How come they get to be the hawks? And we get to be the doves? A hawk is a noble bird. A dove. Well, basically it's a pigeon. The sort of bird that, in New York City anyway, messes your building's window sills, is always underfoot, and, along with the city's rats, makes a hearty lunch for the red-tailed hawks which now populate our parks.

Even a turkey would be less of a turkey than a dove. We get to carry that olive twig — okay, they call it a "branch" — around in our beaks, but you can bet your bippy that they get the olives, or, more likely, the opportunity to trample the olive groves into oil.

They get to swoop and prey. We get to pace the sidelines, cooing our complaints. Their ideas — it never matters how visibly dumb they are — get tried. Ours never do. And when theirs fail miserably, they get to recalibrate and try again. We never get to try once.

That's because it's well accepted that they are "realists" and we are "dreamers," or "utopians," or maybe, like most doves, vegans. If you're not addicted to force (and so failure), you're simply not a part of the grand scheme of things, of the world as it is.

They get hundreds of billions of dollars to play with. We don't get bus fare to Washington. Oh, and then, at about the point when everything they've planned for has gone to hell, they suddenly turn to us and, claiming we're just so many naysayers, ask belligerently what the hell we'd do now. What's our plan anyway?

And to make matters worse, even though they have a dismal record when it comes to predicting what their plans will do, they don't hesitate to explain to us with complete confidence just what sort of catastrophes our ideas will surely lead to. If we force them to withdraw from such-and-such a country in such-and-such a way, we'll be responsible for nothing short of "genocide," or ensure that a nuclear weapon goes off in an American city, or worse. And the media believes them, despite the fact that they've been proven wrong time and again, and so gives them carte blanche as "experts."

I'm talking, of course, about the U.S. military's top brass (uniforms and all those medals are just so imposing!), the key civilians in the Pentagon, the rest of the national security establishment, the hordes of think-tank strategists in our capital, and the political leaders who go with them. Talk about failing upwards! Despite everything, hawks rule; doves never even get the chance to take off. And as the novelist Kurt Vonnegut used to say, so it goes.

Force as the Solution

And now for a tad of history…

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, those few who suggested that the appropriate response might be intensive, determined global police action, not the loosing of the might of the U.S. military on Afghanistan, were derisively hooted from the room. It was so obvious that an invasion was not only a necessity, but couldn't fail against the ragtag Taliban and their al-Qaedan allies, not given the military might of the planet's "sole superpower." Even now, when it comes to that invasion "lite" and the subsequent occupation of Afghanistan from which unending disaster ensued, no mea culpas have been offered; nor does anyone in the mainstream pay the slightest attention to those who worried about, or warned against, such an approach.

Nor was serious attention paid when, before the invasion of Iraq, millions of people worldwide poured into the streets of global cities to say loud and clear: Don't do it! It'll be a catastrophe!

Instead, they did it. It was a catastrophe and both the antiwar crowds and the critics of that moment have been largely forgotten — those who weren't simply discredited — while the enthusiasts for the invasion, military and civilian, now often transformed into "critics" of how it and its aftermath were handled, remain the "experts" on what the U.S. should do next. Counterintuitive as it might seem, they are the ones whose assessments still count — and that's par for the course.

Once the invasion was over, doves said, okay, at least don't occupy the country long term. Don't build massive bases. Get out while you can — and quickly. Of course, no one who mattered paid the slightest heed to such wrong-headedness in the wake of such a historic "victory." And so it went. And so it goes.

In our world as it is, force remains the essential arbiter. And when its application leads to catastrophe, the response is… simply more of the same.

Consider this conundrum logically. On the one hand, you have a method that, in our moment, has failed the United States repeatedly. On the other, you have something largely untried, an attempt to settle problems without resorting to force or, at least, with minimal force or the use of force as a genuine last resort in defense of nation, kin, and self. Yet, their efforts and our money go only into developing better ways of using force, and ever-more-powerful and eerie ways of delivering it.

Or have I missed a sudden proliferation of peace task forces and think tanks in Washington? Has anyone seen the suggestion, first made in 1792 by signer of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Rush, and more recently by Congressman Dennis Kucinich, for the establishment of a cabinet level Department of Peace go anywhere — other than into the bottom drawer where the dossier on Kucinich's sighting of a UFO is stored?

On the one hand, failure; on the other, the unknown. You would think that, every now and then, the "opposites" principle the character George on Seinfeld applies to his failed life would hold. As Jerry Seinfeld tells him: "If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right."

In Washington, though, what our former Secretary of Defense called the "known knowns" are invariably preferred, and so war rooms, not peace rooms, prevail and, as in Afghanistan today, military commanders remain our ultimate experts for whom every day is a potential do-over.

Force as Religion

In these last years in Washington, force became something close to an American religion. The Bush administration's top officials were all fundamentalists in their singular belief in the efficacy of force. In fact, they arrived convinced that an all-powerful, techno-wondrous military, unrivaled on the planet, left them with the ability to project force in ways no other power ever had. When it came to remaking the world, anything seemed possible.

What this meant was that an extreme version of military fundamentalism went hand-in-hand with an extreme version of economic fundamentalism. Today, both of these fundamentalisms are collapsing, even if a pared down version of the military half of the equation is anything but dead.

In those same years, Americans also began to genuflect before the idea of our military in ways previously unimaginable. They pledged their unending support for "our troops," now commonly referred to as "warriors," who were repeatedly hailed as the bravest, most valiant, most successful fighters around, part of the most awesome military ever. It — and they — simply could do no wrong. Given this faith, when things did go wrong, mistakes would never be blamed on the military.

As a result, while actual American soldiers were sent halfway across the planet in a distinctly unreverential way on their third, fourth, and fifth tours of duty (with few here giving much of a damn), Americans treated the idea of those "warriors" and their "mission" with ritualistic fervor.

A cold-eyed look at the record of the U.S. military in these last years, however, tells quite a different tale. It's no small thing, after all, that U.S. military actions in two disastrous wars managed to
burnish the reputation of one of the uglier fallen dictators on the planet and pave the way for the return, as a national resistance force, of a brutish, retrograde, failed regime almost universally rejected by its own people when it fled in November 2001. I'm speaking, of course, about Iraq's Saddam Hussein and the Taliban of Afghanistan. Worse yet, the ever greater application of force, including recently the repeated firing of missiles from CIA-operated drone aircraft into the Pashtun borderlands of Pakistan, has resulted in the spread of the Taliban, religious extremism, terrorism, and war into the heartland of Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country now being destabilized.

What makes all this more remarkable is that, unlike the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, twenty-first century America had no impressive enemies to face in September 2001. In losing its brutal Afghan War, the Soviets confronted a superpower that was more than its match — us. In Afghanistan today, it's estimated that the Taliban consists of but 10,000-15,000 relatively lightly armed guerrillas. The Iraq insurgency was probably only marginally larger than that at its height. Al-Qaeda, with a capability for major operations every couple of years, was even less impressive, despite the 9/11 televisual spectacular it put on.

You would have to go back to Spain at the beginning of the nineteenth century to find the match for this moment. Then, the most advanced military in Europe, Napoleon's army, an imperial force advancing (like the American military in recent years) under the banner of liberty, ran into a meat grinder of an insurgency from the Sunni fundamentalists of that day — enraged Catholic peasants, often led by their priests. (If you want to know what that was like, check out Goya's unforgettable series of prints, The Disasters of War.)

In Iraq, over nearly six years, the U.S. military has recalibrated so many times it's dizzying. Who now recalls the "revolution in military affairs" that created the "lite," high-tech military which launched a "decapitation" campaign that killed plenty of Iraqi civilians but left all of that country's leaders with their heads still firmly on their shoulders; or the "shock and awe" campaign, which mainly awed Washington — and that was before the occupation, the Sunni insurgency, and a civil war took root, after which tactical changes came and went with names like "get tough," "oil spot" and "ink blot," the "Salvador option," "clear and hold," and "the surge" as well as the "clear, hold, and build" counterinsurgency strategy which is now supposedly being transferred to Afghanistan.

Today, Iraq, still one of the most dangerous places on the planet, is far quieter than at the height of the civil violence of 2005-2006 and so the "surge," overseen by Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno, is said in Washington to have worked, even if it hasn't succeeded in resolving the underlying ethnic, political, and religious tensions let loose by the American invasion. A recent article on the inside pages of the New York Times, however, offers a somewhat different perspective on the effectiveness of military force in Iraq in these last years. Little aid, Times journalist Timothy Williams reports, is now available to Iraq's estimated 740,000 widows, most made so, it seems, by years of war and violence; and that figure, he indicates, may be an undercount, given the chaos in which that country remains.

If you were capable of adding to the dead husbands of those hundreds of thousands of "war widows," the dead wives, dead sisters, dead daughters, dead grandmothers and grandfathers, as well as the children who died thanks, in one way or another, to the violence of those years, not to speak of the large group of dead young men who were not yet married, you would surely have a staggering figure, a toll of perhaps a million or more Iraqis from an estimated prewar population of perhaps 26 million. That level of slaughter might qualify in scale as near genocidal. (It's worth adding that, as in the Vietnam era so many decades ago, mainstream critics of antiwar critics continue to regularly suggest that any kind of "precipitous" withdrawal of American troops would almost certainly result in a genocidal slaughter, even as such a slaughter has taken place with the troops there.)

If the staggering numbers of dead civilians in Iraq's post-2003 killing fields, and those who are still dying, are a measure of Washington's "success," it's the success of the undertaker.

Taking Options Off the Table

Let's face it, the U.S. is addicted to force, and when force fails to achieve its purposes (for failure, too, is addictive), yet more force is applied in marginally different ways under radically different names.

Now much of Washington and the media have indeed reached a consensus that the Bush administration's use of force was a disaster of the first order. As a result, they have generally concluded that, in Iraq, we must be especially careful not to stop applying it too quickly lest we destabilize what's left of that country and, in Afghanistan, that achieving "stability" calls for the deployment of significantly more forces which, of course, will use significantly more force.

In Iraq, where President Obama is indeed talking about a withdrawal that would remove all U.S. forces by the end of 2011, we also know, thanks to Thomas Ricks's latest book The Gamble, that America's top generals, including Centcom commander Petraeus and General Odierno, the top commander in Iraq, believe we'll still be fighting in that country in 2015. In the meantime, the general who commands U.S. forces in Afghanistan, David McKiernan, is already talking about years more of fighting at surge levels — and suggesting that yet more U.S. troops will be needed. ("I think… that this is not a temporary force uplift, that it's going to need to be sustained for some period of time. I can't give you an exact number of — the year that it would be. But I've said I'm trying to look out for the next three to four or five years.")

In the meantime, the Obama administration is hoping to find some extra help by calling together a regional conference of interested countries, possibly including Iran, and by using the military to negotiate with and peel off "moderate" Taliban backers, while it sends in at least 17,000 more troops. This is what passes for new foreign policy thinking in Washington.

In the meantime, the Afghan chain of command has been further militarized. It now stretches from retired Marine General Jim Jones, the new national security advisor, through Centcom commander Petraeus and Afghan commander McKiernan to a soon-to-retire Army general, Karl Eikenberry, who reportedly will be appointed U.S. ambassador in Kabul. Meanwhile, in southern Afghanistan, as well as along the Pakistani border, peace and stabilization will involve the further application of force with results that shouldn't surprise us.

To summarize: They can be wrong a hundred times and when they are, they get to try every cockamamie scheme and call it anything they want. We don't even have names for whatever peace strategies might be used. And while Iran is, however grudgingly, however imperially, being invited to the Afghan table, antiwar activists and critics, no matter how on the mark they might have been, remain the equivalent of an American Hamas.

On the other hand, if you've been a "hawk" and a pundit, or one of those retired generals who talked us, however ineptly, through our latest wars (like the TV financial analysts who, in mid-meltdown, were still calling on us to buy more stocks and assuring us of the solidity of A.I.G. and Citigroup), you can't be wrong often enough to be asked to leave the table at which the Great Game is
played.

Oh, and with this in mind, a small tip for prospective "doves" within the Obama administration: Be careful not to be too on the mark in your analysis or, at least, too loud about proclaiming it. On this subject, history is a suicide bomber and it's coming for you. After all, the worst thing in any administration is to be a dove and be right.

As David Halberstam memorably wrote in his history of the Vietnam War, The Best and the Brightest, of hawkish future Secretary of State Dean Rusk, "So [he] was once again promoted (the best people, who had correctly predicted the fall of China, would see their careers destroyed, but Dean Rusk, who had failed to predict the Chinese entry into the Korean War, would see his career accelerate.) There had to be a moral for him here: if you are wrong on the hawkish side of an event you are all right; if you are accurate on the dovish side you are in trouble."

Leaving the Comfort Zone

Let's be clear here. In our world, any application of imperial force is part of the problem, not part of the solution. It doesn't work. We can't afford it. It's not in "the national interest." The last seven years have made this abundantly clear for those who care to look.

Let's be clear on this, too: If we keep sending military people in to solve our problems, they will, not surprisingly, turn to military solutions. Whatever lip service they offer to diplomacy and other possible paths, they will, in the end, prefer force by whatever label. It's what they know. However uncomfortable its results, it's still their comfort zone.

That's why the American president is commander-in-chief — exactly so that military men aren't left to "solve" our problems for us.

Let's be clear on this as well: Nobody knows what antiwar solutions would make sense, no less succeed, since so little effort or money or time or experimentation has gone into them, but we know a lot about what force can't do in our world.

Wouldn't it make sense to put a small percentage of the long-term effort and money that the Pentagon now profligately invests in force and the means to deliver it into strategies for peace, and into the de-escalation of the use of force as a solution (and of the global imperial mission that goes with it)? Shouldn't somebody consider, for instance, whether the principle found in so many individual martial arts — that defense, and even striking reserves of power, can be found not in meeting force with blunt force, but in giving way before force — might apply to more collective situations? Don't such groups as the Taliban and al-Qaeda feed off of, thrive and recruit off of, military action against them as well as the human destruction and the attention that goes with it?

Isn't it time for us to begin to take force off that "table" on which, officials in Washington always insist, lie "all options," but especially smash-mouth ones? Isn't it time to suggest that there can be no national interest when it comes to military action in Iraq or Afghanistan, only an imperial interest? Isn't it time to suggest that, as bad as things are, as little as we know how to do anything else, simply fighting on in Iraq or Afghanistan until 2015 or 2020, as our economic system collapses around our ears, can't be a solution to anything?

Decades ago, after visiting American troops in Vietnam, singer Johnny Cash was asked by a reporter whether that didn't make him a hawk. "No, no, that don't make me a hawk," he responded. "But I said if you watch the helicopters bring in the wounded boys, and then you go into the wards and sing for 'em and try and do your best to cheer 'em up, so they can get back home, it might make you a dove with claws." Later, he would call that image "stupid." Maybe that's because he didn't go all the way. Maybe he meant "a falcon of peace."

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 American Age of Denial. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt

Sometimes, it’s the everyday things, the ones that fly below the radar, that matter.

Here, according to Bloomberg News, is part of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s recent testimony on the Afghan War before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

“U.S. goals in Afghanistan must be ‘modest, realistic,’ and ‘above all, there must be an Afghan face on this war,’ Gates said. ‘The Afghan people must believe this is their war and we are there to help them. If they think we are there for our own purposes, then we will go the way of every other foreign army that has been in Afghanistan.'”

Now, in our world, a statement like this seems so obvious, so reasonable as to be beyond comment. And yet, stop a moment and think about this part of it: “there must be an Afghan face on this war.” U.S. military and civilian officials used an equivalent phrase in 2005-2006 when things were going really, really wrong in Iraq. It was then commonplace — and no less unremarked upon — for them to urgently suggest that an “Iraqi face” be put on events there.

Evidently back in vogue for a different war, the phrase is revelatory — and oddly blunt. As an image, there’s really only one way to understand it (not that anyone here stops to do so). After all, what does it mean to “put a face” on something that assumedly already has a face? In this case, it has to mean putting an Afghan mask over what we know to be the actual “face” of the Afghan War — ours — a foreign face that men like Gates recognize, quite correctly, is not the one most Afghans want to see. It’s hardly surprising that the Secretary of Defense would pick up such a phrase, part of Washington’s everyday arsenal of words and images when it comes to geopolitics, power, and war.

And yet, make no mistake, this is Empire-speak, American-style. It’s the language — behind which lies a deeper structure of argument and thought — that is essential to Washington’s vision of itself as a planet-straddling goliath. Think of that “Afghan face”/mask, in fact, as part of the flotsam and jetsam that regularly bubbles up from the American imperial unconscious.

Of course, words create realities even though such language, in all its strangeness, essentially passes unnoticed here. Largely uncommented upon, it helps normalize American practices in the world, comfortably shielding us from certain global realities; but it also has the potential to blind us to those realities, which, in perilous times, can be dangerous indeed. So let’s consider just a few entries in what might be thought of as The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak.

War Hidden in Plain Sight: There has recently been much reporting on, and even some debate here about, the efficacy of the Obama administration’s decision to increase the intensity of CIA missile attacks from drone aircraft in what Washington, in a newly coined neologism reflecting a widening war, now calls “Af-Pak” — the Pashtun tribal borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Since August 2008, more than 30 such missile attacks have been launched on the Pakistani side of that border against suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban targets. The pace of attacks has actually risen since Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, as have casualties from the missile strikes, as well as popular outrage in Pakistan over the attacks.

Thanks to Senator Diane Feinstein, we also know that, despite strong official Pakistani government protests, someone official in that country is doing more than looking the other way while they occur. As the Senator revealed recently, at least some of the CIA’s unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) cruising the skies over Af-Pak are evidently stationed at Pakistani bases. We learned recently as well that American Special Operations units are now regularly making forays inside Pakistan “primarily to gather intelligence”; that a unit of 70 American Special Forces advisors, a “secret task force, overseen by the United States Central Command and Special Operations Command,” is now aiding and training Pakistani Army and Frontier Corps paramilitary troops, again inside Pakistan; and that, despite (or perhaps, in part, because of) these American efforts, the influence of the Pakistani Taliban is actually expanding, even as Pakistan threatens to melt down.

Mystifyingly enough, however, this Pakistani part of the American war in Afghanistan is still referred to in major U.S. papers as a “covert war.” As news about it pours out, who it’s being hidden from is one of those questions no one bothers to ask.

On February 20th, the New York Times’ Mark Mazzetti and David E. Sanger typically wrote:

“With two missile strikes over the past week, the Obama administration has expanded the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside Pakistan, attacking a militant network seeking to topple the Pakistani government… Under standard policy for covert operations, the C.I.A. strikes inside Pakistan have not been publicly acknowledged either by the Obama administration or the Bush administration.”

On February 25th, Mazzetti and Helene Cooper reported that new CIA head Leon Panetta essentially bragged to reporters that “the agency’s campaign against militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas was the ‘most effective weapon’ the Obama administration had to combat Al Qaeda’s top leadership… Mr. Panetta stopped short of directly acknowledging the missile strikes, but he said that ‘operational efforts’ focusing on Qaeda leaders had been successful.” Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal reported the next day that Panetta said the attacks are “probably the most effective weapon we have to try to disrupt al Qaeda right now.” She added, “Mr. Obama and National Security Adviser James Jones have strongly endorsed their use, [Panetta] said.”

Uh, covert war? These “covert” “operational efforts” have been front-page news in the Pakistani press for months, they were part of the U.S. presidential campaign debates, and they certainly can’t be a secret for the Pashtuns in those border areas who must see drone aircraft overhead relatively regularly, or experience the missiles arriving in their neighborhoods.

In the U.S., “covert war” has long been a term for wars like the U.S.-backed Contra War against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s, which were openly discussed, debated, and often lauded in this country. To a large extent, when aspects of these wars have actually been “covert” — that is, purposely hidden from anyone — it has been from the American public, not the enemies being warred upon. At the very least, however, such language, however threadbare, offers official Washington a kind of “plausible deniability” when it comes to thinking about what kind of an “American face” we present to the world.

Imperial Naming Practices: In our press, anonymous U.S. officials now point with pride to the increasing “precision” and “accuracy” of those drone missile attacks in taking out Taliban or al-Qaeda figures without (supposedly) taking out the tribespeople who live in the same villages or neighboring compounds. Such pieces lend our air war an almost sterile quality. They tend to emphasize the extraordinary lengths to which planners go to avoid “collateral damage.” To many Americans, it must then seem strange, even irrational, that perfectly non-fundamentalist Pakistanis should be quite so outraged about attacks aimed at the world’s worst terrorists.

On the other hand, consider for a moment the names of those drones now regularly in the skies over “Pashtunistan.” These are no less regularly published in our press to no comment at all. The most basic of the armed drones goes by the name of Predator, a moniker which might as well have come directly from those nightmarish sci-fi movies about an alien that feasts on humans. Undoubtedly, however, it was used in the way Col. Michael Steele of the 101st Airborne Division meant it when he exhorted his brigade deploying to Iraq (according to Thomas E. Ricks’ new book The Gamble) to remember: “You’re the predator.”

The Predator drone is armed with “only” two missiles. The more advanced drone, originally called the Predator B, now being deployed to the skies over Af-Pak, has been dubbed the Reaper — as in the Grim Reaper. Now, there’s only one thing such a “hunter-killer UAV” could be reaping, and you know just what that is: lives. It can be armed with up to 14 missiles (or four missiles and two 500-pound bombs), which means it packs quite a deadly wallop.

Oh, by the way, those missiles are named as well. They’re Hellfire missiles. So, if you want to consider the nature of this covert war in terms of names alone: Predators and Reapers are bringing down the fire from some satanic hell upon the peasants, fundamentalist guerrillas, and terrorists of the Af-Pak border regions.

In Washington, when the Af-Pak War is discussed, it’s in the bloodless, bureaucratic language of “global counterinsurgency” or “irregular warfare” (IW), of “soft power,” “hard power,” and “smart power.” But flying over the Pashtun wildlands is the blunt-edged face of predation and death, ready at a moment’s notice to deliver hellfire to those below.

Imperial Arguments: Let’s pursue this just a little further. Faced with rising numbers of civilian casualties from U.S. and NATO air strikes in Afghanistan and an increasingly outraged Afghan public, American officials tend to place the blame for most sky-borne “collateral damage” squarely on the Taliban. As Joint Chiefs Chairman Michael Mullen bluntly explained recently, “[T]he enemy hides behind civilians.” Hence, so this Empire-speak argument goes, dead civilians are actually the Taliban’s doing.

U.S. military and civilian spokespeople have long accused Taliban guerrillas of using civilians as “shields,” or even of purposely luring devastating air strikes down on Afghan wedding parties to create civilian casualties and so inflame the sensibilities of rural Afghanistan. This commonplace argument has two key features: a claim that they made us do it (kill civilians) and the implication that the Taliban fighters “hiding” among innocent villagers or wedding revelers are so many cowards, willing to put their fellow Pashtuns at risk rather than come out and fight like men — and, of course, given the firepower arrayed against them, die.

The U.S. media regularly records this argument without reflecting on it. In this country, in fact, the evil of combatants “hiding” among civilians seems so self-evident, especially given the larger evil of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, that no one thinks twice about it.

And yet like so much of Empire-speak on a one-way planet, this argument is distinctly uni-directional. What’s good for the guerrilla goose, so to speak, is inapplicable to the imperial gander. To illustrate, consider the American “pilots” flying those unmanned Predators and Reapers. We don’t know exactly where all of them are (other than not in the drones), but some are certainly at Nellis Air Force Base just outside Las Vegas.

In other words, were the Taliban guerrillas to leave the protection of those civilians and come out into the open, there would be no enemy to fight in the usual sense, not even a predatory one. The pilot firing that Hellfire missile into some Pakistani border village or compound is, after all, using the UAV’s cameras, including by next year a new system hair-raisingly dubbed “Gorgon Stare,” to locate his target and then, via console, as in a single-shooter video game, firing the missile, possibly from many thousands of miles away.

And yet nowhere in our world will you find anyone making the argument that those pilots are in “hiding” like so many cowards. Such a thought seems absurd to us, as it would if it were applied to the F-16 pilots taking off from aircraft carriers off the Afghan coast or the B-1 pilots flying out of unnamed Middle Eastern bases or the Indian Ocean island base of Diego Garcia. And yet, whatever those pilots may do in Afghan skies, unless they experience a mechanical malfunction, they are in no more danger than if they, too, were somewhere outside Las Vegas. In the last seven years, a few helicopters, but no planes, have gone down in Afghanistan.

When the Afghan mujahedeen fought the Soviets in the 1980s, the CIA supplied them with hand-held Stinger missiles, the most advanced surface-to-air missile in the U.S. arsenal, and they did indeed start knocking Soviet helicopters and planes out of the skies (which proved the beginning of the end for the Russians). The Afghan or Pakistani Taliban or al-Qaeda terrorists have no such capability today, which means, if you think about it, that what we here imagine as an “air war” involves none of the dangers we would normally associate with war. Looked at in another light, those missile strikes and bombings are really one-way acts of slaughter.

The Taliban’s tactics are, of course, the essence of guerrilla warfare, which always involves an asymmetrical battle against more powerful armies and weaponry, and which, if successful, always depends on the ability of the guerrilla to blend into the environment, natural and human, or, as Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong so famously put it, to “swim” in the “sea of the people.”

If you imagine your enemy simply using the villagers of Afghanistan as “shields” or “hiding” like so many cowards among them, you are speaking the language of imperial power but also blinding yourself (or the American public) to the actual realities of the war you’re fighting.

Imperial Jokes: In October 2008, Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, refused to renew the U.S. lease at Manta Air Base, one of at least 761 foreign bases, macro to micro, that the U.S. garrisons worldwide. Correa reportedly said: “We’ll renew the base on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami — an Ecuadorean base. If there’s no problem having foreign soldiers on a country’s soil, surely they’ll let us have an Ecuadorean base in the United States.”

This qualifies as an anti-imperial joke. The “leftist” president of Ecuador was doing no more than tweaking the nose of goliath. An Ecuadorian base in Miami? Absurd. No one on the planet could take such a suggestion seriously.

On the other hand, when it comes to the U.S. having a major base in Kyrgyzstan, a Central Asian land that not one in a million Americans has ever heard of, that’s no laughing matter. After all, Washington has been paying $20 million a year in direct rent for the use of that country’s Manas Air Base (and, as indirect rent, another $80 million has gone to various Kyrgyzstani programs). As late as last October, the Pentagon was planning to sink another $100 million into construction at Manas “to expand aircraft parking areas at the base and provide a ‘hot cargo pad’ — an area safe enough to load and unload hazardous and explosive cargo — to be located away from inhabited facilities.” That, however, was when things started to go wrong. Now, Kyrgyzstan’s parliament has voted to expel the U.S. from Manas within six months, a serious blow to our resupply efforts for the Afghan War. More outrageous yet to Washington, the Kyrgyzstanis seem to have done this at the bidding of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has the nerve to want to reestablish a Russian sphere of influence in what used to be the borderlands of the old Soviet Union.

Put in a nutshell, despite the crumbling U.S. economic situation and the rising costs of the Afghan War, we still act as if we live on a one-way planet. Some country demanding a base in the U.S.? That’s a joke or an insult, while the U.S. potentially gaining or losing a base almost anywhere on the planet may be an insult, but it’s never a laughing matter.

Imperial Thought: Recently, to justify those missile attacks in Pakistan, U.S. officials have been leaking details on the program’s “successes” to reporters. Anonymous officials have offered the “possibly wishful estimate” that the CIA “covert war” has led to the deaths (or capture) of 11 of al Qaeda’s top 20 commanders, including, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report, “Abu Layth al-Libi, whom U.S. officials described as ‘a rising star’ in the group.”

“Rising star” is such an American phrase, melding as it does imagined terror hierarchies with the lingo of celebrity tabloids. In fact, one problem with Empire-speak, and imperial thought more generally, is the way it prevents imperial officials from imagining a world not in their own image. So it’s not surprising that, despite their best efforts, they regularly conjure up their enemies as a warped version of themselves — hierarchical, overly reliant on leaders, and top heavy.

