America's Tragic Descent into Empire
by Tom Engelhardt, Haymarket Books
Posted on July 7, 2010
Source
The following is an excerpt from The American
Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's by Tom Engelhardt (Haymarket, 2010).
"War is peace" was one of the memorable slogans on the facade
of the Ministry of Truth, or Minitrue in "Newspeak," the language
invented by George Orwell in 1948 for his dystopian novel 1984. Some
sixty years later, a quarter century after Orwell's imagined future bit
the dust, the phrase is, in a number of ways, eerily applicable
to the United States. On September 10, 2009, for instance, a New York Times
front-page story by Eric Schmitt and David E. Sanger was headlined "Obama
Is Facing Doubts in Party on Afghanistan, Troop Buildup at Issue." It
offered a modern version of journalistic Newspeak.
"
Doubts," of course, imply dissent, and in fact just the week before
there had been a major break in Washington's ranks, though not among
Democrats. The conservative columnist George Will wrote a piece offering
blunt advice to the Obama administration, summed up in its headline: "Time
to Get Out of Afghanistan." In our age of political and audience
fragmentation and polarization, think of this as the Afghan version
of Vietnam's Walter Cronkite moment.
The Times report on those Democratic doubts, on the other hand,
represented a more typical Washington moment. Ignored, for instance,
was Wisconsin
senator Russ Feingold's call for the president to develop an
Afghan withdrawal timetable. The focus of the piece was instead
a planned
speech by Michigan
senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee.
He was, Schmitt and Sanger reported, hoping to push back against
well-placed
leaks (in the Times, among other places) indicating that war
commander General Stanley McChrystal was urging the president
to commit fifteen
thousand to forty-five thousand more American troops to the Afghan
War.
Here, according to the two reporters, was the gist of Levin's
message about what everyone agreed was a "deteriorating" U.S. position: "[H]e
was against sending more American combat troops to Afghanistan until
the United States speeded up the training and equipping of more Afghan
security forces."
Think of this as the line in the sand within
the Democratic Party. Both positions could be summed up with the
same word:
More. The
essence of
this "debate" came down to: More of them versus
more of us (and keep in mind that more of "them"—an
expanded training program for the Afghan National Army—actually
meant more of "us" in
the form of extra trainers and advisers). In other words,
however contentious the disputes in Washington, however dismally
the public
viewed the war,
however much the president's war coalition might threaten
to crack open, the only choices were between more
and more.
In such a situation,
no
alternatives are likely to get a real hearing.
Few alternative policy proposals even exist because alternatives
that don't fit with "more" have ceased to be part of Washington's
war culture. No serious thought, effort, or investment goes into them.
Clearly referring to Will's column, one of the unnamed "senior officials" who
swarm through our major newspapers made the administration's position
clear, saying sardonically, according to the Washington Post, "I
don't anticipate that the briefing books for the [administration]
principals on these debates over the next weeks and months
will be filled with submissions
from opinion columnists. I do anticipate they will be filled
with vigorous discussion of how successful we've been to
date."
State of War
Because the United States does not look
like a militarized
country, it's hard for Americans to grasp that Washington
is a war capital,
that the
United States is a war state,
that it garrisons
much of the planet, and that the norm for
us is to be at war somewhere (usually,
in fact, many
places) at any moment. Similarly, we've become used to
the idea that, when various forms of force (or threats of force)
don't
work, our
response, as in Afghanistan, is to recalibrate and apply
some alternate version
of the same under a new or rebranded name—the hot one
now being "counterinsurgency," or
COIN—in a marginally different manner. When it comes
to war, as well as preparations for war, more is now generally
the order of
the day.
This wasn't always the case. The early
Republic that the
most hawkish conservatives love to cite was a land whose
leaders
looked with
suspicion on the very idea of
a standing army. They would
have viewed our hundreds
of global garrisons, our vast network of spies, agents,
Special Forces teams, surveillance operatives, interrogators,
rent-a-guns,
and mercenary
corporations—as well as our staggering Pentagon budget
and the constant future-war gaming and planning that
accompanies it—with genuine horror.
The question is: What kind of
country do we actually live in when the so-called U.S. Intelligence Community
lists
seventeen intelligence
services ranging from Air Force Intelligence, the Central Intelligence
Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency to the
National Reconnaissance Office and the National Security Agency?
What could "intelligence" mean
once spread over seventeen sizeable, bureaucratic,
often competing outfits with a cumulative 2009 budget
estimated at more than $55
billion (a startling
percentage of which is controlled by the Pentagon)?
What exactly is so intelligent about all that? And
why does no one think it even
mildly
strange or in any way out of the ordinary?
