At the same time, unnamed American officials leaked the news that, for the first time, a U.S. military drone had conducted a strike against al-Shabab militants in Somalia, with the implication that this was a “war” that would also be intensifying. Meanwhile, curious reports were emerging from Pakistan, where the CIA has been conducting an escalating drone war since 2004 (strikes viewed “negatively” by 97 percent of Pakistanis, according to a 2011 Pew poll). Top Pakistani officials were threatening to shut down the agency’s drone operations at Shamsi air base in Baluchistan. Shamsi is the biggest of the three borrowed Pakistani bases from which the CIA secretly launches its drones. The Obama administration responded bluntly. White House counterterrorism chief John O. Brennan insisted that, whatever happened, the United States would continue to “deliver precise and overwhelming force against al-Qaida” in the Pakistani tribal areas.
As Spencer Ackerman of Wired’s Danger Room blog summed things up, “The harsh truth is that the Pakistanis can’t stop the drone war on their soil. But they can shift its launching points over the Afghan border. And the United States is already working on a backup plan for a long-term drone war, all without the Pakistanis’ help.” In other words, permission from a beleaguered local ally might be nice, but it isn’t a conceptual necessity.
If Bush’s crew is long gone, the world they willed us is alive and well. After all, there are reasonable odds that, on the day you read this, somewhere in the free-fire zone of the Greater Middle East, a drone “piloted” from an air base in the western United States or perhaps a secret “suburban facility” near Langley, Virginia, will act as judge, jury, and executioner somewhere in the “arc of instability.” It will take out a terrorist suspect or suspects, or a set of civilians mistaken for terrorists, or a “target” someone in Washington didn’t like, or that one of our allies-cum-intelligence-assets had it in for, or perhaps a mix of all of the above. We can’t be sure how many countries’ American drones, military or CIA, are patrolling, but in at least six of them—Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Iraq—they have launched strikes in recent years that have killed more “suspects” than ever died in the 9/11 attacks.
And there is more—possibly much more—to come. In late June 2011, the Obama administration posted that unclassified summary of its 2011 National Strategy for Counterterrorism at the White House website. It’s a document that carefully avoids using the term war on terror, even though counterterrorism adviser Brennan did admit that it “tracked closely with the goals” of the Bush administration.
The document tries to argue that, when it comes to counterterrorism (or CT), the Obama administration has actually pulled back somewhat from the expansiveness of Bush-era GWOT thinking. We are now, it insists, only going after “al-Qaeda and its affiliates and adherents,” not every “terror group” on the planet. But here’s the curious thing: when you check out its “areas of focus,” other than “the Homeland” (always capitalized as if our country were the United States of Homeland), what you find is an expanded version of the Bush global target zone, including the Maghreb and Sahel (North Africa), East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, South Asia, Central Asia, and—thrown in for good measure—Southeast Asia. In most of those areas, Bush-style hunting season is evidently still open.
If you consider deeds, not words, when it comes to drones the arc of instability is expanding—and based on the new counterterrorism document, the next place for our robotic assassins to cross borders in search of targets could be the Maghreb and Sahel. There, we’re told, al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), with roots in Algeria but operatives in northern Mali, among other places, potentially threatens “U.S. citizens and interests in the region.”
Here’s how the document puts the matter in its classically bureaucratese version of English: “[W]e must therefore pursue near-term efforts and at times more targeted approaches that directly counter AQIM and its enabling elements. We must work actively to contain, disrupt, degrade, and dismantle AQIM as logical steps on the path to defeating the group. As appropriate, the United States will use its CT tools, weighing the costs and benefits of its approach in the context of regional dynamics and perceptions and the actions and capabilities of its partners in the region.”
That may not sound so ominous, but best guess: the GWOT is soon likely to be on the march across North Africa, heading south. And Obama national security appointments only emphasize how much the drone wars are on Washington’s future agenda. After all, Leon Panetta, the man who since 2009 ran the CIA’s drone wars, has moved over to the Pentagon as secretary of defense, while Bush’s favorite general, David Petraeus, the war commander who loosed American air power (including drone power) in a massive way in Afghanistan, is moving on to the CIA.
On his first visit to South Asia as secretary of defense, Panetta made the claim that Washington was “within reach of strategically defeating al-Qaeda.” Perhaps it won’t surprise you that such news signals not a winding down, but a ratcheting up, of the Global War on Terror. Panetta, as Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post reported, “hinted of more to come, saying he would redouble efforts by the military and the spy agency to work together on counterterrorism missions outside the traditional war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq.”
More to come, as two men switching their “civilian” and military roles partner up. Count on drone-factory assembly lines to rev up as well, and the military’s special operations forces to be in expansion mode. And note that by the penultimate page of that CT strategy summary, the administration has left al-Qaeda behind and is muttering in bureau-speak about Hezbollah and Hamas, Iran and Syria (“active sponsors of terrorism”), and even the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
On the Bush administration’s watch, the United States blew a gasket, American power went into decline, and the everyday security of everyday Americans took a major hit. Still, give them credit. They were successful on at least one count: they made sure that we’d never stop fighting their war on terror. In this sense, Obama and his top officials are a drone national security team, carrying out the dreams and fantasies of their predecessors, while Bush and his men (and woman) give lucrative speeches and write books hundreds or thousands of miles away.