In the Vietnam era, for instance, American officials spent a remarkable amount of effort sending troops to search for, and planes to bomb, the border sanctuaries of Cambodia and Laos on a fruitless hunt for COSVN (the so-called Central Office for South Vietnam), the supposed nerve center of the communist enemy, aka “the bamboo Pentagon.” Of course, it wasn’t there to be found, except in Washington’s imperial imagination.

In the Af-Pak “theater,” we may be seeing a similar phenomenon. Underpinning the CIA killer-drone program is a belief that the key to combating al-Qaeda (and possibly the Taliban) is destroying its leadership one by one. As key Pakistani officials have tried to explain, the missile attacks, which have indeed killed some al-Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban figures (as well as whoever was in their vicinity), are distinctly counterproductive. The deaths of those figures in no way compensates for the outrage, the destabilization, the radicalization that the attacks engender in the region. They may, in fact, be functionally strengthening each of those movements.

What it’s hard for Washington to grasp is this: “decapitation,” to use another American imperial term, is not a particularly effective strategy with a decentralized guerrilla or terror organization. The fact is a headless guerrilla movement is nowhere near as brainless or helpless as a headless Washington would be.

Only recently, Eric Schmitt and Jane Perlez of the New York Times reported that, while top U.S. officials were exhibiting optimism about the effectiveness of the missile strikes, Pakistani officials were pointing to “ominous signs of Al Qaeda’s resilience” and suggesting “that Al Qaeda was replenishing killed fighters and midlevel leaders with less experienced but more hard-core militants, who are considered more dangerous because they have fewer allegiances to local Pakistani tribes… The Pakistani intelligence assessment found that Al Qaeda had adapted to the blows to its command structure by shifting ‘to conduct decentralized operations under small but well-organized regional groups’ within Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

Imperial Dreams and Nightmares: Americans have rarely liked to think of themselves as “imperial,” so what is it about Rome in these last years? First, the neocons, in the flush of seeming victory in 2002-2003 began to imagine the U.S. as a “new Rome” (or new British Empire), or as Charles Krauthammer wrote as early as February 2001 in Time Magazine, “America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome.”

All roads on this planet, they were then convinced, led ineluctably to Washington. Now, of course, they visibly don’t, and the imperial bragging about surpassing the Roman or British empires has long since faded away. When it comes to the Afghan War, in fact, those (resupply) “roads” seem to lead, embarrassingly enough, through Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Russia, and Iran. But the comparison to conquering Rome evidently remains on the brain.

When, for instance, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post recently, drumming up support for the revised, age-of-Obama American mission in Afghanistan, he just couldn’t help starting off with an inspiring tale about the Romans and a small Italian city-state, Locri, that they conquered. As he tells it, the ruler the Romans installed in Locri, a rapacious fellow named Pleminius, proved a looter and a tyrant. And yet, Mullen assures us, the Locrians so believed in “the reputation for equanimity and fairness that Rome had built” that they sent a delegation to the Roman Senate, knowing they could get a hearing, and demanded restitution; and indeed, the tyrant was removed.

Admittedly, this seems a far-fetched analogy to the U.S. in Afghanistan (and don’t for a second mix up Pleminius, that rogue, with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, even though the Obama-ites evidently now believe him corrupt and replaceable). Still, as Mullen sees it, the point is: “We don’t always get it right. But like the early Romans, we strive in the end to make it right. We strive to earn trust. And that makes all the difference.”

Mullen is, it seems, the Aesop of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, in his somewhat overheated brain, we evidently remain the conquering (but just) “early” Romans — before, of course, the fatal rot set in.

And then there’s the Washington Post’s Thomas Ricks, a superb reporter who, in his latest book, gives voice to the views of Centcom Commander David Petraeus. Reflecting on Iraq, where he (like the general) believes we could still be fighting in “2015,” Ricks begins a recent Post piece this way:

“In October 2008, as I was finishing my latest book on the Iraq war, I visited the Roman Forum during a stop in Italy. I sat on a stone wall on the south side of the Capitoline Hill and studied the two triumphal arches at either end of the Forum, both commemorating Roman wars in the Middle East… The structures brought home a sad realization: It’s simply unrealistic to believe that the U.S. military will be able to pull out of the Middle East… It was a week when U.S. forces had engaged in combat in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan — a string of countries stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean — following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, the Romans and the British.”

With the waning of British power, Ricks continues, it “has been the United States’ turn to take the lead there.” And our turn, as it happens, just isn’t over yet. Evidently that, at least, is the view from our imperial capital and from our military viceroys out on the peripheries.

Honestly, Freud would have loved these guys. They seem to channel the imperial unconscious. Take David Petraeus. For him, too, the duties and dangers of empire evidently weigh heavily on the brain. Like a number of key figures, civilian and military, he has lately begun to issue warnings about Afghanistan’s dangers. As the Washington Post reported, “[Petraeus] suggested that the odds of success were low, given that foreign military powers have historically met with defeat in Afghanistan. ‘Afghanistan has been known over the years as the graveyard of empires,’ he said. ‘We cannot take that history lightly.'”

Of course, he’s worrying about the graveyard aspect of this, but what I find curious — exactly because no one thinks it odd enough to comment on here — is the functional admission in the use of this old adage about Afghanistan that we fall into the category of empires, whether or not in search of a graveyard in which to die.

And he’s not alone in this. Secretary of Defense Gates put the matter similarly recently: “Without the support of the Afghan people, Gates said, the U.S. would simply ‘go the way of every other foreign army that’s ever been in Afghanistan.'”

Imperial Blindness: Think of the above as just a few prospective entries in The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak that will, of course, never be compiled. We’re so used to such language, so inured to it and to the thinking behind it, so used, in fact, to living on a one-way planet in which all roads lead to and from Washington, that it doesn’t seem like a language at all. It’s just part of the unexamined warp and woof of everyday life in a country that still believes it normal to garrison the planet, regularly fight wars halfway across the globe, find triumph or tragedy in the gain or loss of an air base in a country few Americans could locate on a map, and produce military manuals on counterinsurgency warfare the way a do-it-yourself furniture maker would produce instructions for constructing a cabinet from a kit.

We don’t find it strange to have 16 intelligence agencies, some devoted to listening in on, and spying on, the planet, or capable of running “covert wars” in tribal borderlands thousands of miles distant, or of flying unmanned drones over those same borderlands destroying those who come into camera view. We’re inured to the bizarreness of it all and of the language (and pretensions) that go with it.

If The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak were ever produced, who here would buy it? Who would feel the need to check out what seems like the only reasonable and self-evident language for describing the world? How else, after all, would we operate? How else would any American in a position of authority talk in Washington or Baghdad or Islamabad or Rome?

So it undoubtedly seemed to the Romans, too. And we know what finally happened to their empire and the language that went with it. Such a language plays its role in normalizing the running of an empire. It allows officials (and in our case the media as well) not to see what would be inconvenient to the smooth functioning of such an enormous undertaking. Embedded in its words and phrases is a fierce way of thinking (even if we don’t see it that way), as well as plausible deniability. And in the good times, its uses are obvious.

On the other hand, when the normal ways of empire cease to function well, that same language can suddenly work to blind the imperial custodians — which is, after all, what the foreign policy “team” of the Obama era is — to necessary realities. At a moment when it might be important to grasp what the “American face” in the mirror actually looks like, you can’t see it.

And sometimes what you can’t bring yourself to see can, as now, hurt you.

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 American Age of Denial. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

[Note: In thinking about a prospective Dictionary of American Empire-Speak, I found four websites particularly useful for keeping me up to date: Juan Cole’s invaluable Informed Comment (I don’t know how he stays at day-in, day-out, year after year); Antiwar.com and the War in Context, where editors with sharp eyes for global developments seem to be on the prowl 24/7; and last but by no means least, Noah Shachtman’s Danger Room blog at Wired.com. Focused on the latest military developments, from strategy and tactics to hunter-killer drones and “robo-beasts,” Danger Room is not only a must-follow site, but gives an everyday sense of the imperial bizarreness of our American world. Finally, a deep bow of thanks to Christopher Holmes, who keeps the copyediting lights burning in Japan, and TomDispatch eternally chugging along.]

Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt

It turns out that you don’t want to be a former city dweller in rural parts of southernmost Australia, a stalk of wheat in China or Iraq, a soybean in Argentina, an almond or grape in northern California, a cow in Texas, or almost anything in parts of east Africa right now. Let me explain.

As anyone who has turned on the prime-time TV news these last weeks knows, southeastern Australia has been burning up. It’s already dry climate has been growing ever hotter. “The great drying,” Australian environmental scientist Tim Flannery calls it. At its epicenter, Melbourne recorded its hottest day ever this month at a sweltering 115.5 degrees, while temperatures soared even higher in the surrounding countryside. After more than a decade of drought, followed by the lowest rainfall on record, the eucalyptus forests are now burning. To be exact, they are now pouring vast quantities of stored carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas considered largely responsible for global warming, into the atmosphere.

In fact, everything’s been burning there. Huge sheets of flame, possibly aided and abetted by arsonists, tore through whole towns. More than 180 people are dead and thousands homeless. Flannery, who has written eloquently about global warming, drove through the fire belt, and reported:

“It was as if a great cremation had taken place… I was born in Victoria, and over five decades I’ve watched as the state has changed. The long, wet and cold winters that seemed insufferable to me as a boy vanished decades ago, and for the past 12 years a new, drier climate has established itself… I had not appreciated the difference a degree or two of extra heat and a dry soil can make to the ferocity of a fire. This fire was different from anything seen before.”

Australia, by the way, is a wheat-growing breadbasket for the world and its wheat crops have been hurt in recent years by continued drought.

Meanwhile, central China is experiencing the worst drought in half a century. Temperatures have been unseasonably high and rainfall, in some areas, 80% below normal; more than half the country’s provinces have been affected by drought, leaving millions of Chinese and their livestock without adequate access to water. In the region which raises 95% of the country’s winter wheat, crop production has already been impaired and is in further danger without imminent rain. All of this represents a potential financial catastrophe for Chinese farmers at a moment when about 20 million migrant workers are estimated to have lost their jobs in the global economic meltdown. Many of those workers, who left the countryside for China’s booming cities (and remitted parts of their paychecks to rural areas), may now be headed home jobless to potential disaster. A Wall Street Journal report concludes, “Some scientists warn China could face more frequent droughts as a result of global warming and changes in farming patterns.”

Globe-jumping to the Middle East, Iraq, which makes the news these days mainly for spectacular suicide bombings or the politics of American withdrawal, turns out to be another country in severe drought. Americans may think of Iraq as largely desert, but (as we were all taught in high school) the lands between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the “fertile crescent,” are considered the homeland of agriculture, not to speak of human civilization.

Well, not so fertile these days, it seems. The worst drought in at least a decade and possibly a farming lifetime is expected to reduce wheat production by at least half; while the coutry’s vast marshlands, once believed to be the location of the Garden of Eden, have been turned into endless expanses of baked mud. That region, purposely drained by dictator Saddam Hussein to tame rebellious “Marsh Arabs,” is now experiencing the draining power of nature.

Nor is Iraq’s drought a localized event. Serious drought conditions extend across the Middle East, threatening to exacerbate local conflicts from Cyprus and Lebanon to Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel where this January was reported to have been the hottest and driest in 60 years. “With less than 2 months of winter left,” Daniel Pedersen has written at the environmental website Green Prophet, “the region has received only 6%-50% of the annual average rainfall, with the desert areas getting 30% or less.”

Leaping continents, in Latin America, Argentina is experiencing “the most intense, prolonged and expensive drought in the past 50 years,” according to Hugo Luis Biolcati, the president of the Argentine Rural Society. One of the world’s largest grain exporters, it has already lost five billion dollars to the drought. Its soybeans — the country is the third largest producer of them — are wilting in the fields; its corn — Argentina is the world’s second largest producer — and wheat crops are in trouble; and its famed grass-fed herds of cattle are dying — 1.5 million head of them since October with no end in sight.

Dust Bowl Economics

In our own backyard, much of the state of Texas — 97.4% to be exact — is now gripped by drought, and parts of it by the worst drought in almost a century. According to the New York Times, “Winter wheat crops have failed. Ponds have dried up. Ranchers are spending heavily on hay and feed pellets to get their cattle through the winter. Some wonder if they will have to slaughter their herds come summer. Farmers say the soil is too dry for seeds to germinate and are considering not planting.” Since 2004, in fact, the state has yoyo-ed between the extremities of flood and drought.

Meanwhile, scientists predict that, as global warming strengthens, the American southwest, parts of which have struggled with varying levels of drought conditions for years, could fall into “a possibly permanent state of drought.” We’re talking potential future “dust bowl” here. A December 2008 U.S. Geological Survey report warns: “In the Southwest, for example, the models project a permanent drying by the mid-21st century that reaches the level of aridity seen in historical droughts, and a quarter of the projections may reach this level of aridity much earlier.”

And talking about drought gripping breadbasket regions, don’t forget northern California which “produces 50 percent of the nation’s fruits, nuts and vegetables, and a majority of [U.S.] salad, strawberries and premium wine grapes.” Its agriculturally vital Central Valley, in particular, is in the third year of an already monumental drought in which the state has been forced to cut water deliveries to farms by up to 85%.

Observers are predicting that it may prove to be the worst drought in the history of a region “already reeling from housing foreclosures, the credit crisis, and a plunge in construction and manufacturing jobs.” January, normally California’s wettest month, has been wretchedly dry and the snowpack in the northern Sierra Mountains, crucial to the state’s water supplies and its agricultural health, is at less than half normal levels.

Northern California, in fact, offers a glimpse of the havoc that the extreme weather conditions scientists associate with climate change could cause, especially when combined with other crises. In a Los Angeles Times interview, new Secretary of Energy Steven Chu offered an eye-popping warning (of a sort top government officials simply don’t give) about what a global-warming future might hold in store for California, his home state. Interviewer Jim Tankersley summed up Chu’s thoughts this way:

“California’s farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century, and its major cities could be in jeopardy, if Americans do not act to slow the advance of global warming… In a worst case… up to 90% of the Sierra snowpack could disappear, all but eliminating a natural storage system for water vital to agriculture. ‘I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen,’ [Chu] said. ‘We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.’ And, he added, ‘I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going’ either.”

As for East Africa and the Horn of Africa, under the pressure of rising temperatures, drought has become a tenacious long-term visitor. For East Africa, the drought years of 2005-2006 were particularly horrific and now Kenya, with the region’s biggest economy, a country recently wracked by political disorder and ethnic violence, is experiencing crop failures. An estimated 10 million Kenyans may face hunger, even starvation, this year in the wake of a poor harvest, lack of rainfall, and rising food prices; if you include the drought-plagued Horn of Africa, 20 million people may be endangered, according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

Recently, climatologist David Battisti and Rosamond Naylor, director of Stanford University’s Program on Food Security and the Environment, published a study in Science magazine on the effect of extreme heat on crops. They concluded, based on recent climate models and a study of past extreme heat waves, that there was “a 90% chance that, by the end of the century, the coolest temperatures in the tropics during the crop growing season would exceed the hottest temperatures recorded between 1900 and 2006.” According to the British Guardian, under such circumstances Battisti and Naylor believe “[h]alf of the world’s population could face severe food shortages by the end of the century as rising temperatures take their toll on farmers’ crops… Harvests of staple food crops such as rice and maize could fall by between 20% and 40% as a result of higher temperatures during the growing season in the tropics and subtropics.”

Not surprisingly, it’s hard to imagine — perhaps I mean swallow — such an extreme world, and so most of us, the mainstream media included, don’t bother to. That means certain potentially burning questions go not just unanswered but unasked.

The Grapes of Wrath (Updated)

Mind you, what you’ve read thus far represents an amateur’s eye view of drought on our planet at this moment. It’s hardly comprehensive. To give but one example, Afghanistan has only recently begun to emerge from an eight-year drought involving severe food shortages — and, as journalist Christian Parenti writes, it would need another “five years worth of regular snowfall just to replenish its aquifers.” Parenti adds: “As snow packs in the Himalayan and Hindu Kush ranges continue to recede, the rivers flowing from them will diminish and the economic situation in all of Central Asia will deteriorate badly.”

Nor is this piece meant to be authoritative, exactly because I know so relatively little. Think of it as a reflection of my own frustration with work not done elsewhere — and, by the way, thank heavens for Google University. Yes, Googling leaves you on your own, can be time-consuming, and tends to lead to cul-de-sacs (“Nuggets end 17-year drought in Orlando”), but what would we do without it? Thanks to good ol’ G.U., anyone can, for instance, check out the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Drought Information Center or its U.S. Drought Monitor, or the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center and begin a self-education.

Now let me explain why I even bothered to write this piece. It’s true that, if you’re reading the mainstream press, each of the droughts mentioned above has gotten at least some attention, several of them a fair amount of attention (as well as some fine reporting), and the Australian firestorms have been headlines globally for weeks. The problem is that (the professional literature, the science magazines, and a few environmental websites and blogs aside) no one in the mainstream media seems to have thought to connect these dots or blots of aridity in any way. And yet it seems a no-brainer that mainstream reporters should be doing just that.

After all, cumulatively these drought hotspots, places now experiencing record or near-record aridity, could be thought of as representing so many burning questions for our planet. And yet you can search far and wide without stumbling across a mainstream American overview of drought in our world at this moment. This seems, politely put, puzzling, especially at a time when University College London’s Global Drought Monitor claims that 104 million people are now living under “exceptional drought conditions.”

Scientists generally agree that, as climate change accelerates throughout this century (and no matter what happens from here on in, nothing will evidently stop some form of acceleration), extreme weather of every sort, including drought, will become ever more the planetary norm. In fact, experts are suggesting that, as the Washington Post reported recently, “The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems.”

Now, no one can claim beyond all doubt that global warming is the cause of any specific drought, or certainly the only cause anyway. As with the Texas drought, a La Niña weather pattern in the Pacific is often mentioned as a key causal factor right now. But the crucial point is what the present can tell us about the impact of a global pattern of extreme weather, especially extreme drought, on what will surely be a more extreme planet in the relatively near future.

If global temperatures are on the rise and more heat means lower crop yields, then you’re talking about more Kenyas, and not just in Africa either. You’re probably also talking about desperation, upheaval, resource conflicts, and mass out-migrations of populations, even — if scientists are right — from the American Southwest. (And in case you don’t think such a thing can happen here, remember Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath or think of any of Dorothea Lange’s iconic photos of the “Okies” fleeing the American dustbowl of the 1930s.)

Burning Questions

Right now, the global economic meltdown has massively depressed fuel prices (key to farming, processing, and transporting most crops to market) and commodity prices have generally fallen as well, including food prices. Whatever the future economic weather, however, that is not likely to last.

So here’s a burning question on my mind:

We’re now experiencing the extreme effects of economic bad “weather” in the wake of the near collapse of the global financial system. Nonetheless, from the White House to the media, speculation about “the road to recovery” is already underway. The stimulus package, for instance, had been dubbed the “recovery bill,” aka the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the question of when we’ll hit bottom and when — 2010, 2011, 2012 — a real recovery will begin is certainly in the air.

Recently, in a speech in Singapore, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund, suggested that the “world’s advanced economies” — the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan — were “already in depression,” and the “worst cannot be ruled out.” This got little attention here, but President Obama’s comment at his first press conference that delay on his stimulus package could lead to a “lost decade,” as in Japan in the 1990s (or, though it went unmentioned, the U.S. in the 1930s), made the headlines.

If, indeed, this is “the big one,” and does result in a “lost decade” or more, here’s what I wonder: Could the sort of “recovery” that everyone assumes lies just over a recessive or depressive horizon not be there? What if our lost decade lasts long enough to meet an environmental crisis involving extreme weather — drought and flood, hurricanes, typhoons, and firestorms of unprecedented magnitude — possibly in some of the breadbasket regions of the planet? What will happen if the rising fuel prices likely to come with the beginning of any economic “recovery” were to meet the soaring food prices of environmental disaster? What kind of human tsunami might that result in?

Once we start connecting some of today’s drought dots, wouldn’t it make sense to try to connect a few of the prospective dots as well? After all, if you begin to imagine what the worst might look like, you can also begin to think about what might be done to mitigate it. Isn’t that more sensible than looking the other way?

If the kinds of hits regional agriculture is now taking from record-setting drought became the future norm, wouldn’t we then be bereft of our most reassuring formulations in bad times? For example, the president spoke at that press conference of our present moment as “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.” On an extreme planet, no such comforting “since the…” would be available, nor would there be any historical road map for what was coming at us, not if we had already run out of history.

Maybe the world we knew but scarce months ago is already, in some sense, long gone. What if, after a lost decade, we were to find ourselves living on another planet?

Feel free, of course, to ignore my burning questions. After all, I’m only an amateur with the flimsiest of credentials from Google U. Still, I do keep wondering when the media pros will finally pitch in, and what they’ll tell us is on that distant horizon, the one with the red glow.

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 American Age of Denial. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt

It is now a commonplace — as a lead article in the New York Times’s Week in Review pointed out recently — that Afghanistan is “the graveyard of empires.” Given Barack Obama’s call for a greater focus on the Afghan War (“we took our eye off the ball when we invaded Iraq…”), and given indications that a “surge” of U.S. troops is about to get underway there, Afghanistan’s dangers have been much in the news lately. Some of the writing on this subject, including recent essays by Juan Cole at Salon.com, Robert Dreyfuss at the Nation, and John Robertson at the War in Context website, has been incisive on just how the new administration’s policy initiatives might transform Afghanistan and the increasingly unhinged Pakistani tribal borderlands into “Obama’s War.”

In other words, “the graveyard” has been getting its due. Far less attention has been paid to the “empire” part of the equation. And there’s a good reason for that — at least in Washington. Despite escalating worries about the deteriorating situation, no one in our nation’s capital is ready to believe that Afghanistan could actually be the “graveyard” for the American role as the dominant hegemon on this planet.

In truth, to give “empire” its due you would have to start with a reassessment of how the Cold War ended. In 1989, which now seems centuries ago, the Berlin Wall came down; in 1991, to the amazement of the U.S. intelligence community, influential pundits, inside-the-Beltway think-tankers, and Washington’s politicians, the Soviet Union, that “evil empire,” that colossus of repression, that mortal enemy through nearly half a century of threatened nuclear MADness — as in “mutually assured destruction” — simply evaporated, almost without violence. (Soviet troops, camped out in the relatively cushy outposts of Eastern Europe, especially the former East Germany, were in no more hurry to come home to the economic misery of a collapsed empire than U.S. troops stationed in Okinawa, Japan, are likely to be in the future.)

In Washington where, in 1991, everything was visibly still standing, a stunned silence and a certain unwillingness to believe that the enemy of almost half a century was no more would quickly be overtaken by a sense of triumphalism. A multigenerational struggle had ended with only one of its super-participants still on its feet.

The conclusion seemed too obvious to belabor. Right before our eyes, the USSR had miraculously disappeared into the dustbin of history with only a desperate, impoverished Russia, shorn of its “near abroad,” to replace it; ergo, we were the victors; we were, as everyone began to say with relish, the planet’s “sole superpower.” Huzzah!

Masters of the Universe

The Greeks, of course, had a word for it: “hubris.” The ancient Greek playwrights would have assumed that we were in for a fall from the heights. But that thought crossed few minds in Washington (or on Wall Street) in those years.

Instead, our political and financial movers and shakers began to act as if the planet were truly ours (and other powers, including the Europeans and the Japanese, sometimes seemed to agree). To suggest at the time, as the odd scholar of imperial decline did, that there might have been no winners and two losers in the Cold War, that the weaker superpower had simply left the scene first, while the stronger, less hollowed out superpower was inching its way toward the same exit, was to speak to the deaf.

In the 1990s, “globalization” — the worldwide spread of the Golden Arches, the Swoosh, and Mickey Mouse — was on all lips in Washington, while the men who ran Wall Street were regularly referred to, and came to refer to themselves, as “masters of the universe.”

The phrase was originally used by Tom Wolfe. It was the brand name of the superhero action figures his protagonist’s daughter plays with in his 1987 novel Bonfire of the Vanities. (“On Wall Street he and a few others — how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that… Masters of the Universe…”) As a result, the label initially had something of Wolfe’s cheekiness about it. In the post-Cold War world, however, it soon enough became purely self-congratulatory.

In those years, when the economies of other countries suddenly cratered, Washington sent in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to “discipline” them. That was the actual term of tradecraft. To the immense pain of whole societies, the IMF regularly used local or regional disaster to pry open countries to the deregulatory wonders of “the Washington consensus.” (Just imagine how Americans would react if, today, the IMF arrived at our battered doors with a similar menu of must-dos!)

Now, as the planet totters financially, while from Germany to Russia and China, world leaders blame the Bush administration’s deregulatory blindness and Wall Street’s derivative shenanigans for the financial hollowing out of the global economy, it’s far more apparent that those titans of finance were actually masters of a flim-flam universe. Retrospectively, it’s clearer that, in those post-Cold War years, Wall Street was already heading for the exits, that it was less a planetary economic tiger than a monstrously lucrative paper tiger. Someday, it might be a commonplace to say the same of Washington.

Almost twenty years later, in fact, it may finally be growing more acceptable to suggest that certain comparisons between the two Cold War superpowers were apt. As David Leonhardt of the New York Times pointed out recently:

“Richard Freeman, a Harvard economist, argues that the U.S. bubble economy had something in common with the old Soviet economy. The Soviet Union’s growth was artificially raised by huge industrial output that ended up having little use. America’s was artificially raised by mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations and even the occasional Ponzi scheme.”

Today, when it comes to Wall Street, you can feel the anger rising on Main Street as Americans grasp that those supposed masters of the universe actually hollowed out their world and brought immense suffering down on them. They understand what those former masters of financial firms, who handed out $18.4 billion in bonuses to their employees at the end of 2008, clearly don’t. John Thain, former CEO of Merrill Lynch, for instance, still continues to defend his purchase of a $35,000 antique commode for his office, as well as the $4 billion in bonuses he dealt out to the mini-masters under him in a quarter in which his group racked up more than $15 billion in losses, in a year in which his firm’s losses reached $27 billion.

At least now, however, no one — except perhaps Thain himself — would mistake the Thains for masters rather than charlatans, or the U.S. for a financial superpower riding high rather than a hollowed out economic powerhouse laid low.

As it happens, however, there was another set of all-American “masters of the universe,” even if never given that label. I’m speaking of the top officials of our national security state, the key players in foreign and military policy. They, too, came to believe that the planet was their oyster. They came to believe as well that, uniquely in the history of empires, global domination might be theirs. They began to dream that they might oversee a new Rome or imperial Great Britain, but of a kind never before encountered, and that the competitive Great Game played by previous rivalrous Great Powers had been reduced to solitaire.

For them, the very idea that the U.S. might be the other loser in the Cold War was beyond the pale. And that was hardly surprising. Ahead of them, after all, they thought they saw clear sailing, not graveyards. Hence, Afghanistan.

Twice in the Same Graveyard

It’s here, of course, that things get eerie. I mean, not just a graveyard, but the same two superpowers and the very same graveyard. In November 2001, knowing intimately what had happened to the USSR in Afghanistan, the Bush administration invaded anyway — and with a clear intent to build bases, occupy the country, and install a government of its choice.

When it comes to the neocon architects of global Bushism, hubris remains a weak word. Breathless at the thought of the supposed power of the U.S. military to crush anything in its path, they were blind to other power realities and to history. They equated power with the power to destroy.

Believing that the military force at their bidding was nothing short of invincible, and that whatever had happened to the Soviets couldn’t possibly happen to them, they launched their invasion. They came, they saw, they conquered, they celebrated, they settled in, and then they invaded again — this time in Iraq. A trillion dollars in wasted taxpayer funds later, we look a lot more like the Russians.

What made this whole process so remarkable was that there was no other superpower to ambush them in Afghanistan, as the U.S. had once done to the Soviet Union. George W. Bush’s crew, it turned out, didn’t need another superpower, not when they were perfectly capable of driving themselves off that Afghan cliff and into the graveyard below with no more help than Osama bin Laden could muster.