What does it mean when the most military-obsessed administration
in our history, which, year after year, submitted ever
more bloated Pentagon
budgets to Congress, is succeeded by one headed by a
president who ran, at least partially, on an antiwar
platform, and
who then submitted an
even larger Pentagon budget? What does this tell you
about Washington and about the viability of nonmilitarized
alternatives
to the
path George W. Bush took? What does it mean when the
new administration, surveying
nearly eight years and two wars' worth of disasters,
decides to
expand the U.S. Armed Forces rather than shrink the U.S.
global mission?
What kind of a world do we inhabit when, at a time
of mass unemployment, the American taxpayer is
financing the building
of a three-story,
exceedingly permanent-looking $17 million troop
barracks at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan?
This, in turn, is part of a taxpayer-funded $220
million upgrade of the base that includes new "water treatment plants, headquarters buildings,
fuel farms, and power generating plants." And
what about the U.S. air base built at Balad, north
of Baghdad, that has fifteen
bus routes,
two fire stations, two water treatment plants, two
sewage treatment plants, two power plants, a water
bottling plant, and the requisite
set of fast-food
outlets, PXes, and so on, as well as air traffic
levels sometimes compared to those at Chicago's O'Hare
International?
What kind of world are we living in when a plan
to withdraw most U.S. troops from Iraq involves
the removal of more
than 1.5 million
pieces
of equipment? Or in which the possibility of
withdrawal leads the Pentagon to issue nearly billion-dollar
contracts (new
ones!) to
increase the
number of private security contractors in that
country?
What do you make of a world in which the
U.S. military has robot assassins in the skies over
its war zones,
24/7, and
the "pilots" who
control them from thousands of miles away are
ready on a moment's notice to launch missiles—"Hellfire" missiles
at that—into Pashtun peasant villages in
the wild, mountainous borderlands of Pakistan
and
Afghanistan? What does it mean when American
pilots can be at war "in" Afghanistan,
9 to 5, by remote control, while their bodies
remain at a base outside Las Vegas, and then
they can head home past a sign that warns them
to
drive carefully because this is "the most
dangerous part of your day"?
What does it mean when, for our security and
future safety, the Pentagon funds the wildest
ideas imaginable for developing
high-tech
weapons
systems, many of which sound as if they came
straight out of the pages of sci-fi
novels?
Take, for example, Boeing's advanced
coordinated system of handheld drones,
robots, sensors, and
other battlefield surveillance equipment
slated for seven army brigades within the
next two years at
a cost of $2 billion and for the full army
by 2025; or the Next
Generation
Bomber,
an advanced "platform" slated for 2018; or a truly futuristic
bomber, "a suborbital semi-spacecraft able to move at hypersonic
speed along the edge of the atmosphere," for
2035? What does it mean about our world
when those people in our government peering
deepest
into a blue skies future are planning ways
to send armed "platforms" up
into those skies and kill more than a quarter
century from now?
And do you ever wonder about this: If such
weaponry is being endlessly
developed
for our safety and security, and that
of our children and grandchildren, why is it
that one of our most
successful businesses involves the
sale of the same weaponry to other countries?
Few Americans are comfortable thinking
about this, which
may explain
why global arms- trade pieces
don't tend to make it onto the front
pages of our newspapers.
In September 2009, the Times Pentagon correspondent
Thom Shanker, for instance, wrote a rare
piece on the subject,
but it appeared
inside the
paper on a quiet Labor Day. "Despite Slump, U.S. Role as Top Arms
Supplier Grows" was the headline. Perhaps Shanker, too, felt uncomfortable
with his subject, because he included the following generic description: "In
the highly competitive global arms market, nations vie for both profit
and political influence through weapons sales, in particular to developing
nations." The figures he cited from a congressional study of that "highly
competitive" market told a different story: The United States, with
$37.8 billion in arms sales (up $12.4 billion from 2007), controlled
68.4 percent of the global arms market in 2008. Highly competitively
speaking, Italy came "a distant second" with
$3.7 billion.
In sales to "developing nations," the
United States inked $29.6 billion in weapons agreements
or 70.1 percent of the market.
Russia was
a vanishingly distant second at $3.3
billion, or 7.8 percent of the market. In other words, with 70
percent
of the market, the United
States actually
has what, in any other field, would qualify
as a monopoly position—in this case, in things that
go boom in
the night. With the American
car industry in a ditch, it seems that
this (along with Hollywood films
that go boom in the night) is what we
now do best, as befits a war, if not warrior, state. Is that an
American accomplishment you're
comfortable
with?
