Americans have long
believed that the very notion of empire is an offense against our
democratic heritage, yet in recent months, these two words --
American empire -- have been on everyone's lips. At this moment of
unprecedented economic and military strength, the leaders of the
United States have embraced imperial ambitions openly. How did we
get to this point? And what lies down the road?
Read more>>
The End of (Military) History?
The United States, Israel, and the Failure of the Western Way of War
By Andrew Bacevich
Listen to the TomCast Interview with Andrew Bacevich:
“In watching the flow of events over the past decade or so, it is
hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened
in world history.” This sentiment, introducing the essay that made
Francis Fukuyama a household name, commands renewed attention today,
albeit from a different perspective.
Developments during the 1980s, above all the winding down of the
Cold War, had convinced Fukuyama that the “end of history” was at
hand. “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea,” he wrote in 1989, “is evident… in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.”
Today the West no longer looks quite so triumphant. Yet events
during the first decade of the present century have delivered history
to another endpoint of sorts. Although Western liberalism may retain
considerable appeal, the Western way of war has run its course.
Death on Your Doorstep
What Sebastian Junger and Restrepo Won’t Tell You About War
By Nick Turse
I’ve never heard a shot fired in anger. But I might know a little bit more about war than Sebastian Junger.
Previously best known as the author of The Perfect Storm, Junger, a New York-based reporter who has covered African wars and the Kosovo killing fields, and Tim Hetherington,
an acclaimed film-maker and photographer with extensive experience in
conflict zones, heard many such shots, fired by Americans and Afghans,
as they made their new documentary film Restrepo
-- about an isolated combat outpost named after a beloved medic killed
in a firefight. There, they chronicled the lives of U.S. soldiers from
Battle Company, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment of the 173rd
Airborne Brigade, during a tour of duty in eastern Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley.
Why Are We in Afghanistan?
As Petraeus Takes Over, Could Success Be Worse Than Failure?
By Tom Engelhardt
July 12, 2011, Washington, D.C. -- In triumphant testimony
before a joint committee of Congress in which he was greeted on both
sides of the aisle as a conquering hero, Gen. David Petraeus announced
the withdrawal this month of the first 1,000 American troops from
Afghanistan. “This is the beginning of the pledge the president made
to the American people to draw down the surge troops sent in since
2009,” he said, adding, “and yet let me emphasize, as I did when I took
this job, that our commitment to the Afghan government and people is an enduringone.”
Last July, when Gen. Petraeus replaced the discredited Gen. Stanley McChrystal as Afghan war commander, he was hailed as an “American hero” by Senator John McCain, as “the most talented officer of his generation” by the New Yorker’s George Packer, and as “the nation's premier warrior-diplomat” by Karen DeYoung and Craig Whitlock of the Washington
Post -- typical of the comments of both Republicans and Democrats,
liberals and conservatives at the time. Petraeus then promised that the
United States was in Afghanistan “to win.”
Counterinsurgency Down for the Count in Afghanistan…
But the War Machine Grinds On and On and On
By Ann Jones
President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy isn’t working. So said a
parade of Afghanistan watchers during the flap over war commander
General Stanley McChrystal’s firing. But what does that phrase, so
often in the media these days, really mean? And if the strategy really
isn’t working, just how can you tell?
The answers to these questions raise even more important ones,
including: Why, when President Obama fires an insubordinate and failing
general, does he cling to his failing war policy?
And if our strategy isn’t working, what about the enemy’s? And if
nothing much is working, why does it still go on nonstop this way?
Let’s take these one at a time.
BP in the Gulf -- The Persian Gulf
How an Oil Company Helped Destroy Democracy in Iran
By Stephen Kinzer
To frustrated Americans who have begun boycotting BP: Welcome to the club. It's great not to be the only member any more!
Does boycotting BP really make sense? Perhaps not. After all, many
BP filling stations are actually owned by local people, not the
corporation itself. Besides, when you're filling up at a Shell or
ExxonMobil station, it's hard to feel much sense of moral triumph.
Nonetheless, I reserve my right to drive by BP stations. I started
doing it long before this year's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
America Detached from War
Bush’s Pilotless Dream, Smoking Drones, and Other Strange Tales from the Crypt
By Tom Engelhardt
Admittedly, before George W. Bush had his fever dream, the U.S. had
already put its first unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drone
surveillance planes in the skies over Kosovo in the late 1990s. By November 2001, it had armed them with missiles and was flying them over Afghanistan.
In November 2002, a Predator drone would loose a Hellfire missile
on a car in Yemen, a country with which we weren’t at war. Six
suspected al-Qaeda members, including a suspect in the bombing of the
destroyer the USS Cole would be turned into twisted metal and ash -- the first “targeted killings” of the American robotic era.
BP-Style Extreme Energy Nightmares to Come
Four Scenarios for the Next Energy Mega-Disaster
By Michael Klare
On June 15th, in their testimony
before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the chief executives of
America’s leading oil companies argued that BP’s Deepwater Horizon
disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was an aberration -- something that
would not have occurred with proper corporate oversight and will not
happen again once proper safeguards are put in place. This is
fallacious, if not an outright lie. The Deep Horizon explosion was the
inevitable result of a relentless effort to extract oil from ever
deeper and more hazardous locations. In fact, as long as the industry
continues its relentless, reckless pursuit of “extreme energy”
-- oil, natural gas, coal, and uranium obtained from geologically,
environmentally, and politically unsafe areas -- more such calamities
are destined to occur.