They promoted a convenient all-purpose fantasy explanation for their global actions, but also gave in to it, and it has yet to be dispelled, even now that the American economy has gone over its own cliff. Under the rubric of the Global War on Terror, they insisted that the greatest danger to the planet’s “sole superpower” came from a ragtag group of fanatics backed by the relatively modest moneys a rich Saudi could get his hands on. Indeed, while the Bush administration paid no attention whatsoever, bin Laden had launched a devastating and televisually spectacular set of assaults on major American landmarks of power — financial, military, and (except for the crash of Flight 93 in a field in Pennsylvania) political. Keep in mind, however, that those attacks had been launched as much from Hamburg and Florida as from the Afghan backlands.

Given the history of the graveyard, Americans should probably have locked their plane doors, put in some reasonable protections domestically, and taken their time going after bin Laden. Al-Qaeda was certainly capable of doing real harm every couple of years, but their strength remained minimal, their “caliphate” a joke, and Afghanistan — for anyone but Afghans — truly represented the backlands of the planet. Even now, we could undoubtedly go home and, disastrous as the situation there (and in Pakistan) has become under our ministrations, do less harm than we’re going to do with our prospective surges in the years to come.

The irony is that, had they not been so blinded by triumphalism, Bush’s people really wouldn’t have needed to know much to avoid catastrophe. This wasn’t atomic science or brain surgery. They needn’t have been experts on Central Asia, or mastered Pashto or Dari, or recalled the history of the anti-Soviet War that had ended barely a decade earlier, or even read the prophetic November 2001 essay in Foreign Affairs magazine, “Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires,” by former CIA station chief in Pakistan Milton Bearden, which concluded: “The United States must proceed with caution — or end up on the ash heap of Afghan history.”

They could simply have visited a local Barnes & Noble, grabbed a paperback copy of George MacDonald Fraser’s rollicking novel Flashman, and followed his blackguard of an anti-hero through England’s disastrous Afghan War of 1839-1842 from which only one Englishman returned alive. In addition to a night’s reading pleasure, that would have provided any neocon national security manager with all he needed to know when it came to getting in and out of Afghanistan fast.

Or subsequently, they could have spent a little time with the Russian ambassador to Kabul, a KGB veteran of the Soviet Union’s Afghan catastrophe. He complained to John Burns of the New York Times last year that neither Americans nor NATO representatives were willing to listen to him, even though the U.S. had repeated “all of our mistakes,” which he carefully enumerated. “Now,” he added, “they’re making mistakes of their own, ones for which we do not own the copyright.”

True, the Obama crew at the White House, the National Security Council, the State Department, the Pentagon, and in the U.S. military, even holdovers like Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Centcom Commander David Petraeus, are not the ones who got us into this. Yes, they are more realistic about the world. Yes, they believe — and say so — that we’re, at best, in a stalemate in Afghanistan and Pakistan, that it’s going to be truly tough sledding, that it probably will take years and years, and that the end result won’t be victory. Yes, they want some “new thinking,” some actual negotiations with factions of the Taliban, some kind of a grand regional bargain, and above all, they want to “lower expectations.”

As Gates summed things up in congressional testimony recently:

“This is going to be a long slog, and frankly, my view is that we need to be very careful about the nature of the goals we set for ourselves in Afghanistan… If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose, because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience and money.”

Okay, in Norse mythology, Valhalla may be the great hall for dead warriors and the Secretary of Defense may have meant an “Asian Eden,” but cut him a little slack: at least he acknowledged that there were financial limits to the American role in the world. That’s a new note in official Washington, where global military and diplomatic policy have, until now, existed in splendid isolation from the economic meltdown sweeping the country and the planet.

Similarly, official Washington is increasingly willing to talk about a “multi-polar world,” rather than the unipolar fantasy planet on which the first-term Bush presidency dwelled. Its denizens are even ready to imagine a relatively distant moment when the U.S. will have “reduced dominance,” as Global Trends 2025, a futuristic report produced for the new President by the National Intelligence Council, put it. Or as Thomas Fingar, the U.S. intelligence community’s “top analyst,” suggested of the same moment:

“[T]he U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished over this period of time… [T]he overwhelming dominance that the United States has enjoyed in the international system in military, political, economic, and arguably, cultural arenas is eroding and will erode at an accelerating pace with the partial exception of military.”

Still, it’s a long way from fretting about finances, while calling for more dollars for the Pentagon, to imagining that we already might be something less than the dominant hegemon on this planet, or that the urge to tame the backlands of Afghanistan, half a world from home, makes no sense at all. Not for us, not for the Afghans, not for anybody (except maybe al-Qaeda).

For all their differences with Bush’s first-term neocons, here’s what the Obama team still has in common with them — and it’s no small thing: they still think the U.S. won the Cold War. They still haven’t accepted that they can’t, even if in a subtler fashion than the Busheviks, control how this world spins; they still can’t imagine that the United States of America, as an imperial power, could possibly be heading for the exits.

Whistling Past the Graveyard

Back in 1979, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, plotting to draw the Soviets into a quagmire in Afghanistan, wrote President Jimmy Carter: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.”

In fact, the CIA-backed anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan that lasted through the 1980s would give the Soviets far worse. After all, while the Vietnam War was a defeat for the U.S., it was by no means a bankrupting one.

In 1986, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev vividly described the Afghan War as a “bleeding wound.” Three years later, by which time it had long been obvious that transfusions were hopeless, the Soviets withdrew. It turned out, however, that the bleeding still couldn’t be staunched, and so the Soviet Union, with its sclerotic economy collapsing and “people power” rising on its peripheries, went down the tubes.

Hand it to the Bush administration, in the last seven-plus years the U.S. has essentially inflicted a version of the Soviets’ “Afghanistan” on itself. Now the Obama team is attempting to remedy this disaster, but what new thinking there is remains, as far as we can tell, essentially tactical. Whether the new team’s plans are more or less “successful” in Afghanistan and on the Pakistani border may, in the end, prove somewhat beside the point. The term Pyrrhic victory, meaning a triumph more costly than a loss, was made for just such moments.

After all, more than a trillion dollars later, with essentially nothing to show except an unbroken record of destruction, corruption, and an inability to build anything of value, the U.S. is only slowly drawing down its 140,000-plus troops in Iraq to a “mere” 40,000 or so, while surging yet more troops into Afghanistan to fight a counterinsurgency war, possibly for years to come. At the same time, the U.S. continues to expand its armed forces and to garrison the globe, even as it attempts to bail out an economy and banking system evidently at the edge of collapse. This is a sure-fire formula for further disaster — unless the new administration took the unlikely decision to downsize the U.S. global mission in a major way.

Right now, Washington is whistling past the graveyard. In Afghanistan and Pakistan the question is no longer whether the U.S. is in command, but whether it can get out in time. If not, when the moment for a bailout comes, don’t expect the other pressed powers of the planet to do for Washington what it has been willing to do for the John Thains of our world. The Europeans are already itching to get out of town. The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Indians… who exactly will ride to our rescue?

Perhaps it would be more prudent to stop hanging out in graveyards. They are, after all, meant for burials, not resurrections.

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 American Age of Denial. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt

Inauguration day!

Gazillions of Americans descended on Washington. The rest of us were watching on TV or checking out streaming video on our computers. No one was paying attention to anything else. Every pundit in sight was nattering away all day long, as they will tomorrow and, undoubtedly, the next day about whatever comes to mind until we get bored. And in the morning, when this post is still hanging around in your inbox, you’ll be reading your newspaper on… well, you know… the same things: Obama’s speech! So many inaugural balls! Etc., etc.

So I’m thinking of this post as a freebie, a way to lay out a little news about the world that no one will notice. And all I can say — for those of you who aren’t reading this anyway, and in the spirit of the clunky 1951 sci-fi classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still — is: Klaatu barada nikto!

Okay, no actual translation of that phrase (to the best of Wikipedia’s knowledge) exists. We do know that, when invoked, the three words acted as a kind of “fail-safe” device, essentially disarming the super-robot Gort (which arrived on the Washington Mall by spacecraft with the alien Klaatu). That was no small thing, since Gort was capable not just of melting down tanks but possibly of ending life on this planet. Still, I remain convinced, based on no evidence whatsoever, that the phrase could also mean: “Whew! We’re still here!”

Though I skipped the recent remake of the film, which bombed (so to speak), I consider this post my remake, though with a slightly altered title:

January 20, 2009: The Day the Earth Still Stood.

Klaatu barada nikto has, by the way, been called “the most famous phrase ever spoken by an extraterrestrial.” After watching the final press conference of George W. Bush, I wonder.

Now, whether Bush was the extraterrestrial and Dick Cheney the super (goof-it-up) robot, or vice-versa, is debatable, but whatever the case, let’s celebrate the obvious: We’re still here, more or less, and they’re gone. Dick Cheney to fish and shoot. George W. to think big, big thoughts at his still-to-be-built library. Let’s face it, on the day on which Barack Obama has taken the oath of office, that constitutes something of a small miracle. But a nagging question remains: just how small?

Or rather, just how large is the disaster? If the Earth still stands, how wobbly is it?

In fact, our last president — in that remarkable final news conference of his (“the ultimate exit interview,” he called it) in which he swanned around, did his anti-Sally Fields imitation (you don’t like me, right now, you don’t like me!), sloshed in self-pity while denouncing self-pity, brimmed with anger, and mugged (while mugging the press) — even blurted out one genuine, and startling, piece of news. With the Washington press corps being true to itself to the last second of his administration, however, not a soul seemed to notice.

Reporters, pundits, and analysts of every sort focused with laser beam predictability on whether the President would admit to his mistakes in Iraq and elsewhere. In the meantime, out of the blue, Bush offered something strikingly new and potentially germane to any assessment of our moment.

Here’s what he said:

“Now, obviously these are very difficult economic times. When people analyze the situation, there will be — this problem started before my presidency, it obviously took place during my presidency. The question facing a President is not when the problem started, but what did you do about it when you recognized the problem. And I readily concede I chunked aside some of my free market principles when I was told by [my] chief economic advisors that the situation we were facing could be worse than the Great Depression.

“So I’ve told some of my friends who said — you know, who have taken an ideological position on this issue — why did you do what you did? I said, well, if you were sitting there and heard that the depression could be greater than the Great Depression, I hope you would act too, which I did. And we’ve taken extraordinary measures to deal with the frozen credit markets, which have affected the economy.”

Hold onto those “worse than the Great Depression… greater than the Great Depression” comments for a moment and let’s try to give this a little context. Assumedly, our last president was referring to his acceptance of what became his administration’s $700 billion bailout package for the financial system, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. He signed that into law in early October. So — for crude dating purposes — let’s assume that his “chief economic advisors,” speaking to him in deepest privacy, told him in perhaps early September that the U.S. was facing a situation that might be “worse than the Great Depression.”

By then, the Bush administration had long publicly rejected the idea that the country had even entered a recession. As early as February 28, 2008, at a press conference, Bush himself had said: “I don’t think we’re headed to a recession, but no question we’re in a slowdown.” In May, his Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Edward Lazear had been no less assertive: “The data are pretty clear that we are not in a recession.” At the end of July in a CNBC interview, White House Budget Director Jim Nussle typically reassured the public this way: “I think we have avoided a recession.”

By late September, the president, now campaigning for Congress to give him his bailout package, was warning that we could otherwise indeed “experience a long and painful recession.” But well into October, White House press spokesperson Dana Perino still responded to a question about whether we were in a recession by insisting, “You know I don’t think that we know.”

Lest you imagine that this no-recession verbal minuet was simply a typical administration prevarication operation, for much of the year top newspapers (and the TV news) essentially agreed to agree. While waiting for economic confirmation that the nation’s gross national product had dropped in at least two successive quarters, the papers reported increasingly grim economic news using curious circumlocutions to avoid directly calling what was underway a “recession.” We were said, as former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan put it in February, to be at “the edge of a recession,” a formulation many reporters picked up, or “near” one, or simply in an “economic slowdown,” or an “economic downturn.”

At the beginning of December, the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private group of leading economists, made “official,” as CNN wrote, “what most Americans have already believed about the state of the economy” (no thanks to the press). We were not only officially in a recession, the Bureau announced, but, far more strikingly, had been since December 2007. For at least a year, that is. Suddenly, “recession” was an acceptable media description of our state, without qualifiers (though you can look high and low for a single major paper which then reviewed its economic labeling system, December 2007-December 2008, and questioned its own coverage.) Recession simply became the new norm.

Now, as times have gotten even tougher, it’s become a commonplace turn of phrase to call what’s underway “the worst” or “deepest” economic or financial crisis “since the Great Depression.” Recently, a few brave economic souls — in particular, columnist Paul Krugman of the New York Times — have begun to use the previously verboten “d” word, or even the “GD” label more directly. As Krugman wrote recently, “Let’s not mince words: This looks an awful lot like the beginning of a second Great Depression.” But he remains the exception to the public news rule in claiming that, barring the right economic formula from the new Obama administration, we might well find ourselves in a situation as bad as the Great Depression.

Now, let’s return to our last president’s news conference and consider what he claims his “chief economic advisors” told him in private last fall. His statement was, in fact, staggeringly worse than just about anything you can presently read in your newspapers or see on the TV news. What was heading our way, he claimed he was told, might be “worse” or “greater” than the Great Depression itself. Admittedly, John Whitehead, the 86-year-old former chairman of Goldman Sachs, suggested in November that the current economic crisis might turn out to be “worse than the [Great] depression.” But on this, he was speaking as something of a public minority of one.

Stop for a minute and consider what Bush actually told us. It’s a staggering thought. Who even knows what it might mean? In the United States, for example, the unemployment rate in the decade of the Great Depression never fell below 14%. In cities like Chicago and Detroit in the early 1930s, it approached 50%. So, worse than that? And yet in the privacy of the Oval Office, that was evidently a majority view, unbeknownst to the rest of us.

It’s possible, of course, that Bush’s “chief economic advisors” simply came up with a formulation so startling it could wake the dead or make a truly lame-duck president quack. Still, doesn’t it make you wonder? What if, a year from now, the same National Bureau of Economic Research announces that, by January 2009, we were already in a depression?

I’m only saying that, on the question of just how steadily the Earth now stands, the verdict is out. Recent history, cited above, indicates how possible it is that, on this question, we are in the dark.

And one more thing, while we’re on the subject of recessions and depressions, what if what’s happening isn’t, prospectively, the worst since the Great Depression, or as bad as the Great Depression, or even, worse than the Great Depression. What if it’s something new? Something without a name or reference point? What then? How do we judge what’s still standing in that case?

Standing Questions

If I were the Obama administration, I might be exceedingly curious about a couple of other “standing” questions right now. Here’s one I might ask, for example: Just what kind of a government are the Obamanians really inheriting? When, tomorrow, they settle into the Oval Office — or its departmental and agency equivalents — and begin opening all the closets and drawers, what are they going to find that Bush’s people have left behind?

This is no small matter. After all, they are betting the store on an enormous economic stimulus package — approximately $550 billion in pump-priming government spending, and another $275 billion in tax cuts of various sorts, according to the present plan in the House of Representatives. All kinds of possibilities are being proposed from daringly experimental renewable energy projects to computerizing health-care records and building a national “smart” electricity grid, not to speak of rebuilding an infrastructure of bridges, roads, levees, and transport systems known to be in a desperate state of disrepair.

But what if the federal government slated to organize, channel, and oversee that spending is itself thoroughly demoralized and broken? What then?

We know that, after eight catastrophic years, some parts of it are definitely in an advanced state of wear and tear. The Justice Department is a notorious, demoralized wreck. So, infamously, is the Federal Emergency Management Agency. So, for that matter, is the whole Department of Homeland Security, as it has been ever since it was (ill) formed in 2002. So, evidently, is the CIA. Who knows what condition the eviscerated Environmental Protection Agency is in, or the Housing Department, or the Interior Department, or the Treasury Department, or the Energy Department after these years of thoroughgoing politicization in which all those crony capitalist pals of the Bush administration and all those industry lobbyist foxes were let loose among the federal chickens meant to oversee them?

In those same years, huge new complexes of interests formed around certain agencies, especially the Department of Homeland Security, and all sorts of government functions were privatized and outsourced, often to crony corporations and often, it seems, expensively and inefficiently. Who knows how well any parts of our government now function?

All I’m saying is that it can take months, or even years, to restore an agency in disrepair or a staff in a state of massive demoralization. In the meantime, how effectively will those agencies and departments direct the Obama stimulus package? The manner in which the Treasury Department threw $350 billion down a banking hole in these last frenetic months should certainly give us pause, especially since the banking system has been anything but rescued. In the end, the U.S. government can order up hundreds of billions of dollars, but applying them well may be another matter entirely. What if, that is, the government now supposed to save us isn’t itself really standing? What if it, too, needs to be saved?

And let’s not forget the world out there. If you watched Secretary of State designate Hillary Clinton breeze through her confirmation hearings, she seemed like the wonky picture of confidence, mixing the usual things you say in Washington (“We are not taking any option off the table at all”) with promises of new policies. Looking at her, or our other new and recycled custodians of empire, it’s easy enough to avoid the obvious thought: that they are about to face a world — from Latvia to Somalia, Gaza to Afghanistan — which may be in far greater disarray than we imagine.

Only the other day, for instance, in a hardly noticed report, “Joint Operating Environment (JOE 2008),” the U.S. Joint Forces Command on worldwide security threats suggested that “two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse.” One — Pakistan — was no surprise, though all sorts of potentially catastrophic scenarios lurk in its nasty brew of potential economic collapse, tribal wars, terrorism, border disputes, and nuclear politics. The other country, however, should make any American sit back and wonder. It’s Mexico.

Here’s the money passage in the report: “The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and press[ed] by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state. Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone.”

Of course, it could just be a matter of part of the U.S. military looking for new arenas of potential expansion, but let’s remember that we’re no longer in the frightening but strangely orderly Cold War world, nor even on a planet any longer overshadowed by a “lone superpower,” the “New Rome.” No indeed. Events in Mumbai reminded us of this recently. There, ten trained terrorists armed with the most ordinary of weapons and off-the-shelf high-tech equipment of a sort that could be bought in any mall managed to bring two nuclear-armed superpowers to the edge of conflict. Ten men. Imagine that.

We don’t know what the world holds for us in the Obama years, but it’s not likely to be pretty and some of what’s heading our way may not be in any of the familiar playbooks by which we’ve been operating for the past half century-plus. We don’t yet know if whole countries, even whole continents, may collapse in the economic, or environmental, rubble of our twenty-first century moment, or what that would actually mean.

I’m no expert on any of this, but on this day of anxious celebration, here’s my question: Is the world still standing? Do you know? Really? Does anyone?

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 American Age of Denial. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years now ending.

Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt

We consider ours a singular age of individual psychology and self-awareness. Isn’t it strange then that our recent presidents have had nothing either modest or insightful to say about themselves in their first inaugural addresses, while our earliest presidents in their earliest moments spoke openly of their failings, limitations, and deficiencies.

In fact, the very first inaugural address — George Washington’s in New York City on April 30, 1789 — began with a personal apology. In a fashion inconceivable in a country no longer known for acknowledging its faults, our first president, in his very first words, apologized to Congress for his own unworthiness to assume the highest office in the new country he had helped to found. “On the other hand,” he said, “the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies.”

Inferior endowments… unpracticed in the duties of civil administration… his own deficiencies. Remind me when you last heard words like those from an American president.

This was, of course, the “father of our country,” the former commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, who had steadfastly seen the American revolution through to victory. And yet, having a strong sense of the limits of what one man could do as the head of a still modest-sized country, he began his presidency by raising doubts about himself. Imagine that.

And don’t think Washington’s words were a fluke. When, 12 years later, Thomas Jefferson gave his inaugural address from the unfinished Capitol building in a Washington still under construction, he took up similar themes. The principal author of the Declaration of Independence, the former governor of Virginia, the former secretary of state, and the former vice president professed “a sincere consciousness that the task is above my talents, and that I approach it with those anxious and awful presentiments which the greatness of the charge and the weakness of my powers so justly inspire.”

Eight years later, James Madison, too, acknowledged his “deficiencies,” as did James Monroe eight years after that, insisting that, “[c]onscious of my own deficiency, I cannot enter on these duties without great anxiety for the result.”

How curious and archaic such sentiments seem today, highlighting as they did humility, denigrating ability. Nor do these comments feel like meaningless stylistic tics of that distant moment. Even from Washington and Jefferson who, assumedly, knew that they had accomplished something Earth-shaking, the protestations — read today — do not ring hollow.

What recent president would have considered saying, as Jefferson did, of the task ahead, “I shrink from the contemplation, and humble myself before the magnitude of the undertaking.”

Today, all this would stink of weakness, and so be taboo. To lead this country to ultimate “security” and, of course, eternal greatness, our presidents must — so goes the common wisdom — be ever strong and confident. They must, in fact, sing hymns to our strength, as well as to our unquestioned “mission” or “calling” in the world. In the first moments of a presidency, they must summon Americans to do great things, as befits a great power, not just on the national, but on the planetary stage.

By the time John F. Kennedy came along, there was no more talk of shrinking from contemplation. “In the long history of the world,” he said in his inaugural address, “only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility — I welcome it.” He then sounded a “trumpet” to call on Americans to engage in “a long twilight struggle… against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself,” not to speak of Soviet Communism.

Ever since, presidents have regularly preached strength beyond compare, threatened potential enemies, and hit the call notes of an ever more imperial presidency. Underneath the often dull words of modern inaugurals lies a distinct hubris, an emphasis on the potential limitlessness of American power, which would reach its zenith (and apogee) in the commander-in-chief presidency of George W. Bush.

In his second inaugural address, after raising the warning flag of “our vulnerability” and our need for security beyond compare, Bush pledged Americans to a program of strength involving bringing “freedom” to nothing less than the whole planet. He identified this as “the urgent requirement of our nation’s security, and the calling of our time… with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Limitlessness indeed.

Only one president in recent memory offered a shred of the modesty that the first presidents exhibited. Jimmy Carter’s 1976 inaugural address, coming in the wake of Watergate, the Nixon presidency, and the disaster of defeat in Vietnam, called Americans to “a new spirit,” a new way of thinking about the country, which was to include a recognition of “our recent mistakes” and a realization that “even our great Nation has its recognized limits, and that we can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems.”

This would be a theme of his presidency, most famously in his “malaise” address to the nation in July 1979 in which he called on Americans to face their “intolerable dependence on foreign oil” and to recognize the limits of their “worship” of “self-indulgence and consumption.” Only he, of all our modern presidents — or their speechwriters — who assumedly reread the earliest inaugural addresses, picked up on the theme of personal limits. “Your strength,” he told Americans that January day in 1976, “can compensate for my weakness, and your wisdom can help to minimize my mistakes.”

Little good that, or his later infamous confession of “lust… in his heart” and adultery in his dreams, did him. He was, after one term, soundly thumped by a candidate who imagined a very different kind of “morning in America,” involving a nation without global limits.

Looked at another way, Washington and Jefferson had an advantage over recent presidents. The country they were to lead was still an experiment that its creators knew could go wrong; it had, in fact, done just that with the Articles of Confederation, which hadn’t worked out well.

So our earliest presidents had the modesty of uncertain beginnings to guide them, just as we now have the immodesty of a government that garrisons much of the planet to guide us. They were called on to lead a new nation which was still militarily weak, whose capital, only 13 years after Jefferson doubted himself in public, would be sacked and burned by British troops. They were under oath to a country whose existence, only recently wrested from the great imperial power of its day, was still a kind of fragile miracle.

We have just lived through a commander-in-chief presidency whose oppressive power and overwhelming hubris would undoubtedly have left those early presidents in shock, if not armed revolt. They would have seen George Bush’s world — in which strength was the byword of power and weakness an anathema — as the scion of European autocracy. These were, after all, men wary of armies and military power, who had sacrificed the very idea of executive strength to a tripartite form of government that would, they hoped, have the advantages of resiliency and responsibility. They understood — and embraced — certain limits that Americans may only be waking up to now.

Prelude to an Inaugural

It’s in this light that I’ve been thinking about Barack Obama’s inaugural address, only days away. For a president who wants to set us on a new path amid global disaster, what better time to remember the experimental modesty with which our first presidents anxiously embarked on their journeys?

I also have to confess: I’ve had an urge to write a draft of that address. Of course, like every president since Herbert Hoover, Barack Obama already has a speechwriter, 28-year-old Jonathan Favreau, who gained his 15 seconds of fame recently for photos, briefly posted on Facebook, that showed him groping, then dancing with, a cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton. He has described his speechwriting partnership with Obama this way: “He gives me lines that he wants to use, phrases, ideas — he sends me e-mails with chunks of outlines and speeches — so it’s a real collaborative effort. It’s very much a two-way street. It’s a little bit like being Tom Brady’s quarterback coach.”

Admittedly, I’m no quarterback coach, but like a lot of Americans I have some thoughts on how I’d like to see my government proceed. Inaugural addresses are all about tone, which matters, and, given the last eight years — Have we ever had a president who told more countries what they “must” do? — I’d like to hear our next president speaking more like one of us and less like the ruler of the universe, more like the president of these imperiled United States and less like the autocrat of the planet.

Of course, Americans, especially younger ones, have long been alienated from their government — aka “the bureaucracy” — and a national capital that projects the oppressive look of a Green Zone. That’s where an eloquent black president, an improbable crosser of all sorts of boundaries, standing before us next Tuesday to express his — and our — dreams and fears, offers an immediate ray of hope. In his very words that first day, he can potentially begin airing out the most secretive (and inefficient) government in national memory. He can remind us of our better selves and let the sun shine in.

His campaign/transition team has admirably set up an on-line suggestion box where we can even send his new administration our ideas and experiences and it has evidently been busy indeed. But really, that’s too polite. After all, the government isn’t his or his campaign’s; it is — or should be — ours. The fact is we don’t need a website. We should be able to shout our thoughts, ideas, criticisms from the rooftops, if we care to.

Of course, given these last years of a government gone dark and ominous, it’s not surprising that we generally don’t. Facing the imperial, never-apologize, don’t-listen-to-a-word-you-say, Caesarian, unitary-executive, commander-in-chief years of disarray, we Americans have — despite some online liveliness — largely suffered a failure of the imagination.

If we want to have a government we care about, we had better start exercising those imaginative powers fast. After all, if you don’t use it, you lose it. Voting isn’t faintly enough. Supporting Barack Obama isn’t faintly enough. Either we start acting like we, the people, can set a few agendas of our own, write a few speeches of our own, or we might as well forget it.

In that spirit, and as an older American looking on with some dismay at our strange and disturbing world, I thought I might briefly step into Favreau’s shoes. Barack Obama hasn’t, of course, emailed a single phrase or idea my way, but, lacking in obvious qualifications as I may be, I continue to believe that we shouldn’t wait for that presidential call to participate in our government.

So, below, you’ll find my draft of Obama’s inaugural speech, one emphasizing the strength that lies in modesty, in not playing the over-armed bully. Admittedly, this may be an address which no American president would care to give, centering as it does on an apology. If, however, we want to take a genuine shot at starting anew, these last terrible years have to be acknowledged, which means, first and foremost, apologizing for the damage the Bush administration did to our country, to the world, and undoubtedly to the future. We need to apologize, among many other things, for having thought so much about our own immediate “safety” and “security” (as well as gain), and so little about the world our children and grandchildren will inherit.

I remain convinced that the Vietnam War has dogged this country for endless decades largely because most Americans and their leaders were never willing to come to grips with what we had done, and so never offered a word of apology or any restitution for the damage caused. What is not reckoned with, not acknowledged, not atoned for, haunts us.

After the 2004 election, a website, Sorry Everybody, was set up that contained a photo album of young Americans holding signs apologizing for the election of George W. Bush. How right they were in every sense. Once the damage is done, saying you’re sorry is never enough. But it is a start, which is what an inaugural moment should be.

It’s now well past time to leave behind the imperial fantasies of the Bush era and join a world in trouble — and there’s no better day to begin than on January 20, 2009.