Chapter 2
Entering the Soviet Era
Washington Drunk on War
Mark it on your calendar. It seems we’ve finally entered the Soviet era in America.
You remember the Soviet Union, now almost twenty years in its grave, but who gives it a second thought today? Even in its glory years, that “evil empire” was sometimes referred to as “the second superpower.” In 1991, after seven decades, it suddenly disintegrated and disappeared, leaving the United States—the “sole superpower” or even the “hyperpower,” on planet Earth—surprised but triumphant.
The USSR had been heading for the exits for quite a while, not that official Washington had a clue. At the moment it happened, Soviet “experts” like Robert Gates, then director of the CIA, still expected the Cold War to go on and on. In Washington, eyes were trained on the might of the Soviet military, which the Soviet leadership had never stopped feeding, even as its sclerotic bureaucracy was rotting, its economy (which had ceased to grow in the late 1970s) was tanking, budget deficits were soaring, indebtedness to other countries was growing, and social welfare payments were eating into what funds remained. Not even a vigorous reformist leader like Mikhail Gorbachev could stanch the rot, especially when, in the late 1980s, the price of Russian oil fell drastically.
Looking back, the most distinctive feature of the last years of the Soviet Union may have been the way it continued to pour money into its military—and its military adventure in Afghanistan—when it was already going bankrupt and the society it had built was beginning to collapse around it. In the end, its aging leaders made a devastating miscalculation. They mistook military power for power on this planet. Armed to the teeth and possessing a nuclear force capable of destroying the Earth many time
s over, the Soviets nonetheless remained the vastly poorer, weaker, and (except when it came to the arms race) far less technologically innovative of the two superpowers.
In December 1979, perhaps taking the bait of the Carter administration, whose national security adviser was eager to see the Soviets bloodied by a “Vietnam” of their own, the Red Army invaded Afghanistan to support a weak Communist government in Kabul. When resistance in the countryside, led by Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas and backed by the other superpower, only grew, the Soviets sent in more troops, launched major offensives, called in air power, and fought on brutally and futilely for a decade until, in 1989, long after they had been whipped, they withdrew in defeat.
Gorbachev had dubbed Afghanistan “the bleeding wound,” and when the wounded Red Army finally limped home, it was to a country that would soon cease to exist. For the Soviet Union, Afghanistan had literally proven “the graveyard of empires.” If, at the end, its military remained standing, the empire didn’t.
If you don’t already find this description just a tad eerie, given the present moment in the United States, you should.
In Washington, the Bush administration—G. H. W.’s, not G. W.’s—declared victory and then left the much ballyhooed “peace dividend” in the nearest ditch. Caught off guard by the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington’s consensus policy makers drew no meaningful lessons from it, just as they had drawn few that mattered from their Vietnam defeat sixteen years earlier.
Quite the opposite: successive administrations would blindly head down the very path that had led the Soviets to ruin. They would serially agree that, in a world without significant enemies, the key to global power was still the care and feeding of the U.S. military and the military-industrial complex that went with it. As the years passed, that military would be sent regularly into the far reaches of the planet to fight frontier wars, establish military bases, and finally impose a global Pax Americana on the planet.
This urge, delusional in retrospect, seemed to reach its ultimate expression in the second Bush administration, whose infamous “unilateralism” rested on a belief that no country or even bloc of countries should ever again be allowed to come close to matching United States military power. (As its National Security Strategy of 2002 put the matter—and it couldn’t have been blunter on the subject—the United States was to “build and maintain” its military power “beyond challenge.”) Bush’s military fundamentalists firmly believed that, in the face of the most technologically advanced, bulked-up, destructive force around, hostile states would be “shocked and awed” by a simple demonstration of U.S. power, and friendly ones would have little choice but to come to heel. After all, as the president said in front of a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in 2007, the U.S. military was “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.”
In this way, far more than the Soviets, the top officials of the Bush administration mistook military power for power, a gargantuan misreading of the economic position of the United States in the world.
Boundless Military Ambitions
The attacks of September 11, 2001, that “Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century,” clinched the deal. In the space the Soviet Union had deserted, which had been occupied for years by minor outlaw states like North Korea, there was now a new shape-shifting enemy, al-Qaeda (also known as Islamic extremism or the new “totalitarianism”), which could be just as big as you wanted to make it. Suddenly, we were in what the Bush administration dubbed “the Global War on Terror”—and this time there would be nothing “cold” about it.
