American Way of War

by Tom Engelhardt

  And how exactly do we explain this ever-rising pile of civilian dead to ourselves? It’s being done, so we’ve been told, for our safety and security here in the United States. The former vice president has made clear that among the great achievements of the Bush administration was the prevention of a second 9/11. And President Obama continues to play the 9/11 card heavily. As he reportedly put it, he is not “‘naive about how dangerous this world is’ and…wakes up every day and goes to bed every night thinking and worrying ‘about how to keep the American people safe.’”

  Personally, I always thought that we could have locked our plane doors and gone home long ago. We were never in mortal danger from al-Qaeda in the backlands of Afghanistan, despite the perfervid imagination of the previous administration and the riotous fears of so many Americans. The rag-tag group that attacked us in September 2001 was then capable of committing acts of terror on a spectacular scale (two U.S. embassy buildings in Africa, a destroyer in a Yemeni harbor, and of course those towers in New York and the Pentagon), but only every couple of years. In other words, al-Qaeda was capable of stunning this country and of killing Americans, but was never a threat to the nation itself.

  All this, of course, was compounded by the fact that the Bush administration couldn’t have cared less about al-Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks, that the “Defense Department” imagined its job to be “power projection” abroad, not protecting American shores (or air space), and that our intelligence agencies were in chaos. So those towers came down and rather than simply going after the group that had acted against us, we invaded Afghanistan (“no safe havens for terrorists”) and began plans for “regime change” in Iraq and beyond. In the process, the Bush administration went to extreme efforts to fetishize our own safety and security, and simultaneously turned “security” into a lucrative endeavor.

  Of course, elsewhere people have lived through remarkable paroxysms of violence and terror without the sort of fuss and fear this nation exhibited, or the money-making that went with it. If you want to be reminded of just how fetishistic our focus on our own safety was, consider a 2005 news article written for a Florida newspaper, “Weeki Wachee Mermaids in Terrorists’ Cross Hairs?” It began:Who on earth would ever want to harm the Weeki Wachee mermaids?

  It staggers the imagination.

  Still, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has named Weeki Wachee Springs as the potential terror target of Hernando County, according to a theme park official.

  The Weeki Wachee staff is teaming up with the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office to “harden the target” by keeping the mermaid theater and the rest of the park safe from a potential terror attack, said marketing and promotion manager John Athanason.…

  Terror-prevention plans for Weeki Wachee may include adding surveillance cameras, installing lights in the parking lot and securing areas in the roadside attraction where there may be “security breaches,” he said.

  But Athanason is also realistic. He said Walt Disney World is a bigger attraction and is likely to receive more counterterrorism funds.

  This was how, in deepest Florida, distant Utah, or on the Texas border, all places about as likely to be hit by an al-Qaeda attack as by a meteor, Americans were obsessing about keeping everything near and dear to them safe and secure. At the same time, of course, the Bush administration was breaking the bank at the Pentagon and in its Global War on Terror, while preparing the way for an America that would be plunged into startling economic insecurity.

  Let’s for a moment assume, however, that our safety really was, and remains, at stake in a war halfway across the planet. If so, let me ask you a question: What’s your “safety” really worth? Are you truly willing to trade the lives of Awal Khan’s family for a blanket guarantee of your safety, and not just his family, but all those Afghan one-year-olds, all those wedding parties that are—yes, they really are—going to be blown away in the years to come for you?

  If, in 1979, as the Carter presidency was ending and our Afghan wars were beginning, you had told any group of Americans that we would be ever more disastrously involved in Afghanistan for thirty years, that, even then, no end would be in sight, and that we would twice declare victory (in 1989 after the Soviets withdrew, and again in 2001 when the Afghan capital Kabul was taken from the Taliban) only to discover that disaster followed, they undoubtedly would have thought you mad. Afghanistan? Please. You might as well have said Mars. Now, three decades later, it’s possible to see that every step taken from the earliest support for Afghan jihadis in their anti-Soviet war has only made things worse for us, and ever so much worse for the Afghans.

  Maybe it’s time to put less value on the idea of absolute American safety, since in many ways the Bush administration definition of our safety and security, which did not go into retirement with George and Dick, is now in the process of breaking us. Even if Dick Cheney and his minions prevented another 9/11 (and there’s no evidence they did), in doing so, look what they brought down around our ears—and all in the name of our safety, and ours alone.

  Ask yourself these questions, then, in the dead of night: Do we really want stories like Awal Khan’s to float up out of the villages of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and who knows where else for years, even decades, to come? Does that seem right? Is your supposed safety worth that?

  General “Manhunter”

  Stanley McChrystal is the general from the dark side (and proud of it). So his appointment by President Obama to run the Afghan War seems to signal an administration going for broke. It’s heading straight into what, in the Vietnam era, was known as “the big muddy,” doubling down on the bad decisions of his predecessor.