In a Dark Valley

Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address

In my lifetime, presidents have regularly come before you, the American people, proclaiming new dawns or hailing this country as a shining city upon a hill, an example to the rest of the world. But on this cold, wintry day, I hardly need tell you that we seem to have joined much of the rest of the world in an increasingly shadowy, sunless valley.

We — not just we Americans but all of us — are living in a world in peril, one in which we have far more to fear than fear itself. And don’t imagine, having just taken the oath of office on the Bible Abraham Lincoln laid his hand on in an earlier moment of national crisis, that I don’t have my own fears about the task ahead. I can’t help but worry whether my abilities are up to challenges, which would surely have been daunting even to a Washington, a Lincoln, or a Roosevelt.

Nonetheless, you elected me. You have, I know, invested your hopes in me in these trying times. And fortunately, I sense that you are at my side now and will, I hope, remain there, encouraging and criticizing, praising or chiding as you see fit, through the worst and, with luck, the best of times. I’m thankful for that. Without your support, your wisdom, what could I hope to accomplish? We — and in this presidency, when I use that word, I will mean you and me, not the royal “we” to which American presidents have become far too attached — we can, I think, hope to accomplish much, but only if we’re honest with ourselves.

This nation was founded in the immodest modesty of experimentation by men who hoped for much but were aware that they did not always know what might work. They were ready to falter, to fall on their faces, to fail, and yet not to quit. We — you and I — must be willing to do the same. In this difficult moment, we must be willing to acknowledge our limits, to admit our mistakes, and to welcome all others who care to join us, or want us to join them, on the path of experimentation in a needy world.

Let me, then, start — not simply as your new president but as a human being, a proud American, and the father of two children who deserve a better future, not a thoroughly degraded world — with two simple words: I’m sorry.

In the last eight years, we Americans have in no way lived up to our better natures. Our country has, in fact, repeatedly caused grievous damage to others and to ourselves. The mistakes, the misguided policies, have been legion. We — you and I — must do our best to correct them and make amends. For Americans, at home and abroad, there must be a better way.

The kidnapping of people off the streets of global cities, the disappearing of suspects who have no chance to face judge or jury, the torture, abuse, and killing of prisoners, these are wounds inflicted on the world and on ourselves. There must be a better way.

Shock-and-awe assaults on other nations, whether by ourselves or allies we’ve green-lighted, lead — it should be clear enough by now — to horrors beyond measure visited on civilians. There must be a better way.

The repeated firing of missiles at, and the bombing of, villages halfway across the globe, the repeated killing of innocent farm families while on missions to protect ourselves, constitutes a global war for terror, not against it. There must be a better way.

The twisting of our Constitution into whatever shape a president (and his lawyers) find useful or power-enhancing constitutes a body blow to this nation. There must be a better way.

The offering of vast bailouts, without strings or oversight, to the most profligate and greediest among us, while ignoring the daily suffering of ordinary Americans inflicts grievous harm on our society. There must be a better way.

The turning of our government — your government — into a surveillance state, a spy society, meant to eternally watch you cannot represent the fulfillment of the dreams of Washington or Jefferson. There must be a better way.

Transforming the heavens into a storage depot for greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels is like passing a death sentence on humanity. There must be a better way.

Considering war and military action the solution of first, not last, resort whenever a difficult or painful problem arises represents a disastrous path. There must be a better way.

Of all times, this is no time to be at war. For our recent wars, all of us have paid a heavy price, not just in lives that should never have been lost, but in distraction from what truly matters.

We were once proudly a can do nation. For the last eight years, we have been a can’t do nation, incapable of rebuilding great cities or small towns, replacing failing bridges or shoring up our systems of levees. And yet we’ve had the presumption to believe that we, who had lost the knack for rebuilding at home, had a special ability to rebuild other societies far from home. All of this has to end now. We need to do better.

Everywhere on this shaky planet people feel insecure and unsafe — and we have only sharpened such feelings in these last years. To feel secure and safe should be the most basic of rights. It is, however, far past time for us to give the very idea of security new meaning. Yes, we must protect ourselves. Any country must do that for its citizens, but you, the American people, must also hear a truth that has not been said in these last eight years. It is a fantasy to believe that, in the long run, we can make ourselves secure to the detriment of everyone else. On that path lies only insecurity for all. We need to do better.

In policy terms, tomorrow is the day to roll up our sleeves and begin, but today I want to say to you: Don’t despair. Yes, the news is grim. Yes, as Americans and as citizens of this world we should know our limits and the increasingly apparent limits of our small planet, but we should also dream, and struggle, and plan, and innovate.

I repeated one phrase many times during the long presidential campaign, and I emphatically repeat it today: Yes, we can!

And when we do, we have to reach out to the world with our discoveries and ideas, but without the sense that those discoveries, those ideas, are the be-all and end-all. We have to learn how to listen as well as teach.

Our planet will either be an ark, which will carry us, and our children and grandchildren, through time and space, or it will be our grave. This is a stark choice that seems no choice at all. But believe me, to choose the ark, not the grave, is the hardest thing of all. Nonetheless, may that be the choice to which we Americans consecrate ourselves on this day and in all the days to come.

Thank you and God bless us all.

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 American Age of Denial. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years now ending.

[Note on further inaugural reading: For those wanting to check out inaugural addresses through the centuries — not, admittedly, one of the most thrilling forms of rhetoric known to humanity — click here. American historian Jill Lepore, whose regular New Yorker essays should not be missed, has recently done a superb review of the inaugural form. (For the full piece, you need to get your hands on the actual magazine.) Robert Schlesinger’s White House Ghosts, his history of presidential ghost writers, has just appeared in paperback for those of you dreaming about presidential speechwriting. And finally, one striking modern discussion of an inaugural address should be noted. In his stirring book on Lincoln’s most famous speech, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, Garry Wills lays out just what a president could do with the work of a “speechwriter.” William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state designee, wrote the initial draft of his first inaugural address, but (as Wills demonstrates) Abe, who was more than capable of writing his own material, was also the greatest presidential editor of all time. (Start reading Wills at page 157.) Here’s what he did with the famous last line of that address:

As Seward wrote it: “The mystic chords which, proceeding from so many battle-fields and so many patriot graves, pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours, will yet harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angels of the nation.”

As Lincoln edited and reworked it: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”]

Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt

It may finally be 2009, but in some ways, given these last years, it might as well be 800 BCE.

From the ninth to the seventh centuries BCE, the palace walls of the kings who ruled the Assyrian Empire were decorated with vast stone friezes, filled with enough dead bodies to sate any video-game maker and often depicting — in almost comic strip-style — various bloody royal victories and conquests. At least one of them shows Assyrian soldiers lopping off the heads of defeated enemies and piling them into pyramids for an early version of what, in the VCE (Vietnam Common Era) of the 1960s, Americans came to know as the “body count.”

So I learned recently by wandering through a traveling exhibit of ancient Assyrian art from the British Museum. On the audio tour accompanying the show, one expert pointed out that Assyrian scribes, part of an impressive imperial bureaucracy, carefully counted those heads and recorded the numbers for the greater glory of the king (as, in earlier centuries, Egyptian scribes had recorded counts of severed hands for victorious Pharaohs).

Hand it to art museums. Is there anything stranger than wandering through one and locking eyes with a Vermeer lady, a Van Eyck portrait, or one of Rembrandt’s burghers staring out at you across the centuries? What a reminder of the common humanity we share with the distant past. In a darker sense, it’s no less a reminder of our kinship across time to spot a little pyramid of heads on a frieze, imagine an Assyrian scribe making his count, and — eerily enough — feel at home. What a measure of just how few miles “the march of civilization” (as my parents’ generation once called it) has actually covered.

Prejudiced Toward War

If you need an epitaph for the Bush administration, here’s one to test out: They tried. They really tried. But they couldn’t help it. They just had to count.

In a sense, George W. Bush did the Assyrians proud. With his secret prisons, his outsourced torture chambers, his officially approved kidnappings, the murders committed by his interrogators, the massacres committed by his troops and mercenaries, and the shock-and-awe slaughter he ordered from the air, it’s easy enough to imagine what those Assyrian scribes would have counted, had they somehow been teleported into his world. True, his White House didn’t have friezes of his victories (one problem being that there were none to glorify); all it had was Saddam Hussein’s captured pistol proudly stored in a small study off the Oval Office. Almost 3,000 years later, however, Bush’s “scribes,” still traveling with the imperial forces, continued to count the bodies as they piled ever higher in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Pakistani borderlands, and elsewhere.

Many of those body counts were duly made public. This record of American “success” was visible to anyone who visited the Pentagon’s website and viewed its upbeat news articles complete with enumerations of “Taliban fighters” or, in Iraq, “terrorists,” the Air Force’s news feed listing the number of bombs dropped on “anti-Afghan forces,” or the U.S. Central Command’s stories of killing “Taliban militants.”

On the other hand, history, as we know, doesn’t repeat itself and — unlike the Assyrians — the Bush administration would have preferred not to count, or at least not to make its body counts public. One of its small but tellingly unsuccessful struggles, a sign of the depth of its failure on its own terms, was to avoid the release of those counts.

Its aversion to the body count made some sense. After all, since the 1950s, body counting for the U.S. military has invariably signaled not impending victory, but disaster, and even defeat. In fact, one of the strangest things about the American empire has been this: Between 1945 and George W. Bush’s second term, the U.S. economy, American corporations, and the dollar have held remarkable sway over much of the rest of the world. New York City has been the planet’s financial capital and Washington its war capital. (Moscow, even at the height of the Cold War, always came in a provincial second.)

In the same period, the U.S. military effectively garrisoned much of the globe from the Horn of Africa to Greenland, from South Korea to Qatar, while its Navy controlled the seven seas, its Air Force dominated the global skies, its nuclear command stood ready to unleash the powers of planetary death, and its space command watched the heavens. In the wake of the Cold War, its various military commands (including Northcom, set up by the Bush administration in 2002, and Africom, set up in 2007) divided the greater part of the planet into what were essentially military satrapies. And yet, the U.S. military, post-1945, simply could not win the wars that mattered.

Because the neocons of the Bush administration brushed aside this counterintuitive fact, they believed themselves faced in 2000 with an unparalleled opportunity (whose frenetic exploitation would be triggered by the attacks of 9/11, the “Pearl Harbor” of the new century). With the highest-tech military on the planet, funded at levels no other set of nations could cumulatively match, the United States, they were convinced, was uniquely situated to give the phrase “sole superpower” historically unprecedented meaning. Even the Assyrians at their height, the Romans in their Pax Romana centuries, the British in the endless decades when the sun could never set on its empire, would prove pikers by comparison.

In this sense, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and the various neocons in the administration were fundamentalist idolaters — and what they worshipped was the staggering power of the U.S. military. They were believers in a church whose first tenet was the efficacy of force above all else. Though few of them had the slightest military experience, they gave real meaning to the word bellicose. They were prejudiced towards war.

With awesome military power at their command, they were also convinced that they could go it alone as the dominating force on the planet. As with true believers everywhere, they had only contempt for those they couldn’t convert to their worldview. That contempt made “unilateralism” their strategy of choice, and a global Pax Americana their goal (along with, of course, a Pax Republicana at home).

If All Else Fails, Count the Bodies

It was in this context that they were not about to count the enemy dead. In their wars, as these fervent, inside-the-Beltway utopians saw it, there would be no need to do so. With the “shock and awe” forces at their command, they would refocus American attention on the real metric of victory, the taking of territory and of enemy capitals. At the same time, they were preparing to disarm the only enemy that truly scared them, the American people, by making none of the mistakes of the Vietnam era, including — as the President later admitted — counting bodies.

Of course, both the Pax Americana and the Pax Republicana would prove will-o’-the-wisps. As it turned out, the Bush administration, blind to the actual world it faced, disastrously miscalculated the nature of American power — especially military power — and what it was capable of doing. And yet, had they taken a clear-eyed look at what American military power had actually achieved in action since 1945, they might have been sobered. In the major wars (and even some minor actions) the U.S. military fought in those decades, it had been massively destructive but never victorious, nor even particularly successful. In many ways, in the classic phrase of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong, it had been a “paper tiger.”

Yes, it had “won” largely meaningless victories — in Operation Urgent Fury, the invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983; against the toothless Panamanian regime of Manuel Noriega in Operation Just Cause in 1989; in Operation Desert Storm, largely an air campaign against Saddam Hussein’s helpless military in 1990 (in a war that settled nothing); in NATO’s Operation Deliberate Force, an air war against the essentially defenseless Serbian military in 1995 (while meeting disaster in operations in Iran in 1980 and Somalia in 1993). On the other hand, in Korea in the early 1950s and in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from the 1960s into the early 1970s, it had committed its forces all but atomically, and yet had met nothing but stalemate, disaster, and defeat against enemies who, on paper at least, should not have been able to stand up to American power.

It was in the context of defeat and then frustration in Korea that the counting of enemy bodies began. Once Chinese communist armies had entered that war in massive numbers in late 1950 and inflicted a terrible series of defeats on American forces but could not sweep them off the peninsula, that conflict settled into a “meatgrinder” of a stalemate in which the hope of taking significant territory faded; yet some measure of success was needed as public frustration mounted in the United States: thus began the infamous body count of enemy dead.

The body count reappeared quite early in the Vietnam War, again as a shorthand way of measuring success in a conflict in which the taking of territory was almost meaningless, the countryside a hostile place, the enemy hard to distinguish from the general population, and our own in-country allies weak and largely unable to strengthen themselves. Those tallies of dead bodies, announced daily by military spokesmen to increasingly dubious reporters in Saigon, were the public face of American “success” in the Vietnam era. Each body was to be further evidence of what General William Westmoreland called “the light at the end of the tunnel.” When those dead bodies and any sense of success began to part ways, however, when, in the terminology of the times, a “credibility gap” opened between the metrics of victory and reality, the body count morphed into a symbol of barbarism as well as of defeat. It helped stoke an antiwar movement.

This was why, in choosing to take on Saddam Hussein’s hapless military in 2003 — the administration was looking for a “cakewalk” campaign that would “shock and awe” enemies throughout the Middle East — they officially chose not to release any counts of enemy dead. General Tommy Franks, commander of the administration’s Afghan operation in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq thereafter, put the party line succinctly, “We don’t do body counts.”

As the President finally admitted in some frustration to a group of conservative columnists in October 2006, his administration had “made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team.” Not intending to repeat the 1960s experience, he and his advisors had planned out an opposites war on the home front — anything done in Vietnam would not be done this time around — and that meant not offering official counts of the dead which might stoke an antiwar movement… until, as in Korea and Vietnam, frustration truly set in.

When the taking of Baghdad in April 2003 proved no more of a capstone on American victory than the taking of Kabul in November 2001, when everything began to go disastrously wrong and the carefully enumerated count of the American dead in Iraq rose precipitously, when “victory” (a word which the President still invoked 15 times in a single speech in November 2005) adamantly refused to make an appearance, the moment for the body count had arrived. Despite all the planning, they just couldn’t stop themselves. A frustrated President expressed it this way: “We don’t get to say that — a thousand of the enemy killed, or whatever the number was. It’s happening. You just don’t know it.”

Soon enough the Pentagon was regularly releasing such figures in reports on its operations and, in December 2006, the President, too, first slipped such a tally into a press briefing. (“Our commanders report that the enemy has also suffered. Offensive operations by Iraqi and coalition forces against terrorists and insurgents and death squad leaders have yielded positive results. In the months of October, November, and the first week of December, we have killed or captured nearly 5,900 of the enemy.”)

It wasn’t, of course, that no one had been counting. The President, as we know from Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, had long been keeping “‘his own personal scorecard for the [global] war [on terror]’ in the form of photographs with brief biographies and personality sketches of those judged to be the world’s most dangerous terrorists — each ready to be crossed out by the President as his forces took them down.” And the military had been counting bodies as well, but as the possibility of victory disappeared into the charnel houses of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon and the president finally gave in. While this did not stoke an antiwar movement, it represented a tacit admission of policy collapse, a kind of surrender. It was as close as an administration which never owned up to error could come to admitting that two more disastrous wars had been added to a string of military failures in the truncated American Century.

That implicit admission, however, took years to arrive, and in the meantime, Iraqis and Afghans — civilians, insurgents, terrorists, police, and military men — were dying in prodigious numbers.

The Global War on Terror as a Ponzi Scheme

As it happened, others were also counting. Among the earliest of them, a website, Iraq Body Count, carefully toted up Iraqi civilian deaths as documented in reputable media outlets. Their estimate has, by now, almost reached 100,000 — and, circumscribed by those words “documented” and “civilian,” doesn’t begin to get at the full scope of Iraqi deaths.

Various groups of scholars and pollsters also took up the task, using sophisticated sampling techniques (including door-to-door interviews under exceedingly dangerous conditions) to arrive at reasonable approximations of the Iraqi dead. They have come up with figures ranging from the hundreds of thousands to a million or more in a country with a prewar population of perhaps 26 million. United Nations representatives have similarly attempted, under difficult circumstances, to keep a count of Iraqis fleeing into exile — exile being, after a fashion, a form of living death — and have estimated that more than 2 million Iraqis fled their country, while another 2.7 million, having fled their homes, remained “internally displaced.”

Similar attempts have been made for Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch has, for instance, done its best to tally civilian deaths from air strikes in that country (while even TomDispatch has attempted to keep a modest count of wedding parties obliterated by U.S. air attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq). But, of course, the real body count in either country will never be known.

One thing is certain, however: it is an obscenity of the present moment that Iraq, still a charnel house, still in a state of near total disrepair, still on the edge of a whole host of potential conflicts, should increasingly be portrayed here as a limited Bush administration “surge” success. Only a country — or a punditry or a military — incapable of facing the depths of destruction that the Bush administration let loose could reach such a conclusion.

If all roads once led to Rome, all acts of the Bush administration have led to destruction, and remarkably regularly to piles of dead or tortured bodies, counted or not. In fact, it’s reasonable to say that every Bush administration foreign policy dream, including its first term fantasy about a pacified “Greater Middle East” and its late second term vision of a facilitated “peace process” between the Israelis and Palestinians, has ended in piles of bodies and in failure. Consider this a count all its own.

Looked at another way, the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror and its subsidiary wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have, in effect, been a giant Ponzi scheme. At a cost of nearly one trillion taxpayer dollars to date (but sure to be in the multi-trillions when all is said and done), Bush’s mad “global war” simply sucked needed money out of our world at levels that made Bernie Madoff seem like a small fry.

Madoff, by his own accounting, squandered perhaps $50 billion of other people’s money. The Bush administration took a trillion dollars of ours and handed it out to its crony corporate buddies and to the Pentagon as down payments on disaster — and that’s without even figuring into the mix the staggering sums still needed to care for American soldiers maimed, impaired, or nearly destroyed by Bush’s wars.

With Bush’s “commander-in-chief” presidency only days from its end, the price tag on his “war” continues to soar as dollars grow scarce, new investors refuse to pay in, and the scheme crumbles. Unfortunately, the American people, typical suckers in such a con game, will be left with a mile-high stack of IOU’s. In any Ponzi scheme comparison with Madoff, however, one difference (other than size) stands out. Sooner or later, Madoff, like Charles Ponzi himself, will end up behind bars, while George, Dick, & Co. will be writing their memoirs and living off the fat of the land.

Eight years of bodies, dead, broken, mutilated, abused; eight years of ruined lives down countless drains; eight years of massive destruction to places from Baghdad to New Orleans where nothing of significance was ever rebuilt: all this was brought to us by a President, now leaving office without apology, who said the following in his first inaugural address: “I will live and lead by these principles: to advance my convictions with civility… to call for responsibility and try to live it as well.”

He lived, however, by quite a different code. Destruction without responsibility, that’s Bush’s legacy, but who’s counting now that the destruction mounts and the bodies begin to pile up here in the “homeland,” in our own body count nation? The laid off, the pension-less, the homeless, the suicides — imagine what that trillion dollars might have meant to them.

It’s clear enough in these last days of the Bush administration that its model was Iraq, dismantled and devastated. The world, had he succeeded, might have become George W. Bush’s Iraq.

Yes, he came up short, but, given the global economic situation, how much short we don’t yet know. Perhaps, in the future, historians will call him a Caesar — of destruction.

Veni, vidi, vastavi… [I came, I saw, I devastated…]

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 American Age of Denial. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years now ending.

[Note: I rely on many wonderful sources and websites in putting together TomDispatch.com, but as 2009 starts, I would feel remiss if I didn’t credit three in particular: Antiwar.com, Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, and Paul Woodward’s The War in Context. Each is invaluable in its own way; each made my task of trying to make some sense of George W. Bush’s world so much easier. A deep bow of thanks to all three. Finally, I can’t help wondering about one missing Iraqi who remains on my mind: a young Sunni woman living in Baghdad in 2003, who adopted the pseudonym Riverbend. She began her “girlblog from Iraq,” Baghdad Burning, with this epigraph: “…I’ll meet you ’round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend…” For several years, she provided a vivid citizen’s reportage on Bush’s disaster that should have put most journalists to shame. As I wrote in 2006, hers was “an unparalleled record of the American war on, and occupation of, Iraq (and Riverbend writes like an angel). [It represents] simply the best contemporary account we are likely to have any time soon of the hell into which we’ve plunged that country.” Her last report from Syria — she had just arrived as a refugee — was posted on October 22, 2007. Since then, as far as I know, she has not been heard from.]

Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt

It's the ultimate argument, the final bastion against withdrawal, and over these last years, the Bush administration has made sure it would have plenty of heft. Ironically, its strength lies in the fact that it has nothing to do with the vicissitudes of Iraqi politics, the relative power of Shiites or Sunnis, the influence of Iran, or even the riptides of war. It really doesn't matter what Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki or oppositional cleric Muqtada al-Sadr think about it. In fact, it's an argument that has nothing to do with Iraq and everything to do with us, with the American way of war (and life), which makes it almost unassailable.

And this week Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen — the man President-elect Obama plans to call into the Oval Office as soon as he arrives — wheeled it into place and launched it like a missile aimed at the heart of Obama's 16-month withdrawal plan for U.S. combat troops in Iraq. It may not sound like much, but believe me, it is. The Chairman simply said, "We have 150,000 troops in Iraq right now. We have lots of bases. We have an awful lot of equipment that's there. And so we would have to look at all of that tied to, obviously, the conditions that are there, literally the security conditions… Clearly, we'd want to be able to do it safely." Getting it all out safely, he estimated, would take at least "two to three years."

For those who needed further clarification, the Wall Street Journal's Yochi J. Dreazen spelled it out: "In recent interviews, two high-ranking officers stated flatly that it would be logistically impossible to dismantle dozens of large U.S. bases there and withdraw the 150,000 troops now in Iraq so quickly. The officers said it would take close to three years for a full withdrawal and could take longer if the fighting resumed as American forces left the country."

As for the Obama plan, if the military top brass have anything to say about it, sayonara. It's "physically impossible," says "a top officer involved in briefing the President-elect on U.S. operations in Iraq," according to Time Magazine. The Washington Post reports that, should Obama continue to push for his two brigades a month draw-down, a civilian-military "conflict is inevitable," and might, as the Nation's Robert Dreyfuss suggests, even lead to an Obama "showdown" with the military high command in his first weeks in office.

In a nutshell, the Pentagon's argument couldn't be simpler or more red-bloodedly American: We have too much stuff to leave Iraq any time soon. In war, as in peace, we're trapped by our own profligacy. We are the Neiman Marcus and the Wal-Mart of combat. Where we go, our "stuff" goes with us — in such prodigious quantities that removing it is going to prove more daunting than invading in the first place. After all, it took less than a year to put in place the 130,000-plus invasion force, and all its equipment and support outfits from bases all around the world, as well as the air power and naval power to match.

Some have estimated, however, that simply getting each of the 14 combat brigades still stationed in Iraq on January 20, 2009, out with all their equipment might take up to 75 days per brigade. (If you do the math, that's 36 months, and even that wouldn't suffice if you wanted to remove everything else we now have in that California-sized country.)

Getting out? Don't dream of it.

Going to War with the Society You Have

Back in December 2004, when a soldier at a base in Kuwait asked about the lack of armor on his unit's Humvees, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said, "As you know, you have to go to war with the Army you have…"

Rumsfeld was then still focused on his much-ballyhooed "transformation" in warfare. He was intent on creating a Military Lite — the most pared down, totally agile, completely networked, highest of all high-tech forces that was going to make the U.S. the dominant power on the planet for eons. As it turned out, that force was a mirage. In reality, the U.S. military in Iraq proved to be a Military Heavy. In retrospect, Rumsfeld might have more accurately responded: You have to go to war with the society you have.

In fact, the Bush administration did just that — with a passion. After the attacks of 9/11, the President famously pleaded with the American public to return to normal life by shopping, flying, and visiting Disney World. ("Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.") The administration and the Pentagon led the way. As the Pentagon's budget soared, its civilians and the high command went on an imperial spending spree the likes of which may never have been seen on this planet.

For them, Iraq has been war as cornucopia, war as a consumer's paradise. Arguably, on a per-soldier basis, no military has ever occupied a country with a bigger baggage train. On taking Iraq, they promptly began constructing a series of gigantic military bases, American ziggurats meant to outlast them. These were full-scale "American towns," well guarded, 15-20 miles around, with multiple PXes, fitness clubs, brand fast-food outlets, traffic lights, the works. (This, in a country where, for years after the invasion, nothing worked.)

To the tune of multi-billions of dollars, they continued to build these bases up, and then, in Baghdad, put the icing on the Iraqi cake by constructing an almost three-quarter-billion dollar embassy of embassies, a veritable citadel in the heart of the capital's American-controlled Green Zone, meant for 1,000 "diplomats" with its own pool, tennis courts, recreation center, post exchange/community center, commissary, retail and shopping areas, and restaurants — again, the works.

In other words, abroad, we weren't the Spartans, we were the Athenians on steroids. And then, of course, there was the "equipment" that Mullen referred to, the most expensive and extensive collection you could find. As the Washington Times's Arnaud de Borchgrave wrote back in October 2007: "Watching them drive by at 30 miles per hour, would take 75 days. Bumper-to-bumper, they would stretch from New York City to Denver. That's how U.S. Air Force logistical expert Lenny Richoux described the number of vehicles that would have to be shipped back from Iraq when the current deployment is over. These include, among others, 10,000 flatbed trucks, 1,000 tanks and 20,000 Humvees." And don't forget "the 300,000 'heavy' items that would have to be shipped back, such as ice-cream machines that churn out different flavors upon request at a dozen bases…"

As Dr. Seuss might have put it: and that is not all, oh no, that is not all. In July 2007, for instance, the Associated Press's Charles Hanley described U.S. bases holding "more than the thousands of tanks, other armored vehicles, artillery pieces and Humvees assigned to combat units. They're also home to airfields laden with high-tech gear, complexes of offices filled with computers, furniture and air conditioners, systems of generators and water plants, PXs full of merchandise, gyms packed with equipment, big prefab latrines and ranks of small portable toilets, even Burger Kings and Subway sandwich shops."

And it doesn't stop there. In mid-2007, when the issue of our "stuff" first became part of the withdrawal news, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates pointed out: "You're talking about not just U.S. soldiers, but millions of tons of contractor equipment that belongs to the United States government, and a variety of other things… This is a massive logistical undertaking whenever it takes place." So, one might ask, what about those many tens of thousands of private contractors in Iraq and all their materiel? Presumably, some of them, too, would have to withdraw, mainly through the bottleneck of Kuwait and its overburdened ports. This would, as the military now portrays it, be an American Dunkirk stretching on for years.

The Argument of Last Resort

Now, back in the days when we had less experience fighting losing wars, Americans in retreat simply shoved those extra helicopters off the decks of aircraft carriers in chaos, burned free-floating cash in tin drums, and left tons of expensive equipment and massive bases behind for the enemy to turn into future industrial parks. At the U.S. Embassy in Saigon in April 1975, while everything in sight was being burned or destroyed including precious advanced electronic equipment, money actually rained down from the Embassy incinerator on the roof upon amazed Vietnamese allies huddled below, waiting for a promised airlift to safety that, for most, never came.

