Here’s the latest news from Congress, in case you’ve been in Afghanistan for the last couple of weeks.  A debate about slashing the federal budget is now upon us, while fears of a possible government shutdown as spring approaches are on the rise.  The Republican leadership of the House of Representatives originally picked $40 billion as its target figure for cuts to the as-yet-not-enacted 2011 budget. That was the gauntlet it threw down to the Obama administration, only to find its own proposal slashed to bits by the freshman class of that body’s conservative majority.

They insisted on adhering to a Republican Pledge to America vow to cut $100 billion from the budget.  With that figure back on the table, Democrats are gasping, while pundits are predicting widespread pain in the land, including the possible loss of at least 70,000 jobs “as government aid to cops, teachers, and research is slashed.”

In the meantime, the Obama administration has hustled its own entry in the cut-and-burn sweepstakes into place, leaving Democrats again gasping.  Its plan calls for ending or trimming more than 200 federal programs next year.  It also reportedly offers cuts adding up to $1.1 trillion over a decade and puts in place a “five-year freeze on domestic programs [that] would reduce spending in that category to the lowest level, measured against the economy, since President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office in 1961.”

It all sounds daunting, and the muttering is only beginning about “entitlement” programs — Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — that have yet to be touched. 

Which reminds me: Didn’t I mention Afghanistan?

If so, how fortunate, because there’s a perfectly obvious path toward that Republican goal of $100 billion.  If we were to embark on it, there would be even more cuts to follow and — believe it or not — they wouldn’t be all that painful, provided we did one small thing: change our thinking about making war.

After all, according to the Pentagon, the cost of the Afghan War in 2012 will be almost $300 million a day or, for all 365 of them, $107.3 billion.  Like anything having to do with American war-fighting, however, such figures regularly turn out to be undercounts.  Other estimates for our yearly war costs there go as high as $120-$160 billion.

And let’s face it, it’s a war worth ending fast.  Almost a decade after the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. military is still fruitlessly engaged in possibly the stupidest frontier war in our history, thousands of miles from home in the backlands of the planet.  It’s just the sort of dumb conflict that has, historically, tended to drive declining imperial powers around the bend, just the sort — in the very same country — that helped do in the Soviet Union.  And though news from that war remains remarkably grim, were we by some miracle to win, for hundreds of billions of dollars we would have gained tenuous control over the fifth poorest, second most corrupt, and premier narco-state on the planet.  Al-Qaeda, on the other hand, would undoubtedly still be happily ensconced in the Pakistani tribal border areas with a range of superbly failed states available elsewhere for exploitation.

There’s genuine money to be slashed simply by bringing the troops home, but okay, I hear you.  You live in Washington and you can’t bear to give up that war, lock, stock, and barrel. 

I understand.  Really, I do.  So let’s just pretend that we’re part of that “moderate” and beleaguered House leadership and really only want to go after $40 billion in the 2011 federal budget. 

In that case, here’s an idea! We’ve been training the Afghan military and police forces for almost a decade now, dumping an estimated $29-billion-plus into the endeavor, only to find that, unlike the Taliban, our Afghans generally prefer not to fight and love to desert.  What if the Obama administration were simply to stop the training program?  What if we weren’t to spend the $11.6 billion slated for this year, or the up-to-$12.8 billion being discussed for next year, or the $6 billion or more annually thereafter to create a security force of nearly 400,000 Afghans that we’ll have to pay for into eternity, since the Afghan government is essentially broke?

What if, instead, we went cold turkey on our obsession with training Afghans?  For one thing, you’d promptly wipe out more than a quarter of that $40 billion the House leadership wants cut and many more billions for years to come.  (And that doesn’t even take into account all the saveable American dollars going down the tubes in Afghanistan — a recent report from the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction suggested it adds up to $12 billion for the Afghan Army alone — in graft, corruption, and pure incompetence.)

Think about it this way: Are we actually safer if we get rid of police, firefighters, and teachers here in the U.S., while essentially hiring hordes of police and military personnel to secure Afghanistan?  I suspect you know how most Americans would answer that question.

Dumb Intelligence Runs Rampant

Here’s another way to approach both those $40 billion and $100 billion targets.  Start with the budget for the labyrinthine U.S. Intelligence Community which is officially $80.1 billion.  That, of course, is sure to prove an undercount.  So, just for the heck of it, let’s take a wild guess and assume that the real figure probably edges closer to… $100 billion.

I know, I know, the Republican House majority will never agree to get rid of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, and neither will the Democrats.  They’ll claim that Washington would be blinded by such an act — although it’s no less reasonable to argue that, without the blinders of what we call “intelligence,” which is largely a morass of dead thinking about our world, our leaders might finally be able to see again.  Nonetheless, in the spirit of compromise with a crew that hates the “federal bureaucracy” (until the words “national security” come up), how about cutting back from 17 intelligence outfits to maybe three?  Let’s say, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency.

I’ll bet you’re talking an easy $40 to $50 billion dollars in savings right there — and the cost of the job-retraining programs for the out-of-work intelligence analysts and operatives would be minimal by comparison.

According to a Washington Post series, “Top Secret America,” here are just a few of the things that you, the taxpayer, have helped our intelligence bureaucracy do: Produce 50,000 intelligence reports annually; create the sheer redundancy of “51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, [to] track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks”; and, in the category of the monumental (as well as monumentally useless), construct “33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work…  since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings — about 17 million square feet of space.”

Take just one example: the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency which has 16,000 employees and a “black budget thought to be at least $5 billion per year.” Until now, you may not have known that such a crew was protecting your security, but you’re paying through the nose for its construction spree anyway.  Believe it or not, as Gregg Easterbrook has pointed out, it now has a gleaming new, nearly Pentagon-sized headquarters complex rising in Virginia at the cost of $1.8 billion — almost as expensive, that is, as the Freedom Tower now going up at Ground Zero in Manhattan.

Or let’s check out some smaller, distinctly choppable potatoes. Officially, America’s Iraq War is ending (even if in a Shiite-dominated state allied with Iran).  All American military personnel are, at least theoretically, to leave the country by year’s end.  Whether that happens or not, the Obama administration evidently remains convinced that it’s in our interest to prolong our effort to control that country.  As a result, the planned “civilian” presence left behind to staff the three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar citadel of an “embassy” the U.S. built in downtown Baghdad and various consular outposts will look uncomfortably like a mini-army.

As Wired.com’s Danger Room website put it recently, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq “will become a de facto general of a huge, for-hire army.”  We’re talking about 5,500 mercenaries paid to guard the 17,000 “civilians,” representing various U.S. government agencies and the State Department there.  To guard the Baghdad embassy alone — really a regional command headquarters — there will be 3,650 hired guns under contract for almost $1 billion.  The full complement of heavily armed mercenaries will operate out of “15 different sites… including 3 air hubs, 3 police training centers… and 5 Office of Security Cooperation sites.”

In 2010, USA Today estimated that the cost of operating just the monstrous Baghdad embassy was more than $1.5 billion a year.  God knows what it is now. 

What if the cost-cutters in Washington were to conclude that it was a fruitless task to try to manage the unmanageable (i.e., Iraq) and that, instead of militarizing the State Department, the U.S. should return to the business of diplomacy with a modest embassy and a consulate or two to negotiate deals, discuss matters of common interest, and hand out the odd visa.  That would represent a cost-cutting extravaganza on a small scale.  (And the same could be said for the near billion-dollar “embassy” being built in Islamabad, Pakistan, and the $790 million going into another such embassy and consulates in Afghanistan.)

Deep in the Big Muddy

It’s important to note that none of the potential cost-cutting measures I’ve mentioned touch the big palooka.  I’m talking about the Pentagon budget, a very distinctive “entitlement” program on the American landscape.  Given the news reports on “Pentagon cuts” lately, you might think that the Obama administration is taking a hatchet to the Defense Department’s funds, but think again. As defense analyst Miriam Pemberton wrote recently, “The Pentagon is following the familiar tradition of planning ambitious increases, paring them back, and calling this a cut.”  In fact, at $553 billion, the proposed Pentagon budget for 2012 actually represents a 5% increase over the already stunningly bloated 2011 version of the same.

Keep in mind that U.S. military spending equals that of the next 15 countries combined (most of them allies) and represents 47% of total global military spending.  If Washington’s mindset were different, it wouldn’t be hard to find that $100 billion the Republican House freshmen are looking for in the Pentagon budget alone — quite aside from cuts in supplemental war-fighting funds — and still be the most heavily armed nation on the planet.

And here’s my question to you: Don’t you find it odd that cuts of this potential size are so obviously available and yet, with all the raging and groaning about deficits and budget-cutting, no one who matters seems to focus on such possibilities at all?  To head down this path, Washington would need to make only the smallest of changes: it would have to begin thinking outside the war box for about a minute and 30 seconds.

Our leaders would have to conclude the obvious: that, in these last years, war hasn’t proven the best way to advance American interests.  We would have to decide that real security does not involve fighting permanently in distant lands, pursuing a “war on terror” in 75 countries, or growing the Pentagon (and the weapons-makers that go with it) year after year.

Americans would have to begin to think anew.  That’s all.  The minute we did, our financial situation would look different and for all we know, something like not-war, if not peace, might begin to break out.

Forty years ago, Americans regularly spoke about a war 7,500 miles away in Vietnam as a “quagmire.”  We were, as one protest song of that era went, “waist deep in the Big Muddy.”  Today, Afghanistan, too, looks like a quagmire, but don’t be fooled.  The real quagmire isn’t there; it’s right here in Washington D.C., that capital mythically built on a swamp.

There’s no way that thinking so old and stale, so out-of-date, can begin to take in or react adventurously to a fast-changing world.  Look at Egypt, or China, or Brazil, or India, or Turkey.  There, new thinking and new developments are blooming, but you wouldn’t know it in Washington. 

Neither $553 billion nor $80.1 billion can buy Washington a brain.  Right now, by all evidence, our leaders are still convinced that it’s their job to run the world and fight distant wars until hell freezes over.  They can’t bear to think a new thought, or take a chance, or experiment on anything, or look at our planet in a new way.  At the moment, the evidence indicates that they have the brainpower of the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz without that character’s urge for self-improvement, and it’s taking us down.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com.  His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books). You can catch him discussing war American-style and that book in a Timothy MacBain TomCast video by clicking here.

Copyright 2011 Tom Engelhardt

As we’ve watched the dramatic events in the Middle East, you would hardly know that we had a thing to do with them.  Oh yes, in the name of its War on Terror, Washington had for years backed most of the thuggish governments now under siege or anxious that they may be next in line to hear from their people.  When it came to Egypt in particular, there was initially much polite (and hypocritical) discussion in the media about how our “interests” and our “values” were in conflict, about how far the U.S. should back off its support for the Mubarak regime, and about what a “tightrope” the Obama administration was walking.  While the president and his officials flailed, the mildest of questions were raised about how much we should chide our erstwhile allies, or encourage the massed protestors, and about whether we should “take sides” (as though we hadn’t done so decisively over the last decades).

With popular cries for “democracy” and “freedom” sweeping through the Middle East, it’s curious to note that the Bush-era’s now-infamous “democracy agenda” has been nowhere in sight.  In its brief and disastrous life, it was used as a battering ram for regimes Washington loathed and offered as a soft pillow of future possibility to those it loved.

Still, make no mistake, there’s a story in a Washington stunned and “blindsided,” in an administration visibly toothless and in disarray as well as dismayed over the potential loss of its Egyptian ally, “the keystone of its Middle Eastern policy,” that’s so big it should knock your socks off.  And make no mistake: part of the spectacle of the moment lies in watching that other great power of the Cold War era finally head ever so slowly and reluctantly for the exits.  You know the one I’m talking about.  In 1991, when the Soviet Union disappeared and the United States found itself the last superpower standing, Washington mistook that for a victory most rare.  In the years that followed, in a paroxysm of self-satisfaction and amid clouds of self-congratulation, its leaders would attempt nothing less than to establish a global Pax Americana.  Their breathtaking ambitions would leave hubris in the shade.

The results, it’s now clear, were no less breathtaking, even if disastrously so.  Almost 20 years after the lesser superpower of the Cold War left the world stage, the “victor” is now lurching down the declinist slope, this time as the other defeated power of the Cold War era.

So don’t mark the end of the Cold War in 1991 as our conventional histories do.  Mark it in the early days of 2011, and consider the events of this moment a symbolic goodbye-to-all-that for the planet’s “sole superpower.”

Abroads, Near and Far

The proximate cause of Washington’s defeat is a threatened collapse of its imperial position in a region that, ever since President Jimmy Carter proclaimed his Carter Doctrine in 1980, has been considered the crucible of global power, the place where, above all, the Great Game must be played out.  Today, “people power” is shaking the “pillars” of the American position in the Middle East, while — despite the staggering levels of military might the Pentagon still has embedded in the area — the Obama administration has found itself standing by helplessly in grim confusion.

As a spectacle of imperial power on the decline, we haven’t seen anything like it since 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down.  Then, too, people power stunned the world.  It swept like lightning across the satellite states of Eastern Europe, those “pillars” of the old Soviet empire, most of which had (as in the Middle East today) seemed quiescent for years.

It was an invigorating time.  After all, such moments often don’t come once in a life, no less twice in 20 years.  If you don’t happen to be in Washington, the present moment is proving no less remarkable, unpredictable, and earthshaking than its predecessor.

Make no mistake, either (though you wouldn’t guess it from recent reportage): these two moments of people power are inextricably linked.  Think of it this way: as we witness the true denouement of the Cold War, it’s already clear that the “victor” in that titanic struggle, like the Soviet Union before it, mined its own positions and then was forced to watch with shock, awe, and dismay as those mines went off.

Among the most admirable aspects of the Soviet collapse was the decision of its remarkable leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, not to call the Red Army out of its barracks, as previous Soviet leaders had done in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Prague in 1968.  Gorbachev’s conscious (and courageous) choice to let the empire collapse rather than employ violence to try to halt the course of events remains historically little short of unique.

Today, after almost two decades of exuberant imperial impunity, Washington finds itself in an uncomfortably unraveling situation.  Think of it as a kind of slo-mo Gorbachev moment — without a Gorbachev in sight.

What we’re dealing with here is, in a sense, the story of two “abroads.”  In 1990, in the wake of a disastrous war in Afghanistan, in the midst of a people’s revolt, the Russians lost what they came to call their “near abroad,” the lands from Eastern Europe to Central Asia that had made up the Soviet Empire.  The U.S., being the wealthier and stronger of the two Cold War superpowers, had something the Soviets never possessed.  Call it a “far abroad.”  Now, in the midst of another draining, disastrous Afghan war, in the face of another people’s revolt, a critical part of its far abroad is being shaken to its roots.

In the Middle East, the two pillars of American imperial power and control have long been Egypt and Saudi Arabia — along, of course, with obdurate Israel and little Jordan.  In previous eras, the chosen bulwarks of “stability” and “moderation,” terms much favored in Washington, had been the Shah of Iran in the 1960s and 1970s (and you remember his fate), and Saddam Hussein in the 1980s (and you remember his fate, too).  In the larger region the Bush administration liked to call “the Greater Middle East” or “the arc of instability,” another key pillar has been Pakistan, a country now in destabilization mode under the pressure of a disastrous American war in Afghanistan.

And yet, without a Gorbachevian bone in its body, the Obama administration has still been hamstrung.  While negotiating madly behind the scenes to retain power and influence in Egypt, it is not likely to call the troops out of the barracks.  American military intervention remains essentially inconceivable.   Don’t wait for Washington to send paratroopers to the Suez Canal as those fading imperial powers France and England tried to do in 1956.  It won’t happen.  Washington is too drained by years of war and economic bad times for that.

Facing genuine shock and awe (the people’s version), the Obama administration has been shaken.  It has shown itself to be weak, visibly fearful, at a loss for what to do, and always several steps behind developing events.  Count on one thing: its officials are already undoubtedly worried about a domestic political future in which the question (never good for Democrats) could be: Who lost the Middle East?  In the meantime, their oh-so-solemn, carefully calibrated statements, still in command mode, couched in imperial-speak, and focused on what client states in the Middle East must do, might as well be spoken to the wind.  Like the Cheshire Cat’s grin, only the rhetoric of the last decades seems to be left.

The question is: How did this happen?  And the answer, in part, is: blame it on the way the Cold War officially ended, the mood of unparalleled hubris in which the United States emerged from it, and the unilaterialist path its leaders chose in its wake.

Let’s do a little reviewing.

Second-Wave Unilateralism

When the Soviet Union dissolved, Washington was stunned — the collapse was unexpected despite all the signs that something monumental was afoot — and then thrilled.  The Cold War was over and we had won.  Our mighty adversary had disappeared from the face of the Earth.

It didn’t take long for terms like “sole superpower” and “hyperpower” to crop up, or for dreams of a global Pax Americana to take shape amid talk about how our power and glory would outshine even the Roman and British empires.  The conclusion that victory — as in World War II — would have its benefits, that the world was now our oyster, led to two waves of American “unilateralism” or go-it-alone-ism that essentially drove the car of state directly toward the nearest cliff and helped prepare the way for the sudden eruption of people power in the Middle East.

The second of those waves began with the fateful post-9/11 decision of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and company to “drain the global swamp” (as they put it within days of the attacks in New York and Washington).  They would, that is, pursue al-Qaeda (and whomever else they decided to label an enemy) by full military means.  That included the invasion of Afghanistan and the issuing of a with-us-or-against-us diktat to Pakistan, which reportedly included the threat to bomb that country “back to the Stone Age.”  It also involved a full-scale militarization, Pentagonization, and privatization of American foreign policy, and above all else, the crushing of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the occupation of his country.  All that and more came to be associated with the term “unilateralism,” with the idea that U.S. military power was so overwhelming Washington could simply go it alone in the world with any “coalition of the billing” it might muster and still get exactly what it wanted.

That second wave of unilateralism, now largely relegated to the memory hole of history by the mainstream media, helped pave the way for the upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, and possibly elsewhere.  As a start, from Pakistan to North Africa, the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror, along with its support for thuggish rule in the name of fighting al-Qaeda, helped radicalize the region.  (Remember, for instance, that while Washington was pouring billions of dollars into the American-equipped Egyptian Army and the American-trained Egyptian officer corps, Bush administration officials were delighted to enlist the Mubarak regime as War on Terror warriors, using Egypt’s jails as places to torture terror suspects rendered off any streets anywhere.)

In the process, by sweeping an area from North Africa to the Chinese border that it dubbed the Greater Middle East into that War on Terror, the Bush administration undoubtedly gave the region a new-found sense of unity, a feeling that the fate of its disparate parts was somehow bound together.

In addition, Bush’s top officials, fundamentalists all when it came to U.S. military might and delusional fantasists when it came to what that military could accomplish, had immense power at its command: the power to destroy.  They gave that power the snappy label “shock and awe,” and then used it to blow a hole in the heart of the Middle East by invading Iraq.  In the process, they put that land, already on the ropes, onto life support.

It’s never really come off.  In the wars, civil and guerrilla, set off by the American invasion and occupation, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis undoubtedly died and millions were sent into exile abroad or in their own land.  Today, Iraq remains a barely breathing carcass of a nation, unable to deliver something as simple as electricity to its restive people or pump enough oil to pay for the disaster.

At the same time, the Bush administration sat on its hands while Israel had its way, taking Palestinian lands via its settlement policies and blowing its own hole in southern Lebanon with American backing (and weaponry) in the summer of 2006, and a smaller hole of utter devastation through Gaza in 2009.  In other words, from Lebanon to Pakistan, the Greater Middle East was destabilized and radicalized.

The acts of Bush’s officials couldn’t have been rasher, or more destructive.  They managed, for instance, to turn Afghanistan into the globe’s foremost narco-state, even as they gave new life to the Taliban — no small miracle for a movement that, in 2001, had lost any vestige of popularity.  Most crucial of all, they and the Obama adminsitration after them spread the war irrevocably to populous, nuclear-armed Pakistan.

To their mad plans and projects, you can trace, at least in part, the rise to power of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza (the only significant result of Bush’s “democracy agenda,” since Iraq’s elections arrived, despite Bush administration opposition, due to the prestige of Ayatollah Ali Sistani).  You can credit them with an Iran-allied Shiite government in Iraq and a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, as well as the growth of a version of the Taliban in the Pakistani tribal borderlands.  You can also credit them with the disorganization and impoverishment of the region.  In summary, when the Bush unilateralists took control of the car of state, they souped it up, armed it to the teeth, and sent it careening off to catastrophe.

How hollow the neocon quip of 2003 now rings: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad.  Real men want to go to Tehran.”  But remember as well that, however much the Bush administration accomplished (in a manner of speaking), there was a wave of unilateralism, no less significant, that preceded it.

Our Financial Jihadis

Though we all know this first wave well, we don’t usually think of it as “unilateralist,” or in terms of the Middle East at all, or speak about it in the same breath with the Bush administration and its neocon supporters.  I’m talking about the globalists, sometimes called the neoliberals, who were let loose to do their damnedest in the good times of the post-Cold-War Clinton years.  They, too, were dreamy about organizing the planet and about another kind of American power that was never going to end: economic power.  (And, of course, they would be called back to power in Washington in the Obama years to run the U.S. economy into the ground yet again.)  They believed deeply that we were the economic superpower of the ages, and they were eager to create their own version of a Pax Americana.  Intent on homogenizing the world by bringing American economic power to bear on it, their version of shock-and-awe tactics involved calling in institutions like the International Monetary Fund to discipline developing countries into a profitable kind of poverty and misery.

In the end, as they gleefully sliced and diced subprime mortgages, they drove a different kind of hole through the world.  They were financial jihadis with their own style of shock-and-awe tactics and they, too, proved deeply destructive, even if in a different way.  The irony was that, in the economic meltdown of 2008, they finally took down the global economy they had helped “unify.”  And that occured just as the second wave of unilateralists were facing the endgame of their dreams of global domination.  In the process, for instance, Egypt, the most populous of Arab countries, was economically neoliberalized and — except for a small elite who made out like the bandits they were — impoverished.

Talk about “creative destruction”!  The two waves of American unilateralists nearly took down the planet.  They let loose demons of every sort, even as they ensured that the world’s first experience of a sole superpower would prove short indeed.  Heap onto the rubble they left behind the global disaster of rising prices for the basics — food and fuel — and you have a situation so combustible that no one should have been surprised when a Tunisian match lit it aflame.

That this moment began in the Greater Middle East should be no surprise either.  That it might not end there should not be ruled out.  This looks like, but may not be, an “Islamic” moment.  If the second wave of American unilateralists ensured that this would start as a Middle Eastern phenomenon, conditions for people’s-power movements exist elsewhere as well.

The Gates of Hell

Nobody today remembers how, in September 2004, Amr Musa, the head of the Arab League, described the post-invasion Iraqi situation.  “The gates of hell,” he said, “are open in Iraq.”  This was not the sort of language we were used to hearing in the U.S., no matter what you felt about the war.  It read — and probably still reads — like an over-the-top metaphor, but it could as easily be taken as a realistic depiction of what happened not just in Iraq, but in the Greater Middle East and, to some extent, in the world.

Our unilateralists twice drove blithely through those gates, imagining that they were the gates to paradise.  The results are now clear for all to see.

And don’t forget, the gates of hell remain open.  Keep your eyes on at least two places, starting with Saudi Arabia, about which practically no one is yet writing, though one of these days its situation could turn out to be shakier than now imagined.  Certainly, whoever controls the Saudi stock market thought so, because as the situation grew more tumultuous in Egypt, Saudi stocks took a nosedive.  With Saudi Arabia, you couldn’t get more basic when it comes to U.S. policy or the fate of the planet, given the amount of oil still under its desert sands.  And then don’t forget the potentially most frightening country of all, Pakistan, where the final gasp of America’s military unilateralists is still playing itself out as if on a reel of film that just won’t end.

Yes, the Obama administration may squeeze by in the region for a while.  Perhaps the Egyptian high command — half of which seems to have been in Washington at the moment the you-know-what hit the fan in their own country — will take over and perhaps they will suppress people power again for a period. Who knows?

One thing is clear inside the gates of hell: whatever wild flowers or weeds turn out to be capable of growing in the soil tilled so assiduously by the victors of 1991, Pax Americana proved to be a Pox Americana for the region and the world.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com.  His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books). You can catch him discussing war American-style and that book in a Timothy MacBain TomCast video by clicking here.

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Paul Woodward of the War in Context website has been offering remarkable ongoing coverage of the fast developing story in Egypt and the Middle East (including striking visuals and video clips).  Not surprisingly, the updates and analysis of Juan Cole at his Informed Comment blog has been invaluable, as has been the collecting of relevant reporting at Antiwar.com.  For three provocative pieces on the Obama administration and developing events, you might check out Jonathan Schell on the U.S. government versus people power, Gareth Porter on why the U.S. clings to an illusory quest for dominance in the Middle East, and Eric Margolis on America’s crumbling Mideast Raj.]

Copyright 2011 Tom Engelhardt

“Slowly a humped shape rose out of the pit, and the ghost of a beam of light seemed to flicker out from it.  Forthwith flashes of actual flame, a bright glare leaping from one to another, sprang from the scattered group of men.  It was as if some invisible jet impinged upon them and flashed into white flame.  It was as if each man were suddenly and momentarily turned to fire.

“Then, by the light of their own destruction, I saw them staggering and falling, and their supporters turning to run…”

That, as H.G. Wells imagined it in 1898, was first contact with a technologically superior and implacable alien race from space, five years before humanity took to the air in anything but balloons.  And that was how the Martians, landing in their “cylinders,” those spaceships from a dying planet, ready to take over ours, responded to a delegation of humans advancing on them waving a flag of peace and ready to parlay.  As everyone knows who has read The War of the Worlds, or heard the 1938 Orson Welles radio show version that terrified New Jersey, or watched the 1953 movie or the Stephen Spielberg 2005 remake, those Martians went on to level cities, slaughter masses of humanity using heat-rays and poison gas, and threaten world domination before being felled by the germs for which they were unprepared.

Germs aside, Wells’s Martians did little more than what earthly powers would do to each other and various “lesser” peoples in the 112 years that followed the publication of his book.  Now, a group of scientists writing in an “extraterrestrial-themed edition” of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A in Great Britain warn us that we should ready ourselves for the possibility of alien contact.  We should, in fact, “prepare for the worst” which, according to contributor Simon Conway Morris, could be summed up this way: thanks to neo-Darwinian laws of evolution assumedly operative anywhere, such aliens, should they exist, would probably be more or less like us.