  General McChrystal comes from a world where killing by any means is the norm and a blanket of secrecy provides the necessary protection. For five years he commanded the Pentagon’s super-secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which, among other things, ran what Seymour Hersh has described as an “executive assassination wing” out of Vice President Cheney’s office. Cheney returned the favor by giving McChrystal a ringing endorsement for position of Afghan War commander: “I think you’d be hard put to find anyone better than Stan.”

  McChrystal gained a certain renown when President Bush touted him as the man responsible for tracking down and eliminating al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The secret force of “manhunters” he commanded in Iraq had its own secret detention and interrogation center near Baghdad, Camp Nama, where bad things happened regularly, and the unit there, Task Force 6-26, had its own slogan: “If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it.” (Since some of the task force’s members were, in the end, prosecuted, the bleeding evidently wasn’t avoided.) In the Bush years, McChrystal was extremely close to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The super-secret force he commanded was, in fact, part of Rumsfeld’s effort to seize control of, and Pentagonize, the covert, on-the-ground activities that were once the purview of the CIA.

  Behind McChrystal lies a string of targeted executions that may run into the hundreds, as well as accusations of torture and abuse by troops under his command, not to speak of a role in the cover-up of the circumstances surrounding the death of army ranger and former National Football League player Pat Tillman. The general has reportedly long thought of Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single battlefield, which means that he was a premature adherent to the idea of an Af-Pak—that is, expanded—war. While in Afghanistan in 2008, the New York Times reported, he was a “key advocate…of a plan, ultimately approved by President George W. Bush, to use American commandos to strike at Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan.” This end-of-term Bush program provoked such anger and blow-back in Pakistan that it was reportedly halted after two cross-border raids, one of which killed civilians.

  All of this offers more than a hint of the sort of “new thinking and new approaches”—to use Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s words—that the Obama administration expects General McChrystal to bring to the devolving Af-Pak battl
efield. He is, in a sense, both a legacy figure from the worst days of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era and the firstborn child of Obama-era Washington’s growing desperation and hysteria over the wars it inherited.

  But none of this matters to what remains of mainstream news analysis. The press establishment has had a long-term love affair with McChrystal. Back in 2006, when Bush first touted him, Newsweek reporters Michael Hirsh and John Barry dubbed him “a rising star” in the army and one of the “Jedi Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls ‘the shadows.’” More recently, in that mix of sports lingo, Hollywood-ese, and just plain hyperbole that makes armchair war strategizing just so much fun, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius claimed that CentCom commander General David Petraeus, who picked McChrystal as his man in Afghanistan, is “assembling an all-star team” and that McChrystal himself is “a rising superstar who, like Petraeus, has helped reinvent the U.S. Army.” Is that all?

  When it comes to pure hagiography, however, the prize goes to Elisabeth Bumiller and Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times, who wrote a front-pager, “A General Steps from the Shadows,” that painted a picture of McChrystal as a mutant cross between Superman and a saint. Among other things, it described the general as “an ascetic who…usually eats just one meal a day, in the evening, to avoid sluggishness. He is known for operating on a few hours’ sleep and for running to and from work while listening to audio books on an iPod.… [He has] an encyclopedic, even obsessive, knowledge about the lives of terrorists.… [He is] a warrior-scholar, comfortable with diplomats, politicians.” The quotes Bumiller and Mazzetti dug up from others were no less spectacular: “He’s got all the Special Ops attributes, plus an intellect.” “If you asked me the first thing that comes to mind about General McChrystal…I think of no body fat.”

  Above all, General McChrystal was praised for being “more aggressive” than his stick-in-the-mud predecessor. He would, as Bumiller and Thom Shanker reported in another piece, bring “a more aggressive and innovative approach to a worsening seven-year war.” The general, we were assured, liked operations without body fat, but with plenty of punch. And though no one quite said this, given his closeness to Rumsfeld and possibly Cheney, his mentality was undoubtedly a GWOT one, which translates into no respect for boundaries, restraints, or the sovereignty of others. After all, as journalist Gareth Porter pointed out in a thoughtful Asia Times portrait of the new Afghan War commander, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld granted the parent of JSOC, the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), “the authority to carry out actions unilaterally anywhere on the globe.”

  McChrystal’s appointment, then, represented a decision by Washington to dispatch the bull directly to the china shop. The Post’s Ignatius even compared McChrystal’s boss Petraeus and Obama’s special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, to “two headstrong bulls in a small paddock.” He then concluded his paean to all of them with this passage: “Obama knows the immense difficulty of trying to fix a broken Afghanistan and make it a functioning, modern country. But with his two bulls, Petraeus and Holbrooke, he’s marching his presidency into the ‘graveyard of empires’ anyway.” McChrystal is evidently the third bull, the one slated to start knocking over the tombstones.