Withdrawal then was unsightly, unseemly, and environmentally unsound. But, as we know, the lessons of Vietnam were subsequently learned.

Today, the Pentagon and the military top command plan to be far more responsible consumers and far better environmentalists, however long it takes, and the Department of Agriculture's "stringent requirements" for the "power-washing" — this, in the desert, of course — of every object to be returned to the U.S. will help ensure that this is so. "Ever since U.S. authorities found plague-infected rats in cargo returning from the Vietnam War," the AP's Hanley has written, "the decontamination process has been demanding: water blasting of equipment, treatment with insecticide and rodenticide, inspections, certifications."

And don't forget the shrink-wrapping of those helicopters — who knows how many — for that long, salt-free sea voyage home.

Think of this as a version of the Pottery Barn Rule that Secretary of State Colin Powell supposedly cited in warning President Bush on the dangers of invading Iraq: "You break it, you own it." For the departure from Iraq, this might be rewritten as: You bring it, you own it.

You might say that, in the end, Bush's secret plan for never withdrawing from Iraq was but an extension of his shop-till-you-drop response to 9/11. The idea was to put so much stuff in the country that we'd have to stay.

And now, as the mission threatens to wind down, the top brass are evidently claiming that an Obama timeline for withdrawal would violate our property rights and squander a vast array of expensive equipment. You'll hear no apologies from the military for traveling heavy, despite the fact that they are now arguing against a reasonable withdrawal timetable based on the need to enact a kind of 12-step program for armed consumer sobriety.

Ever since the President's surge strategy was launched in January 2007, this argument has been a background hum in the withdrawal debate. Now, it's evidently about to come front and center.

A new president will be taking office. His withdrawal plan — he spoke of it more accurately on CBS's 60 Minutes as "a plan that draws down our troops" — is a modest one. After those American "combat brigades" are out, it's still possible, as one of his key security advisers, former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, told National Public Radio last summer, that as many as 55,000 U.S. troops might remain in an advisory capacity or as residual forces. And yet, with the Iraqis urging us on, so many of the arguments against withdrawal have fallen away, which is why, when Barack Obama sits down in the Oval Office with his top commanders, he's going to hear about all that "stuff." For those who want to drag their feet on leaving Iraq, this is the argument of last resort.

As Donald Rumsfeld so classically said, in reference to the looting of Baghdad in April 2003 after American troops entered the city, "stuff happens." How true that turns out to be. When it comes to withdrawal, the most militarily profligate administration in memory has seemingly ensured that the highest military priority in 2009 will be frugality — that is, saving all American "stuff" in Iraq.

Irony hardly covers this one. The Bush administration may have succeeded in little else, but it did embed the U.S. so deeply in that country that leaving can now be portrayed as the profligate thing to do.

By the way, in case anyone thinks that the soon-to-be-Bush-less Pentagon has drawn the obvious lessons from its experience in Iraq, think again. It still seems eager to visit Disney World.

According to Wired Magazine's reliable Danger Room blog, military officials are now suggesting to the Obama transition team that the next Pentagon budget should come in at $581 billion, a staggering $67 billion more than the previous one (and that's without almost all the costs of the Afghan and Iraq wars being included).

But like Rumsfeld's Military Lite, the Pentagon's Military Heavy plans are likely to prove a mirage in the economic future that awaits us. Perhaps the U.S. should indeed salvage every bit of its equipment in Iraq. After all, one thing seems certain: Washington may continue in some fashion to garrison an economically desperate world, but it will never again have the money to occupy a country in the style of Iraq — largely because the Bush administration managed to squander the American imperial legacy in eight short years.

Someday, Iraq and all those massive bases, all that high-tech equipment, all those ice-cream machines and portajohns, will seem like part of an American dream life. Money may never again rain from the sky.

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 American Age of Denial. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years, has recently been published. To listen to a podcast of Engelhardt discussing how and why he decided to write this essay on military resistance to withdrawal from Iraq, click here.

Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt

On the day that Americans turned out in near record numbers to vote, a record was set halfway around the world. In Afghanistan, a U.S. Air Force strike wiped out about 40 people in a wedding party. This represented at least the sixth wedding party eradicated by American air power in Afghanistan and Iraq since December 2001.

American planes have, in fact, taken out two brides in the last seven months. And don’t try to bury your dead or mark their deaths ceremonially either, because funerals have been hit as well. Mind you, those planes, which have conducted 31% more air strikes in Afghanistan in support of U.S. troops this year, and the missile-armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) now making almost daily strikes across the border in Pakistan, remain part of George W. Bush’s Air Force, but only until January 21, 2009. Then, they — and all the brides and grooms of Afghanistan and in the Pakistani borderlands who care to have something more than the smallest of private weddings — officially become the property of President Barack Obama.

That’s a sobering thought. He is, in fact, inheriting from the Bush administration a widening war in the region, as well as an exceedingly tenuous situation in devastated, still thoroughly factionalized, sectarian, and increasingly Iranian-influenced Iraq. There, the U.S. is, in actuality, increasingly friendless and ever less powerful. The last allies from the infamous "coalition of the willing" are now rushing for the door. The South Koreans, Hungarians, and Bulgarians — I’ll bet you didn’t even know the latter two had a few troops left in Iraq — are going home this year; the rump British force in the south will probably be out by next summer.

The Iraqis are beginning to truly go their own way (or, more accurately, ways); and yet, in January, when Barack Obama enters office, there will still be more American troops in Iraq than there were in April 2003 when Baghdad fell. Winning an election with an antiwar label, Obama has promised — kinda — to end the American war there and bring the troops — sorta, mostly — home. But even after his planned 16-month withdrawal of U.S. "combat brigades," which may not be welcomed by his commanders in the field, including former Iraq commander, now Centcom Commander David Petraeus, there are still plenty of combative non-combat forces, which will be labeled "residual" and left behind to fight "al-Qaeda." Then, there are all those "advisors" still there to train Iraqi forces, the guards for the giant bases the Bush administration built in the country, the many thousands of armed private security contractors from companies like Blackwater, and of course, the 1,000 "diplomats" who are to staff the newly opened U.S. embassy in Baghdad’s Green Zone, possibly the largest embassy on the planet. Hmmmm.

And while the new president turns to domestic matters, it’s quite possible that significant parts of his foreign policy could be left to the oversight of Vice President Joe Biden who, in case anyone has forgotten, proposed a plan for Iraq back in 2007 so filled with imperial hubris that it still startles. In a Caesarian moment, he recommended that the U.S. — not Iraqis — functionally divide the country into three parts. Although he preferred to call it a "federal system," it was, for all intents and purposes, a de facto partition plan.

If Iraq remains a sorry tale of American destruction and dysfunction without, as yet, a discernable end in sight, Afghanistan may prove Iraq squared. And there, candidate Obama expressed no desire to wind the war down and withdraw American troops. Quite the opposite, during the election campaign he plunked hard for escalation, something our NATO allies are sure not to be too enthusiastic about. According to the Obama plan, many more American troops (if available, itself an open question) are to be poured into the country in what would essentially be a massive "surge strategy" by yet another occupant of the Oval Office. Assumedly, the new Afghan policy would be aided and abetted by those CIA-run UAVs directed toward Pakistan to hunt down Osama bin Laden and pals, while undoubtedly further destabilizing a shaky ally.

When it comes to rising civilian casualties from U.S. air strikes in their countries, both Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari have already used their congratulatory phone calls to President-elect Obama to plead for an end to the attacks, which produce both a profusion of dead bodies and a profusion of live, vengeful enemies. Both have done the same with the Bush administration, Karzai to the point of tears.

The U.S. military argues that the use of air power is necessary in the face of a spreading, ever more dangerous, Taliban insurgency largely because there are too few boots on the ground. ("If we got more boots on the ground, we would not have to rely as much on airstrikes" was the way Army Brig. Gen. Michael Tucker, deputy commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, put it.) But rest assured, as the boots multiply on increasingly hostile ground, the military will discover it needs more, not less, air power to back more troops in more trouble.

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.

Finally, President-elect Obama accepted the overall framework of a "Global War on Terror" during his presidential campaign. This "war" lies at the heart of the Bush administration’s fantasy world of war that has set all-too-real expanses of the planet aflame. Its dangers were further highlighted this week by the New York Times, which revealed that secret orders in the spring of 2004 gave the U.S. military "new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States."

At least twelve such attacks have been carried out since then by Special Operations forces on Pakistan, Somalia, most recently Syria, and other unnamed countries. Signed by Donald Rumsfeld, signed off on by President Bush, built-upon recently by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, these secret orders enshrine the Pentagon’s right to ignore international boundaries, or the sovereignty of nations, in an endless global "war" of choice against small, scattered bands of terrorists.

As reporter Jim Lobe pointed out recently, a "series of interlocking grand bargains" in what the neoconservatives used to call "the Greater Middle East" or the "arc of instability" might be available to an Obama administration capable of genuinely new thinking. These, he wrote, would be "backed by the relevant regional players as well as major global powers — aimed at pacifying Afghanistan; integrating Iran into a new regional security structure; promoting reconciliation in Iraq; and launching a credible process to negotiate a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arab world."

If, however, Obama accepts a War on Terror framework, as he already seems to have, as well as those "residual" forces in Iraq, while pumping up the war in Afghanistan, he may quickly find himself playing by Rumsfeld rules, whether or not he revokes those specific orders. In fact, left alone in Washington, backed by the normal national security types, he may soon find himself locked into all sorts of unpalatable situations, as once happened to another Democratic president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who opted to escalate an inherited war when what he most wanted to do was focus on domestic policy.

Previews for a Political Zombie Movie

Domestically, it’s clear enough that we are about to leave the age of Bush — in tone and policy — but what that leave-taking will consist of is still an open question. This is especially so given a cratering economy and the pot-holed road ahead. It is a moment when Obama has, not surprisingly, begun to emphasize continuity and reassurance alongside his campaign theme of "change we can believe in."

All you had to do was look at that array of Clinton-era economic types and CEOs behind Obama at his first news conference to think: been there, done that. The full photo of his economic team that day offered a striking profile of pre-Bush era Washington and the Washington Consensus, and so a hint of the Democratic world the new president will walk into on January 20, 2009.

How about former Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, those kings of 1990s globalization, or even the towering former Fed chief from the first Bush era, Paul Volcker? Didn’t that have the look of previews for a political zombie movie, a line-up of the undead? As head of the New America Foundation Steve Clemons has been writing recently, the economic team looks suspiciously as if it were preparing for a "Clinton 3.0" moment.

You could scan that gathering and not see a genuine rogue thinker in sight; no off-the-reservation figures who might represent a breath of fresh air and fresh thinking (other than, being hopeful, the president-elect himself). Clemons offers an interesting list of just some obvious names left off stage: "Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, James Galbraith, Leo Hindery, Clyde Prestowitz, Charlene Barshefsky, C. Fred Bergsten, Adam Posen, Robert Kuttner, Robert Samuelson, Alan Murray, William Bonvillian, Doug & Heidi Rediker, Bernard Schwartz, Tom Gallagher, Sheila Bair, Sherle Schwenninger, and Kevin Phillips."

Mobilizing a largely Clintonista brain trust may look reassuring to some — an in-gathering of all the Washington wisdom available before Hurricane Bush/Cheney hit town, but unfortunately, we don’t happen to be entering a Clinton 3.0 moment. What’s globalizing now is American disaster, which threatens to level a vulnerable world.

In a sense, though, domestic policy may, relatively speaking, represent the good news of the coming Obama era. We know, for instance, that those preparing the way for the new president’s arrival are thinking hard about how to roll back the worst of Bush cronyism, enrich-yourself-at-the-public-troughism, general lawlessness, and unconstitutionality. As a start, according to Ceci Connolly and R. Jeffrey Smith of the Washington Post, Obama advisers have already been compiling "a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues," including oil drilling in pristine wild lands. In addition, Obama’s people are evidently at work on ways to close Guantanamo and try some of its prisoners in U.S. courts.

However, if continuity domestically means rollback to the Clinton era, continuity in the foreign policy sphere — Guantanamo aside — may be a somewhat different matter. We won’t know the full cast of characters to come until the president-elect makes the necessary announcements or has a national security press conference with a similar line-up behind him. But it’s certainly rumored that Robert Gates, a symbol of continuity from both Bush eras, might be kept on as secretary of defense, or a Republican senator like Richard Lugar of Indiana or, more interestingly, retiring Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel might be appointed to the post. Of course, many Clintonistas are sure to be in this line-up, too.

In addition, among the essential cast of characters will be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Michael Mullen, and Centcom Commander David Petraeus, both late Bush appointees, both seemingly flexible military men, both interested in a military-plus approach to the Afghan and Iraq wars. Petraeus, for instance, reportedly recently asked for, and was denied, permission to meet with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

All these figures will represent a turn away from the particular madness of the early Bush years abroad, one that actually began in the final years of his second term. But such a national security line-up is unlikely to include fresh thinkers, who might truly reimagine an imperial world, or anyone who might genuinely buck the power of the Pentagon. What Obama looks to have are custodians and bureaucrats of empire, far more cautious, far more sane, and certainly far more grown-up than the first-term Bush appointees, but not a cast of characters fit for reshaping American policy in a new world of disorder and unraveling economies, not a crew ready to break new ground and cede much old ground on this still American-garrisoned planet of ours.

Breathless in Washington

Let’s assume the best: that Barack Obama truly means to bring some form of the people’s will, as he imagines it, to Washington after eight years of unconstitutional "commander-in-chief" governance. That — take my word for it — he can’t do without the people themselves expressing that will.

Of course, even in the Bush era, Americans didn’t simply cede the public commons. They turned out, for instance, in staggering numbers to protest the President’s invasion of Iraq before it ever happened, and again more recently to work tirelessly to elect Obama president. But — so it seems to me — when immediate goals are either disappointingly not achieved, or achieved relatively quickly, most Americans tend to pack their bags and head for home, as so many did in despair after the invasion was launched in 2003, as so many reportedly are doing again, in a far more celebratory mood, now that Obama is elected.

But hard as his election may have been, that was surely the easy part. He is now about to enter the hornet’s nest. Entrenched interests. Entrenched ideas. Entrenched ideology. Entrenched profits. Entrenched lobbyists. Entrenched bureaucrats. Entrenched think tanks. An entrenched Pentagon and allied military-industrial complex, both bloated beyond imagining and virtually untouchable, along with a labyrinthine intelligence system of more than 18 agencies, departments, and offices.

Washington remains an imperial capital. How in the world will Barack Obama truly begin to change that without you?

In the Bush years, the special interests, lobbyists, pillagers, and crony corporations not only pitched their tents on the public commons, but with the help of the President’s men and women, simply took possession of large hunks of it. That was called "privatization." Now, as Bush & Co. prepare to leave town in a cloud of catastrophe, the feeding frenzy at the public trough only seems to grow.

It’s a natural reaction — and certainly a commonplace media reaction at the moment — to want to give Barack Obama a "chance." Back off those critical comments, people now say. Fair’s fair. Give the President-elect a little "breathing space." After all, the election is barely over, he’s not even in office, he hasn’t had his first 100 days, and already the criticism has begun.

But those who say this don’t understand Washington — or, in the case of various media figures and pundits, perhaps understand it all too well.

Political Washington is a conspiracy — in the original sense of the word: "to breathe the same air." In that sense, there is no air in Washington that isn’t stale enough to choke a president. Send Obama there alone, give him that "breathing space," don’t start demanding the quick ending of wars or anything else, and you’re not doing him, or the American people, any favors. Quite the opposite, you’re consigning him to suffocation.

Leave Obama to them and he’ll break your heart. If you do, then blame yourself, not him; but better than blaming anyone, pitch your own tent on the public commons and make some noise. Let him know that Washington’s isn’t the only consensus around, that Americans really do want our troops to come home, that we actually are looking for "change we can believe in," which would include a less weaponized, less imperial American world, based on a reinvigorated idea of defense, not aggression, and on the Constitution, not leftover Rumsfeld rules or a bogus Global War on Terror.

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 American Age of Denial. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years, has recently been published.

[Note for TomDispatch readers: For those who want to follow issues of war and peace, especially in the "arc of instability," I want to recommend four sites that are sure to prove as invaluable in the Obama era as they have been (to me at least) during the Bush years: Juan Cole’s never miss-able Informed Comment blog, AntiWar.com (which has recently added Jason Ditz’s useful daily summaries of the latest news developments like this Iraqi one), Paul Woodward’s sharp-eyed site The War in Context, and the always fascinating and provocative online newspaper, Asia Times. I check in with all of them daily.]

Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt

They may have been the most disastrous dreamers, the most reckless gamblers, and the most vigorous imperial hucksters and grifters in our history. Selling was their passion. And they were classic American salesmen — if you’re talking about underwater land in Florida, or the Brooklyn Bridge, or three-card monte, or bizarre visions of Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles armed with chemical and biological weaponry let loose over the U.S., or Saddam Hussein’s mushroom clouds rising over American cities, or a full-scale reordering of the Middle East to our taste, or simply eternal global dominance.

When historians look back, it will be far clearer that the "commander-in-chief" of a "wartime" country and his top officials were focused, first and foremost, not on the shifting "central theaters" of the Global War on Terror, but on the theater that mattered most to them — the "home front" where they spent inordinate amounts of time selling the American people a bill of goods. Of his timing in ramping up a campaign to invade Iraq in September 2002, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card infamously explained: "From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August."

Indeed.

From a White House where "victory strategies" meant purely for domestic consumption poured out, to the Pentagon where bevies of generals, admirals, and other high officers were constantly being mustered, not to lead armies but to lead public opinion, their selling focus was total. They were always releasing "new product."

And don’t forget their own set of soaring inside-the-Beltway fantasies. After all, if a salesman is going to sell you some defective product, it always helps if he can sell himself on it first. And on this score, they were world champs.

Because events made it look so foolish, the phrase "shock and awe" that went with the initial attack on Iraq in March 2003 has now passed out of official language and (together with "mission accomplished") into the annals of irony. Back then, though, as bombs and missiles blew up parts of Baghdad — to fabulous visual effect in that other "theater" of war, television — the phrase was constantly on official lips and in media reports everywhere. It went hand-in-glove with another curious political phrase: regime change.

Given the supposed unique technological proficiency of the U.S. military and its array of "precision" weapons, the warriors of Bushworld convinced themselves that a new era in military affairs had truly dawned. An enemy "regime" could now be taken out — quite literally and with surgical precision, in its bedrooms, conference rooms, and offices, thanks to those precision weapons delivered long-distance from ship or plane — without taking out a country. Poof! You only had to say the word and an oppressive regime would be, as it was termed, "decapitated." Its people would then welcome with open arms relatively small numbers of American troops as liberators.

It all sounded so good, and high tech, and relatively simple, and casualty averse, and clean as a whistle. Even better, once there had been such a demonstration, a guaranteed "cakewalk" — as, say, in Iraq — who would ever dare stand up to American power again? Not only would one hated enemy dictator be dispatched to the dustbin of history, but evildoers everywhere, fearing the Bush equivalent of the wrath of Khan, would be shock-and-awed into submission or quickly dispatched in their own right.

In reality (ah, "reality" — what a nasty word!), the shock-and-awe attacks used on Iraq got not a single leader of the Saddamist regime, not one of that pack of 52 cards (including of course the ace of spades, Saddam Hussein, found in his "spiderhole" so many months later). Iraqi civilians were the ones killed in that precise and shocking moment, while Iraqi society was set on the road to destruction, and the world was not awed.

Strangely enough, though, the phrase, once reversed, proved applicable to the Bush administration’s seven-year post-9/11 history. They were, in a sense, the awe-and-shock administration. Initially, they were awed by the supposedly singular power of the American military to dominate and transform the planet; then, they were continually shocked and disbelieving when that same military, despite its massive destructive power, turned out to be incapable of doing so, or even of handling two ragtag insurgencies in two weakened countries, one of which, Afghanistan, was among the poorest and least technologically advanced on the planet.

The Theater of War

In remarkably short order, historically speaking, the administration’s soaring imperial fantasies turned into planetary nightmares. After 9/11, of course, George W. and crew promised Americans the global equivalent — and Republicans the domestic equivalent — of a 36,000 stock market and we know just where the stock market is today: only about 27,000 points short of that irreality.

Once upon a time, they really did think that, via the U.S. Armed Forces, or, as George W. Bush once so breathlessly put it, "the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known," they could dominate the planet without significant help from allies or international institutions of any sort. Who else had a shot at it? In the post-Soviet world, who but a leadership backed by the full force of the U.S. military could possibly be a contender for the leading role in this epic movie? Who else could even turn out for a casting call? Impoverished Russia? China, still rebuilding its military and back then considered to have a host of potential problems? A bunch of terrorists? I mean… come on!

As they saw it, the situation was pretty basic. In fact, it gave the phrase "power politics" real meaning. After all, they had in their hands the reins attached to the sole superpower on this small orb. And wasn’t everyone — at least, everyone they cared to listen to, at least Charles Krauthammer and the editorial page of the Washington Post — saying no less?

I mean, what else would you do, if you suddenly, almost miraculously (after an election improbably settled by the Supreme Court), found yourself in sole command of the globe’s only "hyperpower," the only sheriff on planet Earth, the New Rome. To make matters more delicious, in terms of getting just what you wanted, those hands were on those reins right after "the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century," when Americans were shocked and awed and terrified enough that anything-goes seemed a reasonable response?

It might have gone to anyone’s head in imperial Washington at that moment, but it went to their heads in such a striking way. After all, theirs was a plan — labeled in 2002 the Bush Doctrine — of global domination conceptually so un-American that, in my childhood, the only place you would have heard it was in the mouths of the most evil, snickering imperial Japanese, Nazi, or Soviet on-screen villains. And yet, in their moment of moments, it just rolled right out of their heads and off their tongues — and they were proud of it.

Here’s a question for 2009 you don’t have to answer: What should the former "new Rome" be called now? That will, of course, be someone else’s problem.

The Cast of Characters

And what a debacle the Bush Doctrine proved to be. What a legacy the legacy President and his pals are leaving behind. A wrecked economy, deflated global stock markets, collapsing banks and financial institutions, soaring unemployment, a smashed Republican Party, a bloated Pentagon overseeing a strained, overstretched military, enmired in an incoherent set of still-expanding wars gone sour, a network of secret prisons, as well as Guantanamo, that "jewel in the crown" of Bush’s Bermuda Triangle of injustice, and all the grim practices that went with those offshore prisons, including widespread torture and abuse, kidnapping, assassination, and the disappearing of prisoners (once associated only with South America dictatorships and military juntas).

They headed a government that couldn’t shoot straight or plan ahead or do anything halfway effectively, an administration that emphasized "defense" — or "homeland security" as it came to be called in their years — above all else; yet they were always readying themselves for the last battle, and so were caught utterly, embarrassingly unready for 19 terrorists with box cutters, a hurricane named Katrina, and an arcane set of Wall Street derivatives heading south.

As the supposed party of small government, they succeeded mainly in strangling civilian services, privatizing government operations into the hands of crony corporations, and bulking up state power in a massive way — making an already vast intelligence apparatus yet larger and more labyrinthine, expanding spying and surveillance of every kind, raising secrecy to a first principle, establishing a new U.S. military command for North America, endorsing a massive Pentagon build-up, establishing a second Defense Department labeled the Department of Homeland Security with its own mini-homeland-security-industrial complex, evading checks and powers in the Constitution whenever possible, and claiming new powers for a "unitary executive" commander-in-chief presidency.

No summary can quite do justice to what the administration "accomplished" in these years. If there was, however, a single quote from the world of George W. Bush that caught the deepest nature of the president and his core followers, it was offered by an "unnamed administration official" — often assumed to be Karl Rove — to journalist Ron Suskind back in October 2004:

"He] said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…. and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’"

"We create our own reality… We’re history’s actors."

It must for years have seemed that way and everything about the lives they lived only reinforced that impression. After all, the President himself, as so many wrote, lived in a literal bubble world. Those who met him were carefully vetted; audiences were screened so that no one who didn’t fawn over him got near him; and when he traveled through foreign cities, they were cleared of life, turned into the equivalent of Potemkin villages, while he and his many armored cars and Blackhawk helicopters, his huge contingent of Secret Service agents and White House aides, his sniffer dogs and military sharpshooters, his chefs and who knows what else passed through.

Of course, the President had been in a close race with the reality principle (which, in his case, was the principle of failure) all his life — and whenever reality nipped at his heels, his father’s boys stepped in and whisked him off stage. He got by at his prep school, Andover, and then at Yale, a c-level legacy student and, appropriately enough when it came to sports, a cheerleader and, at Yale, a party animal as well as the president of the hardest drinking fraternity on campus. He was there in the first place only because of who he wasn’t (or rather who his relations were).

Faced with the crises of the Vietnam era, he joined the Texas Air National Guard and more or less went missing in action. Faced with life, he became a drunk. Faced with business, he failed repeatedly and yet, thanks to his dad’s friends, became a multi-millionaire in the process. He was supported, cosseted, encouraged, and finally — to use an omnipresent word of our moment — bailed out. The first MBA president was a business bust. A certain well-honed, homey congeniality got him to the governorship and then to the presidency of the United States without real accomplishments. If there ever was a case for not voting for the guy you’d most like to "have a beer with," this was it.

On that pile of rubble at Ground Zero on September 14, 2001, with a bullhorn in his hands and various rescuers shouting, "USA! USA!" he genuinely found his "calling" as the country’s cheerleader-in-chief (as he had evidently found his religious calling earlier in life). He not only took the job seriously, he visibly loved it. He took a childlike pleasure in being in the "theater" of war. He was thrilled when some of the soldiers who captured Saddam Hussein in that "spiderhole" later presented him with the dictator’s pistol. ("’He really liked showing it off,’ says a… visitor to the White House who has seen the gun. ‘He was really proud of it.’") He was similarly thrilled, on a trip to Baghdad in 2007, to meet the American pilot "whose plane’s missiles killed Iraq’s Al Qaeda leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi" and "returned to Washington in a buoyant mood."

While transforming himself into the national cheerleader-in-chief, he even kept "his own personal scorecard for the war" in a desk drawer in the Oval Office — photos with brief biographies and personality sketches of leading al-Qaeda figures, whose faces could be satisfyingly crossed out when killed or captured. He clearly adored it when he got to dress up, whether in a flight suit landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier in May 2003, or in front of hoo-aahing crowds of soldiers wearing a specially tailored military-style jacket with "George W. Bush, Commander In Chief" hand-stitched across the heart. As earlier in life, he was supported (Karl Rove), enabled (Condoleezza Rice), cosseted (various officials), and so became "the decider," a willing figurehead (as he had been, for instance, when he was an "owner" of the Texas Rangers), manipulated by his co-president Dick Cheney. In these surroundings, he was able to take war play to an imperial level. In the end, however, this act of his life, too, could lead nowhere but to failure.

As it happened, reality possessed its own set of shock-and-awe weaponry. Above all, reality was unimpressed with history’s self-proclaimed "actors," working so hard on the global stage to create their own reality. When it came to who really owned what, it turned out that reality owned the works and that possession was indeed nine-tenths of one law that even George Bush’s handlers and his fervent neocon followers couldn’t suspend.

Exit Stage Right

The results were sadly predictable. The bubble world of George W. Bush was bound to be burst. Based on fantasies, false promises, lies, and bait-and-switch tactics, it was destined for foreclosure. At home and abroad, after all, it had been created using the equivalent of subprime mortgages and the result, unsurprisingly, was a dismally subprime administration.

Now, of course, the bill collector is at the door and the property — the USA — is worth a good deal less than on November 4, 2000. George W. Bush is a discredited president; his job approval ratings could hardly be lower; his bubble world gone bust.

Nonetheless, let’s remember one other theme of his previous life. Whatever his failures, Bush always walked away from disastrous dealings enriched, while others were left holding the bag. Don’t imagine for a second that the equivalent isn’t about to repeat itself. He will leave a country functionally under the gun of foreclosure, a world far more aflame and dangerous than the one he faced on entering the Oval Office. But he won’t suffer.

