Soldiers are political scientists. No-one is more interested...in what they are asked to die for...no-one is closer to the heart of the people than soldiers are. When the people rise up, it is the soldiers who are always first to the front ranks.
This quote, from Mark Jones, precedes one essay chapter in the Stan Goff book Full-Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century.
Stan Goff, now an occasional contributor at HuffPo, was a member of the Armed Forces from 1970 through 1996, and a master sergeant in Special Forces, including Rangers and Delta Force.
As an ex-military author and political scientists, he knows whereof he speaks.
For a brief time in 1994 I acted as the shadow de facto dictator of a portion of northeastern Haiti. With the possible exception of my first marriage, I have never been more ill-prepared for any task...When it was all over, I ended up in meetings where I would introduce myself by saying, "Hi, I'm a drunk named Stan."
So begins Full Spectrum Disorder, a rollicking, intellectual drive through black operations, war science, dialectical materialism and history. Some of the critics of this book have called it unfocused, including one Amazon reviewer who was moved by Goff's staccato style to opine "he kind of leaves the reader hanging on to his shirt-tails as he bounces around."
But this book is not a linear narrative, as we have come to expect from so many military memoirs; it is better read as a collection of essays. Goff explores context, history, and meaning, moving backward and forward in time in order to tease out the repeated elements of imperialism, organizational stupidity, and systems thinking that drive his points home.
I think the most vocal critics of Goff's genre-busting style in this book simply failed to read the Introduction:
Even scientists and academics are frequent prey to the delusion that reality is reducible...That lack of reducibility is my excuse for not writing something as conclusive as an English paper or a master's thesis here....Academics are obliged to use a barrage of citations and other appeals to authority to buttress their case, and in that process risk becoming so arcane no one wants to deal with it. I'm not anti-intellectual, or even anti-academic, but I am not an academic.
This is a book that functions on many levels: as an expose of some of the political excesses carried out by the Special Operations community in he last 50 years (including operations in South America that were about propping up democratic facades and counterinsurgency but covered as being about narcotics control); as a nuanced look at the history of the North Korea / South Korea split; as a nonpartisan critique of both the Clinton and Bush administrations from the perspective of a soldier asked to implement their shadowy policies in faraway places; as a denunciation of neoconservative wet-dreams about military hardware and theory; and perhaps most cogently, as a call for the end of the Unwinnable Iraq Quagmire.
It's hard to encapsulate the diversity of topics offered up in this book; but a selection of choice quotes should give the potential a good reader of the types of statements Goff is making:
There is a naive and dangerous faith among people of good will in the churches and coffehouses and campuses of America and Europe that 'righteousness' will win out. Failing to grasp the full context of the nonviolent struggle against the British colonialism in India and against Jim Crowe in the U.S., where neither could have happened except against the backdrop of a well-armed socialist bloc, there is an ahistorical faith in nonviolent resistance combined with moral imperialism that leads progressives to distance themselves from aggressive armed resistance....the charm of the Zapatistas has been their refusal to engage in any but defensive operations and their scrupulous avoidance of Marxist rhetoric. They have become the "good guerrillas" as opposed to the FARC-EP in Colombia, who are now seen by limousine liberals and parlor socialists as the "bad guerrillas".
In another section Goff shows how the Zapatistas, as a result of their choice of nonviolence, have been essentially cordoned off and corralled into an area where they are separated from their popular base and are politically neutered, while the Feurzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombianas-Ejercito del Pueblo have won military victory after military victory against the Columbian government.
In the essay "Somalia: The Meanings of Bakara", Goff takes on the challenge of reconstructing the Mogadishu incident (famously propagandized in the DoD-approved Blackhawk Down), and his thoughts here are illuminating, if a bit frightening (he was attached to the ill-fated Task Force Ranger, but reassigned just prior to the incident).
Here's just one of many passages that accurately portray how Goff feels about our current administration:
On March 20, 2003, the rich coke-snortin' frat-fuck from Texas declared the initiation of U.S. aggression against Iraq, now framed by the ministry of propaganda (aka CNN) as the U.S. War Against Saddam.
Another gem:
Rumsfield is a narcissist who has convinced himself he is a military genius. His boss is a preppy pretending to be a cowboy, and he is a techno-geek pretending he is the new Clausewitz.
On elections:
There is no possibility--politically--in the current situation in the U.S., of any viable presidential contender defying Israel.
But despite an in-depth analysis of the Iraq situation (unwinnable from Day 1, according to Goff, and further confused by the political instability between Turkey and Kurdistan in the north), insight into North Korea, and the world of special operations and black ops as political instruments, the most interesting tidbits in this strange book were the parts where Goff, an avowed socialist, levels criticism at progressives, as in these passages:
Support for the Zapatistas has been so broad precisely because the EZLN has limited its objectives and avoided combat. Liberals and anarchists are down with that. For entirely different reasons, each of these constituencies oppose any contest for state power. This is lethal when it is the state that is bent on your extermination. And it's why I'm not and never will be a progressive.
There was already an ironclad guarantee of a domestic economic-then-political crises when Bush captured the 2000 elections through a judicial fiat. Then 9/11 gave the Bush administration the pretext to launch a bold venture to restructure the entire global architecture by arms. The gamble was that the seizure of Iraqi (then Saudi if necessary) oil would create the conditions for a fresh upwave of imperial accumulation...and the leverage to eventually strangle China.
The center cannot hold and the profound weakness of the whole system doesn't seem the least bit obscure. I am still bowled over the timidity of many so-called progressives, especially when that timidity is in the face of what is so obviously a system stealing pieces of its own foundation to fix its collapsing roof.
(emphasis added)
Ultimately, all these disparate topics and thoughts of Goff's, taken together, point to the Iraq war as the latest conclusion of the centuries-long march of unsustainable capitalistic "progress"; but Goff doesn't simply lay all the blame on the "evils of capitalism", instead making close arguments about the stability of the total global economic-political system (including enough talk of entropy and equilibrium to satisfy a hardcore hobbyist like myself).
You may not like his conclusions, but I can almost guarantee that, as a thoughtful person, you'll be provoked to thinking. And that's more than I can say for a lot of what passes as "literature" these days.
I mean, here's an ex-special forces guy, who's done horribly dark things in the jungles of South American banana republics, and has now come home to write books and lecture, and guess what: he's not only denouncing the neoconservative movement and its military imperialism, he's also challenging progressives directly, asking, in effect, for them to answer this question, which I'll quote directly from the book in the form of a statement:
When we judge the armed struggle of the left around the world, we need to be mindful of Sherman's statement that "war is cruel and cannot be refined." No commander worth a damn can ever measure decisions using the ethical tools of peacetime. Either the struggle is worth a war or it is not. We can't have it both ways. The political goal is paramount, not the accolades of pacifists in the imperial centers, not the approval of media, not the blessings of those who should be allies but are not there and cannot comprehend the urgency that sometimes leads to terrible mistakes, sometimes even crimes.