Long before Morris, Wells understood that the most dangerous aliens weren’t in space, but right here on planet Earth, and concluded that he lived among them.  When he wrote his ur-alien-invasion novel, he was evidently using the British “war of extermination” against the Tasmanians as his model.

Of course, we in the United States have few doubts about who the aliens on this planet are: Them! (the title of a classic 1954 sci-fi movie about monstrous mutant ants that infest the sewer system of Los Angeles). In my childhood, “them” was “the commies,” of course.  Now, it’s certainly Muslims or jihadists or Islamo-fascists.

When one of them commits some nightmarish act, whether a slaughter at Fort Hood in Texas, the planting of a car bomb in New York City’s Times Square, or the donning of an underwear bomb for a flight to Detroit on Christmas day, our response is a shudder of fear and loathing, followed by further repression.  After all, each of those acts is imagined as part of a barbaric and fiendish pattern inimical to our safety.  Perhaps because it’s assumed that they are mentally ill (“fanatic”) en masse, that being “a loner” isn’t part of their culture, and that individuality is not one of their strong points, the heinousness of the act is focused upon rather than the potentially damaged nature of the individual who acted.

It’s only when a Timothy McVeigh or a Jared Loughner emerges from the undergrowth that problems arise and reactions change.  (Keep in mind that McVeigh’s crime, the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City which killed 168 people, was initially blamed on Arab terrorists and that, had Loughner gotten away from that Safeway in Tucson, similar warnings might have been raised.)  It’s only then that the bizarre individuality, even the twisted humanity, of such acts comes to the fore and so mental illness becomes a possible explanation.  It’s only then that, instead of fear and panic, we “grieve” as a nation and engage in a “conversation” about the state of ourselves.

Not surprisingly, the police mug shot of Loughner featured on the front-page of my hometown paper (and probably every other paper in America) was the equivalent, for the American conversation, of manna from heaven: a smiling maniac, the Grim Reaper gone bonkers, someone who had visibly absorbed left, right, and every kind of fringe into his dream world and conveniently come out a “nihilist.”

In the Crosshairs

Whether it’s obvious or not, all of this avoids a different kind of conversation about slaughter and mania.  After all, thought of from a Wellsian perspective, it’s always possible that the Martians could actually be us (or us, too, at least) — and not just the madmen among us either.  Welles was a rarity on this issue.  When it comes to thinking of ourselves as “them,” normally it just doesn’t come naturally.

At a moment when a single horrific incident, the killing of six Americans and the wounding of 13, including a member of Congress, looms so much larger than life and has for days become “the news,” when our world has been abuzz with media discussions about civility in U.S. politics, crosshairs and where they were placed, the president’s role as “national healer,” and various profiles in courage among the living and dead, when the focus, in other words, is so overwhelming, you have to wonder what’s hidden from sight.

One out-of-sight matter to consider might be those crosshairs — not on a symbolic political map but over actual humans beings, resulting in multiple deaths.  I’m talking about our war in Afghanistan.

To give an example, on January 10th, according to a New York Times report, a “team” (whether American or NATO we don’t know) “conducting a patrol” in the village of Baladas in central Afghanistan “spotted ‘nine armed individuals setting up what appeared to be an ambush position.'”  That team called in a helicopter strike, killing three Afghans and wounding three others.  According to a statement from “a coalition spokesman,” the six casualties turned out to be “innocent people… mistakenly targeted.”  According to local Afghan figures, they were members of “a local police team… on their way to meet a unit of the American Special Forces for a joint patrol.”  Condolences have since been offered and a NATO “assessment team” was sent to the site to “investigate.”

Classified as a case of “friendly fire,” the incident represents one small-scale slaughter that got no attention here.  Like almost all such reports from Afghanistan, the names of the dead and wounded were not recorded (undoubtedly because there was no reporter on the ground to ask).  And it goes without saying that no one in our world will grieve for those dead, or praise them, or offer “healing” words about what their example should mean to the rest of us.  About their fate, there will be no TV reports, no conversation on underlying issues, not a shred of discussion, not here.

Tucson-Kabul

A week ago, it’s reasonable to assume, 99.9% of Americans had never heard of Congressional Representative Gabrielle Giffords; even fewer knew of federal judge John Roll who died in that Safeway parking lot; and none (other than family and friends) had heard about nine-year-old Christina-Taylor Green, tragically shot down while learning firsthand how U.S. politics works, or Daniel Hernandez, the congresswoman’s intern, who ran towards the gunshots to offer help.  Now, we all “know” them as if they were neighbors or friends.  Victims of a nightmare, they have been memorialized repeatedly, giving us the feeling that there is something better to American life than Jared Loughner.

In the process, the coverage of the Tucson massacre has been, to say the least, unrelenting.  From a media point of view, it’s also had its ghoulish side: Think of it as the OJ moment — the discovery that focusing on a high-profile nightmare 24/7 glues eyeballs — meets the more recent massive downsizing of newspapers and TV news.  All of this makes “flooding the zone” (covering a single, endlessly reported event) cheaper, less labor intensive, and far more appealing than blanketing the world.

On the other hand, the coverage of the “friendly fire” incident in Afghanistan has been, to put it politely, relenting.

Close to 100% of Americans knew nothing about that incident when it happened and close to 100% know nothing about it now.  Of course, in the fog of war tragic mistakes are made, intelligence gets screwed up, targeting goes awry, deadly mishaps occur.  So six local Afghan police mistakenly killed or wounded by a helicopter hardly turn us into slaughtering maniacs (though imagine the attention, had six policemen been shot down anywhere in the United States).

To put this incident in perspective, however, consider five similar “friendly fire” incidents reported from Afghanistan in the five weeks preceding January 10th, none of which got significant attention here.

On December 8th in Logar Province, two missiles from a U.S. air strike “mistakenly killed” two Afghan National Army soldiers and wounded five as they were moving to help NATO troops under attack.  The Afghan Defense Ministry “condemned” the strike.  (“As a result of a bombardment by international forces… two soldiers… were martyred…”)

On December 16th in Helmand Province, another air strike killed four Afghan soldiers as they were leaving their base, yet again a case identified as mistaken targeting.  Typically, an investigation was launched (though the results of such investigations are almost never reported).

On December 23rd, “in an attempt to intercept suspected insurgents,” a “NATO helicopter” reportedly strafed a car in a convoy heading for “an event hosted by the head of a local council in [Faryab Province in] northern Afghanistan.”  A policeman and the brother of former parliament member Sarajuddin Mozafari, a local politician, were killed.  Two policemen and a civilian were reported wounded.  The governor of the province, Abdul Haq Shafaq, was among the guests and aided the wounded.  Associated Press reporter Amir Shah quoted the governor this way: “‘We are so angry about this,’ Shafaq said, describing the dead as innocents. He called for an investigation into the incident by the attorney general.” (Said U.S. Air Force Col. James Dawkins in response to the event: “While we take extraordinary care in conducting operations to avoid civilian casualties, unfortunately in this instance it appears innocent men were mistakenly targeted… we deeply regret this incident.”)

On December 24th, there was a “night raid” in Kabul.  (The government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai regularly condemns such American night raids.)  Evidently thanks to mistaken intelligence, two private guards were killed and three wounded when commandos from coalition forces raided the headquarters of the Afghan Tiger Group, “a supplier of vehicles to the United States military.”  (From the New York Times report on the incident comes the following quote: “’It was murder,’ said Col. Mohammed Zahir, director of criminal investigations for the Kabul police, who arrived at the scene shortly after the raid began and said both victims had been shot in the head.”)

On January 5th in Ghazni province, another night raid resulted in the deaths of three Afghans whose bodies were paraded through Ghazni City by angry fellow tribesmen shouting “Death to America.”  Local officials indicated that the three were indeed innocent civilians; the Americans claimed they were “insurgents.”

Massacres like the one in Tucson are more common than Americans like to imagine, but still reasonably rare.  The repetitious deaths of “innocents” in Afghanistan are commonplace in a way that Americans generally don’t care to consider.  Add up the casualties from all six of these incidents between December 8th and January 10th and you get 16 dead (and 13 wounded).

Next, put together the mistaken targetings, the American denials or expressions of condolence, the predictable announcements of investigations whose results never seem to surface, as well as the minimalist coverage in the U.S., and you have a pattern: that is, something you can be sure will happen again and again on as yet unknown days in 2011 to as little attention here.

And keep in mind that such “incidents” have been the norm of our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Pakistani tribal borderlands for years.  There have been hundreds or (who knows?) even thousands of them (not that anyone is counting).  And yet, let’s face it, if we were to look in the mirror, one thing is certain: we would not see a grinning, demented monster staring back at us.

Identifying Barbarians

Here’s a question: Why don’t the dead of our foreign wars register on us, particularly the civilians killed in numbers that, if attributed to our enemies or past imperial armies, would be seen as the acts of barbarians?  After all, when a Taliban suicide bomber kills 17 Afghans and wounds 23 in a bathhouse, including a senior police border-control officer, we know just what to think.  It wouldn’t matter if those who sent the bomber claimed that he had made a “mistake” in targeting, or if they declared the other deaths regrettable “collateral damage.”  When we attack with similar results, we hardly think about it at all.

I can imagine at least three factors involved:

Tribalism: Yes, we consider them the tribal ones, but we have our own tribal qualities, including a deep-seated feeling that what’s close at hand (us) is more valuable than what’s far away (them).  The valorizing of your own group and the devaluing of those outside it undoubtedly couldn’t be more human.  Who doesn’t know, for instance, that when it comes to media coverage, one blond American child kidnapped and murdered is worth 500 Indonesians drowned on a ferry?

Racism/The Superiority Factor:  This subject is no longer raised in connection with American wars, and yet it’s obviously of importance.  If 16 Americans had been killed and 13 wounded in six mistaken-targeting incidents even in distant Afghanistan, we would be outraged.  There would be news coverage, Congressional hearings, who knows what.  If there had been the same number of dead Canadians or Germans, there would still have been an outcry.  But Afghans?  Dark-skinned peoples from an alien culture in the backlands of the planet?  No way.  Our condolences every now and then are the best we have on tap.

The American Way of War: Once upon a time, we Americans responded to air war, especially against civilian populations, as barbaric and, shocked by its effects in Guernica, Shanghai, London, and elsewhere, denounced it.  That, of course, was before air war became such an integral part of the American way of war.  In recent years, American military spokespeople have regularly boasted of the increasingly “surgical” and “precise” nature of air power.  The most impressively surgical thing about air war, however, is the way it has been excised from the category of barbarism in our American world.  The suicide bomber or car bomber is a monster, a barbarian.  Drones, planes, helicopters?  No such thing, despite the stream of innocents they kill.

No wonder when we look in the mirror, we don’t see the grinning face of a maniac; sometimes we see no face at all, quite literally in the case of the Pakistani tribal borderlands where hundreds have died (always “militants” or “suspected militants”) thanks to pilotless drones and video-game-style war.

Blown Away

In a safe in Jared Loughner’s parents’ house, investigators from the Pima County Sheriff’s Department found documents with the words “I planned ahead,” “My assassination,” and “Giffords.”  The words of a madman.  When a Taliban suicide bomber strikes, we know that we are staring off-the-charts brutality in the face.  When it comes to our killings, it’s always another matter.

And yet, even if every one of those Afghan deaths was “mistaken,” there was nothing innocent about the killings.  If something happens often enough to be a predictable horror, then those who commit the acts (and those who send them to do so, as well as those who have the luxury of looking the other way) are responsible, and should be accountable.  

After all, week after week, month after month, year after year since September 11, 2001, the deaths have piled up relentlessly.  Towers and towers of deaths.  Barely reported, seldom named, hardly noted, almost never grieved over in our world, those dead Afghans, Iraqis, and Pakistanis had parents who assumedly loved them, friends who cared about them, enemies who might have wanted to target them, colleagues and associates who knew their quirks. We’re talking so many Safeways’ worth of them that it’s beyond reckoning.

Civilians repeatedly killed at checkpoints; 12 Afghans including a four-year-old girl, a one-year-old boy, and three elderly villagers shot down near the city of Jalalabad when Marine Special Operations forces, attacked by a suicide bomber, fired wildly along a ten-mile stretch of road in April 2007; at least 12 Iraqi civilians (including two employees of Reuters) slaughtered by an Apache helicopter on a street in Baghdad in July 2007; at least 17 Iraqi civilians murdered by Blackwater contractors protecting a convoy of State Department vehicles in Nisour Square, Baghdad, in September 2007.

Any recent year has such “highlights”: a popular Kabul Imam shot to death in his car from a passing NATO convoy with his 7-year-old son in the back seat in January 2010; at least 21 Afghan civilians killed when U.S. jets mistakenly fired on three mini-buses in Uruzgan Province in February 2010; five civilians killed and up to 18 wounded when U.S. troops raked a passenger bus with gunfire near Kandahar in southern Afghanistan in April 2010; and 10 Afghan election workers killed and two wounded last September in a “precision air strike” on a “militant’s vehicle.”

And that, of course, is just to scratch the surface of such incidents.  Wedding parties have repeatedly been obliterated (at least seven in Afghanistan and Iraq), naming ceremonies for children wiped out, and funerals blown away. 

Bodies and more bodies.  All “mistakes.”  And yet, knowing the mistakes that have happened and assured of the mistakes to come, our leaders are still talking about U.S. “combat troops” staying in Afghanistan through 2014; our vice-president is pledging us to remain “well beyond” that year; one of our senators is calling for “permanent bases” there; our trainers are expecting to conduct training exercises in 2016; and in the meantime, our Afghan war commander is calling in more air power, more night raids, and more destruction.

Nowhere do we see the face of a madman grinning, but the toll across the years is that of a cold-blooded killer.  It’s the mark of barbarism, even if we’re not fanatics.   

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com.  His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books). You can catch him discussing war American-style and that book in a Timothy MacBain TomCast video by clicking here.

[Note: Let me offer a small bow of special thanks to three invaluable websites: Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, Antiwar.com (including the prodigious Jason Ditz), and Paul Woodward’s War in Context.  Without them, it would be so much harder to follow the news about America’s distant wars.]

Copyright 2011 Tom Engelhardt

If, as 2011 begins, you want to peer into the future, enter my time machine, strap yourself in, and head for the past, that laboratory for all developments of our moment and beyond.

Just as 2010 ended, the American military’s urge to surge resurfaced in a significant way.  It seems that “leaders” in the Obama administration and “senior American military commanders” in Afghanistan were acting as a veritable WikiLeaks machine.  They slipped information to New York Times reporters Mark Mazzetti and Dexter Filkins about secret planning to increase pressure in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, possibly on the tinderbox province of Baluchistan, and undoubtedly on the Pakistani government and military via cross-border raids by U.S. Special Operations forces in the new year.

In the front-page story those two reporters produced, you could practically slice with a dull knife American military frustration over a war going terribly wrong, over an enemy (shades of Vietnam!) with “sanctuaries” for rest, recuperation, and rearming just over an ill-marked, half-existent border.  You could practically taste the chagrin of the military that their war against… well you name it: terrorists, guerrillas, former Islamic fundamentalist allies, Afghan and Pakistani nationalists, and god knows who else… wasn’t proceeding exactly swimmingly.  You could practically reach out and be seared by their anger at the Pakistanis for continuing to take American bucks by the billions while playing their own game, rather than an American one, in the region.

If you were of a certain age, you could practically feel (shades of Vietnam again!) that eerily hopeful sense that the next step in spreading the war, the next escalation, could be the decisive one.  Admittedly, these days no one talks (as they did in the Vietnam and Iraq years) about turning “corners” or reaching “tipping points,” but you can practically hear those phrases anyway, or at least the mingled hope and desperation that always lurked behind them. 

Take this sentence, for instance: “Even with the risks, military commanders say that using American Special Operations troops could bring an intelligence windfall, if militants were captured, brought back across the border into Afghanistan and interrogated.” Can’t you catch the familiar conviction that, when things are going badly, the answer is never “less,” always “more,” that just another decisive step or two and you’ll be around that fateful corner? 

In this single New York Times piece (and other hints about cross-border operations), you can sense just how addictive war is for the war planners. Once you begin down the path of invasion and occupation, turning back is as difficult as an addict going cold turkey.  With all the sober talk about year-end reviews in Afghanistan, about planning and “progress” (a word used nine times in the relatively brief, vetted “overview” of that review recently released by the White House), about future dates for drawdowns and present tactics, it’s easy to forget that war is a drug.  When you’re high on it, your decisions undoubtedly look as rational, even practical, as the public language you tend to use to describe them.  But don’t believe it for a second.

Once you’ve shot up this drug, your thinking is impaired.  Through its dream-haze, unpleasant history becomes bunk; what others couldn’t do, you fantasize that you can.  Forget the fact that crossing similar borders to get similar information and wipe out similar sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos in the Vietnam War years led to catastrophe for American planners and the peoples of the region.  It only widened that war into what in Cambodia would become auto-genocide.  Forget the fact that, no matter whom American raiders might capture, they have no hope of capturing the feeling of nationalism (or the tribal equivalent) that, in the face of foreign invaders or a foreign occupation, keeps the under-armed resilient against the mightiest of forces.

Think of the American urge to surge as a manifestation of the war drug’s effect in the world. In what the Bush administration used to call “the Greater Middle East,” Washington is now in its third and grimmest surge iteration.  The first took place in the 1980s during the Reagan administration’s anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan and proved the highest of highs; the second got rolling as the last century was ending and culminated in the first years of the twenty-first century amid what can only be described as delusions of grandeur, or even imperial megalomania.  It focused on a global Pax Americana and the wars that extend it into the distant future.  The third started in 2006 in Iraq and is still playing itself out in Afghanistan as 2011 commences.

In Central and South Asia, we could now be heading for the end of the age of American surges, which in practical terms have manifested themselves as the urge to destabilize.  Geopolitically, little could be uglier or riskier on our planet at the moment than destabilizing Pakistan — or the United States.  Three decades after the American urge to surge in Afghanistan helped destabilize one imperial superpower, the Soviet Union, the present plans, whatever they may turn out to be, could belatedly destabilize the other superpower of the Cold War era.  And what our preeminent group of surgers welcomed as an “unprecedented strategic opportunity” as this century dawned may, in its later stages, be seen as an unprecedented act of strategic desperation. 

That, of course, is what drugs, taken over decades, do to you: they give you delusions of grandeur and then leave you on the street, strung out, and without much to call your own.  Perhaps it’s fitting that Afghanistan, the country we helped turn into the planet’s leading narco-state, has given us a 30-year high from hell.

So, as the New Year begins, strap yourself into that time machine and travel with me back into the 1980s, so that we can peer into a future we know and see the pattern that lies both behind and ahead of us.

Getting High in Afghanistan

As 2011 begins, what could be eerier than reading secret Soviet documents from the USSR's Afghan debacle of the 1980s?  It gives you chills to run across Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at a Politburo meeting in October 1985, almost six years after Soviet troops first flooded into Afghanistan, reading letters aloud to his colleagues from embittered Soviet citizens (“The Politburo had made a mistake and must correct it as soon as possible — every day precious lives are lost.”); or, in November 1986, insisting to those same colleagues that the Afghan war must be ended in a year, “at maximum, two.” Yet, with the gut-wrenching sureness history offers, you can’t help but know that, even two years later, even with a strong desire to leave (which has yet to surface among the Washington elite a decade into our own Afghan adventure), imperial pride and fear of loss of “credibility” would keep the Soviets fighting on to 1989.

Or what about Marshal Sergei Akhromeev offering that same Politburo meeting an assessment that any honest American military commander might offer a quarter century later about our own Afghan adventure: “There is no single piece of land in this country that has not been occupied by a Soviet soldier.  Nevertheless, the majority of the territory remains in the hands of the rebels.” Or General Boris Gromov, the last commander of the Soviet 40th Army in Afghanistan, boasting “on his last day in the country that ‘[n]o Soviet garrison or major outpost was ever overrun.’”

Or Andrei Gromyko, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, emphasizing in 1986 the strategic pleasure of their not-so-secret foe, that other great imperial power of the moment: “Concerning the Americans, they are not interested in the settlement of the situation in Afghanistan.  On the contrary, it is to their advantage for the war to drag out.” (The same might today be said of a far less impressive foe, al-Qaeda.)

Or in 1988, with the war still dragging on, to read a “closed” letter the Communist Party distributed to its members explaining how the Afghan fiasco happened (again, the sort of thing that any honest American leader could say of our Afghan war): “In addition, [we] completely disregarded the most important national and historical factors, above all the fact that the appearance of armed foreigners in Afghanistan was always met with arms in the hands [of the population]… One should not disregard the economic factor either.  If the enemy in Afghanistan received weapons and ammunition for hundreds of millions and later even billions of dollars, the Soviet-Afghan side also had to shoulder adequate expenditures.  The war in Afghanistan costs us 5 billion rubles a year.”

Or finally the pathetic letter the Soviet Military Command delivered to the head of the UN mission in Afghanistan on February 14, 1989, arguing (just as the American military high command would do of our war effort) that it was “not only unfair but even absurd to draw… parallels” between the Soviet Afghan disaster and the American war in Vietnam.  That was, of course, the day the last of 100,000 Soviet soldiers — just about the number of American soldiers there today — left Afghan soil heading home to a sclerotic country bled dry by war, its infrastructure aging, its economy crumbling.  Riddled by drugs and thoroughly demoralized, the Red Army limped home to a society riddled by drugs and thoroughly demoralized led by a Communist Party significantly delegitimized by its disastrous Afghan adventure, its Islamic territories from Chechnya to Central Asia in increasing turmoil.  In November of that same year, the Berlin Wall would be torn down and not long after the Soviet Union would disappear from the face of the Earth.

Reading those documents, you can almost imagine CIA director William Webster and “his euphoric ‘Afghan Team’” toasting the success of the Agency's 10-year effort, its largest paramilitary operation since the Vietnam War.  The Reagan administration surge in Pakistan and Afghanistan had been profligate, involving billions of dollars and a massive propaganda campaign, as well as alliances with the Saudis and a Pakistani dictator and his intelligence service to fund and arm the most extreme of the anti-Soviet jihadists of that moment — “freedom fighters” as they were then commonly called in Washington.

It’s easy to imagine the triumphalist mood of celebration in Washington among those who had intended to give the Soviet Union a full blast of the Vietnam effect.  They had used the “war” part of the Cold War to purposely bleed the less powerful, less wealthy of the two superpowers dry.  As President Reagan would later write in his memoirs: “The great dynamic of capitalism had given us a powerful weapon in our battle against Communism — money.  The Russians could never win the arms race; we could outspend them forever.”

By 1990, the urge to surge seemed a success beyond imagining.  Forget that it had left more than a million Afghans dead (and more dying), that one-third of that impoverished country’s population had been turned into refugees, or that the most extreme of jihadists, including a group that called itself al-Qaeda, had been brought together, funded, and empowered through the Afghan War.  More important, the urge to surge in the region was now in the American bloodstream.  And who could ever imagine that, in a new century, “our” freedom fighters would become our sworn enemies, or that the Afghans, that backward people in a poor land, could ever be the sort of impediment to American power that they had been to the Soviets?

The Cold War was over.  The surge had it.  We were supreme.  And what better high could there be than that?

Fever Dreams of Military Might

Of course, with the Soviet Union gone, there was no military on the planet that could come close to challenging the American one, nor was there a nascent rival great power on the horizon.  Still, a question remained: After centuries of great power rivalry, what did it mean to have a “sole superpower” on planet Earth, and what path should that triumphant power head down? It took a few years, including passing talk about a possible “peace dividend” — that is, the investment of monies that would have gone into the Cold War, the Pentagon, and the military in infrastructural and other domestic projects — for this question to be settled, but settled it was, definitively, on September 12, 2001.

And for all the unknown paths that might have been taken in this unique situation, the one chosen was familiar.  It was, of course, the very one that had helped lead the Soviet Union to implosion, the investment of national treasure in military power above all else.  However, to those high on the urge to surge and now eager to surge globally, when it came to an American future, the fate of the Soviet Union seemed no more relevant than what the Afghans had done to the Red Army.  In those glory years, analogies between the greatest power the planet had ever seen and a defeated foe seemed absurd to those who believed themselves the smartest, clearest-headed guys in the room.

Previously, the “arms race,” like any race, had involved at least two, and sometimes more, great powers.  Now, it seemed, there would be something new under the sun, an arms race of one, as the U.S. prepared itself for utter dominance into a distant, highly militarized future.  The military-industrial complex would, in these years, be further embedded in the warp and woof of American life; the military expanded and privatized (which meant being firmly embraced by crony corporations and hire-a-gun outfits of every sort); and the American “global presence” — from military bases to aircraft-carrier task forces — enhanced until, however briefly, the United States became a military presence unique in the annals of history.

Thanks to the destructive acts of 19 jihadis, the urge to surge would with finality overwhelm all other urges in the fall of 2001 — and there would be a group ready for just such a moment, for (as the newspaper headlines screamed) a “Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century.”

To take full stock of that group, however, we would first have to pilot our time machine back to June 3, 1997, the day a confident crew of Washington think-tank, academic, and political types calling themselves the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) posted a fin de siècle “statement of principles.” In it, they called for “a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States' global responsibilities.”  Crucially, they were demanding that the Clinton administration, or assumedly some future administration with a better sense of American priorities, “increase defense spending significantly.”

The 23 men and two women who signed the initial PNAC statement urging the United States to go for the military option in the twenty-first century would, however, prove something more than your typical crew of think-tank types.  After all, not so many years later, after a disputed presidential election settled by the Supreme Court, Dick Cheney would be vice president; I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby would be his right-hand man; Donald Rumsfeld would be Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense; Zalmay Khalilzad, head of the Bush-Cheney transition team at the Department of Defense and then the first post- invasion U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, as well as ambassador to Iraq and UN ambassador; Elliot Abrams, special assistant to the president with a post on the National Security Council; Paula Dobriansky, Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs; Aaron Friedberg, Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs and Director of Policy Planning in the office of the vice president; and Jeb Bush, governor of Florida.  (Others like John Bolton, who signed on to PNAC later, would be no less well employed.)

This may, in fact, be the first example in history of a think tank coming to power and actually putting its blue-sky suggestions into operation as government policy, or perhaps it’s the only example so far of a government-in-waiting masquerading as an online think tank.  In either case, more than 13 years later, the success of that group can still take your breath away, as can both the narrowness — and scope — of their thinking, and of their seminal document, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” published in September 2000, two months before George W. Bush took the presidency.

This crew of surgers extraordinaires was considering a global situation that, as they saw it, offered Americans an “unprecedented strategic opportunity.”  Facing a new century, their ambitions were caught by James Peck in his startling upcoming book, Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-opted Human Rights, in this way: “In the [Reagan] era, Washington organized half the planet; in the [Bush era] it sought to organize the whole."

“Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” if remembered at all today, is recalled mainly for a throwaway sentence that looked ominous indeed in retrospect: “Further, the process of transformation [of the military], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”  It remains, however, a remarkable document for other reasons.  In many ways canny about the direction war would take in the near future, ranging from the role of drones in air war to the onrushing possibility that cyberwar (or “Net-War,” as they called it) would be the style of future conflict, it was a clarion call to ensure this country’s “unchallenged supremacy” into the distant future by military means alone.

In 1983, in an address to the National Association of Evangelicals, President Ronald Reagan famously called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”  It wanted, as he saw it, what all dark empires (and every evildoer in any James Bond film) desires: unchallenged dominion over the planet — and it pursued that dominion in the name of a glorious “world revolution.”  Now, in the name of American safety and the glories of global democracy, we were — so the PNAC people both pleaded and demanded — to do what only evil empires did and achieve global dominion beyond compare over planet Earth.

We could, they insisted in a phrase they liked, enforce an American peace, a Pax Americana, for decades to come, if only we poured our resources, untold billions — they refused to estimate what the real price might be — into war preparations and, if necessary, war itself, from the seven seas to the heavens, from manifold new “forward operating bases on land” to space and cyberspace.  Pushing “the American security perimeter” ever farther into the distant reaches of the planet  (and “patrolling” it via “constabulary missions”) was, they claimed, the only way that “U.S. military supremacy” could be translated into “American geopolitical preeminence.”  It was also the only that the “homeland” — yes, unlike 99.9% of Americans before 9/11, they were already using that term — could be effectively “defended.”

In making their pitch, they were perfectly willing to acknowledge that the United States was already a military giant among midgets, but they were also eager to suggest as well that our military situation was “deteriorating” fast, that we were “increasingly ill-prepared” or even (gasp!) in “retreat” on a planet without obvious enemies.  They couldn’t have thought more globally.  (They were, after all, visionaries, as druggies tend to be.)  Nor could they have thought longer term.  (They were twenty-first century mavens.)  And on military matters, they couldn’t have been more up to date.

Yet on the most crucial issues, they — and so their documents — couldn’t have been dumber or more misguided.  They were fundamentalists when it came to the use of force and idolaters on the subject of the U.S. military.  They believed it capable of doing just about anything.  As a result, they made a massive miscalculation, mistaking military destructiveness for global power.  Nor could they have been less interested in the sinews of global economic power (though they did imagine our future enemy to be China).  Nor were they capable of imagining that the greatest military power on the planet might be stopped in its tracks — in the Greater Middle East, no less — by a ragtag crew of Iraqis and Afghans.  To read “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” today is to see the rabbit hole down which, as if in a fever dream, we would soon disappear.

It was a genuine American tragedy that they came to power and proceeded to put their military-first policies in place; that, on September 12th of the year that “changed everything,” the PNAC people seized the reins of defense and foreign policy, mobilized for war, began channeling American treasure into the military solution they had long desired, and surged.  Oh, how they surged!

That urge to surge was infamously caught in notes on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s comments taken on September 11, 2001.  "[B]arely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon… Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq," even though he was already certain that al-Qaeda had launched the attack. ("'Go massive,' the notes quote him as saying. 'Sweep it all up. Things related and not.'")

And so they did.  They swept up everything and then watched as their dreams and geopolitical calculations were themselves swept into the dustbin of history.  And yet the urge to surge, twisted and ever more desperate, did not abate.

The Soviet Path

To one degree or another, we have been on the Soviet path for years and yet, ever more desperately, we continue to plan more surges.  Our military, like the Soviet one, has not lost a battle and has occupied whatever ground it chose to take.  Yet, in the process, it has won less than nothing at all.  Our country, still far more wealthy than the Soviet Union ever was, has nonetheless entered its Soviet phase.  At home, in the increasing emphasis on surveillance of every sort, there is even a hint of what made “soviet” and “totalitarian” synonymous. 

The U.S. economy looks increasingly sclerotic; moneys for an aging and rotting infrastructure are long gone; state and city governments are laying off teachers, police, even firefighters; Americans are unemployed in near record numbers; global oil prices (for a country that has in no way begun to wean itself from its dependence on foreign oil) are ominously on the rise; and yet taxpayer money continues to pour into the military and into our foreign wars.  It has recently been estimated, for instance, that after spending $11.6 billion in 2011 on the training, supply, and support of the Afghan army and police, the U.S. will continue to spend an average of $6.2 billion a year at least through 2015 (and undoubtedly into an unknown future) — and that’s but one expense in the estimated $120 billion to $160 billion a year being spent at present on the Afghan War, what can only be described as part of America’s war stimulus package abroad.

And, of course, the talk for 2011 is how to expand the American ground war — the air version of the same has already been on a sharp escalatory trajectory — in Pakistan. History and common sense assure us that this can only lead to further disaster.  Clear-eyed leaders, military or civilian, would never consider such plans.  But Washington’s 30-year high in the region, that urge to surge still coursing through its veins, says otherwise, and it’s not likely to be denied.

Sooner than later, Washington, the Pentagon, and the U.S. military will have to enter rehab.  They desperately need a 12-step program for recovery.  Until then, the delusions and the madness that go with surge addiction are not likely to end.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com.  His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books). You can catch him discussing war American-style and that book in a Timothy MacBain TomCast video by clicking here.

[Note on sources:  The National Security Archive, filled to bursting with documents from our imperial and Cold War past, is an online treasure.  I have relied on it for both the Soviet documents quoted on the Afghan war of the 1980s and an analysis of the American version of that war.  For those who are interested in reading PNAC’s “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” click here and then on the link to the pdf file of the document.]

Copyright 2011 Tom Engelhardt

It’s finally coming into focus, and it’s not even a difficult equation to grasp.  It goes like this: take a country in the grips of an expanding national security state and sooner or later your “safety” will mean your humiliation, your degradation.  And by the way, it will mean the degradation of your country, too.

Just ask Rolando Negrin, a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screener who passed through one of those new “whole body image” scanners last May as part of his training for airport security.  His co-workers claimed to have gotten a look at his “junk” and mocked him mercilessly, evidently repeatedly asking, “What size are you?” and referring to him as “little angry man.”  In the end, calling it “psychological torture,” he insisted that he snapped, which in his case meant that he went after a co-worker, baton first, demanding an apology.

Consider that a little parable about just how low this country has sunk, how psychologically insecure we’ve become while supposedly guarding ourselves against global danger.  There is no question that, at the height of Cold War hysteria, when superpower nuclear arsenals were out of this world and the planet seemed a hair-trigger from destruction, big and small penises were in play, symbolically speaking.  Only now, however, facing a ragtag set of fanatics and terrorists — not a mighty nation but a puny crew — are those penises perfectly real and, potentially, completely humiliating.

Failed Bombs Do the Job

We live, it seems, in a national security “homeland” of little angry bureaucrats who couldn’t be happier to define what “safety” means for you and big self-satisfied officials who can duck the application of those safety methods.  Your government can now come up with any wacky solution to American “security” and you’ll pay the price.  One guy brings a failed shoe bomb on an airplane, and you’re suddenly in your socks.  Word has it that bombs can be mixed from liquids in airplane bathrooms, and there go your bottled drinks.  A youthful idiot flies toward Detroit with an ill-constructed bomb in his underwear, and suddenly they’re taking naked scans of you or threatening to grope your junk.

Two bombs don’t go off in the cargo holds of two planes and all of a sudden sending things around the world threatens to become more problematic and expensive.  Each time, the price of “safety” rises and some set of lucky corporations, along with the lobbyists and politicians that support them, get a windfall.  In each case, the terror tactic (at least in the normal sense) failed; in each case, the already draconian standards for our security were ratcheted up, while yet more money was poured into new technology and human reinforcements, which may, in the end, cause more disruption than any successful terror attack.

Directly or indirectly, you pay for the screeners and scanners and a labyrinthine intelligence bureaucracy that officially wields an $80 billion budget, and all the lobbyists and shysters and pitchmen who accompany our burgeoning homeland-security complex.  And by the way, no one’s the slightest bit nice about it either, which isn’t surprising since it’s a national security state we’re talking about, which means its mentality is punitive.  It wants to lock you down, quietly and with full acquiescence if possible.  Offer some trouble, though, or step out of line, and you’ll be hit with a $10,000 fine or maybe put in cuffs.  It’s all for your safety, and fortunately they have a set of the most inept terror plots in history to prove their point.

By now, who hasn’t written about the airport “porno-scans,” the crotch gropes and breast jobs, the “don’t touch my junk” uproar, the growing lines, and the exceedingly modest protests on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, not to speak of the indignity of it all?

Totally been there, completely done that; totally written about, fully read.  Shouldn’t we move on?

Taking Off the Gloves (and Then Everything Else)

And yet there are a few dots that still need to be connected.  After all, since the beginning of George W. Bush’s second term, Americans have been remarkably quiet when it comes to the national security disasters being perpetuated in their name.  America’s wars, its soaring Pentagon budgets, its billion-dollar military bases, its giant new citadels still called embassies but actually regional command centers, its ever-escalating CIA drone war along the Pakistani tribal borderlands, the ever-expanding surveillance at home, and the incessant “night raids” and home razings thousands of miles away in Afghanistan, not to speak of Washington’s stimulus-package spending in its war zones have caused no more than the mildest ripple of protest, much less genuine indignation, in this country in years.

American “safety” has, in every case, trumped outrage.  Now, for the first time in years, the oppressiveness of a national security state bent on locking down American life has actually gotten to some Americans.  No flags are yet flying over mass protests with “Don’t Scan on Me” emblazoned on them.  Still, the idea that air travel may now mean a choice between a spritz of radiation and a sorta naked snapshot or — thrilling option B — having some overworked, overaggressive TSA agent grope you has caused outrage, at least among a minority of Americans, amid administration confusion.  (If you want evidence that Hillary Clinton is considering a run for president in 2012, check out what she had to say about her lack of eagerness to be patted down at the airport.)

Local authorities have threatened to bring sexual battery charges against TSA agents who step over the line in pat-downs.  Some legislators are denouncing the TSA’s new security plans.  Ron Paul has introduced the American Travel Dignity Act.  And good for them all.

But here’s the thing: in our deluded state, Americans don’t tend to connect what we’re doing to others abroad and what we’re doing to ourselves at home.  We refuse to see that the trillion or more dollars that continue to go into the Pentagon, the U.S. Intelligence Community, and the national security state yearly, as well as the stalemated or losing wars Washington insists on fighting in distant lands, have anything to do with the near collapse of the American economy, job-devastation at home, or any of the other disasters of our American age.

As a result, those porno-scanners and enhanced pat-downs are indignities without a cause — except, of course, for those terrorists who keep launching their bizarre plots to take down our planes.  And yet whatever inconvenience, embarrassment, or humiliation you suffer in an airport shouldn’t be thought of as something the terrorists have done to us.  It’s what the American national security state that we’ve quietly accepted demands of its subjects, based on the idea that no degree of danger from a terrorist attack, however infinitesimal, is acceptable. (When it comes to genuine safety, anything close to that principle is absent from other aspects of American life where — from eating to driving, to drinking, to working — genuine danger exists and genuine damage is regularly done.)

We now live not just with all the usual fears that life has to offer, but in something like a United States of Fear.

So think of it as an irony that, when George W. Bush and his cronies decided to sally forth and smite the Greater Middle East, they exulted that they were finally “taking the gloves off.”  And so they were: aggressive war, torture, abuse, secret imprisonment, souped-up surveillance, slaughter, drone wars, there was no end to it.  When those gloves came off, other people suffered first.  But wasn’t it predictable — since unsuccessful wars have a nasty habit of coming home — that, in the end, other things would come off, and sooner or later they would be on you: your hat, your shoes, your belt, your clothes, and of course, your job, your world?

And don’t for a second think that it’s going to end here.  What happens when the first terrorist with a suppository bomb is found aboard one of our planes?  After all, such weapons already exist.  In the meantime, the imposition of more draconian safety and security methods is, of course, being considered for buses, trains, and boats.  Can trucks, taxis, cars, and bikes be far behind?  After all, once begun, there can, by definition, be no end to the search for perfect security.

You Wanna Be Safer?  Really?

You must have a friend who’s extremely critical of everyone else but utterly opaque when it comes to himself.  Well, that’s this country, too.

Here’s a singular fact to absorb: we now know that a bunch of Yemeni al-Qaeda adherents have a far better hit on just who we are, psychologically speaking, and what makes us tick than we do.  Imagine that.  They have a more accurate profile of us than our leading intelligence profilers undoubtedly do of them.

Recently, they released an online magazine laying out just how much the two U.S.-bound cargo-bay bombs that caused panic cost them: a mere $4,200 and the efforts of “less than six brothers” over three months.  They even gave their plot a name, Operation Hemorrhage (and what they imagined hemorrhaging, it seems, was not American blood, but treasure).

Now, they’re laughing at us for claiming the operation failed because — thanks reportedly to a tip from Saudi intelligence — those bombs didn’t go off.  “This supposedly ‘foiled plot,’” they wrote, “will without a doubt cost America and other Western countries billions of dollars in new security measures. That is what we call leverage.”

They are, they claim, planning to use the “security phobia that is sweeping America” not to cause major casualties, but to blow a hole in the U.S. economy.  “We knew that cargo planes are staffed by only a pilot and a co-pilot, so our objective was not to cause maximum casualties but to cause maximum losses to the American economy” via the multi-billion-dollar U.S. freight industry.

This is a new definition of asymmetrical warfare.  The terrorists never have to strike an actual target.  It’s not even incumbent upon them to build a bomb that works.  Just about anything will do.  To be successful, they just have to repeatedly send things in our direction, inciting the expectable Pavlovian reaction from the U.S. national security state, causing it to further tighten its grip (grope?) at yet greater taxpayer expense.

In a sense, both the American national security state and al-Qaeda are building their strength and prestige as our lives grow more constrained and our treasure vanishes.

So you wanna be safer?  I mean, actually safer?  Here’s a simple formula for beginning to improve American safety and security at every level.  End our trillion dollar wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; set our military to defending our own borders (and no, projecting power abroad does not normally qualify as a defense of the United States); begin to shut down our global empire of bases; stop building grotesque embassy-citadels abroad (one even has a decorative moat, for god’s sake!); end our overseas war stimulus packages and bring some of that money home.  In short, stop going out of our way to tick off foreigners and then pouring our treasure into an American war machine intent on pursuing a generational global war against them. 

Of course, the U.S. national security state has quite a different formula for engendering safety in America: fight the Afghan War until hell freezes over; keep the odd base or two in Iraq; dig into the Persian Gulf region; send U.S. Special Operations troops into any country where a terrorist might possibly lurk; and make sure the drones aren’t far behind.  In other words, reinforce our war state by ensuring that we’re eternally in a state of war, and then scare the hell out of Americans by repeatedly insisting that we’re in imminent danger, that shoe, underwear, and someday butt bombers will destroy our country, our lives, and our civilization.  Insist that a single percent of risk is 1% too much when it comes to terror and American lives, and then demand that those who feel otherwise be dealt with punitively, if they won’t shut up.

It’s a formula for leaving you naked in airports, while increasing the oppressive power of the state.  And here’s the dirty, little, distinctly Orwellian secret: the national security state can’t do without those Yemeni terrorists (and vice versa), as well as our homegrown variety.  All of them profit from a world of war.  You don’t — and on that score, what happens in an airport line should be the least of your worries.

The national security state is eager to cop a feel.  As long as Americans don’t grasp the connections between our war state and our “safety,” things will only get worse and, in the end, our world will genuinely be in danger.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com.  His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books). You can catch him discussing war American-style and that book in a Timothy MacBain TomCast video by clicking here.

Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt

Going, going, gone!  You can almost hear the announcer’s voice throbbing with excitement, only we’re not talking about home runs here, but about the disappearing date on which, for the United States and its military, the Afghan War will officially end.

Practically speaking, the answer to when it will be over is: just this side of never.  If you take the word of our Afghan War commander, the secretary of defense, and top officials of the Obama administration and NATO, we’re not leaving any time soon.  As with any clever time traveler, every date that’s set always contains a verbal escape hatch into the future.

In my 1950s childhood, there was a cheesy (if thrilling) sci-fi flick, The Incredible Shrinking Man, about a fellow who passed through a radioactive cloud in the Pacific Ocean and soon noticed that his suits were too big for him.  Next thing you knew, he was living in a doll house, holding off his pet cat, and fighting an ordinary spider transformed into a monster.  Finally, he disappeared entirely leaving behind only a sonorous voice to tell us that he had entered a universe where “the unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle.”

In recent weeks, without a radioactive cloud in sight, the date for serious drawdowns of American troops in Afghanistan has followed a similar path toward the vanishing point and is now threatening to disappear “over the horizon” (a place where, we are regularly told, American troops will lurk once they have finally handed their duties over to the Afghan forces they are training).

If you remember, back in December 2009 President Obama spoke of July 2011 as a firm date to “begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan,” the moment assumedly when the beginning of the end of the war would come into sight.  In July of this year, Afghan President Hamid Karzai spoke of 2014 as the date when Afghan security forces “will be responsible for all military and law enforcement operations throughout our country.”

Administration officials, anxious about the effect that 2011 date was having on an American public grown weary of an unpopular war and on an enemy waiting for us to depart, grabbed Karzai’s date and ran with it (leaving many of his caveats about the war the Americans were fighting, particularly his desire to reduce the American presence, in the dust).  Now, 2014 is hyped as the new 2011.

It has, in fact, been widely reported that Obama officials have been working in concert to “play down” the president’s 2011 date, while refocusing attention on 2014. In recent weeks, top administration officials have been little short of voluble on the subject.  Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (“We’re not getting out. We’re talking about probably a years-long process.”), Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen, attending a security conference in Australia, all “cited 2014… as the key date for handing over the defense of Afghanistan to the Afghans themselves.”  The New York Times headlined its report on the suddenly prominent change in timing this way: “U.S. Tweaks Message on Troops in Afghanistan.”

Quite a tweak.  Added Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller: “The message shift is effectively a victory for the military, which has long said the July 2011 deadline undermined its mission by making Afghans reluctant to work with troops perceived to be leaving shortly.” 

Inflection Points and Aspirational Goals

Barely had 2014 risen into the headlines, however, before that date, too, began to be chipped away.  As a start, it turned out that American planners weren’t talking about just any old day in 2014, but its last one.  As Lieutenant General William Caldwell, head of the NATO training program for Afghan security forces, put it while holding a Q&A with a group of bloggers, “They’re talking about December 31st, 2014.  It’s the end of December in 2014… that [Afghan] President Karzai has said they want Afghan security forces in the lead.”

Nor, officials rushed to say, was anyone talking about 2014 as a date for all American troops to head for the exits, just “combat troops” — and maybe not even all of them.  Possibly tens of thousands of trainers and other so-called non-combat forces would stay on to help with the “transition process.” This follows the Iraq pattern where 50,000 American troops remain after the departure of U.S. “combat” forces to great media fanfare.  Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was typical in calling for “the substantial combat forces [to] be phased out at the end of 2014, four years from now.”  (Note the usual verbal escape hatch, in this case “substantial,” lurking in his statement.)

Last Saturday, behind “closed doors” at a NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal, Afghan War commander General David Petraeus presented European leaders with a “phased four-year plan” to “wind down American and allied fighting in Afghanistan.” Not surprisingly, it had the end of 2014 in its sights and the president quickly confirmed that “transition” date, even while opening plenty of post-2014 wiggle room.  By then, as he described it, “our footprint” would only be “significantly reduced.” (He also claimed that, post-2014, the U.S. would be maintaining a “counterterrorism capability” in Afghanistan — and Iraq — for which “platforms to… execute… counterterrorism operations,” assumedly bases, would be needed.)

Meanwhile, unnamed “senior U.S. officials” in Lisbon were clearly buttonholing reporters to “cast doubt on whether the United States, the dominant power in the 28-nation alliance, would end its own combat mission before 2015.”  As always, the usual qualifying phrases were profusely in evidence.

Throughout these weeks, the “tweaking” — that is, the further chipping away at 2014 as a hard and fast date for anything — only continued.  Mark Sedwill, NATO’s civilian counterpart to U.S. commander General David Petraeus, insisted that 2014 was nothing more than “an inflection point” in an ever more drawn-out drawdown process.  That process, he insisted, would likely extend to “2015 and beyond,” which, of course, put 2016 officially into play.  And keep in mind that this is only for combat troops, not those assigned to “train and support” or keep “a strategic over watch” on Afghan forces.

On the eve of NATO’s Lisbon meeting, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell, waxing near poetic, declared 2014 nothing more than an “aspirational goal,” rather than an actual deadline.  As the conference began, NATO’s Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen insisted that the alliance would be committed in Afghanistan “as long as it takes.”  And new British Chief of the Defense Staff General Sir David Richards suggested that, given the difficulty of ever defeating the Taliban (or al-Qaeda) militarily, NATO should be preparing plans to maintain a role for its troops for the next 30 to 40 years.

War Extender

Here, then, is a brief history of American time in Afghanistan.  After all, this isn’t our first Afghan War, but our second.  The first, the CIA’s anti-Soviet jihad (in which the Agency funded a number of the fundamentalist extremists we’re now fighting in the second), lasted a decade, from 1980 until 1989 when the Soviets withdrew in defeat.

In October 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration launched America’s second Afghan War, taking Kabul that November as the Taliban dissolved.  The power of the American military to achieve quick and total victory seemed undeniable, even after Osama bin Laden slipped out of Tora Bora that December and escaped into Pakistan’s tribal borderlands.

However, it evidently never crossed the minds of President Bush’s top officials to simply declare victory and get out.  Instead, as the U.S. would do in Iraq after the invasion of 2003, the Pentagon started building a new infrastructure of military bases (in this case, on the ruins of the old Soviet base infrastructure).  At the same time, the former Cold Warriors in Washington let their dreams about pushing the former commies of the former Soviet Union out of the former soviet socialist republics of Central Asia, places where, everyone knew, you could just about swim in black gold and run geopolitically wild.

Then, when the invasion of Iraq was launched in March 2003, Afghanistan, still a “war” (if barely) was forgotten, while the Taliban returned to the field, built up their strength, and launched an insurgency that has only gained momentum to this moment.  In 2008, before leaving office, George W. Bush bumped his favorite general, Iraq surge commander Petraeus, upstairs to become the head of the Central Command which oversees America’s war zones in the Greater Middle East, including Afghanistan.

Already the guru of counterinsurgency (known familiarly as COIN), Petraeus had, in 2006, overseen the production of the military’s new war-fighting bible, a how-to manual dusted off from the Vietnam era’s failed version of COIN and made new and magical again.  In June 2010, eight and a half years into our Second Afghan War, at President Obama’s request, Petraeus took over as Afghan War commander.  It was clear then that time was short — with an administration review of Afghan war strategy coming up at year’s end and results needed quickly.  The American war was also in terrible shape.

In the new COIN-ish U.S. Army, however, it is a dogma of almost biblical faith that counterinsurgencies don’t produce quick results; that, to be successful, they must be pursued for years on end.  As Petraeus put it back in 2007 when talking about Iraq, “[T]ypically, I think historically, counterinsurgency operations have gone at least nine or 10 years.”  Recently, in an interview with Martha Raddatz of ABC News, he made a nod toward exactly the same timeframe for Afghanistan, one accepted as bedrock knowledge in the world of the COINistas.

What this meant was that, whether as CENTCOM commander or Afghan War commander, Petraeus was looking for two potentially contradictory results at the same time.  Somehow, he needed to wrest those nine to 10 years of war-fighting from a president looking for a tighter schedule and, in a war going terribly sour, he needed almost instant evidence of “progress” that would fit the president’s coming December “review” of the war and might pacify unhappy publics in the U.S. and Europe.

Now let’s do the math.  At the moment, depending on how you care to count, we are in the 10th year of our second Afghan War or the 20th year of war interruptus.  Since June 2009, Petraeus and various helpers have stretched the schedule to 2014 for (most) American combat troops and at least 2015 or 2016 for the rest.  If you were to start counting from the president’s December surge address, that’s potentially seven more years.  In other words, we’re now talking about either a 15-year war or an on-and-off again quarter-century one.  All evidence shows that the Pentagon’s war planners would like to extend those already vague dates even further into the future.

On Ticking Clocks in Washington and Kabul

Up to now, only one of General Petraeus’s two campaigns has been under discussion here: the other one, fought out these last years not in Afghanistan, but in Washington and NATO capitals, over how to schedule a war.  Think of it as the war for a free hand in determining how long the Afghan War is to be fought.

It has been run from General Petraeus’s headquarters in Kabul, the giant five-sided military headquarters on the Potomac presided over by Secretary of Defense Gates, and various think-tanks filled with America’s militarized intelligentsia scattered around Washington — and it has proven a classically successful “clear, hold, build” counterinsurgency operation.  Pacification in Washington and a number of European capitals has occurred with remarkably few casualties.  (Former Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal, axed by the president for insubordination, has been the exception, not the rule.)

Slowly but decisively, Petraeus and company constricted President Obama’s war-planning choices to two options: more and yet more.  In late 2009, the president agreed to that second surge of troops (the first had been announced that March), not to speak of CIA agents, drones, private contractors, and State Department and other civilian government employees. In his December “surge” address at West Point (for the nation but visibly to the military), Obama had the temerity as commander-in-chief to name a specific, soon-to-arrive date — July 2011 — for beginning a serious troop drawdown.  It was then that the COIN campaign in Washington ramped up into high gear with the goal of driving the prospective end of the war back by years.

It took bare hours after the president’s address for administration officials to begin leaking to media sources that his drawdown would be “conditions based” — a phrase guaranteed to suck the meaning out of any deadline.  (The president had indeed acknowledged in his address that his administration would take into account “conditions on the ground.”)  Soon, the Secretary of Defense and others took to the airwaves in a months-long campaign emphasizing that drawdown in Afghanistan didn’t really mean drawdown, that leaving by no means meant leaving, and that the future was endlessly open to interpretation.

With the ratification in Lisbon of that 2014 date “and beyond,” the political clocks — an image General Petraeus loves — in Washington, European capitals, and American Kabul are now ticking more or less in unison.

Two other “clocks” are, however, ticking more like bombs.  If counterinsurgency is a hearts and minds campaign, then the other target of General Petraeus’s first COIN campaign has been the restive hearts and minds of the American and European publics.  Last year a Dutch government fell over popular opposition to Afghanistan and, even as NATO met last weekend, thousands of antiwar protestors marched in London and Lisbon.  Europeans generally want out and their governments know it, but (as has been true since 1945) the continent’s leaders have no idea how to say “no” to Washington.  In the U.S., too, the Afghan war grows ever more unpopular, and while it was forgotten during the election season, no politician should count on that phenomenon lasting forever.