He will have his new house in Dallas (not to speak of the "ranch" in Crawford) and his more than $200 million presidential "library" and "freedom institute" at Southern Methodist University; and then there’s always that 20% of America — they know who they are — who think his presidency was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Believe me, 20% of America is more than enough to pony up spectacular sums, once Bush takes to the talk circuit. As the president himself put it enthusiastically,"’I’ll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol’ coffers.’ With assets that have been estimated as high as nearly $21 million, Mr. Bush added, ‘I don’t know what my dad gets — it’s more than 50-75’ thousand dollars a speech, and ‘Clinton’s making a lot of money.’"

This is how a legacy-student-turned-president fails upward. Every disaster leaves him better off.

The same can’t be said for the country or the world, saddled with his "legacy."

Still, his administration has been foreclosed. Perhaps there’s ignominy in that. Now, the rest of us need to get out the brooms and start sweeping the stables.

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 American Age of Denial. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years, has recently been published. To listen to a podcast in which he discusses Bush’s record abroad, click here.

Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt

The year is 2010 and, yes, Saddam Hussein is gone and there are no American troops in Iraq, but, as the report suggests, "the challenge will be to see whether a modern, secular successor government emerges that does not threaten its neighbors" — especially since those dogged Iraqis are back at work on their nuclear weapons program. Meanwhile, the national security agenda of American policymakers, who face no conventional military challenges, is dominated by five questions: "whether to intervene, when, with whom, with what tools, and to what end?"

Surveying the world in 2010, we find a Russia irredeemably in economic decline, a China beset by too many internal problems to hope for military dominance in Asia, and a North Korea so transformed that military tensions have vanished from the Korean peninsula (along, evidently, with the North Korean nuclear program). Oh, and those food riots that swept the globe recently, they never happened. After all, it’s well known that food production has kept up with population pressures, and energy production has been more than a match for global energy needs. As for global warming? Never heard of it. On the bright side, the key to the future is "international cooperation," led, of course, by us truly.

An alternate universe from a missing Star Trek episode or that new sci-fi novel you haven’t read yet? Not quite. Thanks to the best brains in the many agencies that make up the U.S. Intelligence Community or IC, it’s been possible for me to venture into the future, just as our own world is being shaken to its roots — into the years 2010 and 2015, to be exact.

There, surprisingly enough, life is relatively calm and the United States remains the preeminent Power of Powers. There, you aren’t likely to hear the words "deep recession" or "depression" on anyone’s lips.

In that far perkier future our intelligence analysts sent me to, you can exist forever and there will never be those four jets, box cutters, and 19 hijackers. The Bush administration will never barge into the world "unilaterally." The U.S. will not be renowned for torture techniques or an offshore secret prison system of injustice, and nothing will contravene then-Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Ben Bernanke’s 2005 assessment that soaring housing prices were due to "strong economic fundamentals."

In neither 2010 nor 2015 will anyone have heard of the collapse of Lehman Brothers or the giant insurance company A.I.G. In neither year will newspapers have headlines like "Worst Crisis Since ’30s, With No End Yet in Sight." In neither will anyone know that the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, conducting two bankrupting wars that refused to end.

Think of it as the blandest, tidiest, least-likely-to-occur future around. And it was even paid for with your tax dollars.

Planting the Stars and Stripes in Future Soil

In a world where shock has repeatedly been the name of the game, where tall towers fall in clouds of toxic ash, investment houses disappear in the blink of an eye, and a black man is the Democratic Party’s candidate for president of the United States, the American intelligence community has been straining to imagine a future without surprises or discontinuities. As its experts summed the matter up in 1997, "Genuine discontinuities — sharp nonevolutionary breaks with the past — are rare, and our focus is on evolutionary change."

Lucky is the country that didn’t bet its foreign policy on that bit of intelligence wisdom. Of course, in the long decade of hubris, from the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 (something American intelligence neither predicted nor expected) to the moment American troops entered Baghdad in April 2003, it seemed obvious enough in Washington that a generational Pax Americana was settling over the world.

As a result, the futures the IC’s analysts produced back then were remarkable mainly for their inability to imagine what was stirring under the surface of the obvious. As a result, when you visit those futures, you’re not likely to have the urge to throw away your Arthur Clark or Isaac Asimov or Philip Dick or William Gibson classics. But maybe you’ll still be curious, as I was, to know what that "community’s" top minds missed when they peered ahead. Think of it as a window into the limits of our intelligence services when they tried to grasp the real nature of U.S. power by forecasting the future.

What’s strange is that the distant future was once the province of utopian or dystopian thinkers, pulp fiction writers, oddballs, visionaries, even outright nuts, but not government intelligence services. Peering into it was, at its best, a movingly strange individual adventure of the imagination, whether you were reading Edward Bellamy or Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin or H.G. Wells, George Orwell or Aldous Huxley. That was, of course, before the Pentagon and allied outfits began planning for the weaponry of 2020, 2035, and 2050; before war turned nuclear and so, with the exception of two cities in 1945, could only be "fought" in think tanks via futuristic scenario writing; before names like Complex 2030, Vision 2020, UAV [Unmanned Aerial Vehicle] Roadmap 2030 were regularly affixed to government programs. In fact, the U.S. government has been planting the Stars and Stripes deep in territory previous left to sci-fi dreamers for quite a while.

In the process, regularly analyzing the distant future has become almost as much the duty of the 18 agencies of the U.S. Intelligence Community as doing National Intelligence Estimates on Iran. Ever since the 1990s, they have been hard at work preparing committee-made futures that simply won’t happen. To judge by their work, they are a community of seers without sizzle, and yet the next of their fantasy futures, for the distant year 2025, is about to be made public.

Predicting America’s Diminishing Power

Every few years the National Intelligence Council (NIC) is mandated to provide "’over the horizon’ estimates of broader trends at work in the world." Just in case you’ve never heard of the NIC, it describes itself as "a center of strategic thinking within the U.S. Government, reporting to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and providing the President and senior policymakers with analyses of foreign policy issues that have been reviewed and coordinated throughout the Intelligence Community."

Sometime in the 1990s, its analysts embarked on a project, released in 1997, called Global Trends 2010, a best-guesstimate about the nature of our world 13 years hence. In 2000, Global Trends (GT) 2015 came out, followed in 2004 by GT 2020.

As the 2020 project proudly described the process, the IC "consulted experts from around the world in a series of regional conferences to offer a truly global perspective. We organized conferences on five continents to solicit the views of foreign experts…" In other words, no prospective stone was left prospectively unturned to keep top U.S. policymakers up to speed.

Recently, this Washington Post headline caught my eye: "Reduced Dominance Is Predicted for U.S." As the Post’s Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus noted, the latest of the NIC’s reports, Global Trends 2025, due out this December, was previewed in a speech by Thomas Fingar, "the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst." Officially, he’s the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis as well as the Chairman of the National Intelligence Council. The report is already supposedly being briefed to presidential candidates McCain and Obama.

Indeed, talking to the 2008 Intelligence and National Security Alliance Analytic Transformation Conference, Fingar praised the IC for its job restoring "confidence in the product" (a not-so-subtle reference to what the Bush administration did to its reputation back in 2002-2003) and hyped the IC’s "17 years of forecasting and scenario building." He then previewed the upcoming "product" on the futuristic intelligence block, "intended to shape the thinking of [the] new administration," and here was his prediction of America’s fate as 2025 approaches:

"[T]he U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished over this period of time… the overwhelming dominance that the United States has enjoyed in the international system in military, political, economic, and arguably, cultural arenas is eroding and will erode at an accelerating pace with the partial exception of military. But part of the argument here is that by 15 years from now, the military dimension [that] will remain the most preeminent will be the least significant…"

I’d have to guess that NIC members are, at this very moment, doing a little rewriting on this issue as the known world descends around our projected ears. Anyway, just how useful was Fingar’s "news," even before our financial system plunged into the maw?

Let’s face it, if the Post headline had said: "America [or China, or a clique of petro-states] Predicted to Rule World in 2025" that might have been news. But if you’ve been paying the slightest attention to your daily paper, Fingar’s speech offered a hint of a future hardly more illuminating than a headline saying, "Water predicted to remain in Indian Ocean in 2025."

Birthed by the T. Rex of global intelligence combines, his revelation represents, at best, a hen’s egg of knowledge. Admittedly, such a prediction might have taken real insight back in 1997 when the U.S. was riding high, and only a handful of declinist scholars like Immanuel Wallerstein were considering the possibility that American power was not on a path to new heights. But in 2008, did anyone really need costly conferences on five continents to imagine a future in which that power would be in decline, a forecast that is now a commonplace of bestselling book titles and could have been read at websites like this one years ago?

The Future Behind Us

Still, I couldn’t resist zipping back to 1997 and then 2000 just to get a sense of what — when Washington was riding high — the IC thought lay ahead in 2010 and 2015.

Three years after it made its 1997 findings public, the NIC’s analysts saw nothing but signs of the increasing dominance of American power in the global future. Like the new administration of that moment, they were bullish on America, so much so that they even critiqued the NIC’s seers of 1997 as weak-kneed on the U.S.: "The effect of the United States as the preponderant power is introduced in GT 2015. The US role as a global driver has emerged more clearly over the past four years, particularly as many countries debate the impact of ‘US hegemony’ on their domestic and foreign policies."

While, in 2000, there seemed no serious obstacles to the growth of American power 15 years in the future, poor Russia remained a declinist state which, fortunately, would "continue to lack the resources to impose its will," and China faced "an array of political, social, and economic pressures that will increasingly challenge the regime’s legitimacy, and perhaps its survival." And here was yet more splendid news from the NIC’s point of view: "The global economy, overall, will return to the high levels of growth reached in the 1960s and early 1970s." Even better, "[i]nternational cooperation will continue to increase through 2015." (Evidently, they forgot to brief top Bush administration officials on that particular prediction!)

Despite some discussion of non-state actors, loose nukes, and a potential "trend toward greater lethality in terrorist attacks" — after all, two American embassies in Africa and the USS Cole had by then been devastated — the IC saw no global wars on terror ahead. Terrorism was an outlier in a heady world of "globalization" that, in 2015, was remarkably sunny-side up when it came to us.

As with any document by committee, many of the report’s reigning predictions were carefully qualified elsewhere in the document, a familiar kind of cover-your-butt-ism in which you bravely predict the obvious — and (just in case) its opposite. The exuberant U.S. economy, to take a typical example, was also described as "vulnerable to a loss of international confidence in its growth prospects that could lead to a sharp downturn, which, if long lasting, would have deleterious economic and policy consequences for the rest of the world." There was even an appendix ("Four Alternative Global Futures") that offered modest scenarios in which U.S. power might "wane" somewhat, but here was the IC’s money paragraph for 2015:

"Experts agree that the United States, with its decisive edge in both information and weapons technology, will remain the dominant military power during the next 15 years. Further bolstering the strong position of the United States are its unparalleled economic power, its university system, and its investment in research and development — half of the total spent annually by the advanced industrial world. Many potential adversaries, as reflected in doctrinal writings and statements, see US military concepts, together with technology, as giving the United States the ability to expand its lead in conventional warfighting capabilities."

Sigh… In the future that’s now behind us, we know just where that sort of thinking led.

By 2004, of course, things were beginning to go sour in Bushworld, and so the 2020 study had a somewhat more dystopian edge to it. (It could pose the question, "U.S. Unipolarity – How Long Can It Last?" even if the answer was: a long time.) And finally, this December, it seems, the "waning" of U.S. power will make it, just a tad late, out of the appendices and into the bloodstream of the future.

Handmaidens of Delusion

What’s undeniably fascinating about these futuristic exercises is the degree to which they reflect the limits of the world of the present as seen from Washington; they reflect, that is, just what Washington has been (and largely still remains) incapable of grasping about the nature of power — and danger — on this planet. In this way, the IC’s analysts remained handmaidens to delusion, not just when it came to foreign powers, but when it came to our own country. The Global Trends reports will remain significant documents for future historians who want to chart just how glacially slow was Washington’s realization that the collapse of Soviet power didn’t actually mean American power was destined to be transcendent on Earth.

In its predictions, it’s clear that the IC had little better luck getting its agents embedded in the future than it did getting them inside al-Qaeda or into Iran. Not surprisingly, given what we know about the bureaucratic morass that is American intelligence, the GT reports have all the faults of intelligence by committee and negotiation — which is why H.G. Wells, Arthur Clark, Isaac Asimov, George Orwell, and others, who caught something of the strangeness of possible futures, would never have had a chance in hell of succeeding in careers in the IC. Wells’s Martians with their poison gas and flying machines, Orwell’s Big Brother with his "memory hole," and Huxley’s "feelies" would have been left on the negotiating room floor. Far too quirky. Far too many "discontinuities" involved for the IC.

Better to forecast what the people you brief already believe, raised to the highest predictive power and squared, and skip the oddballs with their strange hunches, the sorts who might actually have a knack for recognizing the shock of the future lurking in the present. Don’t pay any mind, for that matter, to FBI agents reporting the truly strange in the present — like, say, "a 33-year-old French citizen of Moroccan descent" at a flight school who wants to learn how to fly a commercial jet, but not how it takes off or lands.

What the Global Trends documents represent, then, is not a deep dive into the mysteries of the future, but a series of belly flops by an unbearably obese IC into a barely grasped present. Let 18 intelligence outfits proliferate and one thing is guaranteed: in some future, maybe even tomorrow, no matter how powerful you are, you won’t know what hit you.

If I were the next president, I might prefer to skip the IC, spend a few nights with a little science fiction, peer into the darkness, muster some commonsense, and take a wild guess or two.

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 American Age of Denial. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site, has recently been published. Focusing on what the mainstream media hasn’t covered, it is an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

[Note on Readings: The Global Trends reports are all on line. You can read them by clicking here: Global Trends 2010, Global Trends 2015, Global Trends 2020. You can read both of Thomas Fingar’s recent speeches by clicking here (pdf file — and fair warning, despite his billing as the "top analyst" in the U.S. Intelligence Community, they are almost unbearably banal, soporific, and remarkably incoherent). Finally, I wrote about Global Trends 2020 when it came out in 2004. For any of you who might find that of interest, click here.]

Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt

Here it is, as simply as I can put it: In the course of any year, there must be relatively few countries on this planet on which U.S. soldiers do not set foot, whether with guns blazing, humanitarian aid in hand, or just for a friendly visit. In startling numbers of countries, our soldiers not only arrive, but stay interminably, if not indefinitely. Sometimes they live on military bases built to the tune of billions of dollars that amount to sizeable American towns (with accompanying amenities), sometimes on stripped down forward operating bases that may not even have showers. When those troops don’t stay, often American equipment does — carefully stored for further use at tiny "cooperative security locations," known informally as "lily pads" (from which U.S. troops, like so many frogs, could assumedly leap quickly into a region in crisis).

At the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans had an estimated 37 major military bases scattered around their dominions. At the height of the British Empire, the British had 36 of them planetwide. Depending on just who you listen to and how you count, we have hundreds of bases. According to Pentagon records, in fact, there are 761 active military "sites" abroad.

The fact is: We garrison the planet north to south, east to west, and even on the seven seas, thanks to our various fleets and our massive aircraft carriers which, with 5,000-6,000 personnel aboard — that is, the population of an American town — are functionally floating bases.

And here’s the other half of that simple truth: We don’t care to know about it. We, the American people, aided and abetted by our politicians, the Pentagon, and the mainstream media, are knee-deep in base denial.

Now, that’s the gist of it. If, like most Americans, that’s more than you care to know, stop here.

Where the Sun Never Sets

Let’s face it, we’re on an imperial bender and it’s been a long, long night. Even now, in the wee hours, the Pentagon continues its massive expansion of recent years; we spend militarily as if there were no tomorrow; we’re still building bases as if the world were our oyster; and we’re still in denial. Someone should phone the imperial equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous.

But let’s start in a sunnier time, less than two decades ago, when it seemed that there would be many tomorrows, all painted red, white, and blue. Remember the 1990s when the U.S. was hailed — or perhaps more accurately, Washington hailed itself — not just as the planet’s "sole superpower" or even its unique "hyperpower," but as its "global policeman," the only cop on the block? As it happened, our leaders took that label seriously and our central police headquarters, that famed five-sided building in Washington D.C, promptly began dropping police stations — aka military bases — in or near the oil heartlands of the planet (Kosovo, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait) after successful wars in the former Yugoslavia and the Persian Gulf.

As those bases multiplied, it seemed that we were embarking on a new, post-Soviet version of "containment." With the USSR gone, however, what we were containing grew a lot vaguer and, before 9/11, no one spoke its name. Nonetheless, it was, in essence, Muslims who happened to live on so many of the key oil lands of the planet.

Yes, for a while we also kept intact our old bases from our triumphant mega-war against Japan and Germany, and then the stalemated "police action" in South Korea (1950-1953) — vast structures which added up to something like an all-military American version of the old British Raj. According to the Pentagon, we still have a total of 124 bases in Japan, up to 38 on the small island of Okinawa, and 87 in South Korea. (Of course, there were setbacks. The giant bases we built in South Vietnam were lost in 1975, and we were peaceably ejected from our major bases in the Philippines in 1992.)

But imagine the hubris involved in the idea of being "global policeman" or "sheriff" and marching into a Dodge City that was nothing less than Planet Earth itself. Naturally, with a whole passel of bad guys out there, a global "swamp" to be "drained," as key Bush administration officials loved to describe it post-9/11, we armed ourselves to kill, not stun. And the police stations… Well, they were often something to behold — and they still are.

Let’s start with the basics: Almost 70 years after World War II, the sun is still incapable of setting on the American "empire of bases" — in Chalmers Johnson’s phrase — which at this moment stretches from Australia to Italy, Japan to Qatar, Iraq to Colombia, Greenland to the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, Rumania to Okinawa. And new bases of various kinds are going up all the time (always with rumors of more to come). For instance, an American missile system is slated to go into Poland and a radar system into Israel. That will mean Americans stationed in both countries and, undoubtedly, modest bases of one sort or another to go with them. (The Israeli one — "the first American base on Israeli territory" — reports Aluf Benn of Haaretz, will be in the Negev desert.)

There are 194 countries on the planet (more or less), and officially 39 of them have American "facilities," large and/or small. But those are only the bases the Pentagon officially acknowledges. Others simply aren’t counted, either because, as in the case of Jordan, a country finds it politically preferable not to acknowledge such bases; because, as in the case of Pakistan, the American military shares bases that are officially Pakistani; or because bases in war zones, no matter how elaborate, somehow don’t count. In other words, that 39 figure doesn’t even include Iraq or Afghanistan. By 2005, according to the Washington Post, there were 106 American bases in Iraq, ranging from tiny outposts to mega-bases like Balad Air Base and the ill-named Camp Victory that house tens of thousands of troops, private contractors, Defense Department civilians, have bus routes, traffic lights, PXes, big name fast-food restaurants, and so on.

Some of these bases are, in effect, "American towns" on foreign soil. In Afghanistan, Bagram Air Base, previously used by the Soviets in their occupation of the country, is the largest and best known. There are, however, many more, large and small, including Kandahar Air Base, located in what was once the unofficial capital of the Taliban, which even has a full-scale hockey rink (evidently for its Canadian contingent of troops).

You would think that all of this would be genuine news, that the establishment of new bases would regularly generate significant news stories, that books by the score would pour out on America’s version of imperial control. But here’s the strange thing: We garrison the globe in ways that really are — not to put too fine a point on it — unprecedented, and yet, if you happen to live in the United States, you basically wouldn’t know it; or, thought about another way, you wouldn’t have to know it.

In Washington, our garrisoning of the world is so taken for granted that no one seems to blink when billions go into a new base in some exotic, embattled, war-torn land. There’s no discussion, no debate at all. News about bases abroad, and Pentagon basing strategy, is, at best, inside-the-fold stuff, meant for policy wonks and news jockeys. There may be no subject more taken for granted in Washington, less seriously attended to, or more deserving of coverage.

Missing Bases

Americans have, of course, always prided themselves on exporting "democracy," not empire. So empire-talk hasn’t generally been an American staple and, perhaps for that reason, all those bases prove an awkward subject to bring up or focus too closely on. When it came to empire-talk in general, there was a brief period after 9/11 when the neoconservatives, in full-throated triumph, began to compare us to Rome and Britain at their imperial height (though we were believed to be incomparably, uniquely more powerful). It was, in the phrase of the time, a "unipolar moment." Even liberal war hawks started talking about taking up "the burden" of empire or, in the phrase of Michael Ignatieff, now a Canadian politician but, in that period, still at Harvard and considered a significant American intellectual, "empire lite."

On the whole, however, those in Washington and in the media haven’t considered it germane to remind Americans of just exactly how we have attempted to "police" and control the world these last years. I’ve had two modest encounters with base denial myself:

In the spring of 2004, a journalism student I was working with emailed me a clip, dated October 20, 2003 — less than seven months after American troops entered Baghdad — from a prestigious engineering magazine. It quoted Lt. Col. David Holt, the Army engineer "tasked with facilities development" in Iraq, speaking proudly of the several billion dollars ("the numbers are staggering") that had already been sunk into base construction in that country. Well, I was staggered anyway. American journalists, however, hardly noticed, even though significant sums were already pouring into a series of mega-bases that were clearly meant to be permanent fixtures on the Iraqi landscape. (The Bush administration carefully avoided using the word "permanent" in any context whatsoever, and these bases were first dubbed "enduring camps.")

Within two years, according to the Washington Post (in a piece that, typically, appeared on page A27 of the paper), the U.S. had those 106 bases in Iraq at a cost that, while unknown, must have been staggering indeed. Just stop for a moment and consider that number: 106. It boggles the mind, but not, it seems, American newspaper or TV journalism.

TomDispatch.com has covered this subject regularly ever since, in part because these massive "facts on the ground," these modern Ziggurats, were clearly evidence of the Bush administration’s long-term plans and intentions in that country. Not surprisingly, this year, U.S. negotiators finally offered the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki its terms for a so-called status of forces agreement, evidently initially demanding the right to occupy into the distant future 58 of the bases it has built.

It has always been obvious — to me, at least — that any discussion of Iraq policy in this country, of timelines or "time horizons," drawdowns or withdrawals, made little sense if those giant facts on the ground weren’t taken into account. And yet you have to search the U.S. press carefully to find any reporting on the subject, nor have bases played any real role in debates in Washington or the nation over Iraq policy.

I could go further: I can think of two intrepid American journalists, Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post and Guy Raz of NPR, who actually visited a single U.S. mega-base, Balad Air Base, which reputedly has a level of air traffic similar to Chicago’s O’Hare International or London’s Heathrow, and offered substantial reports on it. But, as far as I know, they, like the cheese of children’s song, stand alone. I doubt that in the last five years Americans tuning in to their television news have ever been able to see a single report from Iraq that gave a view of what the bases we have built there look like or cost. Although reporters visit them often enough and, for instance, have regularly offered reports from Camp Victory in Baghdad on what’s going on in the rest of Iraq, the cameras never pan away from the reporters to show us the gigantic base itself.

More than five years after ground was broken for the first major American base in Iraq, this is, it seems to me, a remarkable record of media denial. American bases in Afghanistan have generally experienced a similar fate.

My second encounter with base denial came in my other life. When not running TomDispatch.com, I’m a book editor; to be more specific, I’m Chalmers Johnson’s editor. I worked on the prophetic Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, which was published back in 2000 to a singular lack of attention — until, of course, the attacks of 9/11, after which it became a bestseller, adding both "blowback" and the phrase "unintended consequences" to the American lexicon.

By the time The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, the second volume in his Blowback Trilogy, came out in 2004, reviewers, critics, and commentators were all paying attention. The heart of that book focused on how the U.S. garrisons the planet, laying out Pentagon basing policies and discussing specific bases in remarkable detail. This represented serious research and breakthrough work, and the book indeed received much attention here, including major, generally positive reviews. Startlingly, however, not a single mainstream review, no matter how positive, paid any attention, or even really acknowledged, his chapters on the bases, or bothered to discuss the U.S. as a global garrison state. Only three years later did a major reviewer pay the subject serious attention. When Jonathan Freedland reviewed Nemesis, the final book in the Trilogy, in the New York Review of Books, he noticed the obvious and, in a discussion of U.S. basing policy, wrote, for instance:

"Johnson is in deadly earnest when he draws a parallel with Rome. He swats aside the conventional objection that, in contrast with both Romans and Britons, Americans have never constructed colonies abroad. Oh, but they have, he says; it’s just that Americans are blind to them. America is an ’empire of bases,’ he writes, with a network of vast, hardened military encampments across the earth, each one a match for any Roman or Raj outpost."

Not surprisingly, Freedland is not an American journalist, but a British one who works for the Guardian.

In the U.S., military bases really only matter, and so make headlines, when the Pentagon attempts to close some of the vast numbers of them scattered across this country. Then, the fear of lost jobs and lost income in local communities leads to headlines and hubbub.

Of course, millions of Americans know about our bases abroad firsthand. In this sense, they may be the least well kept secrets on the planet. American troops, private contractors, and Defense Department civilian employees all have spent extended periods of time on at least one U.S. base abroad. And yet no one seems to notice the near news blackout on our global bases or consider it the least bit strange.

The Foreshortened American Century

In a nutshell, occupying the planet, base by base, normally simply isn’t news. Americans may pay no attention and yet, of course, they do pay. It turns out to be a staggeringly expensive process for U.S. taxpayers. Writing of a major 2004 Pentagon global base overhaul (largely aimed at relocating many of them closer to the oil heartlands of the planet), Mike Mechanic of Mother Jones magazine online points out the following: "An expert panel convened by Congress to assess the overseas basing realignment put the cost at $20 billion, counting indirect expenses overlooked by the Pentagon, which had initially budgeted one-fifth that amount."

And that’s only the most obvious way Americans pay. It’s hard for us even to begin to grasp just how military (and punitive) is the face that the U.S. has presented to the world, especially during George W. Bush’s two terms in office. (Increasingly, that same face is also presented to Americans. For instance, as Paul Krugman indicated recently, the civilian Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] has been so thoroughly wrecked these last years that significant planning for the response to Hurricane Gustav fell on the shoulders of the military’s Bush-created U.S. Northern Command.)

In purely practical terms, though, Americans are unlikely to be able to shoulder forever the massive global role the Pentagon and successive administrations have laid out for us. Sooner or later, cutbacks will come and the sun will slowly begin to set on our base-world abroad.

In the Cold War era, there were, of course, two "superpowers," the lesser of which disappeared in 1991 after a lifespan of 74 years. Looking at what seemed to be a power vacuum across the Bering Straits, the leaders of the other power prematurely declared themselves triumphant in what had been an epic struggle for global hegemony. It now seems that, rather than victory, the second superpower was just heading for the exit far more slowly.

As of now, "the American Century," birthed by Time/Life publisher Henry Luce in 1941, has lasted but 67 years. Today, you have to be in full-scale denial not to know that the twenty-first century — whether it proves to be the Century of Multipolarity, the Century of China, the Century of Energy, or the Century of Chaos — will not be an American one. The unipolar moment is already so over and, sooner or later, those mega-bases and lily pads alike will wash up on the shores of history, evidence of a remarkable fantasy of a global Pax Americana.

Not that you’re likely to hear much about this in the run-up to November 4th in the U.S. Here, fantasy reigns in both parties where a relatively upbeat view of our globally dominant future is a given, and will remain so, no matter who enters the White House in January 2009. After all, who’s going to run for president not on the idea that "it’s morning again in America," but on the recognition that it’s the wee small hours of the morning, the bender is ending, and the hangover… Well, it’s going to be a doozy.

Better take some B vitamins and get a little sleep. The world’s probably not going to look so great by the dawn’s early light.