Consider this: War is now the American
way, even if peace is what most
Americans experience
while
their
proxies
fight in
distant lands. Any
serious alternative to war, which means
our "security," is
increasingly inconceivable. In Orwellian
terms then, war is indeed peace in the
United States—and peace
is war.
Newspeak, as Orwell imagined it, was
an ever more constricted form of English
that
would,
sooner
or later, make "all other modes
of thought impossible." "It
was intended," he wrote in an appendix
to his novel, "that when Newspeak
had been adopted once and for all and
Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought
should be literally unthinkable."
When
it comes to war (and peace), we live
in a world of American Newspeak in which alternatives to a state
of war are not only ever more unacceptable,
but ever harder to imagine. If war
is now our permanent situation, it has also been sundered from a
set of words that once accompanied it.
It lacks, for instance, "victory." After all, when was the
last time the United States actually won a war (unless you include our "victories" over
small countries incapable of defending themselves, like the tiny Caribbean
island of Grenada in 1983 or powerless Panama in 1989)? The smashing "victory" over
Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War only led to
a stop-and-start conflict now almost two decades
old
that has proved a catastrophe.
Keep heading backward through the Vietnam
and Korean Wars, and the U.S. military
was last
truly victorious
in 1945.
But achieving
victory
no
longer seems to matter. War
American-style is now conceptually
unending, as
are preparations for
it. When George W.
Bush proclaimed a Global
War on Terror (aka World War IV),
conceived as
a "generational struggle" like
the cold war, he caught a certain American reality.
In a sense, the ongoing war system can't absorb victory.
Any such endpoint might
indeed prove
to be a kind of defeat.
No longer has war anything to do
with the taking of territory either,
or
even with
direct conquest.
War is increasingly
a state of being,
not a process with a beginning,
an end, and an actual geography.
Similarly drained of its traditional
meaning has been the word "security"—though
it has moved from a state of being
(secure) to an eternal,
immensely profitable process whose
endpoint is unachievable. If we
ever decided
we were either secure enough, or
more willing to
live without the unreachable idea
of total security, the
American way of war and the
national security
state would lose much of their
meaning. In other words, in our
world, security is insecurity.
As for "peace"—war's companion
and theoretical opposite—it, too, has been emptied
of meaning and all but discredited.
Appropriately enough, diplomacy,
the part of government that classically would have
been associated with peace,
or at least with the pursuit of the goals of war by other means,
has
been
dwarfed
by, subordinated to, or even
subsumed by the Pentagon. In
recent years, the U.S. military, with its vast funds, has taken
over, or
encroached upon, a range of
activities that once would have been left
to an underfunded State Department, especially
humanitarian aid operations,
foreign aid, and what's now called nation-building.
Diplomacy itself has been militarized
and, like our country, is
now hidden behind
massive fortifications,
and has
been placed under
Lord
of the
Flies-style guard. The State
Department's embassies are
now bunkers and military-style
headquarters
for
the prosecution
of war policies.
Its
officials, when enough of
them can be found, are now sent
out into the
provinces
in
war zones to
do "civilian" things.
And peace itself? Simply put,
there's no money in it. Of
the nearly trillion
dollars
the United
States
invests
in
war and
war-related
activities,
nothing goes to peace. No money,
no effort, no thought. The
very idea that
there
might be peaceful
alternatives
to endless
war
is so discredited
that it's left to utopians,
bleeding hearts, and feathered doves.
As in Orwell's Newspeak,
while "peace" remains
with us, it's largely been shorn of its possibilities.
No longer the opposite
of war, it's
just a rhetorical flourish embedded, like one of
our reporters, in
Warspeak.
What a world might be like
in which we began not just
to withdraw
our
troops from one
war to fight
another,
but
to seriously
scale down the
American global mission,
close those hundreds of bases—as of 2010,
there were almost
four hundred
of them,
macro
to micro,
in
Afghanistan
alone—and bring our military
home is beyond imagining.
To discuss such
obviously
absurd
possibilities makes
you an apostate
to America's
true religion and addiction,
which is
force. However much it might
seem that most of
us are peaceably
watching our
TV sets
or computer
screens
or iPhones, we Americans
are also—always—marching
as to war.
We may
not all bother
to
attend the church
of our
new religion,
but we all
tithe. We all partake. In
this sense, we live peaceably in
a state of war.
Excerpted from The American
Way of War: How Bush's
Wars Became
Obama's by Tom
Engelhardt (Haymarket,
2010). All
rights reserved
Tom Engelhardt, editor of http://www.Tomdispatch.com,
is co-founder of the “American
Empire Project” and author of The American Way of War:
How Bush's Wars Became Obama's.
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© 2010 Haymarket Books All rights reserved.
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