And then, of course, there’s the literal ticking bomb, the actual war in Afghanistan.  In that campaign, despite a drumbeat of American/NATO publicity about “progress,” the news has been grim indeed.  American and NATO casualties have been higher this year than at any other moment in the war; the Taliban seems if anything more entrenched in more parts of the country; the Afghan public, ever more puzzled and less happy with foreign troops and contractors traipsing across the land; and Hamid Karzai, the president of the country, sensing a situation gone truly sour, has been regularly challenging the way General Petraeus is fighting the war in his country. (The nerve!)

No less unsettling, General Petraeus himself has seemed unnerved.  He was declared “irked” by Karzai’s comments and was said to have warned Afghan officials that their president’s criticism might be making his “own position ‘untenable,’” which was taken as a resignation threat.  Meanwhile, the COIN-meister was in the process of imposing a new battle plan on Afghanistan that leaves counterinsurgency (at least as usually described) in a roadside ditch.  No more is the byword “protect the people,” or “clear, hold, build”; now, it’s smash, kill, destroy.  The war commander has loosed American firepower in a major way in the Taliban strongholds of southern Afghanistan.

Early this year, then-commander McChrystal had significantly cut back on U.S. air strikes as a COIN-ish measure meant to lessen civilian casualties.  No longer.  In a striking reversal, air power has been called in — and in a big way.  In October, U.S. planes launched missiles or bombs on 1,000 separate Afghan missions, numbers seldom seen since the 2001 invasion.  The Army has similarly loosed its massively powerful High Mobility Artillery Rocket System in the area around the southern city of Kandahar.  Civilian deaths are rising rapidly.  Dreaded Special Operations night raids on Afghan homes by “capture/kill” teams have tripled with 1,572 such operations over the last three months.  (These are the tactics on which Karzai recently challenged Petraeus.)  With them, the body count has also arrived.  American officials are eagerly boasting to reporters about their numerical efficiency in taking out mid-level Taliban leaders (“…368 insurgent leaders killed or captured, and 968 lower-level insurgents killed and 2,477 captured, according to NATO statistics”).

In the districts around Kandahar, a newly reported American tactic is simply to raze individual houses or even whole villages believed to be booby-trapped by the Taliban, as well as tree lines “where insurgents could hide.”  American troops have also been “blow[ing] up outbuildings, flatten[ing] agricultural walls, and carv[ing] new ‘military roads,’ because existing ones are so heavily mined… right through farms and compounds.”  And now, reports Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post, the Marines are also sending the first contingent of M1 Abrams tanks (with a “main gun that can destroy a house more than a mile away”) into the south. Such tanks, previously held back for fear of reminding Afghans of their Russian occupiers, are, according to an unnamed U.S. officer he quotes, bringing “awe, shock, and firepower” to the south.

None of this, of course, has anything to do with winning hearts and minds, just obliterating them.  Not surprisingly, such tactics also generate villagers fleeing embattled farmlands often for “squalid” refugee camps in overcrowded cities.

Flip of the COIN

Suddenly, this war for which General Petraeus has won his counterinsurgency warriors at least a four- to-six-year reprieve is being fought as if there were no tomorrow.  Here, for instance, is a brief description from a British Guardian reporter in Kandahar of what the night part of the war now feels like from a distance:

“After the sun sets, the air becomes noisy with US jets dropping bombs that bleach the dark out of the sky in their sudden eruptions; with the ripping sound of the mini-guns of the Kiowa helicopter gunships and A-10 Warthogs hunting in the nearby desert.  The night is also lit up by brilliant flares that fall as slow as floating snowflakes, a visible sign of the commando raids into the villages beyond. It is a conflict heard, but not often witnessed.”

None of this qualifies as “counterinsurgency,” at least as described by the general and his followers.  It does, however, resemble where counterinsurgencies have usually headed — directly into the charnel house of history.

Chandrasekaran quotes a civilian adviser to the NATO command in Kabul this way: “Because Petraeus is the author of the COIN [counterinsurgency] manual, he can do whatever he wants.  He can manage the optics better than McChrystal could.  If he wants to turn it up to 11, he feels he has the moral authority to do it.”

We have no access to the mind of David Petraeus.  We don’t know just why he is bringing in the big guns or suddenly fighting his war as if there were no tomorrow.  We don’t know whether he fears the loss of the backing of an American president or the American people or even the U.S. military itself, whether he despairs of President Karzai or the Taliban, or the whole mission, or whether he has launched his version of a blitz in the most hopeful of moods.  We don’t know whether he sees the contradiction in any of this, though no one, the general included, should be surprised when, for all the talk of rational planning and strategy, the irrationality of war — the mass killing of other human beings — grabs us by the throat and shakes us for all we’re worth.

Petraeus has flipped a COIN and taken a gamble.  However it turns out for him, one thing is certain: Afghans will once again pay with their homes, farms, livelihoods, and lives, while Americans, Europeans, and Canadians will pay with lives and treasure invested in a war that couldn’t be more bizarre, a war with no end in sight.  If this goes on to 2014 “and beyond,” heaven help us.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com.  His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books). You can catch him discussing war American-style and that book in a Timothy MacBain TomCast video by clicking here.

Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt

You must have had a moment when you thought to yourself: It really isn’t going to end, is it?  Not ever.  Rationally, you know perfectly well that whatever your “it” might be will indeed end, because everything does, but your gut tells you something different.

I had that moment recently when it came to the American way of war.  In the past couple of weeks, it could have been triggered by an endless string of ill-attended news reports like theChristian Science Monitor piece headlined “U.S. involvement in Yemen edging toward ‘clandestine war.’”  Or by the millions of dollars in U.S. payments reportedly missing in Afghanistan, thanks to under-the-table or unrecorded handouts in unknown amounts to Afghan civilian government employees (as well as Afghan security forces, private-security contractors, and even the Taliban).  Or how about the news that the F-35 “Joint Strike Fighter,” the cost-overrun poster weapon of the century, already long overdue, will cost yet more money and be produced even less quickly?

Or what about word that our Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has officially declared the Obama administration “open” to keeping U.S. troops in Iraq after the announced 2011 deadline for their withdrawal?  Or how about the news from McClatchy’s reliable reporter Nancy Youssef that Washington is planning to start “publicly walking away from what it once touted as key deadlines in the war in Afghanistan in an effort to de-emphasize President Barack Obama’s pledge that he’d begin withdrawing U.S. forces in July 2011”?

Or that bottomless feeling could have been triggered by the recent request from the military man in charge of training Afghan security forces, Lieutenant General William Caldwell, for another 900 U.S. and NATO trainers in the coming months, lest the improbable “transition” date of 2014 for Afghan forces to “take the lead” in protecting their own country be pushed back yet again.  (“No trainers, no transition,” wrote the general in a “report card” on his mission.)

Or it could have been the accounts of how a trained Afghan soldier turned his gun on U.S. troops in southern Afghanistan, killing two of them, and then fled to the Taliban for protection (one of a string of similar incidents over the last year).  Or, speaking of things that could have set me off, consider this passage from the final paragraphs of an Elisabeth Bumiller article tucked away inside the New York Times on whether Afghan War commander General David Petraeus was (or was not) on the road to success: “’It is certainly true that Petraeus is attempting to shape public opinion ahead of the December [Obama administration] review [of Afghan war policy],’ said an administration official who is supportive of the general. ‘He is the most skilled public relations official in the business, and he’s trying to narrow the president’s options.’”

Or, in the same piece, what about this all-American analogy from Bruce Riedel, the former CIA official who chaired President Obama’s initial review of Afghan war policy in 2009, speaking of the hundreds of mid-level Taliban the U.S. military has reportedly wiped out in recent months: “The fundamental question is how deep is their bench.” (Well, yes, Bruce, if you imagine the Afghan War as the basketball nightmare on Elm Street in which the hometown team’s front five periodically get slaughtered.)

Or maybe it should have been the fact that only 7% of Americans had reports and incidents like these, or evidently anything else having to do with our wars, on their minds as they voted in the recent midterm elections.

The Largest “Embassy” on Planet Earth

Strange are the ways, though.  You just can’t predict what’s going to set you off.  For me, it was none of the above, nor even the flood of Republican war hawks heading for Washington eager to “cut” government spending by “boosting” the Pentagon budget.  Instead, it was a story that slipped out as the midterm election results were coming in and was treated as an event of no importance in the U.S.

The Associated Press covered U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry’s announcement that a $511 million contract had been awarded to Caddell Construction, one of America’s “largest construction and engineering groups,” for a massive expansion of the U.S. embassy in Kabul.  According to the ambassador, that embassy is already “the largest… in the world with more than 1,100 brave and dedicated civilians… from 16 agencies and working next to their military counterparts in 30 provinces,” and yet it seems it’s still not large enough.

A few other things in his announcement caught my eye.  Construction of the new “permanent offices and housing” for embassy personnel is not to be completed until sometime in 2014, approximately three years after President Obama’s July 2011 Afghan drawdown is set to begin, and that $511 million is part of a $790 million bill to U.S. taxpayers that will include expansion work on consular facilities in the Afghan cities of Mazar-i-Sharif and Herat.  And then, if the ambassador’s announcement was meant to fly below the media radar screen in the U.S., it was clearly meant to be noticed in Afghanistan.  After all, Eikenberry publicly insisted that the awarding of the contract should be considered “an indication… an action, a deed that you can take as a long-term commitment of the United States government to the government of Afghanistan.”

(Note to Tea Party types heading for Washington: this contract is part of a new stimulus package in one of the few places where President Obama can, by executive fiat, increase stimulus spending.  It has already resulted in the hiring of 500 Afghan workers and when construction ramps up, another 1,000 more will be added to the crew.) 

Jo Comerford and the number-crunchers at the National Priorities Project have offered TomDispatch a hand in putting that $790 million outlay into an American context: “$790 million is more than ten times the money the federal government allotted for the State Energy Program in FY2011. It’s nearly five times the total amount allocated for the National Endowment for the Arts (threatened to be completely eliminated by the incoming Congress). If that sum were applied instead to job creation in the United States, in new hires it would yield more than 22,000 teachers, 15,000 healthcare workers, and employ more than 13,000 in the burgeoning clean energy industry.”

Still, to understand just why, among a flood of similar war reports, this one got under my skin, you need a bit of backstory.

Singular Spawn or Forerunner Deluxe?

One night in May 2007, I was nattering on at the dinner table about reports of a monstrous new U.S. embassy being constructed in Baghdad, so big that it put former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s grandiose Disneyesque palaces to shame.  On 104 acres of land in the heart of the Iraqi capital (always referred to in news reports as almost the size of Vatican City), it was slated to cost $590 million. (Predictable cost overruns and delays — see F-35 above — would, in the end, bring that figure to at least $740 million, while the cost of running the place yearly is now estimated at $1.5 billion.)

Back then, more than half a billion dollars was impressive enough, even for a compound that was to have its own self-contained electricity-generation, water-purification, and sewage systems in a city lacking most of the above, not to speak of its own antimissile defense systems, and 20 all-new blast-resistant buildings including restaurants, a recreation center, and other amenities.  It was to be by far the largest, most heavily fortified embassy on the planet with a “diplomatic” staff of 1,000 (a number that has only grown since).

My wife listened to my description of this future colossus, which bore no relation to anything ever previously called an “embassy,” and then, out of the blue, said, “I wonder who the architect is?”  Strangely, I hadn’t even considered that such a mega-citadel might actually have an architect.

That tells you what I know about building anything.  So imagine my surprise to discover that there was indeed a Kansas architect, BDY (Berger Devine Yaeger), previously responsible for the Sprint Corporation’s world headquarters in Overland Park, Kansas; the Visitation Church in Kansas City, Missouri; and Harrah’s Hotel and Casino in North Kansas City, Missouri.  Better yet, BDY was so proud to have been taken on as architect to the wildest imperial dreamers and schemers of our era that it posted sketches at its website of what the future embassy, its “pool house,” its tennis court, PX, retail and shopping areas, and other highlights were going to look like. 

Somewhere between horrified and grimly amused, I wrote a piece at TomDispatch, entitled “The Mother Ship Lands in Baghdad” and, via a link to the BDY drawings, offered readers a little “blast-resistant spin” through Bush’s colossus.  From the beginning, I grasped that this wasn’t an embassy in any normal sense and I understood as well something of what it was.  Here’s the way I put it at the time:

“As an outpost, this vast compound reeks of one thing: imperial impunity. It was never meant to be an embassy from a democracy that had liberated an oppressed land. From the first thought, the first sketch, it was to be the sort of imperial control center suitable for the planet’s sole ‘hyperpower,’ dropped into the middle of the oil heartlands of the globe. It was to be Washington’s dream and Kansas City’s idea of a palace fit for an embattled American proconsul — or a khan.”

In other words, a U.S. “control center” at the heart of what Bush administration officials then liked to call “the Greater Middle East” or the “arc of instability.”  To my surprise, the piece began racing around the Internet and other sites — TomDispatch did not then have the capacity to post images — started putting up BDY’s crude drawings.  The next thing I knew, the State Department had panicked, declared this a “security breach,” and forced BDY to take down its site and remove the drawings.

I was amazed.  But (and here we come to the failure of my own imagination) I never doubted that BDY’s bizarre imperial “mother ship” being prepared for landing in Baghdad was the singular spawn of the Bush administration.  I saw it as essentially a vanity production sired by a particular set of fantasies about imposing a Pax Americana abroad and a Pax Republicana at home.  It never crossed my mind that there would be two such “embassies.”

So, on this, call me delusional.  By May 2009, with Barack Obama in the White House, I knew as much.  That was when two McClatchy reporters broke a story about a similar project for a new “embassy” in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, at the projected cost of $736 million (with a couple of hundred million more slated for upgrades of diplomatic facilities in Afghanistan).

Simulating Ghosts

Now, with the news in from Kabul, we know that there are going to be three mother ships.  All gigantic beyond belief.  All (after the usual cost overruns) undoubtedly in the three-quarters of a billion dollar range, or beyond.  All meant not to house modest numbers of diplomats acting as the face of the United States in a foreign land, but thousands of diplomats, spies, civilian personnel, military officials, agents, and operatives hunkering down long-term for war and skullduggery.

Connect two points and you have a straight line.  Connect three points and you have a pattern — in this case, simple and striking.  The visionaries and fundamentalists of the Bush years may be gone and visionless managers of the tattered American imperium are now directing the show.  Nonetheless, they and the U.S. military in the region remain remarkably devoted to the control of the Greater Middle East.  Even without a vision, there is still the war momentum and the money to support it.

While Americans fight bitterly over whether the stimulus package for the domestic economy was too large or too small, few in the U.S. even notice that the American stimulus package in Kabul, Islamabad, Baghdad, and elsewhere in our embattled Raj is going great guns.  Embassies the size of pyramids are still being built; military bases to stagger the imagination continue to be constructed; and nowhere, not even in Iraq, is it clear that Washington is committed to packing up its tents, abandoning its billion-dollar monuments, and coming home.

In the U.S., it’s clearly going to be paralysis and stagnation all the way, but in Peshawar and Mazar-i-sharif, not to speak of the greater Persian Gulf region, we remain the spendthrifts of war, perfectly willing, for instance, to ship fuel across staggering distances and unimaginably long supply lines at $400 a gallon to Afghanistan to further crank up an energy-heavy conflict.   Here in the United States, police are being laid off.  In Afghanistan, we are paying to enroll thousands and thousands of them and train them in ever greater numbers.  In the U.S., roads crumble; in Afghanistan, support for road-building is still on the agenda.

At home, it’s peace all the way to the unemployment line, because peace, in our American world, increasingly seems to mean economic disaster.  In the Greater Middle East, it’s war to the horizon, all war all the time, and creeping escalation all the way around.  (And keep in mind that the escalatory stories cited above all occurred before the next round of Republican warhawks even hit Washington with the wind at their backs, ready to push for far more of the same.)

The folks who started us down this precipitous path and over an economic cliff are now in retirement and heading onto the memoir circuit: our former president is chatting it up with Matt Lauer and Oprah; his vice president is nursing his heart while assumedly writing about “his service in four presidential administrations”; his first secretary of defense is readying himself for the publication of his memoir in January; and his national security advisor, then secretary of state (for whom Chevron once named a double-hulled oil tanker), is already heading into her second and third memoir.  But while they scribble and yak, their policy ghosts haunt us, as does their greatest edifice, that embassy in Baghdad, now being cloned elsewhere.  Even without them or the neocons who pounded the drums for them, the U.S. military still pushes doggedly toward 2014 and beyond in Afghanistan, while officials “tweak” their drawdown non-schedules, narrow the president’s non-options, and step in to fund and build yet more command-and-control centers in the Greater Middle East.

It looks and feels like the never-ending story, and yet, of course, the imperium is visibly fraying, while the burden of distant wars grows ever heavier.  Those “embassies” are being built for the long haul, but a decade or two down the line, I wouldn’t want to put my money on what exactly they will represent, or what they could possibly hope to control.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com.  His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books). You can catch a Timothy MacBain TomDispatch video interview with me on our “stimulus” spending abroad by clicking here or download it to your iPod, here. 

[Note:  For those still interested, some of the BDY sketches of the Baghdad embassy remain up at Antiwar.com.  Click here to see them.  And while I’m at it, let me make a heartfelt bow to Antiwar.com, without which TomDispatch research would truly be hell and, in particular, Jason Ditz, whose daily updates are must-read fare for me.  Other crucial must-read sites for collecting war info include Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, Paul Woodward’s the War in Context, and Noah Shachtman’s Danger Room.]

Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt

By the time you read this, I’ll already have voted — the single most reflexive political act of my life — in the single most dispiriting election I can remember.  As I haven’t missed a midterm or presidential election since my first vote in 1968, that says something.  Or maybe by the time you’ve gotten to this, the results of the 2010 midterm elections will be in.  In either case, I’ll try to explain just why you don’t really need those results to know which way the wind is gusting.

First, though, a little electoral history of me.  Certainly, my version of election politics started long before I could vote.  I remember collecting campaign buttons in the 1950s and also — for the 1956 presidential campaign in which Dwight Eisenhower (and his vice president, Richard Nixon) faced off against Democratic Party candidate Adlai Stevenson – singing this ditty:

Whistle while you work, 
Nixon is a jerk, 
Eisenhower has no power, 
Stevenson will work!

Even in the world of kids, even then, politics could be gloves-off stuff.  Little good my singing did, though: Stevenson was trounced, thus beginning my political education.  My father and mother were dyed-in-the-wool Depression Democrats, and my mother was a political caricaturist for the then-liberal (now Murdoch-owned) tabloid, the New York Post.  I still remember the fierce drawings she penned for that paper’s front page of red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy.  She also came away from those years filled with political fears, reflected in her admonition to me throughout the 1960s: “It’s the whale that spouts that gets caught.”

Still, I was sold on the American system.  It was a sign of the times that I simply couldn’t wait to vote.  The first election rally I ever attended, in 1962, was for John F. Kennedy, already president.  I remember his face, a postage-stamp-sized blur of pink, glimpsed through a sea of heads and shoulders.  Even today, I can feel a remnant of the excitement and hope of that moment.  In those years before our government had become “the bureaucracy” in young minds, I was imbued with a powerful sense of civic duty that, I suspect, was commonplace.  I daydreamed relentlessly about becoming an American diplomat and so representing my country to the world.

The first presidential campaign I followed with a passion, though, was in 1964, after Kennedy’s assassination.  In memory, I feel as if I voted in it, though I couldn’t have since the voting age was then 21, and I was only 20.  Nonetheless, I all but put my X beside the “peace candidate” of that moment, Lyndon B. Johnson, who had, in such an untimely manner, inherited the Oval Office and a war in Vietnam.  What other vote was there, since he was running against a Republican extremist and warmonger, an Arizona senator named Barry Goldwater?

Not long after his inauguration, however, Johnson launched Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing of North Vietnam.  It had been planned before the election, but was kept suitably under wraps while Goldwater was being portrayed as a man intent on getting American boys killed in Asia and maybe nuking the planet as well.

Four years later, with half a million U.S. troops in South Vietnam and the war reaching conflagration status, I was “mad as hell and not going to take this any more” — and that was years before Paddy Chayefsky penned those words for the film Network.  I was at least as mad as any present-day Tea Partier and one heck of a lot younger.

By 1968, I had been betrayed by my not-quite-vote for Johnson and learned my lesson — they were all warmongers — and so, deeply involved in antiwar activities, I rejected both Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who had barely peeped about the war, and his opponent Richard Nixon (that “jerk” of my 1956 ditty) who was promising “peace with honor,” but as I understood quite well, preparing to blast any Vietnamese, Cambodian, or Laotian within reach.  I voted instead, with some pride, for Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver.

(Okay, I didn’t say this was going to be pretty, did I?)

Nor was it exactly thrilling in 1972 when “tricky Dick,” running for reelection, swamped Senator George McGovern, who actually wanted to bring American troops home and end the war, just before the Watergate scandal fully broke.  And don’t forget the 1980 election in which Jimmy Carter was hung out to dry by the Iran hostage crisis.  As I remember it, I voted late and Democratic that Tuesday in November, came home, made a bowl of popcorn, and sat down in front of the TV just in time to watch Carter concede to Ronald Reagan.  Don’t think I didn’t find that dispiriting.

And none of this could, of course, compare to campaign 2000 with its “elected by the Supreme Court” tag or election night 2004, when early exit polls seemed to indicate that Senator John Kerry, himself an admittedly dispiriting figure, might be headed for the White House.  My wife and I threw a party that night which started in the highest of spirits, only to end, after a long, dismal night, in the reelection of George W. Bush.  On the morning of November 3rd, I swore I had “the election hangover of a lifetime,” as I contemplated the way American voters had re-upped for “the rashest presidency in our history (short perhaps of that of Jefferson Davis).”

“They have,” I added, “signed on to a disastrous crime of a war in Iraq, and a losing war at that which will only get worse; they have signed on to whatever dangerous schemes these schemers can come up with. They have signed on to their own impoverishment. This is the political version of the volunteer Army. Now, they have to live with it. Unfortunately, so do we.”

Hermetic Systems and Mad Elephants 

Six years later, we are indeed poorer in all the obvious ways, and some not so obvious ones as well.  How, then, could the 2010 midterms be the most dispiriting elections of my life, especially when Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News assured us, in the days leading up to the event, that it would have “the power to reshape our nation’s politics.”  Okay, you and I know that’s BS, part of the endless, breathless handicapping of the midterms that went on non-stop for weeks on the TV news?

Still, the most dispiriting?  After all, I’m the guy who penned a piece eight days after the 2008 election entitled “Don’t Let Barack Obama Break Your Heart.”  In what was, for most people I knew, a decidedly upbeat moment, I then wrote, for instance: “So, after January 20th, expect Obama to take possession of George Bush's disastrous Afghan War; and unless he is far more skilled than Alexander the Great, British Empire builders, and the Russians, his war, too, will continue to rage without ever becoming a raging success.”

And take my word for it, when I say dispiriting I’m not even referring to just how dismal my actual voting experience was today in New York City.  I mean, two senators and a governor I don’t give a whit about and not a breath of fresh air anywhere — not unless you count our Republican gubernatorial and “Tea Party” candidate, a beyond-mad-as-hell businessman, who made a fortune partially thanks to state government favors and breaks of every sort and then couldn’t wait to take out that government.  (And when Carl Paladino talks about taking something out, you instinctively know that he’s not a man of metaphor.)  Okay, that is dispiriting, just not in a lifetime award kind of way.

No, it’s the whole airless shebang we call an election that’s gotten to me, the bizarrely hermetic, self-financing, self-praising, self-promoting system we still manage to think of as “democratic.” That includes the media echo chamber that’s been ginning up this nationally nondescript season as an epochal life-changer via a powerfully mad — as in mad elephant – populace ready to run amok.

What Goes Up…

I’m no expert on elections, but sometimes all you need is a little common sense.  So let’s start with a simple principle: what goes up must come down.

For at least 30 years now, what’s gone up is income disparity in this country.  Paul Krugman called this period “the Great Divergence.”  After all, between 1980 and 2005, “more than 80% of total increase in Americans' income went to the top 1%” of Americans in terms of wealth, and today that 1% controls 24% of the nation’s income.  Or put another way, after three decades of ”trickle-down” economics, what’s gone up are the bank accounts of the rich.

In 2009, for instance, as Americans generally scrambled and suffered, lost jobs, watched pensions, IRAs, or savings shrink and houses go into foreclosure, millionaires actually increased.  According to the latest figures, the combined wealth of the 400 richest Americans (all billionaires) has risen by 8% this year, even as, in the second quarter of 2010, the net worth of American households plunged 2.8%.

And in this election year, dispiritingly enough, it’s clear what went up is indeed coming down.  It’s been true for years in our electoral campaigns, of course, but this year we’re talking genuine financial downpour.  Up at the top, individually and corporately, ever more money is on hand to “invest” in protecting what one already possesses or might still acquire.  Hence, this election has a price tag that “obliterates” all previous midterm records.  It’s estimated at $4 billion to $4.2 billion, mostly from what is politely called “fundraising” or from “outside interest groups” — in other words, from that 1% and some of the wealthiest corporations, mainly for ad and influence campaigns.  In other words, the already superrich and the giant corporations that sucked up so much dough over the last 30 years now have tons of it to “invest” in our system in order to reap yet more favors — to invest, that is, in Sharron Angle and Harry Reid.  If that isn’t dispiriting, what is?

The right-wing version of this story is that a thunderstorm of money is being invested in a newly aroused, mad-as-hell crew of Americans ready to storm to power in the name of small government, radically reduced federal deficits, and of course lower taxes.  This is a fantasy concoction, though, even if you hear it on the news 24/7.  First of all, those right-wing billionaire and corporate types are not for small government.  They regularly and happily back, and sometimes profit from, the ever-increasing power of the (national security) state to pry, peep, suppress, and oppress, abridge liberties and make war (endlessly) abroad.  They are Pentagon lovers.  They adore the locked-down “homeland.”

In addition, they are for the government giving them every sort of break, any sort of hand — just not for that government laying its hands on them.  They are, in this sense, America’s real welfare queens.  They want a powerful, protective state, but one that benefits them, not us.  All of those dollars that scaled the heights in these last decades are now helping to fund their program.  For what they need, they only have to throw repeated monkey wrenches into the works and the Tea Party, which really isn’t a party at all, is just the latest of those wrenches.

…Must Come Down…

Faced with all our national woes, are we really a mad-as-hell nation?  On that, the jury is out, despite the fact that you’ve heard how “angry” we are a trillion times in the “news.”  Maybe we’re a depressed-as-hell nation.  There’s no way to tell, even though the anger story glued eyeballs this election season.  What we do know, however, is that the rich-as-hell crew are making good use of the mad-as-hell ones.

Amy Gardner of the Washington Post recently offered us a revealing report on the Tea Party landscape.  Of the 1,400 Tea Party groups nationwide that the Post tried to contact, it reached 647.  Many of the rest may have ceased to exist or may never have existed at all. (“The findings suggest that the breadth of the tea party may be inflated.”)  What the Post researchers found bore little relationship to the angry, Obama-as-Hitler-sign-carrying older crew supposedly ready to storm the gates of power.  They discovered instead a generally quiescent movement in which “70% of the grass-roots groups said they have not participated in any political campaigning this year.”  Most of them were small, not directly involved in the midterm scramble or even electoral politics, and meant to offer places to talk and exchange ideas.  Not exactly the stuff of rebellion in the streets.

On the other hand, the funding machines like Tea Party Express (run by Sal Russo, longtime Republican operative, aide to Ronald Reagan, and fundraiser/media strategist for former New York governor George Pataki), FreedomWorks (run by Dick Armey, former Republican House majority leader), and Americans for Prosperity (started by oil billionaire David Koch) have appropriated the Tea Party name nationally and were pouring money into “Tea Party candidates.” And don’t forget the Tea-Partyish funding groups set up by Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s bosom buddy and close advisor.

That these influential “tea partiers” turn out to be familiar right-wing insiders — “longtime political players,” as the Post put it, who since the 1980s "have used their resources and know-how to help elect a number of candidates” — shouldn’t be much of a shock.  Nor can it be so surprising that familiar right-wing political operatives are intent on creating a kind of political mayhem under the Tea Party label.  Still, if that’s not dispiriting, what is?

…And Where It Landed

As for the TV set that’s been filling your living room with the sound and fury of an epochal election that may, in itself, signify relatively little, take a moment to consider the context for all the noise.  We know how the money went up and we’ve all been watching it coming down.  Isn’t it curious, though, how little attention all the commentators, pundits, and talking heads on that screen pay to where so much of that money is actually landing?  I mean, of course, in the hands of their bosses.  Vast amounts of it have come down on the media itself, particularly television.  I’m talking about all those screaming “attack ads,” including the ones sponsored by those unnamed outside interest groups, that are probably driving you completely nuts by now, and that the talking heads just love to analyze, show bits of, and discuss endlessly?

Those are the very ads enriching the media outfits that employ them in a moment when the news world is in financial turmoil.  It is estimated that, for election 2010, the TV ad bill may total $3 billion (up from $2.7 billion in the 2008 presidential campaign year, and $2.4 billion in the 2006 midterms that brought the Democrats back to power in Congress).

For the companies behind the screen, in other words, those ads are manna from heaven.  If, in another context, someone was selling you on the importance of a phenomenon and was at the same time directly benefiting from that phenomenon, it would be considered a self-evident conflict of interest.  In this particular case, all those ad dollars are visibly to the benefit of the very media promoting the world-shaking importance of this election season.  But remind me, when was the last time you saw anyone on television, or really just about anywhere, even suggest that this might represent a conflict of interest?

The media aren’t just reporting on the next election season, they’re also filling the space between your ears, and every other space they can imagine with boosterism for just the kinds of elections we now experience.  They are, in a sense, modern-day carnies, offering endless election spiels to usher you inside the tent.  However they themselves may individually think about it, they are working to boost the profitability of their companies just as surely as any of those right-wing funders are boosting their corporate (or personal) profits.  They are, that is, not outsiders looking in, but a basic part of the hermetic, noisy, profitable system we think of as an election campaign.

Oh, and as for the election itself, none of us really had to wait for the results of midterm 2010, the Anger Extravaganza, to know that it won’t be transformative, not even if the Republicans take both houses of Congress.  This isn’t rocket science.  You already know what the Democrats were capable of (or, more exactly, not capable of) with 60 theoretical votes in the Senate and a humongous advantage in the House of Representatives.  So you should have a perfectly realistic assessment of how much less of “the people’s business” is likely to be done in a more closely divided Congress, or even in one in which the Republicans hold a seat or two advantage in the Senate — and with Democrat Barack Obama as president.

After the election, whatever the results, you already know that Obama will move more toward “the center,” even if for decades it has been drifting ever rightward without ever settling on a home; that he will try to “work with” the Republicans; that this will prove the usual joke, and that the election, however breathlessly reported as a Republican triumph or Democratic save or Tea Party miracle (or anything else), will essentially be a gum-it-up-more event.

Though none of the voluble prognosticators and interpreters you’ll listen to or read are likely to say so, those right-wing fundraisers and outside interest groups pouring money into Tea Party candidates, angry maniacs, dopes, and whoever else is on the landscape undoubtedly could care less.  Yes, a Congress that gave them everything they wanted on a proverbial silver platter would be a wonder, but gum-it-up works pretty darn well, too.  For most Americans, a Washington in congressional gridlock in a moment of roiling national crisis may be nothing to write home about, but for those fundraisers and outside interest groups, it only guarantees more manna from heaven.

And the good news, as far as they are concerned, is that the state that matters, the national security, war-making one, hardly needs Congress at all, or rather knows that no Congress will ever vote “no” to moneys for such matters.  Meanwhile, the media will begin cranking up for the even more expensive Election 2012.  Long before this election season came to a close, my hometown paper was already sporting its first pieces with headlines like “Looking Ahead to the 2012 Race” and beginning to handicap the presidential run to come. (“Although [President Obama] will not say so, there is at least a plausible argument that he might be better off if [the Democrats] lose… [I]f Republicans capture Congress, Mr. Obama will finally have a foil heading toward his own re-election battle in 2012.”)  And don’t think for a second that the New York Times wasn't in good company.  On the weekend before November 2nd, the first Associated Press-Knowledge Network poll was already out asking Democrats if they wanted Obama challenged in the 2012 primaries.

Whether the country I once wanted to represent was ever there in the form I imagined is a question I’ll leave to the historians.  What I can say is that it’s sure not there now.  What remains, angry or depressed, has made for a toxic brew as well as the most dispiriting election of my life.  For what it's worth, consider that my ballot box blues on this dreary Tuesday in November 2010.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com.  His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books). You can catch him discussing war American-style and that book in a Timothy MacBain TomCast video by clicking here. 

Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt

When you look at me, you can’t mistake the fact that I’m of a certain age.  But just for a moment, think of me as nine years old.  You could even say that I celebrated my ninth birthday last week, without cake, candles, presents, or certainly joy.

I’ve had two mobilized moments in my life.  The first was in the Vietnam War years; the second, the one that leaves me as a nine-year-old, began on the morning of September 11, 2001.  I turned on the TV while doing my morning exercises, saw a smoking hole in a World Trade Center tower, and thought that, as in 1945 when a B-25 slammed into the Empire State Building, a terrible accident had happened.

Later, after the drums of war had begun to beat, after the first headlines had screamed their World-War-II-style messages (“the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century”), I had another thought.  And for a reasonably politically sophisticated guy, my second response was not only as off-base as the first, but also remarkably dumb.  I thought that this horrific event taking place in my hometown might open Americans up to the pain of the world.  No such luck, of course.

If you had told me then that we would henceforth be in a state of eternal war as well as living in a permanent war state, that, to face a ragtag enemy of a few thousand stateless terrorists, the national security establishment in Washington would pump itself up to levels not faintly reached when facing the Soviet Union, a major power with thousands of nuclear weapons and an enormous military, that “homeland” — a distinctly un-American word — would land in our vocabulary never to leave, and that a second Defense Department dubbed the Department of Homeland Security would be set up not to be dismantled in my lifetime, that torture (excuse me, “enhanced interrogation techniques”) would become as American as apple pie and that some of those “techniques” would actually be demonstrated to leading Bush administration officials inside the White House, that we would pour money into the Pentagon at ever escalating levels even after the economy crashed in 2008, that we would be fighting two potentially trillion-dollar-plus wars without end in two distant lands, that we would spend untold billions constructing hundreds of military bases in those same lands, that the CIA would be conducting the first drone air war in history over a country we were officially not at war with, that most of us would live in a remarkable state of detachment from all of this, and finally — only, by the way, because I’m cutting this list arbitrarily short — that I would spend my time writing incessantly about “the American way of war” and produce a book with that title, I would have thought you were nuts.

But every bit of that happened, even if unpredicted by me because, like human beings everywhere, I have no special knack for peering into the future.  If it were otherwise, I would undoubtedly now be zipping through fabulous spired cities with a jetpack on my back (as I was assured would happen in my distant youth).  But if prediction isn’t our forte, then adaptability to changing circumstances may be — and it certainly helps account for my being here today.

I’m here because, in response to the bizarre spectacle of this nation going to war while living at peace, even if in a spasmodic state of collective national fear, I did something I hardly understood at the time.  I launched a nameless listserv of collected articles and my own expanding commentary that ran against the common wisdom of that October moment when the bombing runs for our second Afghan war began.  A little more than a year later, thanks to the Nation Institute, it became a website with the name TomDispatch.com, and because our leaders swore we were “a nation at war,” because we were indeed killing people in quantity in distant lands, because the power of the state at home was being strengthened in startling ways, while everything still open about our society seemed to be getting screwed shut, and the military was being pumped up to Schwarzeneggerian dimensions, I started writing about war.

At some level, I can’t tell you how ridiculous that was.  After all, I’m the most civilian and peaceable of guys.  I’ve never even been in the military.  I was, however, upset with the Bush administration, the connect-no-dots media coverage of that moment, and the repeated 9/11 rites which proclaimed us the planet’s greatest victim, survivor, and dominator, leaving only one role, greatest Evil Doer, open for the rest of the planet (and you know who auditioned for, and won, that part hands down)!

Things That Go Boom in the Night

I won’t say, however, that I had no expertise whatsoever with a permanent state of war and a permanent war state, only that the expertise I had was available to anyone who had lived through the post-World War II era.  I was reminded of this on a recent glorious Sunday when, from the foot of Manhattan, I set out, for the first time in more than half a century, on a brief ferry ride that proved, for me, as effective a time machine as anything H.G. Wells had ever imagined.  That ferry was not, of course, taking me to a future civilization at the edge of time, but to Governor’s Island, now a park and National Monument in the eddying waters of New York harbor and to the rubble of a gas station my father, a World War II vet, ran there in the early 1950s when that island was still a major U.S. Army base.

On many mornings in those years, I accompanied him on that short ride across the East River and found myself amid buzzing jeeps and drilling soldiers in a world of Army kids with, among other wonders, access to giant swimming pools and kiddy-matinee Westerns. As a dyed-in-the-wool city boy, it was my only real exposure to the burbs and it proved an edenic one that also caught something of the exotically militarized mood of that Korean War moment.

As on that island, so for most Americans then, the worlds of the warrior and of abundance were no more antithetical than they were to the corporate executives, university research scientists, and military officers who were using a rising military budget and the fear of communism to create a new national security economy.  An alliance between big industry, big science, and the military had been forged during World War II that blurred the boundaries between the military and the civilian by fusing together a double set of desires: for technological breakthroughs leading to ever more efficient weapons of destruction and to ever easier living.  The arms race — the race, that is, for future good wars — and the race for the good life were then, as on that island, being put on the same “war” footing.

In the 1950s, a military Keynesianism was already driving the U.S. economy toward a consumerism in which desire for the ever larger car and missile, electric range and tank, television console and submarine was wedded in single corporate entities.  The companies — General Electric, General Motors, and Westinghouse, among others — producing the large objects for the American home were also major contractors developing the big ticket weapons systems ushering the Pentagon into its own age of abundance.

More than half a century later, the Pentagon is still living a life of abundance — despite one less-than-victorious, less-then-good war after another — while we, increasingly, are not.  In the years in-between, the developing national security state of my childhood just kept growing, and in the process the country militarized in the strangest of ways.

Only once in that period did a sense of actual war seem to hover over the nation.  That was, of course, in the Vietnam years of the 1960s and early 1970s, when the draft brought a dirty war up close and personal, driving it into American homes and out into the streets, when a kind of intermittent warfare seemed to break out in this country’s cities and ghettos, and when impending defeat drove the military itself to the edge of revolt and collapse.

From the 1970s until 2001, as that military rebuilt itself as an all-volunteer force and finally went back to war in distant lands, the military itself seemed to disappear from everyday life.  There were no soldiers in sight, nothing we would consider commonplace today — from uniforms and guns in train stations to military flyovers at football games, or the repeated rites of praise for American troops that are now everyday fare in our world where, otherwise, we largely ignore American wars.

In 1989, for instance, I wrote in the Progressive magazine about a country that seemed to me to be undergoing further militarization, even if in a particularly strange way.  Ours was, I said, an “America that conforms to no notions we hold of militarism… Militarization is, of course, commonly associated with uniformed, usually exalted troops in evidence and a dictatorship, possibly military, in power.  The United States, by such standards, still has the look of a civilian society.  Our military is, if anything, less visible in our lives than it was a decade ago: No uniforms in the streets, seldom even for our traditional parades; a civilian elected government; weaponry out of sight… the draft and the idea of a civilian army a thing of the past.

“In the Reagan-Bush era, the military has gone undercover in the world that we see, though not in the world that sees us.  For if it is absent from our everyday culture, its influence is omnipresent in corporate America, that world beyond our politics and out of our control — the world which, nonetheless, plans our high-tech future of work and consumption.  There, the militarization of the economy and the corporatization of the military is a process so far gone that it seems reasonable to ask whether the United States can even be said to have a civilian economy.”

Of course, that was then, this is now.  Little did I know.  Today, it seems, our country is triumphant in producing only things that go boom in the night: we have a near monopoly on the global weapons market and on the global movie market, where in the dark we’re experts in explosions of every sort.  When I wrote in 1989 that the process was “so far gone,” I had no idea how far we still had to go.  I had no idea, for instance, how far a single administration could push us when it came to war.  Still, one thing that does remain reasonably constant about America’s now perpetual state of war is how little we — the 99% of us who don’t belong to the military or fight — actually see of it, even though it is, in a sense, all around us.

Warscapes

From a remarkable array of possibilities, here are just a few warscapes — think of them as like landscapes, only deadlier — that might help make more visible an American world of, and way of, war that we normally spend little time discussing, questioning, debating, or doing anything about.

As a start, let me try to conjure up a map of what “defense,” as imagined by the Pentagon and the U.S. military, actually looks like.  You can find such a map at Wikipedia, but for a second just imagine a world map laid flat before you.  Now divide it, the whole globe, like so many ill-shaped pieces of cobbler, into six servings — you can be as messy as you want, it’s not an exact science — and label them the U.S. European Command or EUCOM (for Europe and Russia), the U.S. Pacific Command or PACOM (Asia), CENTCOM (the Greater Middle East and a touch of North Africa), NORTHCOM (North America), SOUTHCOM (South America and most of the Caribbean), and AFRICOM (almost all of Africa).  Those are the “areas of responsibility” of six U.S. military commands.

In case you hadn’t noticed, on our map that takes care of just about every inch of the planet, but — I hasten to add — not every bit of imaginable space.  For that, if you were a clever cartographer, you would somehow need to include STRATCOM, the U.S. Strategic Command charged with, among other things, ensuring that we dominate the heavens, and the newest of all the “geographic” commands, CYBERCOM, expected to be fully operational later this fall with “1,000 elite military hackers and spies under one four-star general” prepared to engage in preemptive war in cyberspace.

Some of these commands have crept up on us over the years.  CENTCOM, which now oversees our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, was formed in 1983, a result of the Carter Doctrine — that is, of President Jimmy Carter’s decision to make the protection of Persian Gulf oil a military necessity, while both NORTHCOM (2002) and AFRICOM (2007) were creations of the Global War on Terror.

From a mapping perspective, however, the salient point is simple enough: at the moment, there is no imaginable space on or off the planet that is not an “area of responsibility” for the U.S. military.  That, not the protection of our shores and borders, is what is now meant by that word “defense” in the Department of Defense.  And if you were to stare at that map for a while, I can’t help but think it would come to strike you as abidingly strange.  No place at all of no military interest to us?  What does that say about our country — and ourselves?

In case you’re imagining that the map I’ve just described is simply a case of cartographic hyperbole, consider this: we now have what is, in essence, a secret military inside the U.S. military.  I’m talking about our Special Operations forces.  These elite and largely covert forces were rapidly expanded in the Bush years as part of the Global War on Terror, but also thanks to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s urge to bring covert activities that were once the province of the CIA under the Pentagon’s wing.  By the end of George W. Bush’s second term in office — think of that map again — Special Operations forces were fighting in, training in, or stationed in approximately 60 countries under the aegis of the Global War on Terror.  Less than two years later, according to the Washington Post, 13,000 Special Operations troops are deployed abroad in approximately 75 countries as part of an expanding Global War on Terror (even if the Obama administration has ditched that name); in other words, Special Ops troops alone are now operating in close to 40% of the 192 countries that make up the United Nations!

And talking about what the Pentagon has taken under its wing, I’m reminded of a low-budget sci-fi film of my childhood, The Blob.  In it, a gelatinous alien grows ever more humongous by eating every living thing in its path, with the exception of Steve McQueen in his debut screen role.  By analogy, take what’s officially called the “IC” or U.S. Intelligence Community, that Rumsfeld was so eager to militarize.  It’s made up of 17 major agencies and outfits, including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).  Created in 2004 in response to the intelligence dysfunction of 9/11, ODNI is already its own small bureaucracy with 1,500 employees and next to no power to do the only thing it was really ever meant to do, coordinate the generally dysfunctional labyrinth of the IC itself.

You might wonder what kind of “intelligence” a country could possibly get from 17 competing, bickering outfits — and that’s not even the half of it.  According to a Washington Post series, Top Secret America, by Dana Priest and William Arkin:

“In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11… Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States… In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings — about 17 million square feet of space.”

Oh, and keep in mind that more than two-thirds of the IC’s intelligence programs are controlled by the Pentagon, which also means control over a major chunk of the combined intelligence budget, announced at $75 billion (“2 1/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001,” according to Priest and Arkin), but undoubtedly far larger.

And when it comes to the Pentagon, that’s just a start. Massive expansion in all directions has been its m.o. since 9/11.  Its soaring budget hit about $700 billion for fiscal year 2010 (when you include a war-fighting supplemental bill of $33 billion) — an increase of only 4.7% in otherwise budget-slashing times — and is now projected to hit $726 billion in fiscal year 2011.  Some experts claim, however, that the real figure may come closer to the trillion-dollar mark when all aspects of national security are factored in.  Not surprisingly, it has taken over a spectrum of State Department-controlled civilian activities, ranging from humanitarian relief and development (aka “nation-building”) to actual diplomacy.  And don’t forget its growing roles as a domestic-disaster manager and a global arms dealer, or even as a Green Revolution energy innovator.  You could certainly think of the Pentagon as the Blob on the American horizon, and yet, looking around, you might hardly be aware of the ways your country continues to be militarized.

With that in mind, let’s consider another warscape, one particularly appropriate to a moment when numerous commentators are pointing out that the U.S. seems to be morphing from a can-do into a can’t-do nation, when the headlines are filled with exploding gas lines and grim reports on the country’s aging infrastructure, when a major commuter tunnel from New Jersey to Manhattan, the sort of project that once would have been tattoo-ably American, has just been canceled by New Jersey’s governor.

Still, don’t imagine that the old can-do American spirit I remember from my childhood is dead.  Quite the contrary, we still have our great building projects, our pyramid- and ziggurat-equivalents.  It’s just that these days they tend to get built nearer to the ruins of actual ziggurats and pyramids.  I’m talking about our military bases, especially those being constructed in our war zones.

I mean, no sooner had U.S. troops taken Baghdad in April 2003 than the Pentagon and the crony corporations it now can’t go to war without began to pour billions of taxpayer dollars into the construction of well fortified American towns in Iraq that included multiple bus routes, PXes, fast-food joints, massage parlors, Internet cafés, power plants, water-treatment plants, sewage plants, fire stations, you name it.  Hundreds of military bases, micro to mega, were built in Iraq alone, including the ill-named but ginormous Victory Base Complex at the edge of Baghdad International Airport, with at least nine significant sub-bases nestled inside it, and Balad Air Base, which — sooner than you could say “Saddam Hussein’s in captivity” — was handling air traffic on the scale of O’Hare International in Chicago, and bedding down 40,000 inhabitants including hire-a-gun African cops, civilian defense employees, Special Ops forces, the employees of private contractors, and of course tons of troops.

And all of this was nothing compared to the feat the Pentagon accomplished in Afghanistan where the U.S. military now claims to have built something like 400 bases of every sort from the smallest combat outposts to monster installations like Bagram Air Base in a country without normal resources, fuel, building materials, or much of anything else.  Just about all construction materials for those bases and the fuel to go with them had to be delivered over treacherous supply lines thousands of miles long, so treacherous and difficult in fact that, by the time a gallon of fuel reaches Afghanistan to keep those Humvees and MRAPs rolling along, it’s estimated to cost $400.

At some level, of course, all of this represents a remarkable can-do achievement and tells you a great deal about American priorities today, about where our national treasure and can-do efforts are focused.

Ziggurats or Tunnels?

And I could go on.  The Pentagon and the military make going on easy.  After all, the list is unending, the militarization of our American world ongoing, and it’s all happening in your time, on your watch.  This is the world you are going to walk out into.  I may be nine years old in TomDispatch terms, but I’ve been around for 66 years and this won’t be my world for so long.

So let me ask you: Are you sure that you want the U.S. military to be concerned with every inch of the planet?  Are you sure that you want your tax dollars to go, above all, into building pyramid-equivalents in Iraq or Afghanistan instead of tunnels at home, or into fighting a multigenerational war on terror planet-wide, instead of into putting the unemployed to work here?  If you can’t imagine reducing the American military mission and “footprint” on this planet significantly, then, of course, it’s probably best to ignore this talk.  But rest assured: you won’t save our country that way, you’ll destroy it.

A decade ago, when I was born as TomDispatch.com, many of you were only ten or eleven years old, as were many of our soldiers now in Afghanistan and Iraq.  A decade from now, if the war in Afghanistan (and increasingly Pakistan) is still being fought, most of you will be entering your fourth decade on this planet and you may even have a 10 year-old of your own.  A decade from then, if — as some top Washington officials insist — the global war on terror is “multigenerational,” that child may be fighting in Pakistan or Yemen or Somalia or some other military “area of responsibility” somewhere on the planet.  A decade from then…

Of course, whatever skills we may lack when it comes to predicting the future, all things must end, including the American war state and our strange state of war.  The question is: Can our over-armed global mission be radically downsized before it downsizes us?  It will happen anyway and it won’t take forever either, not the way things are going, but it will happen in an easier and less harmful way, if you’re involved, in whatever fashion you choose, in making it so.  Had I had a birthday cake with candles on it for that ninth birthday of mine and blown them out, that, I think, would have been my wish.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com.  His latest book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books), has recently been published. You can catch him discussing war American-style and his book in a Timothy MacBain TomCast video by clicking here.  This was originally a talk given to students attending Hofstra University’s lecture series, The International Scene.

[Note:  If Marty and Margaret Melkonian hadn’t offered me a double invitation to speak at Hofstra College and the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Shelter Rock, this talk would never have seen the light of day.  A bow of appreciation to both of them!  If it weren’t for Juan Cole’s Informed Comment website, Antiwar.com, and Paul Woodward’s The War in Context, which jostle fiercely in my mind each morning as I try to decide where to stop first in my online travels, I would be so much poorer in good information and analysis.  So let me add a bow to them as well!  In a world made by war, Noah Shachtman’s Danger Zone blog also shouldn’t be missed.  It contains all things warlike.  And Katherine Tiedemann’s AfPak Daily Brief is the best ongoing summary of mainstream coverage of our Afghan (and increasingly Pakistan) War.  For any of you interested in learning more about my childhood in Cold War America — from G.I. Joe to Star Wars and beyond — check out the updated edition of my book, The End of Victory Culture.]

Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt

Sometimes it’s the little things in the big stories that catch your eye.  On Monday, theWashington Post ran the first of three pieces adapted from Bob Woodward’s new book Obama’s Wars, a vivid account of the way the U.S. high command boxed the Commander-in-Chief into the smallest of Afghan corners.  As an illustration, the Post included a graphic the military offered President Obama at a key November 2009 meeting to review war policy.  It caught in a nutshell the favored “solution” to the Afghan War of those in charge of fighting it — Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General David Petraeus, then-Centcom commander, General Stanley McChrystal, then-Afghan War commander, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, among others.

Labeled “Alternative Mission in Afghanistan,” it’s a classic of visual wish fulfillment.  Atop it is a soaring green line that represents the growing strength of the notoriously underwhelming “Afghan Forces,” military and police, as they move toward a theoretical goal of 400,000 — an unlikely “end state” given present desertion rates.  Underneath that green trajectory of putative success is a modest, herky-jerky blue curving line, representing the 40,000 U.S. troops Gates, Petraeus, Mullen, and company were pressuring the president to surge into Afghanistan.

The eye-catching detail, however, was the dating on the chart.  Sometime between 2013 and 2016, according to a hesitant dotted white line (that left plenty of room for error), those U.S. surge forces would be drawn down radically enough to dip somewhere below — don’t gasp — the 68,000 level.  In other words, three to six years from now, if all went as planned — a radical unlikelihood, given the Afghan War so far — the U.S. might be back close to the force levels of early 2009, before the President’s second surge was launched.  (When Obama entered office, there were only 31,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.)

And when would those troops dwindle to near zero?  2019?  2025?  The chart-makers were far too politic to include the years beyond January 1, 2016, so we have no way of knowing.  But look at that chart and ask yourself: Is there any doubt that our high command, civilian and military, were dreaming of, and most forcefully recommending to the president, a forever war — one which the Office of Budget and Management estimated would cost almost $900 billion?

Of course, as we now know, the military “lost” this battle.  Instead of the 40,000 troops they desired, they “only” got 30,000 from a frustrated president (plus a few thousand support troops the Secretary of Defense was allowed to slip in, and some special operations forces that no one was putting much effort into counting, and don’t forget those extra troops wrung out of NATO as well as small allies who, for a price, couldn’t say no — all of which added up to a figure suspiciously close to the 10,000 the president had officially denied his war commanders).