Call the Politburo, We’re in Trouble
Entering the Soviet Era in America
By Tom Engelhardt
[Note for American Empire Project blog readers:Tom Engelhardt here. Steve Fraser and I started, and now co-edit, Metropolitan Books’ American Empire Project. I also run the website TomDispatch.com. If you’ve spent time at the AEP blog, you’ve undoubtedly been reading some of the pieces I regularly write there on Washington and its wars, as well as those of other authors you know well from the AEP series, including Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Michael Klare, and Andrew Bacevich. My new book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, is being published this week. From garrisoning the planet to drone warfare, “collateral damage” to Obama’s Afghan “surges,” it explores the new norm of American life: unending war and preparations for the same. You can read the first review of it -- Pepe Escobar’s “Infinite War” at Asia Times -- by clicking here.
Of the book, Juan Cole, who runs the well-known Informed Comment website, says, “Tom Engelhardt is among our most trenchant critics of American perpetual war. Like I. F. Stone in the 1960s, he has an uncanny ability to ferret out and see clearly the ugly truths hidden in government reports and statistics. No cynic, he always measures the sordid reality against a bright vision of an America that lives up to its highest ideals.”
If There Was Ever a Moment to Seize
Will Obama Stand Up to Big Energy in Deeds as Well as Words?
By Bill McKibben
Here's the president on March 31st, announcing his
plan to lift a longstanding moratorium on offshore drilling: "Given our
energy needs, in order to sustain economic growth and produce jobs, and
keep our businesses competitive, we are going to need to harness
traditional sources of fuel even as we ramp up production of new
sources of renewable, homegrown energy."
Here he is on May 26th,
as political pressure starts to really build over the hole in the
bottom of the sea that BP somehow seems unable to plug: "We're not
going to be able to sustain this kind of fossil fuel use. The planet
can't sustain it." Still, he added quickly, there's no need for any
dramatics: “We’re not going to transition out of oil next year or 10
years from now.”
Graduates of the class of 2010, I’m honored to have been asked to address you today, but I would not want to be you.
I graduated in 1966 on a gloriously sunny day; then again, it was a
sunnier moment in this country. We were, after all, still surfing the
crest of post-World War II American wealth and productivity. The first
oil crisis of 1973 wasn’t even on the horizon. I never gave a thought
to the gas I put in the tank of the used Volkswagen "bug" I bought with
a friend my last year in college. In those days, the oil for that gas
had probably been pumped out of an American well on land (and not
dumped in the Gulf of Mexico). Gas, in any case, was dirt cheap. No one thought about it -- or Saudi Arabia (unless they were working for an oil company or the State Department).
Citizen Alioune
How Not to Deal with Muslims in America
By Stephan Salisbury
Alioune Niass, the Sengalese Muslim vendor who first spotted the now
infamous smoking SUV in Times Square and alerted police, is no hero.
If it were not for the Timesof
London, we would not even know of his pivotal role in the story. No
mainstream American newspaper bothered to mention or profile Niass, who
peddles framed photographs of celebs and the Manhattan skyline. None of
the big television stations interviewed him.
The Relentless Pursuit of Extreme Energy
A New Oil Rush Endangers the Gulf of Mexico and the Planet
By Michael Klare
Yes, the oil spewing up from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico in staggering quantities could prove one of the great ecological disasters of human history. Think of it, though, as just the prelude to the Age ofTough Oil,
a time of ever increasing reliance on problematic, hard-to-reach energy
sources. Make no mistake: we’re entering the danger zone. And brace
yourself, the fate of the planet could be at stake.
It may never be possible to pin down the precise cause of the
massive explosion that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on
April 20th, killing 11 of its 126 workers. Possible culprits include a
faulty cement plug in the undersea oil bore and a disabled cutoff
device known as a blow-out preventer.
Inadequate governmental oversight of safety procedures undoubtedly also
contributed to the disaster, which may have been set off bya combination of defective equipment and human error.
But whether or not the immediate trigger of the explosion is ever fully
determined, there can be no mistaking the underlying cause: a
government-backed corporate drive to exploit oil and natural gas
reserves in extreme environments under increasingly hazardous operating
conditions.
Obama’s Flailing Wars
A Study in BP-Style “Pragmatism”
By Tom Engelhardt
On stage, it would be farce. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, it’s bound to play out as tragedy.
Less than two months ago, Barack Obama flew into
Afghanistan for six hours -- essentially to read the riot act to Afghan
President Hamid Karzai, whom his ambassador had only months before termed “not
an adequate strategic partner.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral
Mike Mullen followed within a day to deliver his own “stern message.”