[Note on Sources: It’s rare indeed that the U.S. empire of bases gets anything like the attention it deserves, so, when it does, praise is in order. Mother Jones online has just launched a major project to map out and analyze U.S. bases worldwide. It includes a superb new piece on bases by Chalmers Johnson, "America’s Unwelcome Advances" and a number of other top-notch pieces, including one on "How to Stay in Iraq for 1,000 Years" by TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan (the second part of whose Pentagon expansion series will be posted at this site soon). Check out the package of pieces at MJ by clicking here. Perhaps most significant, the magazine has produced an impressive online interactive map of U.S. bases worldwide. Check it out by clicking here. But when you zoom in on an individual country, do note that the first base figures you’ll see are the Pentagon’s and so possibly not complete. You need to read the MJ texts below each map to get a fuller picture. As will be obvious, if you click on the links in this post, I made good use of MJ’s efforts, for which I offer many thanks.]

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 American Age of Denial. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site, has just been published. Focusing on what the mainstream media hasn’t covered, it is an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt

Oh, the spectacle of it all — and don’t think I’m referring to those opening ceremonies in Beijing, where North Korean-style synchronization seemed to fuse with smiley-faced Walt Disney, or Michael Phelp’s thrilling hunt for eight gold medals and Speedo’s one million dollar "bonus," a modernized tribute to the ancient Greek tradition of amateurism in action. No, I’m thinking of the blitz of media coverage after Dr. Bruce Ivins, who worked at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, committed suicide by Tylenol on July 29th and the FBI promptly accused him of the anthrax attacks of September and October 2001.

You remember them: the powder that, innocuously enough, arrived by envelope — giving going postal a new meaning — accompanied by hair-raising letters ominously dated "09-11-01" that said, "Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great." Five Americans would die from anthrax inhalation and 17 would be injured. The Hart Senate Office Building, along with various postal facilities, would be shut down for months of clean-up, while media companies that received the envelopes were thrown into chaos.

For a nation already terrified by the attacks of September 11, 2001, the thought that a brutal dictator with weapons of mass destruction (who might even have turned the anthrax over to the terrorists) was ready to do us greater harm undoubtedly helped pave the way for an invasion of Iraq. The President would even claim that Saddam Hussein had the ability to send unmanned aerial vehicles to spray biological or chemical weapons over the east coast of the United States (drones that, like Saddam’s nuclear program, would turn out not to exist).

Today, it’s hard even to recall just how terrifying those anthrax attacks were. According to a LexisNexis search, between Oct. 4 and Dec. 4, 2001, 389 stories appeared in the New York Times with "anthrax" in the headline. In that same period, 238 such stories appeared in the Washington Post. That’s the news equivalent of an unending, high-pitched scream of horror — and from those attacks would emerge an American world of hysteria involving orange alerts and duct tape, smallpox vaccinations, and finally a war, lest any of this stuff, or anything faintly like it, fall into the hands of terrorists.

And yet, by the end of 2001, it had become clear that, despite the accompanying letters, the anthrax in those envelopes was from a domestically produced strain. It was neither from the backlands of Afghanistan nor from Baghdad, but — almost certainly — from our own military bio-weapons labs. At that point, the anthrax killings essentially vanished… Poof!… while 9/11 only gained traction as the singular event of our times.

Those deaths-by-anthrax ceased to be part of the administration’s developing Global War on Terror narrative, which was, of course, aimed at Islamist fanatics (and scads of countries that were said to provide them with "safe haven"), but certainly not military scientists here at home. No less quickly did those attacks drop from the front pages — in fact, simply from the pages — of the nation’s newspapers and off TV screens.

Unlike with 9/11, there would be no ritualistic reminders of the anniversaries of those attacks in years to come. No victims, or survivors, or relatives of victims would step to podiums and ring bells, or read names, or offer encomiums. There would be no billion-dollar (or even million-dollar) memorial to the anthrax dead for the survivors to argue over. There would be little but silence, while the FBI fumbled its misbegotten way through an investigative process largely focused on one U.S. bio-weapons scientist, Steven J. Hatfill, who also worked at Fort Detrick and just happened to be the wrong man. (Bruce Ivins, eerily enough, would work closely with, and aid, the FBI’s investigation for years until the spotlight of suspicion came to be directed at him.)

This essentially remained the state of the case until, as July ended, Ivins committed suicide. Then, what a field day! The details, the questions, the doubts, the disputed scientific evidence, the lists of kinds of drugs he was prescribed, the lurid quotes, the "rat’s nest" of an anthrax-contaminated lab he worked in, the strange emails and letters! ("I wish I could control the thoughts in my mind… I get incredible paranoid, delusional thoughts at times, and there’s nothing I can do until they go away, either by themselves or with drugs.") Case solved! Or not… The "mad scientist" from the Army’s Fort Detrick bio-wars labs finally nabbed! Or not…

It was a dream of a story. And the mainstream media ran with it, knowledgeably, authoritatively, as if they had never let it go. Now, as the coverage fades and the story once again threatens to head for obscurity (despite doubts about Ivins’s role in the attacks), I thought it might be worth mentioning a few questions that came to my mind as I read through recent coverage — not on Ivins’s guilt or innocence, but on matters that are so much a part of our American landscape that normally no one even thinks to ask about them.

Here are my top six questions about the case:

1. Why wasn’t the Bush administration’s War on Terror modus operandi applied to the anthrax case?

On August 10th, William J. Broad and Scott Shane reported on some of the human costs of the FBI anthrax investigation in a front-page New York Times piece headlined, "For Suspects, Anthrax Case Had Big Costs, Scores of the Innocent in a Wide F.B.I. Net." They did a fine job of establishing that those who serially came under suspicion had a tough time of it: "lost jobs, canceled visas, broken marriages, frayed friendships." According to the Times (and others), under the pressure of FBI surveillance, several had their careers wrecked; most were interviewed and re-interviewed numerous times in a "heavy-handed" manner, as well as polygraphed; some were tailed and trailed, their homes searched, and their workplaces ransacked.

Under the pressure of FBI "interest," anthrax specialist and "biodefense insider" Perry Mikesell evidently turned into an alcoholic and drank himself to death. Steven Hatfill, while his life was being turned inside out, had an agent trailing him in a car run over his foot, for which, Broad and Shane add, he, not the agent, was issued a ticket. And finally, of course, Dr. Ivins, growing ever more distressed and evidently ever less balanced, committed suicide on the day his lawyer was meeting with the FBI about a possible plea bargain that could have left him in jail for life, but would have taken the death penalty off the table.

Still, tough as life was for Mikesell, Hatfill, Ivins, and scores of others, here’s an observation that you’ll see nowhere else in a media that’s had a two-week romp through the case: In search of a confession, none of the suspects of these last years, including Ivins, ever had a lighted cigarette inserted in his ear; none of them were hit, spit on, kicked, and paraded naked; none were beaten to death while imprisoned but uncharged with a crime; none were doused with cold water and left naked in a cell on a freezing night; none were given electric shocks, hooded, shackled in painful "stress positions," or sodomized; none were subjected to loud music, flashing lights, and denied sleep for days on end; none were smothered to death, or made to crawl naked across a jail floor in a dog collar, or menaced by guard dogs. None were ever waterboarded.

Whatever the pressure on Ivins or Hatfill, neither was kidnapped off a street near his house, stripped of his clothes, diapered, blindfolded, shackled, drugged, and "rendered" to the prisons of another country, possibly to be subjected to electric shocks or cut by scalpel by the torturers of a foreign regime. Even though each of the suspects in the anthrax murders was, at some point, believed to have been a terrorist who had committed a heinous crime with a weapon of mass destruction, none were ever declared "enemy combatants." None were ever imprisoned without charges, or much hope of trial or release, in off-shore, secret, CIA-run "black sites."

Why not?

2. Why wasn’t the U.S. military sent in?

Part of the reigning paradigm of the Bush years was this: police work was not enough when the homeland was threatened. The tracking down of terrorists who had killed or might someday kill Americans was a matter of "war." Those who had attacked the American homeland and murdered U.S. citizens would, as our President put it, be "hunted down" by special ops forces and CIA agents who had been granted the right to assassinate and brought in "dead or alive."

Why then, when acts of murderous bio-terror had been committed on American soil, was the military not called in? Why were no CIA "death squads" — the tellingly descriptive phrase used by Jane Mayer in her remarkable new book, The Dark Side — dispatched to assassinate likely suspects? Why were no Predator unmanned drones, armed with Hellfire missiles, launched to cruise the skies of Maryland and take out Ivins or other suspects "precisely" and "surgically" in their homes (whatever the "collateral damage")? Why, in fact, weren’t their homes simply obliterated in the manner regularly employed in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and elsewhere? (In fact, it seems to have taken the FBI two years after their first suspicions of Ivins simply to search his house and even longer finally to take away his high-level security clearance.)

Once U.S. weapons labs were identified as the sources of the anthrax, why were no special ops teams sent in to occupy the facilities, shut them down, and fly those found there, shackled and blindfolded, to Guantanamo or other more secret sites?

Why, when the administration went to great lengths to squeeze off funding for terrorists elsewhere, was funding for those labs significantly increased?

Why, when those swept up or simply kidnapped by the Bush administration and then discovered to be innocent, were — after secret imprisonment, abuse, and torture — regularly released without apology or reimbursement (if released at all), did the U.S. government pay Hatfill $4.6 million to settle a lawsuit he filed in response to his ordeal?

Why when, according to the Vice President’s "one percent doctrine," no response was too extreme if even a minuscule chance of a catastrophic attack against the U.S. "homeland" existed, were no extreme acts taken with a WMD killer (or killers) on the loose, possibly in Maryland’s suburbs?

3. Once the anthrax threat was identified as coming from U.S. military labs, why did the administration, the FBI, and the media assume that only a single individual was responsible?

Read as much of the coverage of the anthrax killings as you want and you’ll discover that the FBI has long taken for blanket fact that a single "mad scientist" was the culprit — and, no less important, that that theory has been accepted as bedrock fact by the media as well. No alternative possibilities have been seriously considered for years.

For instance, it is known that a set of the anthrax letters was sent from a mailbox in Princeton, New Jersey, some hours from Ivins’s home and the Fort Detrick lab in Frederick, Maryland. The question the FBI puzzled over — and the media took up vigorously — was whether, on the day in question, Ivins had time to make it to Princeton and back, given what’s known of his schedule. The FBI suggests that he did; critics suggest otherwise. No one, however, seems to consider the possibility that the lone terrorist of the anthrax killings might have had one or more accomplices, which would have made the "problem" of mailing those letters into a piece of cake.

Is it that Americans, as opposed to foreigners bent on terrorism, are assumed to be unstoppable individualists, loners canny enough to carry out plots by themselves? Does no one recall that the last great act of American terrorism in the United States, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, was a crime committed by at least two American "loners"? (The earliest reports in that case, too, blamed Arab terrorists — plural.)

There seem to have been no serious al-Qaeda "sleeper cells" in this country, but how do we know that there isn’t a "sleeper cell" of American bio-killers lurking somewhere in the U.S. military lab community?

4. What of those military labs? Why does their history continue to play little or no part in the story of the anthrax attacks?

In reading through reams of coverage of Ivins’s suicide and the FBI case against him, I found only a single reference to the work his lab at Fort Detrick had been dedicated to throughout most of the Cold War era. Here is that sentence from the Washington Post: "As home to the Army Biological Warfare Laboratories, the facility ran a top-secret program producing offensive biological weapons from 1943 until 1969." And yet, if you don’t grasp this fact, the real significance of the anthrax case remains in the shadows.

As with the continuing story of nuclear dangers on our planet, the terrors of our age are almost invariably portrayed as emerging from bands of fanatics, or lands like Iran said to be ruled by the same, in the backlands of our planet (some of which also just happen to be in the energy heartlands of the same planet). And yet, if we are terrified enough of loose or proliferating weapons of mass destruction to threaten or start wars over them, it’s important to understand that, from 1945 on, these dangers — and they are grim dangers — emerged from the heartland of the military-industrial machines of the two Cold War superpowers, the U.S. and the USSR.

Put another way, the most conceptually frightening attacks of 2001 came directly from the Cold War urge to develop offensive biological weapons. Until 1969, the Army’s biological-warfare laboratories at Fort Detrick were focused, in part, on that task. Plain and simple. After President Richard Nixon shut down the offensive bio-war program in 1969, the Army’s scientists switched to work on "defenses" against the same. As with defenses against nuclear attack, however, such work, by its nature, is often hard to separate from offensive work on such weaponry. In other words, looked at a certain way, one focus of the Fort Detrick lab, which fell under suspicion in the anthrax attacks by the winter of 2001, has long been putting bio-war on the global menu. In that, it was evidently successful in the end.

There is irony here, of course. In the post-Cold War era, our worries focused almost solely on the deteriorating, sometimes ill-guarded Russian Cold War labs and storehouses for biological, chemical, and nuclear war. It was long feared that, from them, such nightmares would drop into our world. But in this we were, it seems, wrong. The labs with the holes were ours and — what’s more terrifying — the possibilities for leakage and misuse are still expanding exponentially.

5. Were the anthrax attacks the less important ones of 2001?

If you compare the two sets of 2001 attacks in terms of death and destruction, 9/11 obviously leaves the anthrax attacks in the dust. Thought about a certain way, however, the attacks of 9/11, while bold, murderous, televisually spectacular, and apocalyptic looking, were conceptually old hat. It was the anthrax attacks that pointed the way to a new and frightening future.

After all, the World Trade Center had already been attacked, and one of its towers nearly toppled, by a rental-van bomb driven into an underground garage by Islamists back in 1993. The planes in the 2001 assaults were, as Mike Davis has written, simply car bombs with wings, and car bombs have a painfully long history. Even though in their targeting — the symbolic mega-buildings of an imperial power whose citizens previously preferred to believe themselves invulnerable — the 9/11 hijackers offered a new psychological reality to Americans, their most striking and unsettling feature was perhaps themselves. Those 19 men had pledged to commit suicide not for their country, as had thousands of Japanese kamikaze pilots at the end of World War II, or even for a potential country like hundreds of Tamil suicide bombers in Sri Lanka, but for a religious fantasy (behind which lay non-religious grievances). On the other hand, the 9/11 attacks were but a larger, more ambitious version of, for instance, the suicide-by-boat attack on the U.S.S. Cole in a Yemeni port in 2000.

On the other hand, the anthrax mailings represented something new. (The Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult had attempted to make and use bio-weapons, including anthrax, back in 1990s, but failed.) If the al-Qaeda strike on 9/11 had only simulated a weapon-of-mass-destruction attack, with the anthrax killer, no imagination was necessary. An actual weapon of mass destruction — highly refined anthrax — had been used successfully, then used again, and the killer(s) remained at large, not in the Afghan backlands but somewhere in our midst, with no evidence that the supply of anthrax had been used up.

And yet, even as the Bush administration, the two presidential candidates, all of Washington, and the media remain focused on terrorism in the Afghan-Pakistani border regions, few give serious thought — except when it comes to individual culpability — to the terror that emerged from the depths of the military-industrial complex, from our own Cold War weapons labs. To that, no aspect of the Global War on Terror seems to apply.

6. Who is winning the Global War on Terror?

The answer, obviously, is the terrorists. Just last week, Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, made this crystal clear when it came to al-Qaeda. He testified before Congress that the organization "is gaining in strength from its refuge in Pakistan and is steadily improving its ability to recruit, train and position operatives capable of carrying out attacks inside the United States." In fact, it’s been clear enough for quite a while that the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror has mainly succeeded in creating ever more terrorists in ever more places. And yet, arguably, the anthrax killer or killers have, to date, gained far more than al-Qaeda. Looked at a certain way, whatever the role of Bruce Ivins, the anthrax killings proved to be a full-scale triumph of terrorism.

One theory has long been that whoever committed the anthrax outrages was intent on drawing attention (and probably funding) to further research and development of U.S. bio-war "defenses." If so, then, what a remarkable success! In the years since the attacks occurred, funding has flooded into such labs, whose numbers have grown strikingly. On September 11, 2001, reports the Washington Post, "there were only five ‘biosafety level 4′ labs — places equipped to study highly lethal agents such as Ebola that have no human vaccine or treatment — a Government Accountability Office report stated last fall. Fifteen are in operation or under construction now, according to the report. There are hundreds more biosafety level 3 labs, which handle agents such as Bacillus anthracis, which does have a human vaccine."

The few hundred people at work in the U.S. bio-defense program before 9/11 have swelled to perhaps 14,000 scientists who have "clearances to work with ‘select biological agents’ such as Bacillus anthracis — many of them civilians working at private universities" where, according to experts, "security regulations are remarkably lax." And don’t forget the Army’s own billion-dollar plan to "build a larger laboratory complex as part of a proposed interagency biodefense campus at Fort Detrick." We’re talking about the place where, as Ivins’s crew was evidently nicknamed, "Team Anthrax" worked and whose labs are reputedly "renowned for losing anthrax." In these same years, according to the New York Times, "almost $50 billion in federal money has been spent to build new laboratories, develop vaccines and stockpile drugs." Some of this money was pulled out of basic public health funds which once ensured that large numbers of people wouldn’t die of treatable diseases like tuberculosis and redirected into work on the Ebola virus, anthrax, and other exotic pathogens.

In these years, not to put too fine a point on it, the Bush administration has exponentially expanded our bio-war labs, increasing significantly the likelihood that a new "mad scientist" will have far more opportunity and far more deadly material available to work with. It has, in other words, increased the likelihood not just that terror will come to "the homeland," but that it will come from the homeland. Thanks to this administration, the terrorists won this round and future terrorists can reap the fruits of that victory.

Bruce Ivins, whatever you did, or whatever was done to you, R.I.P. Your lab is in good hands. And the likelihood is that, almost seven years after the first anthrax envelope arrived, the world is more of a terror machine than ever.

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 American Age of Denial. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site, has just been published. Focusing on what the mainstream media hasn’t covered, it is an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

[Note on readings: Oddly enough, back in December 2002, as this site was going public, the very first TomDispatch guest writer, public health expert David Rosner, took up the issue of smallpox hysteria, pointing out that the disease was saved from total eradication on the planet by a U.S./USSR agreement "to make sure that the virus that causes smallpox would remain in storage awaiting a new opportunity to terrorize the world. For decades, both countries stored it, distributed it to various research labs and otherwise ensured that this public health victory would be turned into a potential human tragedy." He added: "Fear of smallpox has played nicely into the overall strategy of the Bush administration to militarize public health." It’s a piece worth revisiting, as perhaps is "It Should Have Been Unforgettable," a post I wrote back in 2005 when the anthrax case had long fallen off the American radar screen.

More recently, Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com has done superb work on the anthrax story. In 2007, he wrote a striking column, "The unresolved story of ABC News’ false Saddam-anthrax reports," on some crucially bad reporting by Brian Ross and ABC, and he followed up after Ivins’s suicide with a piece, ("Journalists, their lying sources, and the anthrax investigation,") that has more unsettling questions about the anthrax case than any other 16 pieces I’ve seen. It’s a must read. Jay Rosen, at his always interesting PressThink blog, took up Greenwald’s challenge to Brian Ross and ABC on its reporting and pressed the point home in two recent posts, here and here.

Finally, Elisa D. Harris, a senior research scholar at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, had a fine, thoughtful op-ed last week in the New York Times, "The Killers in the Lab" ("Our efforts to fight biological weapons are making us less safe"), which laid out in an impressive way the expansion of U.S. bio-weapons research since 2001.]

Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt

Send me a postcard, drop me a line,
Stating point of view.
Indicate precisely what you mean to say
Yours sincerely, Wasting Away.
— the Beatles, "When I’m 64"

I set foot, so to speak, on this planet on July 20, 1944, not perhaps the best day of the century. It was, in fact, the day of the failed German officers’ plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

My mother was a cartoonist. She was known in those years as "New York’s girl caricaturist," or so she’s called in a newspaper ad I still have, part of a war-bond drive in which your sizeable bond purchase was to buy her sketch of you. She had, sometime in the months before my birth, traveled by train, alone, the breadth of a mobilized but still peaceable American continent to visit Hollywood on assignment for some magazine to sketch the stars. I still have, on my wall, a photo of her in that year on the "deck" of a "pirate ship" on a Hollywood lot drawing one of those gloriously handsome matinee idols. Since I was then inside her, this is not exactly part of my memory bank. But that photo does tell me that, like him, she, too, was worth a sketch.

Certainly, it was appropriate that she drew the card announcing my birth. There I am in that announcement, barely born and already caricatured, a boy baby in nothing but diapers – except that, on my head, I’m wearing my father’s dress military hat, the one I still have in the back of my closet, and, of course, I’m saluting. "A Big Hello — From Thomas Moore Engelhardt," the card says. And thus was I officially recorded entering a world at war.

By then, my father, a major in the U.S. Army Air Corps and operations officer for the 1st Air Commando Group in Burma, had, I believe, been reassigned to the Pentagon. Normally a voluble man, for the rest of his life he remained remarkably silent on his wartime experiences.

I was, in other words, the late child of a late marriage. My father, who, just after Pearl Harbor, at age 35, volunteered for the military, was the sort of figure that the — on average — 26-year-old American soldiers of World War II would have referred to as "pops."

He, like my mother, departed this planet decades ago, and I’m still here. So think of this as… what? No longer, obviously, a big hello from Thomas Moore Engelhardt, nor — quite yet — a modest farewell, but perhaps a moderately late report from the one-man commission of me on the world of peace and war I’ve passed through since that first salute.

On Imagining Myself as Burnt Toast

Precisely what do I mean to say now that I’m just a couple of weeks into my 65th year on this planet?

Let me start this way: If, on the evening of October 22, 1962, you had told me that, in 2008, America’s most formidable enemy would be Iran, I would have danced a jig. Well, maybe not a jig, but I’ll tell you this: I would have been flabbergasted.

On that October evening, President John F. Kennedy went before the nation — I heard him on radio — to tell us all that Soviet missile sites were just then being prepared on the island of Cuba with "a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere." It was, he said, a "secret, swift and extraordinary buildup of communist missiles — in an area well known to have a special and historical relationship to the United States and the nations of the Western Hemisphere." When fully operational, those nuclear-tipped weapons would reach "as far north as Hudson Bay, Canada, and as far south as Lima, Peru." I certainly knew what Hudson Bay, far to the north, meant for me.

"It shall be the policy of this nation," Kennedy added ominously, "to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union." And he ended, in part, this way: "My fellow citizens: let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out. No one can foresee precisely what course it will take or what costs or casualties will be incurred…"

No one could mistake the looming threat: Global nuclear war. Few of us listeners had seen the highly classified 1960 SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan) in which the U.S. military had made its preparations for a massive first strike of 3,200 nuclear weapons against the communist world. It was supposed to take out at least 130 cities, with estimated casualties approaching 300 million, but, even without access to that SIOP, we — I — knew well enough what might be coming. After all, I had seen versions of it, perfectly unclassified, in the movies, even if the power to destroy on a planetary scale was transposed to alien worlds, as in that science fiction blockbuster of 1955 "This Island Earth," or imputed to strange alien rays, or rampaging radioactive monsters. Now, here it was in real life, my life, without an obvious director, and the special effects were likely to be me, dead.

It was the single moment in my life — which tells you much about the life of an American who didn’t go to war in some distant land — when I truly imagined myself as prospective burnt toast. I really believed that I might not make it out of the week, and keep in mind, I was then a freshman in college, just 18 years old and still wondering when life was slated to begin. Between 1939 and 2008, across much of the world, few people could claim to have escaped quite so lightly, not in that near three-quarters of a century in which significant portions of the world were laid low.

Had you, a seer that terrifying night, whispered in my ear the news about our enemies still distant decades away, the Iranians, the… are you kidding?… Iraqis, or a bunch of fanatics in the backlands of Afghanistan and a tribal borderland of Pakistan… well, it’s a sentence that would, at the time, have been hard to finish. Death from Waziristan? I don’t think so.

Truly, that night, if I had been convinced that this was "my" future — that, in fact, I would have a future — I might have dropped to my knees in front of that radio from which Kennedy’s distinctive voice was emerging and thanked my lucky stars; or perhaps — and this probably better fits the public stance of an awkward, self-conscious 18-year-old — I would have laughed out loud at the obvious absurdity of it all. ("The absurd" was then a major category in my life.) Fanatics from Afghanistan? Please…

That we’re here now, that the world wasn’t burnt to a crisp in the long superpower standoff of the Cold War, well, that still seems little short of a miracle to me, a surprise of history that offers hope… of a sort. The question, of course, is: Why, with this in mind, don’t I feel better, more hopeful, now?

After all, if offered as a plot to sci-fi movie directors of that long-gone era — perfectly willing to populate Los Angeles with giant, mutated, screeching ants (Them!), the Arctic with "The Thing From Another World," and Washington D.C. with an alien and his mighty robot, capable of melting tanks or destroying the planet ("Klaatu barada nikto!") — our present would surely have been judged too improbable for the screen. They wouldn’t have touched it with a ten-foot pole, and yet that’s what actually came about — and the planet, a prospective cinder (along with us prospective cinderettes) is, remarkably enough, still here.

Or to put this in a smaller, grimmer way, consider the fate of the American military base at Guantanamo — an extra-special symbol of that "special and historical relationship" mentioned by Kennedy between the small island of Cuba and its giant "neighbor" to the northwest. In that address to the nation in 1962, the president announced that he was reinforcing the base, even as he was evacuating dependents from it. And yet, like me in my 65th year, it, too, survived the Cuban Missile Crisis unscathed. Some four decades later, in fact, it was still in such a special and historical relationship with Cuba that the Bush administration was able to use it to publicly establish all its new categories of off-shore injustice — its global mini-gulag of secret prisons, its public policies of torture, detention without charges, disappearance, you name it. None of which, by the way, would the same set of directors have touched with the same pole. Back in the 1950s, only Nazis, members of the Japanese imperial Army, and KGB agents could publicly relish torture on screen. The FOX TV show "24" is distinctly an artifact of our moment.

A Paroxysm of Destruction Only a Few Miles Wide

Of course, back in 1962, even before Kennedy spoke, I could no more have imagined myself 64 than I could have imagined living through "World War IV" — as one set of neocons loved to call the President’s Global War on Terror — a "war" to be fought mainly against thousands of Islamist fanatics scattered around the planet and an "axis of evil" consisting of three relatively weak regional powers. I certainly expected bigger, far worse things. And little wonder: When it came to war, the full weight of the history of most of the last century pointed exponentially in the direction of a cataclysm with few or no survivors.

From my teen years, I was, you might say, of the Tom Lehrer school of life (as in the lyrics from his 1959 song, "We Will All Go Together When We Go") — and I was hardly alone:

We will all fry together when we fry.
We’ll be french fried potatoes by and by.
There will be no more misery
When the world is our rotisserie.
Yes, we will all fry together when we fry…

And we’ll all bake together when we bake,
They’ll be nobody present at the wake.
With complete participation
In that grand incineration,
Nearly three billion hunks of well-done steak.

I was born, after all, just a year and a few weeks before the United States atomically incinerated Hiroshima and then followed up by atomically obliterating the city of Nagasaki, and World War II ended. Victory arrived, but amid scenes of planetary carnage, genocide, and devastation on a scale and over an expanse previously unimaginable.

In these last years, the Bush administration has regularly invoked the glories of the American role in World War II and of the occupations of Germany and Japan that followed. Even before then, Americans had been experiencing something like a "greatest generation" fest (complete with bestselling books, a blockbuster movie, and two multi-part greatest-gen TV mini-series). From the point of view of the United States, however, World War II was mainly a "world" war in the world that it mobilized, not in the swath of the planet it turned into a charnel house of destruction. After all, the United States (along with the rest of the "New World") was left essentially untouched by both "world" wars. North Africa, the Middle East, and New Guinea all suffered incomparably more damage. Other than a single attack on the American fleet at Hawaii, thousands of miles from the U.S. mainland, on December 7, 1941, the brief Japanese occupation of a couple of tiny Aleutian islands off Alaska, a U-boat war off its coasts, and small numbers of balloon fire bombs that drifted from Japan over the American west, this continent remained peaceable and quite traversable by a 35-year-old theatrical caricaturist in the midst of wartime.