When, on December 1, 2009, Barack Obama addressed the cadets of West Point and, through them, the rest of us to announce the second surge of his presidency, he was at least able to slip in a date to begin a drawdown of U.S. forces.  (“But taken together, these additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.”)  Hardly a nanosecond passed, however, before — first “on background” and soon enough in public — administration spokespeople rushed to reassure the rest of Washington that such a transfer would be “conditions based.” Given conditions there since 2001, not exactly a reassuring statement.

Meanwhile, days before the speech, Afghan war commander McChrystal was already hard at work stretching out the time of the drawdown date the president was still to announce.  It would, he claimed, begin “sometime before 2013.”  More recently, deified new Afghan War commander General David Petraeus has repeatedly assured everyone in sight that none of this drawdown talk will add up to a hill of beans.

More, Never Less

Let’s keep two things in mind here: just how narrow were the options the president considered, and just how large was the surge he reluctantly launched.  By the end of the fall of 2009, it was common knowledge in Washington that the administration’s fiercely debated Afghan War “review” never considered a “less” option, only ones involving “more.”  Now, thanks to Woodward, we can put definitive numbers to those options.  The least of the “more” options was Vice President Biden’s “counterterrorism-plus” strategy, focused on more trainers for the Afghan military and police plus more drone attacks and Special Forces operations.  It involved a surge of 20,000 U.S. troops.  According to Woodward, the military commanders, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the Secretary of Defense more or less instantly ruled this out. 

The military’s chosen option was for those 40,000 troops and an emphasis on counterinsurgency.  Between them lay a barely distinguishable 30,000-35,000 option.  The only other option mentioned during the review process involved a surge of 85,000, and it, too, was ruled out by the military because troops in that quantity simply weren’t available.  This, then, was the full “range” of debate in Washington about the Afghan War.  No wonder the president, according to Woodward, exclaimed in anger, “So what’s my option? You have given me one option.”

It’s also important to remember that this round of surgification involved a lot more than those 30,000 troops and various add-ons.  After all, the “president” — and when you read Woodward, you do wonder whether a modern president isn’t, in many ways, simply a prisoner of Washington — also managed to surge CIA personnel, triple State Department, USAID, and other civilian personnel, and expand the corps of private contractors.

Perhaps more significant, that December the president and his key advisors set the Af/Pak War — to use the new term of that moment — on an ever widening gyre.  Among other things, that escalation included a significant acceleration in U.S. base-building activity which has yet to end; a massive increase in the CIA’s drone war over the Pakistani tribal borderlands (a quadrupling of attacks since the last year of the Bush administration, including at least 22 attacks launched this September, the most yet in a month); a recent uptick in Air Force bombing activity over Afghanistan (which General McChrystal actually cut back for a while), an increase in Special Operations activity throughout Afghanistan; and an increase in border crossings into Pakistan.

The last of these, in particular, reflects the increasing frustration of American commanders fighting a war going badly in Afghanistan in which key enemies have sanctuaries across the border.  Thanks to Woodward’s book, we now know that, in 2002, the Bush administration allowed the CIA to organize a secret Afghan “paramilitary army,” modeled after the U.S. Special Forces and divided into “counterterrorist pursuit teams.”  Three thousand in all, these irregulars have operated as proxy fighters and assassins in Afghanistan — and, in the Obama era, they have evidently also been venturing into the Pakistani tribal borderlands where those CIA drone attacks are already part of everyday life.  In addition, just days ago, U.S. helicopters upped the ante in the first of two such incidents by venturing across the same border to attack retreating Taliban fighters in what U.S. military spokespeople have termed “self-defense,” but what was known in the Vietnam era as “hot pursuit.”

In addition, U.S. military commanders, the New York Times reports, are threatening worse. (“As evidence of the growing frustration of American officials, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan, has recently issued veiled warnings to top Pakistani commanders that the United States could launch unilateral ground operations in the tribal areas should Pakistan refuse to dismantle the militant networks in North Waziristan, according to American officials.”)  In the next year, that label “Af/Pak” could come into its own as a war-fighting reality.

All of this is, of course, part of the unspoken Pentagon doctrine of forever war.  And lest you think that the 2016 date for an Afghan drawdown was a one-of-a-kind bit of planning, consider this line from a recent New York Times report by Michael Gordon and John Burns on Pentagon anxiety over the new British government’s desire to cut defense spending by up to 20%: “American and British officials said that they did not expect any cutbacks to curtail Britain’s capabilities to fight in Afghanistan over the next five years.” Let that sink in for a moment: “over the next five years.”  It obviously reflects the thinking of anonymous officials of some significance and, if you do the modest math, you once again find yourself more or less at January 1, 2016.  In a just released Rolling Stone interview, even the President can be found saying, vaguely but ominously, of the Afghan War: “[I]t’s going to take us several years to work through this issue.”

Or consider the three $100 million bases (or parts of bases) that Walter Pincus of the Washington Post reported the Pentagon is now preparing to build in Afghanistan.  These, he adds, won’t be ready for use until, at best, “later in 2011,” well after the Obama troop drawdown is set to begin.  According to Noah Shachtman of the Danger Room blog, one $100 million upgrade for a future Special Operations headquarters in northern Afghanistan, when done, will include: a “communications building, Tactical Operations Center, training facility, medical aid station, Vehicle Maintenance Facility… dining facility, laundry facility, and a kennel to support working dogs… Supporting facilities include roads, power production system and electrical distribution, water well, non-potable water production, water storage, water distribution, sanitary sewer collection system, communication manhole/duct system, curbs, walkways, drainage, and parking. Additionally, the project will include site preparation and compound security measures to include guard towers.”  

A State of War to the Horizon

Tell me: Does this sound like a military getting ready to leave town any time soon?

And don’t forget the $1.3 billion in funds pending in Congress that Pincus tells us the Pentagon has requested “for multiyear construction of military facilities in Afghanistan.”  We’re obviously talking 2012 to 2015 here, too.  Or how about the $6.2 billion a year that the Pentagon is projected to spend on the training of Afghan forces from 2012 through 2016? Or what about the Pentagon contract TomDispatch’s Nick Turse dug up that was awarded to private contractor SOS International primarily for translators with an estimated completion date of September 2014?  Or how about the gigantic embassy-cum-command-center-cum-citadel (modeled on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, now the largest in the world) which the Obama administration has decided to build in Islamabad, Pakistan?

And let’s not leave out the Army’s incessant planning for the distant future embodied in a recently published report, “Operating Concept, 2016-2028,” overseen by Brigadier General H.R. McMaster, a senior advisor to Gen. David Petraeus.  It opts to ditch “Buck Rogers” visions of futuristic war, and instead to imagine counterinsurgency operations, grimly referred to as “wars of exhaustion,” in one, two, many Afghanistans to the distant horizon.

So here’s one way to think about all this: like people bingeing on anything, the present Pentagon and military cast of characters can’t stop themselves.  They really can’t.  The thought that in Afghanistan or anywhere else they might have to go on a diet, as sooner or later they will, is deeply unnerving.  Forever war is in their blood, so much so that they’re ready to face down the commander-in-chief, if necessary, to make it continue.  This is really the definition of an addiction — not to victory, but to the state of war itself.  Don’t expect them to discipline themselves. They won’t.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com.  His latest book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books), has recently been published. You can catch him discussing war American-style and his book in a Timothy MacBain TomCast video by clicking here.

[Note for readers: You can read the Army’s full “Operating Concept, 2016-2028, by clicking here (.pdf format).  Fair warning, interesting as it may be, it’s not written in recognizable English.]

Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt

The fall issue of Foreign Policy magazine features Fred Kaplan’s “The Transformer,” an article-cum-interview with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.  It received a flurry of attention because Gates indicated he might leave his post “sometime in 2011.”  The most significant two lines in the piece, however, were so ordinary that the usual pundits thought them not worth pondering.  Part of a Kaplan summary of Gates’s views, they read: “He favors substantial increases in the military budget… He opposes any slacking off in America’s global military presence.”

Now, if Kaplan had done a similar interview with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, such lines might have been throwaways, since a secretary of state is today little more than a fancy facilitator, ever less central to what that magazine, with its outmoded name, might still call “foreign policy.” Remind me: When was the last time you heard anyone use that phrase — part of a superannuated world in which “diplomats” and “diplomacy” were considered important — in a meaningful way?  These days “foreign policy” and “global policy” are increasingly a single fused, militarized entity, at least across what used to be called “the Greater Middle East,” where what’s at stake is neither war nor peace, but that “military presence.”

As a result, Gates’s message couldn’t be clearer: despite two disastrous wars and a global war on terror now considered “multigenerational” by those in the know, trillions of lost dollars, and staggering numbers of deaths (if you happen to include Iraqi and Afghan ones), the U.S. military mustn’t in any way slack off.  The option of reducing the global mission — the one that’s never on the table when “all options are on the table” — should remain nowhere in sight.  That’s Gates’s bedrock conviction.  And when he opposes any diminution of the global mission, it matters.

Slicing Up the World Like a Pie

As we know from a Peter Baker front-page New York Times profile of Barack Obama as commander-in-chief, the 49-year-old president “with no experience in uniform” has “bonded” with Gates, the 66-year-old former spymaster, all-around-apparatchik, and holdover from the last years of the Bush era.  Baker describes Gates as the president’s “most important tutor,” and on matters military like the Afghan War, the president has reportedly “deferred to him repeatedly.”

Let’s face it, though: deference has become the norm for the Pentagon and U.S. military commanders, which is not so surprising.  After all, in terms of where our money goes, the Pentagon is the 800-pound gorilla in just about any room.  It has, for instance, left the State Department in the proverbial dust.  By now, it gets at least $12 dollars for every dollar of funding that goes to the State Department, which in critical areas of the world has become an adjunct of the military.

In addition, the Pentagon has taken under its pilotless predatory wing such previously civilian tasks as delivering humanitarian aid and “nation-building.” As Secretary of Defense Gates has pointed out, there are more Americans in U.S. military bands than there are foreign service officers.

If it’s true that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then you can gauge the power of the Pentagon by the fact that, at least in Iraq after 2011, the State Department is planning to become a mini-military — an armed outfit using equipment borrowed from the Pentagon and an “army” of mercenary guards formed into “quick reaction forces,” all housed in a series of new billion-dollar “fortified compounds,” no longer called “consulates” but “enduring presence posts” (as the Pentagon once called its giant bases in Iraq “enduring camps”).  This level of militarization of what might once have been considered the Department of Peaceful Solutions to Difficult Problems is without precedent and an indicator of the degree to which the government is being militarized.

Similarly, according to the Washington Post, the Pentagon has managed to take control of more than two-thirds of the “intelligence programs” in the vast world of the U.S. Intelligence Community, with its 17 major agencies and organizations.  Ever since the mid-1980s, it has also divided much of the globe like a pie into slices called “commands.” (Our own continent joined the crew as the U.S. Northern Command, or Northcom, in 2002, and Africa, as Africom in 2007.)

Before stepping down a notch to become Afghan war commander, General David Petraeus was U.S. Central Command (Centcom) commander, which meant military viceroy for an especially heavily garrisoned expanse of the planet stretching from Egypt to the Chinese border.  Increasingly, in fact, there is no space, including outer space and virtual space, where our military is uninterested in maintaining or establishing a “presence.”

On October 1st, for instance, a new Cyber Command headed by a four-star general and staffed by 1,000 “elite military hackers and spies” is to hit the keyboards typing.  And there will be nothing shy about its particular version of “presence” either.  The Bush-era concept of “preventive war” (that is, a war of aggression) may have been discarded by the Obama administration, but the wizards of the new Cyber Command are boldly trying to go where the Bush administration once went.  They are reportedly eager to establish a virtual war-fighting principle (labeled “active defense”) under which they could preemptively attack and knock out the computer networks of adversaries.

And the White House and environs haven’t been immune to creeping militarization either.  As presidents are now obliged to praise American troops to the skies in any “foreign policy” speech — “Our troops are the steel in our ship of state” — they also turn ever more regularly to military figures in civilian life and for civilian posts.  President Obama’s National Security Adviser, James Jones, is a retired Marine four-star general, and from the Bush years the president kept on Army Lieutenant General Douglas Lute as “war czar,” just as he appointed retired Army Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry as our ambassador to Afghanistan, and recently replaced retired admiral Dennis Blair with retired Air Force Lieutenant General James Clapper as the Director of National Intelligence.  (He also kept on David Petraeus, George W. Bush’s favorite general, and hiked the already staggering Pentagon budget in Bushian fashion.)

And this merely skims the surface of the nonstop growth of the Pentagon and its influence.  One irony of that process: even as the U.S. military has failed repeatedly to win wars, its budgets have grown ever more gargantuan, its sway in Washington ever greater, and its power at home ever more obvious.

Generals and Admirals Mouthing Off

To grasp the changing nature of military influence domestically, consider the military’s relationship to the media.  Its media megaphone offers a measure of the reach and influence of that behemoth, what kinds of pressures it can apply in support of its own version of foreign policy, and just how, under its weight, the relationship between the civilian and military high commands is changing.

It’s true that, in June, the president relieved Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal of duty after his war-frustrated associates drank and mouthed off about administration officials in an inanely derogatory manner in his presence — and the presence of a Rolling Stone magazine reporter. (“Biden?… Did you say: Bite Me?”)  But think of that as the exception that proves the rule.

It’s seldom noted that less obvious but more serious — and egregious — breaches of civilian/military protocol are becoming the norm, and increasingly no one blinks or acts. To take just a few recent examples, in late August commandant of the Marine Corps General James Conway, due to retire this fall, publicly attacked the president’s “conditions-based” July 2011 drawdown date in Afghanistan, saying, “In some ways, we think right now it is probably giving our enemy sustenance.”

Or consider that, while the Obama administration has moved fiercely against government and military leaking of every sort, when it came to the strategic leaking (assumedly by someone in, or close to, the military) of the “McChrystal plan” for Afghanistan in the fall of 2009, nothing at all happened even though the president was backed into a policy-making corner.  And yet, as Andrew Bacevich pointed out, “The McChrystal leaker provid[ed] Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leadership a detailed blueprint of exactly how the United States and its allies were going to prosecute their war.”

Meanwhile, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, on a three-day cross-country “tour” of Midwestern business venues (grandiloquently labeled “Conversations with the Country”), attacked the national debt as “the most significant threat to our national security.”  Anodyne as this might sound, with election 2010 approaching, the national debt couldn’t be a more political issue.

There should be, but no longer is, something startling about all this.  Generals and admirals now mouth off regularly on a wide range of policy issues, appealing to the American public both directly and via deferential (sometimes fawning) reporters, pundits, and commentators.  They and their underlings clearly leak news repeatedly for tactical advantage in policy-making situations.  They organize what are essentially political-style barnstorming campaigns for what once would have been “foreign policy” positions, and increasingly this is just the way the game is played.

From Combat to Commentary

There’s a history still to be written about how our highest military commanders came to never shut up.

Certainly, in 1990 as Gulf War I was approaching, Americans experienced the first full flowering of a new form of militarized “journalism” in which, among other things, retired high military officers, like so many play-by-play analysts on Monday Night Football, became regular TV news consultants.  They were called upon to narrate and analyze the upcoming battle (“showdown in the Gulf”), the brief offensive that followed, and the aftermath in something close to real time.  Amid nifty logos, dazzling Star Wars-style graphics, theme music, and instant-replay nose-cone snuff films of “precision” weapons wiping out the enemy, they offered a running commentary on the progress of battle as well as on the work of commanders in the field, some of whom they might have once served with.

And that was just the beginning of the way, after years of post-Vietnam War planning, the Pentagon took control of the media battlefield and so the popular portrayal of American-style war.  In the past, the reporting of war had often been successfully controlled by governments, while generals had polished their images with the press or — like Omar Bradley and Douglas MacArthur — even employed public relations staffs to do it for them.  But never had generals and war planners gone before the public as actors, supported by all the means a studio could muster on their behalf and determined to produce a program that would fill the day across the dial for the full time of a war.  The military even had a version of a network Standards and Practices department with its guidelines for on-air acceptability. Military handlers made decisions — like refusing to clear for publication the fact that Stealth pilots viewed X-rated movies before missions — reminiscent of network show-vetting practices.

When it came time for Gulf War II, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the military had added the practice of putting reporters through pre-war weeklong “boot camps” and then “embedding” them with the troops (a Stockholm Syndrome-type experience that many American reporters grew to love).  It also built itself a quarter-million-dollar stage set for nonstop war briefings at Centcom headquarters in Doha, Qatar.  All of this was still remarkably new in the history of relations between the Pentagon and the media, but it meant that the military could address the public more or less directly both through those embedded reporters and over the shoulders of that assembled gaggle of media types in Doha.

As long as war took its traditional form, this approach worked well, but once it turned into a protracted and inchoate guerrilla struggle, and “war” and “wartime” became the endless (often dismal) norm, something new was needed.  In the Bush years, the Pentagon responded to endless war in part by sending out an endless stream of well-coached, well-choreographed retired military “experts” to fill the gaping maw of cable news.  In the meantime, something quite new has developed.

Today, you no longer need to be a retired military officer to offer play-by-play commentary on and analysis of our wars.  Now, at certain moments, the main narrators of those wars turn out to be none other than the generals running, or overseeing, them.  They regularly get major airtime to explain to the American public how those wars are going, as well as to expound on their views on more general issues.

This is something new.  Among the American commanders of World War II and the Korean War, only Douglas MacArthur did anything faintly like this, which made him an outlier (or perhaps an omen) and in a sense that’s why President Harry Truman fired him.  Generals Eisenhower, Patton, Ridgeway, et al., did not think to go on media tours touting their own political lines while in uniform.

Admittedly, Vietnam War commander General William Westmoreland was an early pioneer of the form.  He had, however, been pushed onto the stage to put a public face on the American war effort by President Lyndon Johnson, who was desperate to buck up public opinion.  Westmoreland returned from Vietnam in 1968 just before the disastrous Tet Offensive for a “whirlwind tour” of the country and uplifting testimony before Congress.  In a speech at the National Press Club, he spoke of reaching “an important point where the end begins to come into view,” and later in a televised press conference, even more infamously used the phrase “the light at the end of tunnel.”  Events would soon discredit his optimism.

Still, we’ve reached quite a different level of military/media confluence today.  Take the two generals now fighting our Afghan and Iraq wars: General Petraeus and General Ray Odierno — one arriving, the other leaving.

Having spent six weeks assessing the Afghan situation and convinced that he needed to buy more time for his war from the American public, in mid-August Petraeus launched a full-blown, well-organized media tour from his headquarters in Kabul.  In it, he touted “progress” in Afghanistan, offered comments subtly but visibly at odds with the president’s promised July 2011 drawdown date, and generally evangelized for his war.  He began with an hour-long interview with Dexter Filkins of the New York Times and another with Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post.  These were timed to be released on August 15th, the morning he appeared on NBC’s Sunday political show “Meet the Press.”  (Moderator David Gregory traveled to the Afghan capital to toss softball questions at Washington’s greatest general and watch him do push-ups in a “special edition” of the show.)  Petraeus then followed up with a Katie Couric interview on CBS Evening News, as part of an all-fronts “media blitz” that would include Fox News, AP, Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog, and in a bow to the allies, the BBC and even NATO TV, among other places.

At almost the same moment, General Odierno was ending his tour of duty as Iraq war commander by launching a goodbye media blitz of his own from Baghdad, which included interviews with ABC’s “This Week,” Bob Schieffer of CBS’s “Face the Nation,” MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, CNN’s “State of the Union,” PBS Newshour, and the New York Times, among others.   He, too, had a policy line to promote and he, too, expressed himself in ways subtly but visibly at odds with an official Obama position, emphasizing the possibility that some number of U.S. troops might need to stay in Iraq beyond the 2011 departure deadline.  As he said to Schieffer, “If [the Iraqis] ask us that they might want us to stay longer, we certainly would consider that.”  Offering another scenario as well, he also suggested that, as Reuters put it, “U.S. troops… could move back to a combat role if there was ‘a complete failure of the security forces’ or if political divisions split Iraqi security forces.”  (He then covered his flanks by adding, “but we don’t see that happening.”)

This urge to stay represents one long-term strain of thinking in the military and among Pentagon civilians, and it will undoubtedly prove a powerful force for the president to deal with or defer to in 2011.  In February 2009, less than a month after Obama took office, Odierno was already broadcasting his desire to have up to 35,000 troops remain in Iraq after 2011, and at the end of 2009, Gates was already suggesting that a new round of negotiations with a future Iraqi government might extend our stay for years.  All this, of course, could qualify as part of a more general campaign to maintain the Pentagon’s 800-pound status, the military’s clout, and that global military presence.

A Chorus of Military Intellectuals

Pentagon foreign policy is regularly seconded by a growing cadre of what might be called military intellectuals at think tanks scattered around Washington.  Such figures, many of them qualifying as “warrior pundits” and “warrior journalists,” include: Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; retired Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security and Petraeus adviser; former U.S. Army officer Andrew Exum, fellow at the Center for a New American Security, founder of the Abu Muqawama website, and a McChrystal advisor; former Australian infantry officer and Petraeus adviser David Kilcullen, non-resident senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security; Thomas Ricks, formerly of the Washington Post, author of the bestselling Iraq War books Fiasco and The Gamble, Petraeus admirer, and senior fellow at the same center; Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, the man Gates credits with turning around his thinking on Afghanistan and a recent Petraeus hiree in Afghanistan; Kimberley Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War, an adviser to both Petraeus and McChrystal; Kenneth Pollack, director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution; and Stephen Biddle, senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and another Petraeus as well as McChrystal adviser.  These figures, and numerous others like them, are repeatedly invited to U.S. war zones by the military, flattered, toured, given face time with commanders, sometimes hired by them, and sometimes even given the sense that they are the ones planning our wars.  They then return to Washington to offer sophisticated, “objective” versions of the military line.

Toss into this mix the former neocons who caused so much of the damage in the early Bush years and who regularly return at key moments as esteemed media “experts” (not the fools and knaves they were), including former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) L. Paul Bremer III, and former senior advisor to the CPA Noah Feldman, among others.  For them, being wrong means never having to say you’re sorry.  And, of course, they and their thoughts are dealt with remarkably respectfully, while those who were against the Iraq War from the beginning remain scarce commodities on op-ed pages,as sources in news articles, and on the national radio and TV news.

This combined crew of former warriors, war-zone bureaucrats, and warrior pundits are, like Odierno, now plunking for a sizeable residual U.S. military force to stay in Iraq until hell freezes over.  They regularly compare Iraq to post-war South Korea, where U.S. troops are still garrisoned nearly 60 years after the Korean War and which, after decades of U.S.-supported dictators, now has a flourishing democracy.

Combine the military intellectuals, the former neocons, the war commanders, the retired military-officer-commentators, the Secretary of Defense and other Pentagon civilians and you have an impressive array of firepower of a sort that no Eisenhower, Ridgeway, or even MacArthur could have imagined.  They may disagree fiercely with each other on tactical matters when it comes to pursuing American-style war, and they certainly don’t represent the views of a monolithic military.  There are undoubtedly generals who have quite a different view of what the defense of the United States entails.  As a crew, though, civilian and military, in and out of uniform, in the Pentagon or in a war zone, they agree forcefully on the need to maintain that American global military presence over the long term.

Producing War

Other than Gates, the key figure of the moment is clearly Petraeus, who might be thought of as our Teflon general.  He could represent a genuine challenge to the fading tradition of civilian control of the military.  Treated as a demi-god and genius of battle on both sides of the aisle in Washington, he would be hard for any president, especially this one, to remove from office.  As a four-star who would have to throw a punch at Michelle Obama on national television to get fired, he minimally has significant latitude to pursue the war policies of his choice in Afghanistan.  He also has — should he care to exercise it — the potential and the opening to pursue much more.  It’s not completely farfetched to imagine him as the first mini-Caesar-in-waiting of our American times.

As of yet, he and other top figures may plan their individual media blitzes, but they are not consciously planning a media strategy for a coherent Pentagon foreign policy. The result is all the more chilling for not being fully coordinated, and for being so little noticed or attended to by the media that play such a role in promoting it.  What’s at stake here goes well beyond the specific issue of military insubordination that usually comes up when military-civilian relations are discussed.  After all, we could be seeing, in however inchoate form, the beginning of a genuine Pentagon/military production in support of Pentagon timing (as in the new bases now being built in Afghanistan that won’t even be completed until late 2011), our global military presence, and the global mission that goes with it.

In Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, you can see that Pentagon version of an American foreign policy straining to be born.  In the end, of course, it could be stillborn, but it could also become an all-enveloping system offering Americans a strange, skewed vision of a world constantly at war and of the importance of planning for more of the same.

To the extent that it now exists, it is dominated by the vision of figures who, judging from the last near decade, have a particularly constrained sense of American priorities, have been deeply immersed in the imperial mayhem that our wars have created, have left us armed to the teeth and flailing at ghosts and demons, and are still enmeshed in the process by which American treasure has been squandered to worse than no purpose in distant lands.

Nothing in the record indicates that anyone should listen to what these men have to say.  Nothing in the record indicates that Washington won’t be all ears, the media won’t remain an enthusiastic conduit, and Americans won’t follow their lead.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com.  His latest book, The American Way of War:  How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books), has just been published. You can catch him discussing the new military/media landscape in a Timothy MacBain TomCast audio interview by clicking here or, to download it to your iPod, here.

[Source note: For a basic source on the decline of the State Department, Stephen Glain’s 2009 Nation piece “The American Leviathan” is still the place to start.  For those of you who would like more on the history of how the Pentagon organized war in the post-Vietnam era and the tumultuous Bush years, consider getting your hands on the revised, updated version of my book, The End of Victory Culture, and checking out the sections entitled “Afterlife” and “Victory Culture, the Sequel.”  Among the recent “all options on the table” statements, this one from Petraeus’s Washington Post interview caught my attention: “One policy [General Petraeus] has opted not to continue, however, is his predecessor’s asceticism. He suggested that the fast-food restaurants McChrystal ordered closed on bases probably will reopen soon.  ‘With respect to Burger Kings, all options are on the table,’ he said.”]

Consider the following statement offered by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a news conference last week.  He was discussing Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks as well as the person who has taken responsibility for the vast, still ongoing Afghan War document dump at that site. “Mr. Assange,” Mullen commented, “can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.”

Now, if you were the proverbial fair-minded visitor from Mars (who in school civics texts of my childhood always seemed to land on Main Street, U.S.A., to survey the wonders of our American system), you might be a bit taken aback by Mullen’s statement.  After all, one of the revelations in the trove of leaked documents Assange put online had to do with how much blood from innocent Afghan civilians was already on American hands.