While still on Air Force One, National Security Adviser James Jones
offered reporters a version of the tough talk Obama was bringing with
him. Karzai would later see one of Jones’s comments and find it insulting. Brought to his attention as well would be a newspaper article that quoted
an anonymous senior U.S. military official as saying of his
half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, a reputedly corrupt powerbroker in the
southern city of Kandahar: “I'd like him out of there... But there's
nothing that we can do unless we can link him to the insurgency, then
we can put him on the [target list] and capture and kill him." This
was tough talk indeed.
Glenn Beck, America’s Historian Laureate
The Tea Party’s Guide to American Exceptionalism (It Is All About Race)
By Greg Grandin
Americans, it’s been said, learn geography when they go to war.
Now, it seems, many get their history when they go to a Tea Party rally
or tune in to Glenn Beck.
History is a “battlefield of ideas,” as Beck recently put it, while
looking professorial in front of a blackboard filled with his trademark
circled names connected by multidirectional arrows, his hands covered
with chalk dust. In this struggle, movement historians like Beck go
all in, advancing a comprehensive interpretation of American history
meant to provide analytical clarity to believers and potential converts
alike. As paranoid as it may be, this history is neither radical nor
revisionist, since the Tea Party activists and their fellow travelers
pluck at some of the major chords of American nationalism.
Afghan Escalation Funding
More War, Fewer Jobs, Poor Excuses
By David Swanson
Isn’t it time to call what Congress will soon vote on by its right name: war escalation funding?
Early in 2009, President Barack Obama escalated the
war in Afghanistan with 21,000 "combat" troops, 13,000 "support"
troops, and at least 5,000 mercenaries, without any serious debate in
Congress or the corporate media. The President sent the first 17,000
troops prior to developing any plan for Afghanistan, leaving the
impression that escalation was, somehow, an end in itself. Certainly
it didn't accomplish anything else, a conclusion evident in downbeat
reports on the Afghan war situation issued this month by both the Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon.
Blood or Treasure?
Obama's Crucial Choice in the Middle East
By Ira Chernus
Writing about U.S. Middle East policy used to be a boring job. You'd
start out with "The U.S. supports Israel's stand on..." and then just
fill in the details. No longer. Many pundits claim to smell the winds
of policy change blowing from the White House. Every word about the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the president or his advisors is now
parsed by journalists like so many soothsayers studying oracle bones.
Mr. Obama himself remains as cryptic as those bones and as open to
divergent interpretations. At a recent press
conference, he cautioned that "the two sides may say to themselves,
'We are not prepared to resolve these issues no matter how much
pressure the United States brings to bear.'"
After a week away, here's my advice: in news terms, you can afford
to take a vacation. When I came back last Sunday, New Orleans was
bracing for tough times (again). BP, a drill-baby-drill oil company
that made $6.1 billion in the first quarter of this year and lobbied against "new, stricter safety rules" for offshore drilling, had experienced an offshore disaster for which ordinary Americans are going to pay through the nose (again).
News photographers were gearing up for the usual shots of oil-covered
wildlife (again). A White House -- admittedly Democratic, not
Republican -- had deferred to an energy company's needs, accepted its
PR and lies, and then moved too slowly when disaster struck (again).
History's Mad Hatters
The Strange Career of Tea Party Populism
By Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman
On a winter’s day in Boston in 1773, a rally of thousands at Faneuil
Hall to protest a new British colonial tax levied on tea turned into an
iconic moment in the pre-history of the American Revolution. Some of
the demonstrators -- Sons of Liberty, they called themselves -- left
the hall and boarded the Dartmouth, a ship carrying tea, and dumped it overboard.
One of the oddest features of the Boston Tea Party, from which our
current crop of Tea Party populists draw their inspiration, is that a
number of those long-ago guerilla activists dressed up as Mohawk
Indians, venting their anger by emitting Indian war cries, and carrying
tomahawks to slice open the bags of tea. This masquerade captured a
fundamental ambivalence that has characterized populist risings ever
since. After all, if in late eighteenth century America, the Indian
already functioned as a symbol of an oppressed people and so proved
suitable for use by others who felt themselves put upon, it was also
the case that the ancestors of those Boston patriots had managed to
exterminate a goodly portion of the region’s Native American population
in pursuit of their own self-aggrandizement.
A Middle East Peace That Could Happen (But Won’t)
In Washington-Speak, “Palestinian State” Means “Fried Chicken”
By Noam Chomsky
The fact that the Israel-Palestine conflict grinds on without
resolution might appear to be rather strange. For many of the world’s
conflicts, it is difficult even to conjure up a feasible settlement.
In this case, it is not only possible, but there is near universal
agreement on its basic contours: a two-state settlement along the
internationally recognized (pre-June 1967) borders -- with “minor and
mutual modifications,” to adopt official U.S. terminology before
Washington departed from the international community in the mid-1970s.
The basic principles have been accepted by virtually the entire
world, including the Arab states (who go on to call for full
normalization of relations), the Organization of Islamic States
(including Iran), and relevant non-state actors (including Hamas). A
settlement along these lines was first proposed at the U.N. Security
Council in January 1976 by the major Arab states. Israel refused to
attend the session. The U.S. vetoed the resolution, and did so again
in 1980. The record at the General Assembly since is similar.
Blood
and Oil