Bush administration officials promptly suggested that they were prepared to use a newly agile American military to “drain the swamp” of global terrorism. (“While we’ll try to find every snake in the swamp, the essence of the strategy is draining the swamp,” insisted Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz two weeks after 9/11.) They were prepared, they made clear, to undertake these draining operations against Islamic “terrorist networks” in no less than sixty countries around the planet.
Their military ambitions, in other words, knew no bounds; nor, it seemed, did the money and resources that began to flow into the Pentagon, the weapons industries, the country’s increasingly militarized intelligence services, mercenary companies like Blackwater and KBR that grew fat on a privatizing administration’s war plans and the multi-billion-dollar no-bid contracts it was eager to proffer, the new Department of Homeland Security, and a ramped-up, ever more powerful national security state.
As the Pentagon expanded, taking on ever newer roles, the numbers would prove staggering. By the end of the Bush years, Washington was doling out almost twice what the next nine nations combined were spending on their militaries, while total U.S. military expenditures came to just under half the world’s total. Similarly, by 2008, the United States controlled almost 70 percent of the global arms market. It also had eleven aircraft-carrier battle groups capable of patrolling the world’s seas and oceans at a time when no power that could faintly be considered a possible future enemy had more than one.
By then, private contractors had built for the Pentagon almost three hundred military bases in Iraq, ranging from tiny combat outposts to massive “American towns” holding tens of thousands of troops and private contractors. They were in the process of doing the same in Afghanistan and, to a lesser extent, in the Persian Gulf region generally. This, too, represented a massive investment in what looked like a permanent occupation of the oil heartlands of the planet. As right-wing pundit Max Boot put it after a flying tour of America’s global garrisons, the United States possessed military bases that add up to “a virtual American empire of Wal-Mart-style PXs, fast-food restaurants, golf courses, and gyms.”
Depending on just what you counted, there were anywhere from seven hundred to twelve hundred or more of those bases, micro to macro, acknowledged and unacknowledged, around the globe. Meanwhile, the Pentagon was pouring money into the wildest blue-skies thinking at its advanced research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), whose budget grew by 50 percent.
Through DARPA, well-funded scientists experimented with various ways to fight wars in the near and distant future (at a moment when no one was ready to put significant government money into blue-skies thinking about, for instance, how to improve education). The Pentagon was also pioneering a new form of air power, drone warfare, in which “we” wouldn’t be anywhere near the battlefield, and the battlefield would no longer necessarily be in a country with which we were at war.
It was additionally embroiled in two disastrous, potentially trillion-dollar wars (and various global skirmishes), all this at top dollar at a time when next to no money was being invested in bridges, tunnels, waterworks, and the like that made up an aging American infrastructure. Except when it came to victory, the military stood ever taller, while its many missions expanded exponentially, even as the domestic economy was spinning out of control.
In other words, in a far wealthier country, another set of leaders, having watched the Soviet Union implode, decisively embarked on the Soviet path to disaster.
Military Profligacy
In fall 2008, the abyss opened under the U.S. economy, which the Bush administration had been blissfully ignoring, and millions of people fell into it. Giant institutions wobbled or crashed, foreclosures happened on a mind-boggling scale, infrastructure began to buckle, state budgets were caught in a death grip, teachers’ jobs, another kind of infrastructure, went down the tubes in startling numbers, and the federal deficit soared.
A new president also entered the Oval Office, someone (many voters believed) intent on winding down Bush’s wars and the delusions of military omnipotence and technological omniscience that went with them. If George W. Bush had pushed this country to the edge of disaster, at least his military policies, as many of his critics saw it, were as extreme and anomalous as the cult of executive power his top officials fostered.
But here was the strange t
hing. In the midst of the Great Recession, under a new president with supposedly far fewer illusions about American omnipotence and power, war policy continued to expand in just about every way. The Pentagon budget rose by Bushian increments, and while the Iraq War began to wind down, the new president doubled down in Afghanistan soon after entering office, and then again before the end of 2009. There, he “surged” in multiple ways. At best, the United States was only drawing down one war, in Iraq, to feed the flames of another.
As in the Soviet Union before its collapse, the exaltation of the military at the expense of the rest of society and the economy had by now become the new normal, so much so that hardly a serious word could be said—lest you not “support our troops”—when it came to ending the American way of war or downsizing the global mission. Even when, after years of astronomical growth, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates began to talk about cost-cutting at the Pentagon, it was in the service of the reallocation of that money to war-fighting.
Here was how the New York Times summed up what reduction actually meant for our ultimate supersized institution in tough times: “Current budget plans project growth of only 1 percent in the Pentagon budget, after inflation, over the next five years.” Only 1 percent growth—at a time when state budgets, for instance, are being slashed to the bone. Like the Soviet military, the Pentagon is planning to remain obese whatever else goes down.
Meanwhile, the “antiwar” president has been overseeing the expansion of the new normal on many fronts, including the expanding size of the army itself. In fact, when it comes to the Global War on Terror—even with the name now in disuse—the profligacy can still take your breath away.
The United States of Fear Page 6