The British Guardian was one of three publications given early access to the leaked archive, and it began its main article this way: “A huge cache of secret U.S. military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents. They range from the shootings of individual innocents to the often massive loss of life from air strikes…”  Or as the paper added in a piece headlined “Secret CIA paramilitaries’ role in civilian deaths”: “Behind the military jargon, the war logs are littered with accounts of civilian tragedies. The 144 entries in the logs recording some of these so-called ‘blue on white’ events, cover a wide spectrum of day-by-day assaults on Afghans, with hundreds of casualties.”  Or as it also reported, when exploring documents related to Task Force 373, an “undisclosed ‘black’ unit” of U.S. special operations forces focused on assassinating Taliban and al-Qaeda “senior officials”: “The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women, and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.”

Admittedly, the events recorded in the Wikileaks archive took place between 2004 and the end of 2009, and so don’t cover the last six months of the Obama administration’s across-the-board surge in Afghanistan.  Then again, Admiral Mullen became chairman of the Joint Chiefs in October 2007, and so has been at the helm of the American war machine for more than two of the years in question.

He was, for example, chairman in July 2008, when an American plane or planes took out an Afghan bridal party — 70 to 90 strong and made up mostly of women — on a road near the Pakistani border.  They were “escorting the bride to meet her groom as local tradition dictates.” The bride, whose name we don’t know, died, as did at least 27 other members of the party, including children.  Mullen was similarly chairman in August 2008 when a memorial service for a tribal leader in the village of Azizabad in Afghanistan’s Herat Province was hit by repeated U.S. air strikes that killed at least 90 civilians, including perhaps 15 women and up to 60 children. Among the dead were 76 members of one extended family, headed by Reza Khan, a “wealthy businessman with construction and security contracts with the nearby American base at Shindand airport.”

Mullen was still chairman in April 2009 when members of the family of Awal Khan, an Afghan army artillery commander on duty elsewhere, were killed in a U.S.-led raid in Khost province in eastern Afghanistan.  Among them were his “schoolteacher wife, a 17-year-old daughter named Nadia, a 15-year-old son, Aimal, and his brother, employed by a government department.” Another daughter was wounded and the pregnant wife of Khan’s cousin was shot five times in the abdomen.

Mullen remained chairman when, in November 2009, two relatives of Majidullah Qarar, the spokesman for the Minister of Agriculture, were shot down in cold blood in Ghazni City in a Special Operations night raid; as he was — and here we move beyond the Wikileaks time frame — when, in February 2010, U.S. Special Forces troops in helicopters struck a convoy of mini-buses, killing up to 27 civilians, including women and children; as he also was when, in that same month, in a special operations night raid, two pregnant women and a teenage girl, as well as a police officer and his brother, were shot to death in their home in a village near Gardez, the capital of Paktia province.  After which, the soldiers reportedly dug the bullets out of the bodies, washed the wounds with alcohol, and tried to cover the incident up.  He was no less chairman late last month when residents of a small town in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan claimed that a NATO missile attack had killed 52 civilians, an incident that, like just about every other one mentioned above and so many more, was initially denied by U.S. and NATO spokespeople and is now being “investigated.”

And this represents only a grim, minimalist highlight reel among rafts of such incidents, including enough repeated killings or woundings of innocent civilians at checkpoints that previous Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal commented: “We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.”  In other words, if your basic Martian visitor were to take the concept of command responsibility at all seriously, he might reasonably weigh actual blood (those hundreds of unreported civilian casualties of the American war the Guardian highlighted, for example) against prospective blood (possible Afghan informers killed by the Taliban via names combed from the Wikileaks documents) and arrive at quite a different conclusion from Chairman Mullen.

In fact, being from another planet, he might even have picked up on something that most Americans would be unlikely to notice — that, with only slight alterations, Mullen’s blistering comment about Assange could be applied remarkably well to Mullen himself. “Chairman Mullen,” that Martian might have responded, “can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he is doing, but the truth is he already has on his hands the blood of some young soldiers and that of many Afghan families.”

Killing Fields, Then and Now

Fortunately, there are remarkably few Martians in America, as was apparent last week when the Wikileaks story broke.  Certainly, they were in scarce supply in the upper reaches of the Pentagon and, it seemed, hardly less scarce in the mainstream media.  If, for instance, you read the version of the Wikileaks story produced — with the same several weeks of special access — by the New York Times, you might have been forgiven for thinking that the Times reporters had accessed a different archive of documents than had the Guardian crew.

While the Guardian led with the central significance of those unreported killings of Afghan civilians, the Times led with reports (mainly via Afghan intelligence) on a Pakistani double-cross of the American war effort — of the ties, that is, between Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, and the Taliban. The paper’s major sidebar piece concerned the experiences and travails of Outpost Keating, an isolated American base in Afghanistan.  To stumble across the issue of civilian deaths at American hands in the Times coverage, you had to make your way off the front page and through two full four-column Wikileaks-themed pages and deep into a third.

With rare exceptions, this was typical of initial American coverage of last week’s document dump.  And if you think about it, it gives a certain grim reportorial reality to the term Americans favor for the deaths of civilians at the hands of our forces: “collateral damage” — that is, damage not central to what’s going down.  The Guardian saw it differently, as undoubtedly do Afghans (and Iraqis) who have experienced collateral damage firsthand.

The Wikileaks leak story, in fact, remained a remarkably bloodless saga in the U.S. until Admiral Mullen and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (who has overseen the Afghan War since he was confirmed in his post in December 2006) took control of it and began focusing directly on blood — specifically, the blood on Julian Assange’s hands.  Within a few days, that had become the Wikileaks story, as headlines like CNN’s “Top military official: WikiLeaks founder may have ‘blood’ on his hands” indicated.  On ABC News, for instance, in a typical “bloody hands” piece of reportage, the Secretary of Defense told interviewer Christiane Amanpour that, whatever Assange’s legal culpability might be, when it came to “moral culpability… that’s where I think the verdict is guilty on Wikileaks.”

Moral culpability.  From the Martian point of view, it might have been considered a curious phrase from the lips of the man responsible for the last three and a half years of two deeply destructive wars that have accomplished nothing and have been responsible for killing, wounding, or driving into exile millions of ordinary Iraqis and Afghans. Given the reality of those wars, our increasingly wide-eyed visitor, now undoubtedly camping out on the Washington Mall, might have been struck by the selectivity of our sense of what constitutes blood and what constitutes collateral damage.  After all, one major American magazine did decide to put civilian war damage front and center the very week the Wikileaks archive went up.  With the headline “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan,” TIME magazine featured a cover image of a young Afghan woman whose nose and ears had reportedly been sliced off by a “local Taliban commander” as a punishment for running away from an abusive home.

Indeed, the Taliban has regularly been responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians, including women and children who, among other things, ride in vehicles over its roadside bombs or suffer the results of suicide bombings aimed at government figures or U.S. and NATO forces.  The Taliban also has its own list of horrors and crimes for which it should be considered morally culpable.  In addition, the Taliban has reportedly threatened to go through the Wikileaks archive, ferret out the names of Afghan informers, and “punish” them, undoubtedly spilling exactly the kind of “blood” Mullen has been talking about.

Our Martian might have noticed as well that the TIME cover wasn’t a singular event in the U.S.  In recent years, Americans have often enough been focused on the killing, wounding, or maiming of innocent civilians and have indeed been quite capable of treating such acts as a central fact of war and policy-making.  Such deaths have, in fact, been seen as crucially important — as long as the civilians weren’t killed by Americans, in which case the incidents were the understandable, if sad, byproduct of other, far more commendable plans and desires.  In this way, in Afghanistan, repeated attacks on wedding parties, funerals, and even a baby-naming ceremony by the U.S. Air Force or special operations night raids have never been a subject of much concern or the material for magazine covers.

On the other hand, the Bush administration (and Americans generally) dealt with the 9/11 deaths of almost 3,000 innocent civilians in New York City as the central and defining event of the twenty-first century.  Each of those deaths was memorialized in the papers.  Relatives of the dead or those who survived were paid huge sums to console them for the tragedy, and a billion-dollar memorial was planned at what quickly became known as Ground Zero.  In repeated rites of mourning nationwide, their deaths were remembered as the central, animating fact of American life.  In addition, of course, the murder of those civilian innocents officially sent the U.S. military plunging into the Global War on Terror, Afghanistan, and then Iraq.

Similarly — though who remembers it now? — one key trump card played against those who opposed the invasion of Iraq was Saddam Hussein’s “killing fields.”  The Iraqi dictator had indeed gassed Kurds and, with the help of military targeting intelligence provided by his American allies, Iranian troops in his war with Iran in the 1980s.  After the first Gulf War, his forces had brutally suppressed a Shiite uprising in the south of Iraq, murdering perhaps tens of thousands of Shiites and, north and south, buried the dead in mass, unmarked graves, some of which were uncovered after the U.S. invasion of 2003.  In addition, Saddam’s torture chambers and prisons had been busy places indeed.

His was a brutal regime; his killing fields were a moral nightmare; and in the period leading up to the war (and after), they were also a central fact of American life.  On the other hand, however many Iraqis died in those killing fields, more would undoubtedly die in the years that followed, thanks to the events loosed by the Bush administration’s invasion.  That dying has yet to end, and seems once again to be on the rise.  Yet those deaths have never been a central fact of American life, nor an acceptable argument for getting out of Iraq, nor an acknowledged responsibility of Washington, nor of Admiral Mullen, Secretary of Defense Gates, or any of their predecessors.  They were just collateral damage.  Some of their survivors got, at best, tiny “solatia” payments from the U.S. military, and often enough the dead were buried in unmarked graves or no graves at all.

Similarly, in Afghanistan in 2010, much attention and controversy surrounded the decision of our previous war commander, General McChrystal, to issue constraining “rules of engagement” to try to cut down on civilian casualties by U.S. troops.  The American question has been: Was the general “handcuffing” American soldiers by making it ever harder for them to call in air or artillery support when civilians might be in the area?  Was he, that is, just too COIN-ish and too tough on American troops?  On the other hand, little attention in the mainstream was paid to the way McChrystal was ramping up special operations forces targeting Taliban leaders, forces whose night raids were, as the Wikileaks documents showed, repeatedly responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians (and so for the anger of other Afghans).

Collateral Damage in America

Here, then, is a fact that our Martian (but few Americans) might notice: in almost nine years of futile and brutal war in Afghanistan and more than seven years of the same in Iraq, the U.S. has filled metaphorical tower upon tower with the exceedingly unmetaphorical bodies of civilian innocents, via air attacks, checkpoint shootings, night raids, artillery and missile fire, and in some cases, the direct act of murder.  Afghans and Iraqis have died in numbers impossible to count (though some have tried).  Among those deaths was that of a good Samaritan who stopped his minivan on a Baghdad street, in July 2007, to help transport Iraqis wounded by an American Apache helicopter attack to the hospital.  In repayment, he and his two children were gunned down by that same Apache crew.  (The children survived; the event was covered up; typically, no American took responsibility for it; and, despite the fact that two Reuters employees died, the case was not further investigated, and no one was punished or even reprimanded.)

That was one of hundreds, or thousands, of similar events in both wars that Americans have known little or nothing about.  Now, Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old intelligence analyst deployed to eastern Baghdad, who reportedly leaked the video of the event to Wikileaks and may have been involved in leaking those 92,000 documents as well, is preparing to face a court-martial and on a suicide watch, branded a “traitor” by a U.S. senator, his future execution endorsed by the ranking minority member of the House of Representatives’ subcommittee on terrorism, and almost certain to find himself behind bars for years or decades to come.

As for the men who oversaw the endless wars that produced that video (and, without doubt, many similar ones similarly cloaked in the secrecy of “national security”), their fates are no less sure.  When Admiral Mullen relinquishes his post and retires, he will undoubtedly have the choice of lucrative corporate boards to sit on, and, if he cares to, lucrative consulting to do for the Pentagon or eager defense contractors, as well as an impressive pension to take home with him.  Secretary of Defense Gates will undoubtedly leave his post with a wide range of job offers to consider, and if he wishes, he will probably get a million-dollar contract to write his memoirs.  Both will be praised, no matter what happens in or to their wars.  Neither will be considered in any way responsible for those tens of thousands of dead civilians in distant lands.

Moral culpability?  It doesn’t apply.  Not to Americans — not unless they leak military secrets.  None of the men responsible will ever look at their hands and experience an “out, damned spot!” moment.  That’s a guarantee.  However, a young man who, it seems, saw the blood and didn’t want it on his hands, who found himself “actively involved in something that I was completely against,” who had an urge to try to end two terrible wars, hoping his act would cause “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms,” will pay the price for them.  He will be another body not to count in the collateral damage their wars have caused.  He will also be collateral damage to the Afghan antiwar movement that wasn’t.

The men who led us down this path, the presidents who presided over our wars, the military figures and secretaries of defense, the intelligence chiefs and ambassadors who helped make them happen, will have libraries to inaugurate, books to write, awards to accept, speeches to give, honors to receive.  They will be treated with great respect, while Americans — once we have finally left the lands we insistently fought over — will undoubtedly feel little culpability either.  And if blowback comes to the United States, and the first suicide drones arrive, everyone will be deeply puzzled and angered, but one thing is certain, we will not consider any damage done to our society “collateral” damage.

So much blood.  So many hands.  So little culpability.  No remorse.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books), has just been published. You can catch him discussing it on a TomCast video by clicking here.  Check out the latest TomCast audio interview in which he discusses the three stages of the developing Wikileaks story by clicking here or, to download it to your iPod, here.

[Note for readers:  I would especially like to thank Juan Cole’s Informed Comment blog, Antiwar.com, and Paul Woodward’s the War in Context website for helping keep me up to date on America’s ongoing wars.  I couldn’t do without them.  A bow of appreciation to all three.]

Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt

This article was originally posted at TomDispatch.com.

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.”

In the year since, the Taliban insurgency has been blunted and “a tipping point has been reached,” says a senior U.S. military official with the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, who could speak only on the condition of anonymity, in keeping with the policy of his organization.  By every available measure — IEDs or roadside bombs, suicide attacks, Taliban assassinations of local officials, allied casualties, and Afghan civilian casualties — the intensity of the insurgency has weakened significantly.  The Afghan military and police, though not capable of taking the lead in the fighting in their own country, have been noticeably strengthened by American and NATO training missions.  President Hamid Karzai’s government, still considered weak and corrupt, has succeeded in putting an Afghan face on the war.

Democratic critics of Gen. Petraeus, and of President Obama’s surge strategy, were notably quiet this week as the general toured the capital’s power hotspots from John Podesta’s Center for American Progress to the American Enterprise Institute, while being feted as the hero of the moment and a potential presidential candidatein 2016.  As in 2007, when he was appointed to oversee George W. Bush’s surge in Iraq after the critics said it couldn’t be done, the impressive charts the general brought to his congressional testimony once again vividly indicated otherwise.  The situation in Afghanistan has undergone an Iraq-like change since the nadir of July 2010 when critics and proponents alike agreed that the nine-year-old war was foundering, the counterinsurgency strategy failing, and polling in the U.S. highlighted the war’s increasing unpopularity.

“What a difference a year makes,” said a jubilant senior official at the Pentagon.  In just 12 months, as Gen. Petraeus likes to describe it, he managed to synchronizethe Afghan and Washington “clocks” and, in the process, as he had done in Iraq, took the news out of the war and the war out of the news.  The latest Gallup poll indicates that up to 63% of Americans are now “supportive” of the general’s approach to the Afghan War…

What Success Would Mean in Afghanistan

Okay, it hasn’t happened yet — and the odds are it never will.  But for a moment, just imagine stories like that leading the news nationwide as our most political general in generations comes home to a grateful Washington.

By all accounts, the Afghan War could hardly be going worse today.  Counterinsurgency, the strategy promoted by General McChrystal but conceived by General Petraeus, is seemingly in a ditch, while the Taliban are the ones surging.  Around that reality has arisen a chorus of criticism and complaint, left, right, and center.

Failure breeds critics, you might say, the way dead bodies breed flies.  Or put another way, it’s easy enough to criticize a failing American project, but what about a successful one?  What if Petraeus really turns out to be the miracle general of twenty-first century American war-making — which, by the way, only means that he needs to “blunt” the Taliban surge (the modern definition of “winning,” now that victory is no longer a part of the U.S. war-making lexicon)?

Today, the increasingly self-evident failure of American policy in Afghanistan is bringing enough calls for firm drawdown or withdrawal dates (or, from the Republicans, bitter complaints about the same) to exasperate President Obama.  Under the circumstances, no one evidently wonders what success would really mean.  We’ve been down so long, it seems, that few bother to consider what being up might involve.

Too bad.  It’s worth a thought.  Let’s say that Petraeus does return to Washington in what, these days, passes for triumph.  The question is: So what?  Or rather, could success in Afghanistan prove worse for Americans than failure?

Let’s imagine that, in July 2011, the U.S. military has tenuous control over key parts of that country, including Kandahar, its second largest city.  It still has almost 100,000 troops (and at least a similar number of private contractors) in the country, while a slow drawdown of the 30,000 surge troops the president ordered into Afghanistan in December 2009 is underway.  Similarly, the “civilian” surge, which tripled the State Department’s personnel there, remains in place, as does the CIA surge that went with it — and the contractor and base-building surges that went with them.  In fact, the CIA drone war in the Pakistani borderlands will undoubtedly have only escalated further by July 2011.  Experts expect the counterinsurgency campaign to continue for years, even decades more; the NATO allies are heading for the exits; and, again according to the experts, the Taliban, being thoroughly interwoven with Afghanistan’s Pashtun minority, simply cannot in any normal sense be defeated.

This, then, would be “success” 10 years into America’s Afghan war.  Given the logistics nightmare of supporting so many troops, intelligence agents, civilian officials, and private contractors in the country, the approximately $7 billion a month now being spent there will undoubtedly be the price Americans are to pay for a long time to come (and that’s surely a significant undercount, if you consider long-term wear-and-tear to the military as well as the price of future care for those badly wounded in body or mind).

The swollen Afghan army and police will still have to undergo continual training and, in a country with next to no government funds and (unlike Iraq) no oil or other resource revenues on the immediate horizon, they, too, will have to be paid for and supplied by Washington.  And keep in mind that the U.S. Air Force will, for the foreseeable future, be the Afghan Air Force.  In other words, success means that, however tenuously, Afghanistan is ours for years to come.

So what would we actually have to show for all this expenditure of money, effort, and lives?

We would be in minimalist possession of a fractious, ruined land, at war for three decades, and about as alien to, and far from, the United States as it’s possible to be on this planet.  We would be in minimalist possession of the world’s fifth poorest country.  We would be in minimal possession of the world’s second most corrupt country.  We would be in minimal possession of the world’s foremost narco-state, the only country that essentially produces a drug monocrop, opium.  In terms of the global war on terror, we would be in possession of a country that the director of the CIA now believes to hold 50 to 100 al-Qaeda operatives (“maybe less”) — for whom parts of the country might still be a “safe haven.” And for this, and everything to come, we would be paying, at a minimum, $84 billion a year.

On the basis of our stated war objective — “[W]e cannot allow Al Qaeda or other transnational extremists to once again establish sanctuaries from which they can launch attacks on our homeland or on our allies,” as General Petraeus put it in his confirmation hearing at the end of June 2010 — success in Afghanistan means increasingly little.  For al-Qaeda, Afghanistan was never significant in itself.  It was always a place of (relative) convenience.  If the U.S. were to bar access to it, there are so many other countries to choose from.

After all, what’s left of the original al-Qaeda — estimated by U.S. intelligence experts at perhaps 300 leaders and operatives — seems to have established itself in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, a place that the U.S. military could hardly occupy, no matter how many CIA drone attacks were sent against it.  Moreover, U.S. intelligence experts increasingly suggest that al-Qaeda is in the process of fusing with local jihadist groups in those borderlands, Yemen, Somalia, North Africa, and elsewhere; that it is increasingly an amorphous “dispersed network,” or even simply an idea or crude ideology, existing as much online as anywhere in particular on the ground.

In this sense — and this is the only reason now offered for the American presence in Afghanistan — a counterinsurgency “success” there would be meaningless unless, based on the same strategic thinking, the U.S. then secured Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and a potential host of other places.  In other words, the U.S. military would have to do one thing the Bush years definitively proved it couldn’t do: impose a Pax Americana on planet Earth.

Of course, the Bush administration might have offered other explanations for the ongoing Afghan War, including the need to garrison what it called “the arc of instability” stretching from North Africa to the Chinese border (essentially the oil heartlands of the planet), roll back Russia from its former Soviet “backyard” in Central Asia, and guarantee the flow of Caspian Sea oil westward.  More recently, with the revelation that a trillion or more dollars worth of natural resources lie under Afghan soil, securing that country’s raw materials for western mining companies might have been added to that list.  The Obama administration, however, offers no such explanations and, being managerial rather than visionary in nature when it comes to U.S. foreign policy, might not even have them.

In any case, our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seem to be telling a rather different story.  The singular thing the Iraq War seems to have done politically is promote Iranian influence in that country.  Economically, it’s made Iraq a safer place for the state-owned or state-controlled oil companies of China, Russia, and a number of other non-western nations.  In Afghanistan, in terms of those future natural resources, we seem to be fighting to make that country safe for Chinese investment (just as the recently heightened U.S. sanctions against Iran are helping make that country safe for Chinese energy dominance).

The Question Mark over Afghanistan

All of this leaves the massive American investment of its most precious resources, including lives, in Afghanistan an ongoing mystery that is never addressed.  Somewhere in that country’s vast stretches of poppy fields or in the halls of Washington’s national security bureaucracy, in other words, lurks a great unasked question.  It’s a question asked almost half a century ago of Vietnam, the lost war to which David Petraeus turned in 2006 to produce the Army counterinsurgency manual which is the basis for the present surge.

The question was: Why are we in Vietnam?  (It even became the title of a Norman Mailer novel.)  In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson’s administration produced a government propaganda film solely in response to that question, which was already threatening to drive down his polling figures and upend his Great Society at home.  The film was called Why Viet-Nam.  While it had no question mark after the title, the question of whether to add one was actually argued out in the most literal way inside the administration.

The film began with the president quoting a letter he had received from a mother “in the Midwest” whose son was stationed in Vietnam.  You hear the president, in his homey twang, pick up that woman’s question, as if it were his own.  “Why Vietnam?” he repeats three times as the title appears on the screen, after which, official or not, a question mark seems to hover over every scene, as it did over the war itself.

In a sense, the same question mark appeared both before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but it has never been associated with Afghanistan.  Because of 9/11, Afghanistan remained for years the (relatively) good (and largely forgotten) war, until visible failure visibly tarnished it.

It’s now past time to ask that question, even as the Obama administration repeats the al-Qaeda mantra of the Bush years almost word for word and lets any explanation go at that.

Why are we in Afghanistan?  Why is our treasure being wasted there when it’s needed here?

It’s clear enough that a failed counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan will be an unaffordably expensive catastrophe.  Let’s not wait a year to discover that there’s an even worse fate ahead, a “success” that leaves us mired there for years to come as our troubles at home only grow.  With everything else Americans have to deal with, who needs a future Petraeus Syndrome?

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond.  His latest book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books), has just been published. Listen to him discuss the “Why Afghanistan” question in a Timothy MacBain TomCast audio interview by clicking here, or to download it to your iPod, here.

[Note on sources: I’m eternally thankful for the existence of Antiwar.com (including Jason Ditz’s daily updates), Juan Cole’s Informed Comment blog (the quality of which is eternally startling), and Paul Woodward’s The War in Context.  Along with Katherine Tiedemann’s AfPak Channel “Daily Brief” and Noah Shachtman’s Danger Room blog (a must for all things strange and military), they help ensure that not much news coming out of Afghanistan and environs gets by me.]

Copyright 2010 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.

Just two months earlier, in September 2002, as the Bush administration was “introducing” its campaign to sell an invasion of Iraq to Congress and the American people, CIA Director George Tenet and Vice President Dick Cheney “trooped up to Capitol Hill” to brief four top Senate and House leaders on a hair-raising threat to the country.  A “smoking gun” had been uncovered.

According to “new intelligence,” Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had in his possession unmanned aerial vehicles advanced enough to be armed with biological and chemical weaponry.  Worse yet, these were capable — so the CIA director and vice president claimed — of spraying those weapons of mass destruction over cities on the east coast of the United States.  It was just the sort of evil plan you might have expected from a man regularly compared to Adolf Hitler in our media, and the news evidently made an impression in Congress.

Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, for example, said that he voted for the administration’s resolution authorizing force in Iraq because “I was told not only that [Saddam had weapons of mass destruction] and that he had the means to deliver them through unmanned aerial vehicles, but that he had the capability of transporting those UAVs outside of Iraq and threatening the homeland here in America, specifically by putting them on ships off the eastern seaboard.”

In a speech in October 2002, President Bush then offered a version of this apocalyptic nightmare to the American public.  Of course, like Saddam’s supposed ability to produce “mushroom clouds” over American cities, the Iraqi autocrat’s advanced UAVs (along with the ships needed to position them off the U.S. coast) were a feverish fantasy of the Bush era and would soon enough be forgotten.  Instead, in the years to come, it would be American pilotless drones that would repeatedly attack Iraqi urban areas with Hellfire missiles and bombs.

In those years, our drones would also strike repeatedly in Afghanistan, and especially in the tribal borderlands of Pakistan, where in an escalating “secret” or “covert” war, which has been no secret to anyone, multiple drone attacks often occur weekly.  They are now considered so much the norm that, with humdrum headlines slapped on (“U.S. missile strike kills 12 in NW Pakistan”), they barely make it out of summary articles about war developments in the American press.

And yet those robotic planes, with their young “pilots” (as well as the camera operators and intelligence analysts who make up a drone “crew”) sitting in front of consoles 7,000 miles away from where their missiles and bombs are landing, have become another kind of American fever dream.  The drone is our latest wonder weapon and a bragging point in a set of wars where there has been little enough to brag about.

CIA director Leon Panetta has, for instance, called the Agency’s drones flying over Pakistan “the only game in town” when it comes to destroying al-Qaeda; a typically anonymous U.S. official in a Washington Post report claims of drone missile attacks, “We’re talking about precision unsurpassed in the history of warfare”; or as Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command told author Peter Singer, speaking of the glories of drones: “They don’t get hungry. They are not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy next to them has been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.”

Seven thousand of them, the vast majority surveillance varieties, are reportedly already being operated by the military, and that’s before swarms of “mini-drones” come on line.  Our American world is being redefined accordingly.

In February, Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post caught something of this process when he spent time with Colonel Eric Mathewson, perhaps the most experienced Air Force officer in drone operations and on the verge of retirement.  Mathewson, reported Jaffe, was trying to come up with an appropriately new definition of battlefield “valor” — a necessity for most combat award citations — to fit our latest corps of pilots at their video consoles.  “Valor to me is not risking your life,” the colonel told the reporter. “Valor is doing what is right. Valor is about your motivations and the ends that you seek. It is doing what is right for the right reasons. That to me is valor.”

Smoking Drones

These days, CIA and administration officials troop up to Capitol Hill to offer briefings to Congress on the miraculous value of pilotless drones: in disrupting al-Qaeda, destroying its leadership or driving it “deeper into hiding,” and taking out key figures in the Taliban.  Indeed, what started as a 24/7 assassination campaign against al-Qaeda’s top leadership has already widened considerably.  The “target set” has by now reportedly expanded to take in ever lower-level militants in the tribal borderlands.  In other words, a drone assassination campaign is morphing into the first full-scale drone war (and, as in all wars from the air, civilians are dying in unknown numbers).

If the temperature is again rising in Washington when it comes to these weapons, this time it’s a fever of enthusiasm for the spectacular future of drones (which the Air Force has plotted out to the year 2047), of a time when single pilots should be able to handle multiple drones in operations in the skies over some embattled land, and of a far more distant moment when those drones should be able to handle themselves, flying, fighting, and making key decisions about just who to take out without a human being having to intervene.

When we possess such weaponry, it turns out, there’s nothing unnerving or disturbing, apocalyptic or dystopian about it.  Today, in the American homeland, not a single smoking drone is in sight.

Now it’s the United States whose UAVs are ever more powerfully weaponized.  It’s the U.S. which is developing a 22-ton tail-less drone 20 times larger than a Predator that can fly at Mach 7 and (theoretically) land on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier.  It’s the Pentagon which is planning to increase the funding of drone development by 700% over the next decade.

Admittedly, there is a modest counter-narrative to all this enthusiasm for our robotic prowess, “precision,” and “valor.”  It involves legal types like Philip Alston, the United Nations special representative on extrajudicial executions.  He recently issued a 29-page report criticizing Washington’s “ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe.”  Unless limits are put on such claims, and especially on the CIA’s drone war over Pakistan, he suggests, soon enough a plethora of states will follow in America’s footprints, attacking people in other lands “labeled as terrorists by one group or another.”

Such mechanized, long-distance warfare, he also suggests, will breach what respect remains for the laws of war.  “Because operators are based thousands of miles away from the battlefield,” he wrote, “and undertake operations entirely through computer screens and remote audio-feed, there is a risk of developing a ‘PlayStation’ mentality to killing.”

Similarly, the ACLU has filed a freedom of information lawsuit against the U.S. government, demanding that it “disclose the legal basis for its use of unmanned drones to conduct targeted killings overseas, as well as the ground rules regarding when, where, and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, and the number of civilian casualties they have caused.”

But pay no mind to all this.  The arguments may be legally compelling, but not in Washington, which has mounted a half-hearted claim of legitimate “self-defense,” but senses that it’s already well past the point where legalities matter.  The die is cast, the money committed.  The momentum for drone war and yet more drone war is overwhelming.

It’s a done deal.  Drone war is, and will be, us.

A Pilotless Military

If there are zeitgeist moments for products, movie stars, and even politicians, then such moments can exist for weaponry as well.  The robotic drone is the Lady Gaga of this Pentagon moment.

It’s a moment that could, of course, be presented as an apocalyptic nightmare in the style of the Terminator movies (with the U.S. as the soul-crushing Skynet), or as a remarkable tale of how “networking technology is expanding a homefront that is increasingly relevant to day-to-day warfare” (as Christopher Drew recently put it in the New York Times).  It could be described as the arrival of a dystopian fantasy world of one-way slaughter verging on entertainment, or as the coming of a generation of homegrown video warriors who work “in camouflage uniforms, complete with combat boots, on open floors, with four computer monitors on each desk… and coffee and Red Bull help[ing] them get through the 12-hour shifts.” It could be presented as the ultimate in cowardice — the killing of people in a world you know nothing about from thousands of miles away — or (as Col. Mathewson would prefer) a new form of valor.

The drones — their use expanding exponentially, with ever newer generations on the drawing boards, and the planes even heading for “the homeland” — could certainly be considered a demon spawn of modern warfare, or (as is generally the case in the U.S.) a remarkable example of American technological ingenuity, a problem-solver of the first order at a time when few American problems seem capable of solution.  Thanks to our technological prowess, it’s claimed that we can now kill them, wherever they may be lurking, at absolutely no cost to ourselves, other than the odd malfunctioning drone.  Not that even all CIA operatives involved in the drone wars agree with that one.  Some of them understand perfectly well that there’s a price to be paid.

As it happens, the enthusiasm for drones is as much a fever dream as the one President Bush and his associates offered back in 2002, but it’s also distinctly us.  In fact, drone warfare fits the America of 2010 tighter than a glove.  With its consoles, chat rooms, and “single shooter” death machines, it certainly fits the skills of a generation raised on the computer, Facebook, and video games.  That our valorous warriors, their day of battle done, can increasingly leave war behind and head home to the barbecue (or, given American life, the foreclosure) also fits an American mood of the moment.

The Air Force “detachments” that “manage” the drone war from places like Creech Air Force Base in Nevada are “detached” from war in a way that even an artillery unit significantly behind the battle lines or an American pilot in an F-16 over Afghanistan (who could, at least, experience engine failure) isn’t.  If the drone presents the most extreme version thus far of the detachment of human beings from the battlefield (on only one side, of course) and so launches a basic redefinition of what war is all about, it also catches something important about the American way of war.

After all, while this country garrisons the world, invests its wealth in its military, and fights unending, unwinnable frontier wars and skirmishes, most Americans are remarkably detached from all this.  If anything, since Vietnam when an increasingly rebellious citizens’ army proved disastrous for Washington’s global aims, such detachment has been the goal of American war-making.

As a start, with no draft and so no citizen’s army, war and the toll it takes is now the professional business of a tiny percentage of Americans (and their families).  It occurs thousands of miles away and, in the Bush years, also became a heavily privatized, for-profit activity.  As Pratap Chatterjee reported recently, “[E]very US soldier deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq is matched by at least one civilian working for a private company. All told, about 239,451 contractors work for the Pentagon in battle zones around the world.”  And a majority of those contractors aren’t even U.S. citizens.

If drones have entered our world as media celebrities, they have done so largely without debate among that detached populace.  In a sense, our wars abroad could be thought of as the equivalent of so many drones.  We send our troops off and then go home for dinner and put them out of mind.  The question is: Have we redefined our detachment as a new version of citizenly valor (and covered it over by a constant drumbeat of “support for our troops”)?

Under these circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that a “pilotless” force should, in turn, develop the sort of contempt for civilians that can be seen in the recent flap over the derogatory comments of Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal and his aides about Obama administration officials.

The Globalization of Death

Maybe what we need is the return of George W. Bush’s fever dream from the American oblivion in which it’s now interred.  He was beyond wrong, of course, when it came to Saddam Hussein and Iraqi drones, but he wasn’t completely wrong about the dystopian Drone World to come.  There are now reportedly more than 40 countries developing versions of those pilot-less planes.  Earlier this year, the Iranians announced that they were starting up production lines for both armed and unarmed drones.  Hezbollah used them against Israel in the 2006 summer war, years after Israel began pioneering their use in targeted killings of Palestinians.

Right now, in what still remains largely a post-Cold War arms race of one, the U.S. is racing to produce ever more advanced drones to fight our wars, with few competitors in sight.  In the process, we’re also obliterating classic ideas of national sovereignty, and of who can be killed by whom under what circumstances.  In the process, we may not just be obliterating enemies, but creating them wherever our drones buzz overhead and our missiles strike.

We are also creating the (il)legal framework for future war on a frontier where we won’t long be flying solo.  And when the first Iranian, or Russian, or Chinese missile-armed drones start knocking off their chosen sets of “terrorists,” we won’t like it one bit.  When the first “suicide drones” appear, we’ll like it even less.  And if drones with the ability to spray chemical or biological weapons finally do make the scene, we’ll be truly unnerved.

In the 1990s, we were said to be in an era of “globalization” which was widely hailed as good news.  Now, the U.S. and its detached populace are pioneering a new era of killing that respects no boundaries, relies on the self-definitions of whoever owns the nearest drone, and establishes planetary free-fire zones.  It’s a nasty combination, this globalization of death.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book, just published, is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books).  Watch a Timothy MacBain TomCast video of him discussing the American way of war by clicking here.

Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt

This article was originally posted at TomDispatch.com.

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.”

And Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost, has written of The American Way of War: “They may have Blackwater/Xe, Halliburton, aircraft carrier battle groups, deadly drones by the score and the world’s largest military budget, but we have Tom Engelhardt — and a more powerful truth-seeking missile has seldom been invented… For anyone not yet familiar with his work, this is your chance to meet one of the most forceful analysts alive of our country’s dangerous, costly addiction to all things military.” 

I hope you’ll give some thought to picking up a copy.  You can click here to buy it, if you wish.  In addition, if I could put on my editor’s hat for a moment, two remarkable books I’ve edited for the AEP series are due out in August.  They are, in my opinion, must-reads:  Chalmers Johnson’s Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope and Andrew Bacevich’s Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.

I’m sure that I hardly need to introduce either of those bestselling authors and critics of American foreign policy to you.  Pre-order their books and be the first on your block (as they used to say in my childhood) to get both.  Each of them is likely to be much attended to — and add mine to the list while you’re at it.  If you want to explore the American imperium and its ways of war in 2010, they’re a threesome that can’t be beat. 

Below is my most recent TomDispatch take on what our addiction to war and to garrisoning the globe is likely to mean for us all.  Tom]

Mark it on your calendar.  It seems we’ve finally entered the Soviet era in America.

You remember the Soviet Union, now almost 20 years in its grave. 
But who gives it a second thought today?  Even in its glory years that
“evil empire” was sometimes referred to as “the second superpower.”  In
1991, after seven decades, it suddenly disintegrated and disappeared,
leaving the United States — the “sole superpower,” even the
“hyperpower,” on planet Earth — surprised but triumphant.

The USSR had been heading for the exits for quite a while, not that
official Washington had a clue.  At the moment it happened, Soviet
“experts” like Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (then director of the CIA) still expected the Cold War to go on and on. 
In Washington, eyes were trained on the might of the Soviet military,
which the Soviet leadership had never stopped feeding, even as its
sclerotic bureaucracy was rotting, its economy (which had ceased to
grow in the late 1970s) was tanking, budget deficits were soaring,
indebtedness to other countries was growing, and social welfare
payments were eating into what funds remained.  Not even a vigorous,
reformist leader like Mikhail Gorbachev could staunch the rot,
especially when, in the late 1980s, the price of Russian oil fell
drastically.

Looking back, the most distinctive feature of the last years of the
Soviet Union may have been the way it continued to pour money into its
military — and its military adventure in Afghanistan — when it was
already going bankrupt and the society it had built was beginning to
collapse around it.  In the end, its aging leaders made a devastating
miscalculation.  They mistook military power for power on this planet. 
Armed to the teeth and possessing a nuclear force capable of destroying
the Earth many times over, the Soviets nonetheless remained the vastly
poorer, weaker, and (except when it came to the arms race) far less
technologically innovative of the two superpowers.

In December 1979, perhaps taking the bait of the Carter administration whose
national security advisor was eager to see the Soviets bloodied by a
“Vietnam” of their own, the Red Army invaded Afghanistan to support a
weak communist government in Kabul.  When resistance in the
countryside, led by Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas and backed by the
other superpower, only grew, the Soviets sent in more troops, launched
major offensives, called in air power, and fought on brutally and
futilely for a decade until, in 1989, long after they had been whipped,
they withdrew in defeat.

Gorbachev had dubbed Afghanistan “the bleeding wound,” and
when the wounded Red Army finally limped home, it was to a country that
would soon cease to exist.  For the Soviet Union, Afghanistan had
literally proven “the graveyard of empires.”  If, at the end, its
military remained standing, the empire didn’t.  (And if you don’t
already find this description just a tad eerie, given the present
moment in the U.S., you should.)

In
Washington, the Bush administration — G.H.W.’s, not G.W.’s — declared
victory and then left the much ballyhooed “peace dividend” in the
nearest ditch.  Caught off guard by the collapse of the Soviet Union,
Washington’s consensus policymakers drew no meaningful lessons from it
(just as they had drawn few that mattered from their Vietnam defeat 16
years earlier).

Quite the opposite, successive American administrations would
blindly head down the very path that had led the Soviets to ruin.  They
would serially agree that, in a world without significant enemies, the
key to U.S. global power still was the care and feeding of the American
military and the military-industrial complex that went with it.  As the
years passed, that military would be sent ever more regularly into the
far reaches of the planet to fight frontier wars, establish military
bases, and finally impose a global Pax Americana on the planet.

This urge, delusional in retrospect, seemed to reach its ultimate
expression in the second Bush administration, whose infamous
“unilateralism” rested on a belief that no country or even bloc of
countries should ever again be allowed to come close to matching U.S.
military power.  (As its National Security Strategy of 2002 put the matter — and it couldn’t have been blunter on the subject — the U.S. was to “build and maintain” its military power “beyond challenge.”) 
Bush’s military fundamentalists firmly believed that, in the face of
the most technologically advanced, bulked-up, destructive force around,
hostile states would be “shocked and awed” by a simple demonstration of
its power and friendly ones would have little choice but to come to
heel as well.  After all, as the president said
in front of a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in 2007, the U.S.
military was “the greatest force for human liberation the world has
ever known.”

In this way, far more than the Soviets, the top officials of the
Bush administration mistook military power for power, a gargantuan
misreading of the U.S. economic position in the world and of their
moment.

Boundless Military Ambitions

The attacks of September 11, 2001, that “Pearl Harbor
of the twenty-first century,” clinched the deal.  In the space the
Soviet Union had deserted, which had been occupied by minor outlaw
states like North Korea for years, there was a new shape-shifting
enemy, al-Qaeda (aka Islamic extremism, aka the new “totalitarianism”),
which could be just as big as you wanted to make it.  Suddenly, we were
in what the Bush administration instantly dubbed “the Global War on
Terror” (GWOT, one of the worst acronyms ever invented) — and this
time there would be nothing “cold” about it.

Bush administration officials promptly suggested that they were
prepared to use a newly agile American military to “drain the swamp” of
global terrorism.  ("While we'll try to find every snake in the swamp,
the essence of the strategy is draining the swamp," insisted Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz two weeks after 9/11.)  They were prepared,
they made clear, to undertake those draining operations against Islamic
“terrorist networks” in no less than 60 countries around the planet.

Their military ambitions, in other words, knew no bounds; nor, it
seemed, did the money and resources which began to flow into the
Pentagon, the weapons industries, the country’s increasingly militarized intelligence services, mercenary companies like Blackwater and KBR
that grew fat on a privatizing administration’s war plans and the
multi-billion-dollar no-bid contracts it was eager to proffer, the new
Department of Homeland Security, and a ramped-up, ever more powerful
national security state.

As the Pentagon expanded, taking on ever newer roles, the numbers would prove staggering.  By the end of the Bush years, Washington was doling out
almost twice what the next nine nations combined were spending on their
militaries, while total U.S. military expenditures came to just under
half the world’s total.  Similarly, by 2008, the U.S. controlled
almost 70% of the global arms market. It also had 11 aircraft carrier
battle groups capable of patrolling the world’s seas and oceans at a
time when no power that could faintly be considered a possible future
enemy had more than one.

By then, private contractors had built for the Pentagon almost 300 military bases in Iraq, ranging from tiny combat outposts to massive “American towns”
holding tens of thousands of troops and private contractors, with
multiple bus lines, PX’s, fast-food “boardwalks,” massage parlors,
water treatment and power plants, barracks, and airfields.  They were
in the process of doing the same in Afghanistan and, to a lesser extent, in the Persian Gulf region
generally.  This, too, represented a massive investment in what looked
like a permanent occupation of the oil heartlands of the planet.  As
right-wing pundit Max Boot put it
after a recent flying tour of America’s global garrisons, the U.S.
possesses military bases that add up to “a virtual American empire of
Wal-Mart-style PXs, fast-food restaurants, golf courses, and gyms.”

Depending on just what you counted,
there were anywhere from 700 to perhaps 1,200 or more U.S. bases, micro
to macro, acknowledged and unacknowledged, around the globe. 
Meanwhile, the Pentagon was pouring money into the wildest blue-skies thinking at its advanced research arm, DARPA, whose budget grew by 50%.  Through DARPA, well-funded scientists experimented with various ways to fight sci-fi-style wars
in the near and distant future (at a moment when no one was ready to
put significant government money into blue-skies thinking about, for
instance, how to improve the education of young Americans).  The
Pentagon was also pioneering a new form of air power, drone warfare, in
which “we” wouldn’t be within thousands of miles of the battlefield, and the battlefield would no longer necessarily be in a country with which we were at war.

It was also embroiled in two disastrous, potentially trillion-dollar
wars (and various global skirmishes) — and all this at top dollar at a
time when next to no money was being invested in, among other things,
the bridges, tunnels, waterworks, and the like that made up an aging
American infrastructure.  Except when it came to victory, the military
stood ever taller, while its many missions expanded exponentially, even
as the domestic economy was spinning out of control, budget deficits
were increasing rapidly, the governmental bureaucracy was growing ever
more sclerotic, and indebtedness to other nations was rising by leaps
and bounds.

In other words, in a far wealthier country, another set of leaders,
having watched the Soviet Union implode, decisively embarked on the
Soviet path to disaster.

Military Profligacy

In the fall of 2008, the abyss opened under the U.S. economy, which
the Bush administration had been blissfully ignoring, and millions of
people fell into it.  Giant institutions wobbled or crashed; extended
unemployment wouldn’t go away; foreclosures happened on a mind-boggling
scale; infrastructure began to buckle; state budgets were caught in a
death grip; teachers’ jobs, another kind of infrastructure, went down
the tubes in startling numbers; and the federal deficit soared.

Of course, a new president also entered the Oval Office, someone
(many voters believed) intent on winding up (or at least down) Bush’s
wars and the delusions of military omnipotence and technological
omniscience that went with them.  If George W. Bush had pushed this
country to the edge of disaster, at least his military policies, as
many of his critics saw it, were as extreme and anomalous as the cult of executive power his top officials fostered.

But here was the strange thing.  In the midst of the Great
Recession, under a new president with assumedly far fewer illusions
about American omnipotence and power, war policy continued to expand in
just about every way.  The Pentagon budget rose by Bushian increments
in fiscal year 2010; and while the Iraq War reached a kind of dismal
stasis, the new president doubled down in Afghanistan on entering
office — and then doubled down again before the end of 2009.  There,
he “surged” in multiple ways.  At best, the U.S. was only drawing down one war, in Iraq, to feed the flames of another.

As in the Soviet Union before its collapse, the exaltation and
feeding of the military at the expense of the rest of society and the
economy had by now become the new normal; so much so that hardly a
serious word could be said — lest you not “support our troops” — when
it came to ending the American way of war or downsizing the global
mission or ponying up the funds demanded of Congress to pursue war preparations and war-making.

Even when, after years of astronomical growth, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates began to talk
about cost-cutting at the Pentagon, it was in the service of the
reallocation of ever more money to war-fighting.  Here was how the New York Times summed up
what reduction actually meant for our ultimate super-sized institution
in tough times: “Current budget plans project growth of only 1 percent
in the Pentagon budget, after inflation, over the next five years.”  Only 1% growth — at a time when state budgets, for instance, are being slashed to the bone.  Like the Soviet military, the Pentagon, in other words, is planning to remain obese whatever else goes down.

Meanwhile, the “anti-war” president has been overseeing the expansion of the new normal on many fronts, including the expanding size of the Army itself. 
In fact, when it comes to the Global War on Terror — even with the
name now in disuse — the profligacy can still take your breath away.

Consider, for instance, the $2.2 billion Host Nation Trucking contract the Pentagon uses to pay protection money to Afghan security companies which, in turn, slip
some part of those payments to the Taliban to let American supplies
travel safely on Afghan roads.  Or if you don’t want to think about how
your tax dollar supports the Taliban, consider the $683,000 the
Pentagon spent, according to the Washington Post,
to “renovate a cafe that sells ice cream and Starbucks coffee” at its
base/prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  Or the $773,000 used there “to
remodel a cinder-block building to house a KFC/Taco Bell restaurant,”
or the $7.3 million spent on baseball and football fields, or the
$60,000 batting cage, or a promised $20,000 soccer cage, all part of
the approximately two billion dollars that have gone into the American
base and prison complex that Barack Obama promised to, but can’t, close.

Or what about the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, that 104-acre, almost three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar, 21-building homage to the American-mall-as-fortified-citadel?  It costs more than $1.5 billion a year to run, and bears about as much relationship to an “embassy” as MacDonald’s does to a neighborhood hamburger joint.  According to a recent audit,
millions of dollars in “federal property” assigned to what is
essentially a vast command center for the region, including 159 of the
embassy's 1,168 vehicles, are missing or unaccounted for.

And as long as we’re talking about expansion in distant lands, how about the Pentagon’s most recent construction plans
in Central Asia, part of a prospective “mini-building boom” there. 
They are to include an anti-terrorism training center to be constructed
for a bargain basement $5.5 million in… no, not Toledo or Akron or El
Paso, but the combustible
city of Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan.  And that’s just one of several
projects there and in neighboring Tajikistan that are reportedly to be
funded out of the U.S. Central Command’s “counter-narcotics fund” (and
ultimately, of course, your pocket).     

Or consider a particularly striking example of military expansion under President Obama, superbly reported by the Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe in a piece headlined,
“U.S. 'secret war' expands globally as Special Operations forces take
larger role.” As a story, it sank without a trace in a country
evidently unfazed by the idea of having its forces garrisoned and
potentially readying to fight everywhere on the planet. 

Here’s how the piece began:

“Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken diplomacy and beyond the
combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has
significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and
other radical groups, according to senior military and administration
officials.  Special Operations forces have grown both in number and
budget, and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the
beginning of last year.”

Now, without opening an atlas, just try to name any 75
countries on this planet — more than one-third, that is, of the states
belonging to the United Nations.  And yet U.S. special operatives are
now engaging in war, or preparing for war, or training others to do so,
or covertly collecting intelligence in that many countries across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.  Fifteen more than in the Bush era.    

Whatever it is or isn’t called, this remains Bush’s Global War on
Terror on an expansionist trajectory.  DeYoung and Jaffe quote an
unnamed “senior military official” saying that the Obama administration
has allowed "things that the previous administration did not," and
report that Special Operations commanders are now “a far more regular
presence at the White House” than in the Bush years.

Not surprisingly, those Special Operations forces have themselves
expanded in the first year and a half of the Obama presidency and, for
fiscal year 2011, with 13,000 of them already deployed abroad, the
administration has requested a 5.7% hike in their budget to $6.3
billion.

Once upon a time, Special Operations forces got their name because
they were small and “special.”  Now, they are, in essence, being
transformed into a covert military within the military and, as befits
their growing size, reports Noah Shachtman of the Wired's
Danger Room, the Army Special Forces alone are slated to get a new $100
million “headquarters” in northern Afghanistan.  It will cover about 17
acres and will include a “communications building, Tactical Operations
Center, training facility, medical aid station, Vehicle Maintenance
Facility… dining facility, laundry facility, and a kennel to support
working dogs… Supporting facilities include roads, power production
system and electrical distribution, water well, non-potable water
production, water storage, water distribution, sanitary sewer
collection system, communication manhole/duct system, curbs, walkways,
drainage and parking.”  

This headquarters, adds Shachtman, will take a year to build, “at
which point, the U.S. is allegedly supposed to begin drawing down its
forces in Afghanistan. Allegedly.”  And mind you, the Special
Operations troops are but one expanding part of the U.S. military. 

Creeping Gigantism

The first year and a half of the Obama administration has seen a
continuation of what could be considered the monumental
socialist-realist era of American war-making (including a decision to construct
another huge, Baghdad-style “embassy” in Islamabad, Pakistan). This
sort of creeping gigantism, with all its assorted cost overruns and
private perks,
would undoubtedly have seemed familiar to the Soviets.  Certainly no
less familiar will be the near decade the U.S. military has spent,
increasingly disastrously, in the Afghan graveyard.

Drunk on war as Washington may be, the U.S. is still not the Soviet
Union in 1991 — not yet.  But it’s not the triumphant “sole
superpower” anymore either.  Its global power is visibly waning, its ability to win wars distinctly in question, its economic viability open to doubt.  It has been transformed
from a can-do into a can’t-do nation, a fact only highlighted by the
ongoing BP catastrophe and “rescue” in the Gulf of Mexico.  Its
airports are less shiny
and more Third World-like every year.  Unlike France or China, it has
not a mile of high-speed rail. And when it comes to the future,
especially the creation and support of innovative industries in
alternative energy, it’s chasing the pack.  It is increasingly a low-end service economy, losing good jobs that will never return.   

And if its armies come home in defeat… watch out.

In 1991, the Soviet Union suddenly evaporated.  The Cold War was
over.  Like many wars, it seemed to have an obvious winner and an
obvious loser.  Nearly 20 years later, as the U.S. heads down the
Soviet road to disaster — even if the world can’t imagine what a
bankrupt America might mean — it’s far clearer that, in the titanic
struggle of the two superpowers that we came to call the Cold War,
there were actually two losers, and that, when the “second superpower”
left the scene, the first was already heading for the exits, just ever
so slowly and in a state of self-intoxicated self-congratulation. 
Nearly every decision in Washington since then, including Barack
Obama’s to expand both the Afghan War and the war on terror, has only
made what, in 1991, was one possible path seem like fate itself.

Call up the Politburo in Washington.  We’re in trouble.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His new book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s
(Haymarket Books), will be published this week. To catch him discussing
America in the “Soviet era," as well as his new book, on the latest
TomCast audio interview, click here, or to download it to your iPod, click here.

[Note on sources and readings:  I regularly rely on the invaluable Antiwar.com, Juan Cole’s Informed Comment blog, Paul Woodward’s The War in Context, and Noah Shachtman’s Danger Room (for all things strange and military), as well as Katherine Tiedemann’s Daily Brief at the AfPak Channel, and recommend them often enough.  Let me suggest another interesting place to visit: TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg’s Center on Law and Security at NYU has a new website, the CenterLine, which has just launched a daily round-up report on “war on terror” issues of every sort: “Today’s Terrorism News.”
It’s well worth attending to.  Finally, as ever, my special thanks go
to Christopher Holmes, who patrols the borders of TomDispatchland, day
and night, in search of error.  He’s indefatigable.]

Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt

This article was originally posted at TomDispatch.com.