For Americans, I doubt that the real import of that phrase World War — of the way the industrial machinery of complete devastation enveloped much of the planet in the course of the last century — ever quite came home. There had, of course, been world, or near-world, or "known world" wars in the past, even if not thought of that way. The Mongols, after all, had left the steppes of northeastern Asia and conquered China, only being turned back from Japan by the first kamikaze ("divine wind") attacks in history, typhoons which repelled the Mongol fleet in 1274 and again in 1281. Mongol horsemen, however, made their way west across the Eurasian continent, conquering lands and wreaking havoc, reaching the very edge of Europe while, in 1258, sacking and burning Baghdad. (It wouldn’t happen again until 2003.) In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the British and French fought something closer to a "world war," serial wars actually in and around Europe, in North Africa, in their New World colonies and even as far away as India, as well as at sea wherever their ships ran across one another.

Still, while war may have been globalizing, it remained, essentially, a locally or regionally focused affair. And, of course, in the decades before World War I, it was largely fought on the global peripheries by European powers testing out, piecemeal, the rudimentary industrial technology of mass slaughter — the machine gun, the airplane, poison gas, the concentration camp — on no one more significant than benighted "natives" in places like Iraq, the Sudan, or German Southwest Africa. Those locals — and the means by which they died — were hardly worthy of notice until, in 1914, Europeans suddenly, unbelievably, began killing other Europeans by similar means and in staggering numbers, while bringing war into a new era of destruction. It was indeed a global moment.

While the American Civil War had offered a preview of war, industrial-style, including trench warfare and the use of massed firepower, World War I offered the first full-scale demonstration of what industrial warfare meant in the heartlands of advanced civilization. The machine gun, the airplane, and poison gas arrived from their testing grounds in the colonies to decimate a generation of European youth, while the tank, wheeled into action in 1916, signaled a new world of rapid arms advances to come. Nonetheless, that war — even as it touched the Middle East, Africa, and Asia — wasn’t quite imagined as a "world war" while still ongoing. At the time, it was known as the Great War.

Though parts of Tsarist Russia were devastated, the most essential, signature style of destruction was anything but worldwide. It was focused — like a lens on kindling — on a strip of land that stretched from the Swiss border to the Atlantic Ocean, running largely through France, and most of the time not more than a few miles wide. There, on "the Western front," for four unbelievable years, opposing armies fought — to appropriate an American term from the Vietnam War — a "meat grinder" of a war of a kind never seen before. "Fighting," though, hardly covered the event. It was a paroxysm of death and destruction.

That modest expanse of land was bombarded by many millions of shells, torn up, and thoroughly devastated. Every thing built on, or growing upon it, was leveled, and, in the process, millions of young men — many tens of thousands on single days of "trench warfare" — were mercilessly slaughtered. After those four unbearably long years, the Great War ended in 1918 with a whimper and in a bitter peace in the West, while, in the East, amid civil war, the Bolsheviks came to power. The semi-peace that followed turned out to be little more than a two-decade armistice between bloodlettings.

We’re talking here, of course, about "the war to end all wars." If only.

World War II (or the ever stronger suspicion that it would come) retrospectively put that "I" on the Great War and turned it into the First World War. Twenty years later, when "II" arrived, the world was industrially and scientifically prepared for new levels of destruction. That war might, in a sense, be imagined as the extended paroxysm of violence on the Western front scientifically intensified — after all, air power had, by then, begun to come into its own — so that the sort of scorched-earth destruction on that strip of trench-land on the Western Front could now be imposed on whole countries (Japan), whole continents (Europe), almost inconceivable expanses of space (all of Russia from Moscow to the Polish border where, by 1945, next to nothing would remain standing ). Where there had once been "civilization," after the second global spasm of sustained violence little would be left but bodies, rubble, and human scarecrows striving to survive in the wreckage. With the Nazi organization of the Holocaust, even genocide would be industrialized and the poison gas of the previous World War would be put to far more efficient use.

This was, of course, a form of "globalization," though its true nature is seldom much considered when Americans highlight the experiences of that greatest generation. And no wonder. Except for those soldiers fighting and dying abroad, it simply wasn’t experienced by Americans. It’s hard to believe now that, in 1945, the European civilization that had experienced a proud peace from 1871-1914 while dominating two-thirds of the planet lay in utter ruins; that it had become a site of genocide, its cities reduced to rubble, its fields laid waste, its lands littered with civilian dead, its streets flooded by refugees: a description that in recent times would be recognizable only of a place like Chechnya or perhaps Sierra Leone.

Of course, it wasn’t the First or Second, but the Third "World War" that took up almost the first half-century of my own life, and that, early on, seemed to be coming to culmination in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Had the logic of the previous wars been followed, a mere two decades after the "global," but still somewhat limited, devastation of World War II, war’s destruction would have been exponentially upped once again. In that brief span, the technology — in the form of A- and H-bombs, and the air fleets to go with them, and of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles — was already in place to transform the whole planet into a version of those few miles of the Western front, 1914-1918. After a nuclear exchange between the superpowers, much of the world could well have been burnt to a crisp, many hundreds of millions or even billions of people destroyed, and — we now know — a global winter induced that might conceivably have sent us in the direction of the dinosaurs.

The logic of war’s developing machinery seemed to be leading inexorably in just that direction. Otherwise, how do you explain the way the United States and the Soviet Union, long after both superpowers had the ability to destroy all human life on Planet Earth, simply could not stop upgrading and adding to their nuclear arsenals until the U.S. had about 30,000 weapons sometime in the mid-1960s, and Soviets about 40,000 in the 1980s. It was as if the two powers were preparing for the destruction of many planets. Such a war would have given the fullest meaning to "world" and no ocean, no line of defenses, would have left any continent, any place, out of the mix. This is what World War III, whose name would have had to be given prospectively, might have meant (and, of course, could still mean).

Or think of the development of "world war" over the twentieth century another way. It was but a generation, no more, from the first flight of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk to the 1,000-bomber raid. In 1903, one fragile plane flies 120 feet. In 1911, an Italian lieutenant in another only slightly less fragile plane, still seeming to defy some primordial law, drops a bomb on an oasis in North Africa. In 1944 and 1945, those 1,000 plane air armadas take off to devastate German and Japanese cities.

On August 6, 1945, all the power of those armadas was compacted into the belly of a lone B-29, the Enola Gay, which dropped its single bomb on Hiroshima, destroying the city and many of its inhabitants. All this, again, took place in little more than a single generation. In fact, Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay, was born only 12 years after the first rudimentary plane took to the air. And only seven years after Japan surrendered, the first H-bomb was tested, a weapon whose raw destructive power made the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima look like a mere bagatelle.

Admittedly, traces of humanity remained everywhere amid the carnage. After all, the plane that carried that first bomb was named after Tibbets’s mother, and the bomb itself dubbed "Little Boy," as if this were a birthing experience. The name of the second plane, Bockscar, was nothing but a joke based on similarity of the name of its pilot, Frederick Bock, who didn’t even fly it that day, and a railroad "boxcar." But events seemed to be pushing humanity toward the inhuman, toward transformation of the planet into a vast Death Camp, toward developments which no words, not even "world war," seemed to capture.

Entering the Age of Denial

It was, of course, this world of war from which, in 1945, the United States emerged triumphant. The Great Depression of the 1930s would, despite wartime fears to the contrary, not reappear. On a planet many of whose great cities were now largely rubble, a world of refugee camps and privation, a world destroyed (to steal the title of a book on the dropping of the atomic bomb), the U.S. was untouched.

The world war had, in fact, leveled all its rivals and made the U.S. a powerhouse of economic expansion. That war and the atomic bomb had somehow ushered in a golden age of abundance and consumerism. All the deferred dreams and desires of depression and wartime America — the washing machine, the TV set, the toaster, the automobile, the suburban house, you name it — were suddenly available to significant numbers of Americans. The U.S. military began to demobilize and the former troops returned not to rubble, but to new tract homes and G.I. Bill educations.

The taste of ashes may have been in global mouths, but the taste of nectar (or, at least, Coca Cola) was in American ones. And yet all of this was shadowed by our own "victory weapon," by the dark train of thought that led quickly to scenarios of our own destruction in newspapers and magazines, on the radio, in movies, and on TV (think, "The Twilight Zone"), as well as in a spate of novels that took readers beyond the end of the world and into landscapes involving irradiated, hiroshimated futures filled with "mutants" and survivalists. The young, with their own pocket money to spend just as they pleased for the first time in history — teens on the verge of becoming "trend setters" — found themselves plunged into a mordant, yet strangely thrilling world, as I’ve written elsewhere, of "triumphalist despair."

At the economic and governmental level, the 24/7 world of sunny consumerism increasingly merged with the 24/7 world of dark atomic alerts, of ever vigilant armadas of nuclear-armed planes ready to take off on a moment’s notice to obliterate the Soviets. After all, the peaceable giants of consumer production now doubled as the militarized giants of weapons production. A military Keynesianism drove the U.S. economy toward a form of consumerism in which desire for the ever larger car and missile, electric range and tank, television console and atomic submarine was wedded in single corporate entities. The companies — General Electric, General Motors, and Westinghouse, among others — producing the icons of the American home were also major contractors developing the weapons systems ushering the Pentagon into its own age of abundance.

In the 1950s, then, it seemed perfectly natural for Charles Wilson, president of General Motors, to become secretary of defense in the Eisenhower administration, just as retiring generals and admirals found it natural to move into the employ of corporations they had only recently employed on the government’s behalf. Washington, headquarters of global abundance, was also transformed into a planetary military headquarters. By 1957, 200 generals and admirals as well as 1,300 colonels or naval officers of similar rank, retired or on leave, worked for civilian agencies, and military funding spilled over into a Congress that redirected its largesse to districts nationwide.

Think of all this as the beginning not so much of the American (half) Century, but of an American Age of Denial that lasted until… well, I think we can actually date it… until September 11, 2001, the day that "changed everything." Okay, perhaps not "everything," but, by now, it’s far clearer just what the attacks of that day, the collapse of those towers, the murder of thousands, did change — and of just how terrible, how craven but, given our previous history, how unsurprising the response to it actually was.

Those dates — 1945-2001 — 56 years in which life was organized, to a significant degree, to safeguard Americans from an "atomic Pearl Harbor," from the thought that two great oceans were no longer protection enough for this continent, that the United States was now part of a world capable of being laid low. In those years, the sun of good fortune shone steadily on the U.S. of A., even as American newspapers, just weeks after Hiroshima, began drawing concentric circles of destruction around American cities and imagining their future in ruins. Think of this as the shadow story of that era, the gnawing anxiety at the edge of abundance, like those memento mori skulls carefully placed amid cornucopias in seventeenth-century Dutch still-life paintings.

In those decades, the "arms race" never abated, not even long after both superpowers had a superabundant ability to take each other out. World-ending weaponry was being constantly "perfected" — MIRVed, put on rails, divided into land, sea, and air "triads," and, of course, made ever more powerful and accurate. Nonetheless, Americans, to take Herman Kahn’s famous phrase, preferred most of the time not to think too much about "the unthinkable" — and what it meant for them.

As the 1980s began, however, in a surge of revulsion at decades of denial, a vast anti-nuclear movement briefly arose — in 1982, three-quarters of a million people marched against such weaponry in New York City — and President Ronald Reagan responded with his lucrative (for the weapons industry) fantasy scheme of lofting an "impermeable shield" against nuclear weapons into space, his "Star Wars" program. And then, in an almost-moment as startling as it was unexpected, in 1986, in Reykjavik, Iceland, Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev almost made such a fantasy come true, not in space, but right here on planet Earth. They came to the very "brink" — to use a nuclear-crisis term of the time — of a genuine program to move decisively down the path to the abolition of such weapons. It was, in some ways, the most hopeful almost-moment of a terrible century and, of course, it failed.

Thanks largely, however, to one man, Gorbachev, who consciously chose a path of non-violence, after four decades of nuclear standoff in a fully garrisoned MAD (mutually assured destruction) world — and to the amazement, even disbelief, of official Washington — the USSR simply disappeared, and almost totally peaceably at that.

You could measure the era of denial up to that moment both by the level of official resistance to recognizing this obvious fact and by the audible sigh of relief in this country. Finally, it was all over. It was, of course, called "victory," though it would prove anything but.

And only then did the MADness really began. Though there was, in the U.S., modest muttering about a "peace dividend," the idea of "peace" never really caught hold. The thousands of weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, which had seemingly lost their purpose and whose existence should have been an embarrassing reminder of the Age of Denial, were simply pushed further into the shadows and largely ignored or forgotten. Initially assigned no other tasks, and without the slightest hiccup of protest against them, they were placed in a kind of strategic limbo and, like the mad woman in the attic, went unmentioned for years.

In the meantime, it was clear by century’s end that the "peace dividend" would go largely to the Pentagon. At the very moment when, without the Soviet Union, the U.S. might have accepted its own long-term vulnerability and begun working toward a world in which destruction was less obviously on the agenda, the U.S. government instead embarked, like the Greatest of Great Powers (the "new Rome," the "new Britain"), on a series of neocolonial wars on the peripheries. It began building up a constellation of new military bases in and around the oil heartlands of the planet, while reinforcing a military and technological might meant to brook no future opponents. Orwell’s famous phrase from his novel 1984, "war is peace," was operative well before the second Bush administration entered office.

Call this a Mr. Spock moment, one where you just wanted to say "illogical." With only one superpower left, the American Age of Denial didn’t dissipate. It only deepened and any serious assessment of the real planet we were all living on was carefully avoided.

In these years, the world was essentially declared to be "flat" and, on that "level playing field," it was, we were told, gloriously globalizing. This official Age of Globalization — you couldn’t look anywhere, it seemed, and not see that word — was proclaimed another fabulously sunny era of wonder and abundance. Everyone on the planet would now wear Air Jordan sneakers and Mickey Mouse T-shirts, eat under the Golden Arches, and be bombarded with "information"… Hurrah!

News was circling the planet almost instantaneously in this self-proclaimed new Age of Information. (Oh yes, there were many new and glorious "ages" in that brief historical span of self-celebration.) But with the Soviet Union in the trash bin of history — forget that Russia, about to become a major energy power, still held onto its nuclear forces — and the planet, including the former Soviet territories in Eastern Europe and Central Asia open to "globalizing" penetration, few bothered to mention that other nexus of forces which had globalized in the previous century: the forces of planetary destruction.

And Americans? Don’t think that George W. Bush was the first to urge us to "sacrifice" by spending our money and visiting Disney World. That was the story of the 1990s and it represented the deepest of all denials, a complete shading of the eyes from any reasonably possible future. If the world was flat, then why shouldn’t we drive blissfully right off its edge? The SUV, the subprime mortgage, the McMansion in the distant suburb, the 100-mile commute to work… you name it, we did it. We paid the price, so to speak.

And while we were burning oil and spending money we often didn’t have, and at prodigious rates, "globalization" was slowly making its way to the impoverished backlands of Afghanistan.

A Fierce Rearguard Action for Denial

This, of course, brings us almost to our own moment. To the neocons, putting on their pith helmets and planning their Project for a New American Century (meant to be just like the old nineteenth century, only larger, better, and all-American), the only force that really mattered in the world was the American military, which would rule the day, and the Bush administration, initially made up of so many of them, unsurprisingly agreed. This would prove to be one of the great misreadings of the nature of power in our world.

Since what’s gone before in this account has been long, let me make this — our own dim and dismal moment — relatively short and sweet. On September 11, 2001, the Age of Denial ended in the "mushroom cloud" of the World Trade Center. It was no mistake that, within 24 hours, the site where the towers had gone down was declared to be "Ground Zero," a term previously reserved for an atomic explosion. Of course, no such explosion had happened, nor had an apocalypse of destruction actually occurred. No city, continent, or planet had been vaporized, but for Americans, secretly waiting all those decades for their "victory weapon" to come home, it briefly looked that way.

The shock of discovering for the first time and in a gut way that the continental United States, too, could be at some planetary epicenter of destruction was indeed immense. In the media, apocalyptic moments — anthrax, plagues, dirty bombs — only multiplied and most Americans, still safe in their homes, hunkered down in fear to await various doom-laden scenarios that would never happen. In the meantime, other encroaching but unpalatable globalizing realities, ranging from America’s "oil addiction" to climate change, would continue to be assiduously ignored. In the U.S., this was, you might say, the real "inconvenient truth" of these years.

The response to 9/11 was, to say the least, striking — and craven in the extreme. Although the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror (aka World War IV) has been pictured many ways, it has never, I suspect, been seen for what it most truly may have been: a desperate and fierce rearguard action to extend the American Age of Denial. We would, as the President urged right after 9/11, show our confidence in the American system by acting as though nothing had happened and, of course, paying that visit to Disney World. In the meantime, as "commander-in-chief" he would wall us in and fight a "global war" to stave off the forces threatening us. Better yet, that war would once again be on their soil, not ours, forever and ever, amen.

The motto of the Bush administration might have been: Pay any price. Others, that is, would pay any price — disappearance, torture, false imprisonment, death by air and land — for us to remain in denial. A pugnacious and disastrous "war" on terrorism, along with sub-wars, dubbed "fronts" (central or otherwise), would be pursued to impose our continuing Age of Denial by force on the rest of the planet (and soften the costs of our addiction to oil). This was to be the new Pax Americana, a shock-and-awe "crusade" (to use a word that slipped out of the President’s mouth soon after 9/11) launched in the name of American "safety" and "national security." Almost eight years later, as in the present presidential campaign of 2008, these remain the idols to which American politicians, the mainstream media, and assumedly many citizens continue to do frightened obeisance.

The message of 9/11 was, in truth, clear enough — quite outside the issue of who was delivering it for what purpose. It was: Here is the future of the United States; try as you might, like it or not, you are about to become part of the painful, modern history of this planet.

And the irony that went with it was this: The fiercer the response, the more we tried to force the cost of denial of this central reality on others, the faster history — that grim shadow story of the Cold War era — seemed to approach.

Postcard from the Edge

What I’ve written thus far hasn’t exactly been a postcard. But if I were to boil all this down to postcard size, I might write:

Here’s our hope: History surprised us and we got through. Somehow. In that worst of all centuries, the last one, the worst didn’t happen, not by a long shot.

Here’s the problem: It still could happen — and, 64 years later, in more ways than anyone once imagined.

Here’s a provisional conclusion: And it will happen, somehow or other, unless history surprises us again, unless, somehow or other, we surprise ourselves and the United States ends its age of denial.

And a little p.s.: It’s not too late. We — we Americans — could still do something that mattered when it comes to the fate of the Earth.

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 American Age of Denial. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site, has just been published. Focusing on what the mainstream media hasn’t covered, it is an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

[Note for Readers: Those of you interested in more on these topics might check out The End of Victory Culture, my history of the Cold War Age of Denial, in its latest updated edition. I certainly stole from it for this piece and it’s guaranteed to take you on a mad gallop through the various strangenesses of American life, emphasizing popular culture, from 1945 to late last night. It’s a book that Juan Cole has labelled a "must read" and that Studs Terkel called "as powerful as a Joe Louis jab to the solar plexus."

On another "front," back in 1982, Jonathan Schell first took up the (nuclear) fate of the Earth in his bestselling book of the same name. He’s never put the subject down. He returned to it most recently and tellingly in The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger, the paperback of which is due to be published this September. I am deeply indebted to him for the development of my own thinking on the subject.

On this piece, my special thanks as well to Christopher Holmes for help above and beyond the call of duty.]

Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt

It was a tribal affair.  Against a picture-perfect sunset, before a beige-colored cross and an altar made of the very Texas limestone that was also used to build her family’s “ranch,” veil-less in an Oscar de la Renta gown, the 26 year-old bride said her vows. More than 200 members of her extended family and friends were on hand, as well as the 14 women in her “house party,” who were dressed “in seven different styles of knee-length dresses in seven different colors that match[ed] the palette of… wildflowers — blues, greens, lavenders and pinky reds.” Afterwards, in a white tent set in a grove of trees and illuminated by strings of lights, the father of the bride, George W. Bush, danced with his daughter to the strains of “You Are So Beautiful.” The media was kept at arm’s length and the vows were private, but undoubtedly they included the phrase “till death do us part.”

That was early May of this year. Less than two months later, halfway across the world, another tribal affair was underway. The age of the bride involved is unknown to us, as is her name. No reporters were clamoring to get to her section of the mountainous backcountry of Afghanistan near the Pakistani border. We know almost nothing about her circumstances, except that she was on her way to a nearby village, evidently early in the morning, among a party 70-90 strong, mostly women, “escorting the bride to meet her groom as local tradition dictates.”

It was then that the American plane (or planes) arrived, ensuring that she would never say her vows. “They stopped in a narrow location for rest,” said one witness about her house party, according to the BBC. “The plane came and bombed the area.”  The district governor, Haji Amishah Gul, told the British Times, “So far there are 27 people, including women and children, who have been buried. Another 10 have been wounded. The attack happened at 6.30AM. Just two of the dead are men, the rest are women and children. The bride is among the dead.”

U.S. military spokespeople flatly denied the story. They claimed that Taliban insurgents had been “clearly identified” among the group. “[T]his may just be normal, typical militant propaganda,” said 1st Lieutenant Nathan Perry. Despite accounts of the wounded, including women and children, being brought to a local hospital, Captain Christian Patterson, coalition media officer, insisted: “It was not a wedding party, there were no women or children present. We have no reports of civilian casualties.” The members of an Afghan inquiry, appointed by President Hamid Karzai, later found that, in all, 47 civilians had died, including 39 women and children, and nine others were wounded.

Here’s another American take on what happened: “The US military has denied allegations that its forces… killed dozens of people celebrating a marriage… ‘We took hostile fire and we returned fire,’ said Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations… He said there were no indications that the victims of the attack were part of a wedding party.”

Oh, my mistake. Kimmitt was denying that a different wedding party had been obliterated — in the Western Iraqi desert, near the Syrian border, in May 2004. In that case, the wedding feast was long over. The celebrations had ended and the guests were evidently in bed when the U.S. jets arrived. More than 40 people died, including children, women, musicians, and a well-known Iraqi wedding singer hired for the event. According to Rory McCarthy of the British Guardian, who interviewed some of the hospitalized survivors, 27 members of one extended family died when the jets arrived.

In response to reports on that 2004 slaughter, Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, asked the following question: “How many people go to the middle of the desert… to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?” And, in an email responding to questions from a New York Times reporter, General Kimmitt later offered what was, by U.S. military standards, little short of an admission: “Could there have been a celebration of some type going on?… Certainly. Bad guys have celebrations. Could this have been a meeting among the foreign fighters and smugglers? That is a possibility. Could it have involved entertainment? Sure. However, a wedding party in a remote section of the desert along one of the rat lines, held in the early morning hours strains credulity.”

The comments of Mattis and Kimmitt deserve, of course, to go directly into the annals of American military quotes, right next to that Vietnam era classic: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

But back to the subject of collateral ceremonial damage in Afghanistan.  Consider this passage from a news report headlined, “No US Apology over Wedding Bombing,” in the Guardian:

“Afghans claim the wedding guests, who were celebrating near Deh Rawud village, in the mountainous province of Oruzgan, north of Kandahar, had been firing into the air — a Pashtun wedding tradition — when American planes struck. But a U.S. spokesman claimed yesterday that the shooting was ‘not consistent’ with a wedding, saying that the planes had come under attack. ‘Normally when you think of celebratory fire… it’s random, it’s sprayed, it’s not directed at a specific target,’ said Colonel Roger King at the U.S. airbase at Bagram. ‘In this instance, the people on board the aircraft felt that the weapons were tracking them and were [trying] to engage them.'”

That was indeed Afghanistan — not in July 2006, however, but four Julys earlier, when at least 30 people in a wedding party were wiped out, most of them, again, reportedly women and children. Here’s how Abdullah Abdullah, the Afghan foreign minister at the time, described that American air attack. It killed, he said, “a whole family of 25 people. No single person was left alive. This is the extent of the damage.”

Oh, and let’s not forget the ur-incident in wedding party destruction in Bush’s wars. In late December 2001, a B-52 and two B-1B bombers, using precision-guided weapons, essentially wiped out a village in Eastern Afghanistan (and then, in a second strike, took out Afghans digging in the rubble). At the time, it was claimed that Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders had been killed “in their sleep.” It was also claimed that surface-to-air missiles had been fired at the American planes. A spokesman for the U.S. Central Command issued a congratulatory statement after the attack occurred with this passage: “Follow-on reporting indicates that there was no collateral damage.”

Except, of course, as Guardian correspondent Rory Carroll, then in Afghanistan, put it, “bloodied children’s shoes and skirts, bloodied school books, the scalp of a woman with braided grey hair, butter toffees in red wrappers, wedding decorations. The charred meat sticking to rubble in black lumps could have been Osama bin Laden’s henchmen but survivors said it was the remains of farmers, their wives and children, and wedding guests.”

In fact, according to Time Magazine’s Tim McGirk, out of 112 Afghans in the wedding party, only two women survived. In this case, it seems that the Americans were fed disinformation by an Afghan official out to settle scores and acted on it.

That makes four wedding parties blown away by U.S. air power in Iraq and Afghanistan since the end of 2001. And there was probably at least one more. Back in May 2002, it was claimed that U.S. helicopters wiped out a wedding party in the eastern Afghan province of Khost, killing 10 and wounding many more. An Agence France Presse report at the time concluded: “A wedding was in progress in the village when people fired into the air in traditional celebration and US helicopters flying over the area could have mistaken it for hostile fire. An aircraft later bombed the area for several hours.” On this event, however, the documentation is far poorer.

All these “incidents” have some obvious features in common: the almost immediate claims by the U.S. military, for instance, that those who have been hit were adversaries, not wedding parties; the ultimate dismissal of the killings as the usual “collateral damage” in wartime; and, above all, the striking fact that, for none of these slaughters of celebrating locals, did the U.S. ever offer a genuine apology.

The mainstream media tends to pick up such stories as he said/she said affairs. Of course, “she” never actually “says” anything, being dead. But you get the idea. As with the most recent Afghan wedding-party slaughter, such pieces — generally wire service stories — are to be found deep inside American newspapers where only the news jockeys are reading. In fact, your basic wedding party wipe-out report is almost certain to share at least some space in the story with a mini-round-up of other kinds of recent death and mayhem in the region in question. The language in which such stories are written is generally humdrum and, in the military mode, death is sanitized (except in rare instances like Carroll’s fine reports for the Guardian).

We Americans have only had one experience of death delivered from the air since World War II — the attacks of September 11, 2001. As no one is likely to forget, they shocked us to our core. And you know how those deaths were covered, right down to the special pages filled with bios of civilians who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the repeated invocations of the barbarism of al-Qaeda’s killers (and barbarism it truly was).

These wedding parties, however, get no such treatment. Initially, they are automatically assumed to be malevolent — until the reports begin to filter in from the hospitals, the ruined villages, and the graveyards, and, by then, it’s usually too late for much press attention. When that does happen, their deaths are chalked up to an “errant bomb,” or that celebratory gunfire, or no explanation is even offered.

Nothing barbaric lurks here, even though we can be sure that these civilians were hardly less surprised by the arrival of the attacking planes than were the victims of 9/11. For their deaths, no word portraits are ever painted. No one in our world thinks to memorialize them, nor is there any cumulative record of their deaths. Whole extended families have been wiped out, while the dead and wounded run into the hundreds, and yet who remembers?

Here’s the truth of it: In Bush’s wars, the wedding singer dies, the bride does not get a chance to run away, and the event might be relabeled my big, fat, collateral damage wedding.

In the process, we have become a nation of wedding crashers, the uninvited guests who arrived under false pretenses, tore up the place, offered nary an apology, and refused to go home. It’s a remarkable record, really, and catches the nature of the Bush administration’s air war not on, but of and for terror in a particularly raw way. And yet, in this country, when the latest wedding party went down, no reporter seems even to have recalled our past history of wedding-party obliteration. So it goes.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. The World According to TomDispatch:  America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site, has just been published. Focusing on what the mainstream media hasn’t covered, it is an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt