, when it comes to actually honing weak intellects.

 

 

First, an observation

 

American military officers like to substitute educational degrees for their generally shared inability to think on the basis of gathered evidence.

 

This is not an unusual practice in our purportedly great nation.

 

Appearance, increasingly, is all that matters.

 

Many four stars are lauded for being scholarly warriors. As if being a "scholarly" American warmonger is not a contradiction in applied strategic and moral terms.

 

If someone with both brain and significant historical knowledge reads what these consistently obfuscating people write, these authors turn out to be like the obtuse dummies — whom talented professors genuinely hate coming to their office hours.

 

What does one do with a high-achieving moron in those educational settings?

 

Pass them on?

 

 

Herbert Raymond McMaster is (we now know) . . .

 

. . . one of these (for all practical purposes) ineducable people.

 

He recently published one of the most substance-lacking pieces that I have ever read in — the Ruling Establishment's propaganda-dispensing journal — Foreign Affairs.

 

General McMaster's piece is so ridden with the US Military's fondness for proffering unsubstantiated drivel, that one has difficulty finding something solid enough in it to rebut.

 

 

My own professors would have cringed at McMaster's airy twaddle

 

The General opines that:

 

 

[M]any Americans . . . believe that retrenchment would not only avoid the costs of military operations overseas but also improve U.S. security.

 

[This] reflects strong emotions rather than an accurate understanding of what went wrong in the wars that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

 

[R]etrenchers fail to acknowledge the hidden costs of their recommendations.

 

[R]etrenchment advocates ignore the consequences of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011 and of the broader disengagement from the Middle East that accompanied it.

 

Those steps ceded space to jihadi terrorists and Iranian proxies . . . creating an ideal environment for the return of sectarian violence and the establishment of the self-declared caliphate of the Islamic State . . . .

 

Retrenchers ignore the fact that the risks and costs of inaction are sometimes higher than those of engagement. In August 2013, the Syrian regime used poison gas to kill more than 1,400 innocent civilians . . . .

 

Retrenchment advocates are relatively unconcerned about enemies gaining strength overseas . . . they assume that the United States’ geographic blessings . . . will keep Americans safe.

 

The humanitarian, security, and political consequences of the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen have reached well beyond the Middle East and South Asia.

 

[T]he United States’ withdrawal of support for its partners on the frontlines against jihadi terrorists could generate staggering costs if the terrorists succeed in penetrating U.S. borders as they did on September 11, 2001.

 

© 2020 H. R. McMaster, The Retrenchment Syndrome: A Response to “Come Home, America?”, Foreign Affairs (July-August 2020) (excerpts)

 

 

This is typically American leadership bullshit

 

US military strategy goes like this:

 

 

Create a geopolitical problem.

 

Lie to support military intervention.

 

Kill locals with skill and enthusiasm.

 

Pretend that our original problem-creation did not create the resistance that arises to our heavy-footed trespass.

 

Insist that the — foreseeable counterreaction to the problem that we have just created — can only be fixed by continuing to create the original difficulty.

 

And then repeat:

 

Fear-monger (without limit)

 

to demonstrate that

 

other self-created situations

 

will quickly spread

 

from there to here

 

(creating horror in our Homeland) —

 

unless

 

immediately clipped

 

at the foreign location

 

where the made-up

 

or

 

existentially exaggerated

 

threat started.

 

 

Not content with his raindrop-deep simulated thinking

 

General McMaster accuses his critics of lacking:

 

 

"an accurate understanding of what went wrong in the wars that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks."

 

 

Yes, indeed.

 

When I'm the evidence-ignoring dumbshit, it is (evidently) wise to accuse my critics of being the same.

 

 

Andrew Bacevich took exception to McMaster's happy-drool

 

An irritated and consistently retrenchment-minded (also Princeton history-doctorate-holding) Professor Bacevich countered McMaster with this:

 

 

The purpose of McMaster’s essay is to discredit “retrenchers”—that’s his term for anyone advocating restraint as an alternative to the madcap militarism that has characterized U.S. policy in recent decades.

 

Substituting retrenchment for restraint is a bit like referring to conservatives as fascists or liberals as pinks: It reveals a preference for labeling rather than serious engagement. In short, it’s a not very subtle smear, as indeed is the phrase madcap militarism.

 

Yet if not madcap militarism, what term or phrase accurately describes post-9/11 U.S. policy?

 

McMaster never says. It’s among the many matters that he passes over in silence.

 

As a result, his essay amounts to little more than a dodge, carefully designed to ignore the void between what assertive “American global leadership” was supposed to accomplish back when we fancied ourselves the sole superpower and what actually ensued.

 

[T]here is a Trumpian quality to [his] line of argument: broad claims supported by virtually no substantiating evidence.

 

© 2020 Andrew J. Bacevich, Madcap militarism: H.R. McMaster’s dishonest attack on restraint, Responsible Statecraft (30 June 2020) (excerpts)

 

 

The moral? — General McMaster is the perfect manifestation of . . .

 

. . . top-ranking US military (education-flaunting) vacuity.

 

These power-wielding generals are the intellectual sub-mediocrities, who sell and carry out the American Military Industrial Complex's profit-seeking wishes.

 

Save yourself the patience-testing torture of trying to follow their vacuum-filled inanities.

 

Jargon-rich military prattle fails as an intellectual medium.

 

To discover what is really going on and why, follow the money.