  Of course, there were now so many bulls in this particular china shop that smashing was increasingly the name of the game. The early moves of the Obama administration, when combined with the momentum of the situation it inherited, resulted in a surprisingly sweeping expansion of the Af-Pak War. President Obama has, in fact, opted for a down-and-dirty war strategy in search of some at least minimalist form of success. For this, McChrystal was the poster boy. Former Afghan commander General David McKiernan believed that, “as a NATO commander, my mandate stops at the [Afghan] border. So unless there is a clear case of self-protection to fire across the border, we don’t consider any operations across the border in the tribal areas.” Not so Stan McChrystal. The idea that the “responsibilities” of U.S. generals fighting the Afghan War “ended at the border with Pakistan,” Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt of the Times reported, was now considered part of an “old mind-set.” McChrystal represented those “fresh eyes” that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates talked about in the press conference announcing the general’s appointment. As Mazzetti and Schmitt pointed out, “Among [McChrystal’s] last projects as the head of the Joint Special Operations Command was to better coordinate Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency efforts on both sides of the porous border.”

  For those old enough to remember, we’ve been here before. Administrations that start down a path of expansion in such a war find themselves strangely locked in if things don’t work out as expected and the situation continues to deteriorate. In Vietnam, the result was escalation after escalation. President Obama and his foreign policy team now seem locked into an expanding war. Despite the fact that the application of force has not only failed for years, but actually fed that expansion, they also seem to be locked into a policy of applying ever greater force, leading to further expansions of what is already “Obama’s war.”

  Obama and the Imperial Presidency

  Let’s face it. Barack Obama did not win an election to be president of Goodwill Industries, or the YMCA, or the Ford Foundation. He may be remarkable in many ways, but he is also president of the United States, which means that he is head honcho for the globe’s single great garrison state that now, to a significant extent, lives off war and the preparations for future war. He is today the proprietor of U.S. bases, or facilities, or prepositioned military material (or all of the above) in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, in Bahrain, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq (and Iraqi Kurdistan), Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan (where the U.S. military and the CIA share Pakistani military facilities), and a major air force facility on the British-controlled Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, to speak only of the region extending from North Africa to the Chinese border that the Bush loyalists used to call “the Greater Middle East.” Some U.S. bases in these countries are microscopic and solitary, but others, like Camp Victory or Balad Air Base, both in Iraq, are gigantic installations in a web of embedded bases.

  When he entered the Oval Office, Barack Obama also inherited the largest embassy on Earth, built in Baghdad by the Bush administration to imperial proportions as a regional command center. It now houses what are politely referred to as a thousand “diplomats.” As it happens, this project wasn’t just an aberration of the Bush era. Another embassy, just as gigantic, expected to house “a large military and intelligence contingent,” will be constructed by the Obama administration in its new war capital, Islamabad, Pakistan. Once the usual cost overruns are added in, it may turn out be the first billion-dollar embassy. Each of these command centers will, assumedly, anchor the U.S. presence in the Greater Middle East.

  Barack Obama is also now the commander in chief of eleven aircraft carrier strike groups, which regularly patrol the planet’s sea-lanes. He sits atop a U.S. Intelligence Community (yes, that’s what our intelligence crew like to call themselves) of at least sixteen squabbling, overlapping agencies, heavily Pentagonized, and often at each other’s throats. They have a cumulative hush-hush budget of perhaps $50 billion or more. (Imagine a power so obsessively consumed by the idea of “intelligence” that it is willing to support sixteen sizeable separate outfits doing such work, and that’s not even counting various smaller offices dedicated to intelligence activities.)

  The new president will preside over a country that now ponies up almost half the world’s total military expenditures. His 2010 estimated Pentagon budget will be marginally higher than the last staggering one from the Bush years.

  He now inhabits a Washington in which deep thinking consists of a pundit like Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution whining that these bloated sums are, in fact, too little to “maintain” U.S. forces (a budgetary increase of 7 to 8 percent per year for the next decade would, he claims, be just adequate); in which forward looking means Secre
tary of Defense Robert Gates reorienting military spending toward preparations for fighting one, two, many Afghanistans; and in which out-of-the-box, futuristic thinking means letting the blue-skies crew at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) loose on far-out problems like how to turn “programmable matter” into future Transformer-like weapons of war.

  While Obama enthusiasts can take pride in the appointment of some out-of-the-box thinkers in domestic areas, including energy, health, and the science of the environment, in two crucial areas his appointments are pure old-line Washington and have been so from the first post-election transitional moments. His key economic players and advisers are largely a crew of former Clintonistas, or Clintonista wannabes or protégés like Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner. They are distinctly inside-the-boxers, some of them responsible for the thinking that, in the 1990s, led directly to global economic catastrophe.

  As for foreign policy, had the November election results been different, Obama’s top team of today could just as easily have been appointed by Senator John McCain. National Security Adviser James Jones was actually a McCain friend, Gates is someone he admired, and Hillary Clinton is a figure he could well have picked for a top post after a narrow election victory, had he decided to reach out to the Democrats. As a group, Obama’s key foreign policy figures and advisers are traditional players in the national security state and pre-Bush-style Washington guardians of American power, thinking globally in familiar ways.

  The Dream Team in Afghanistan

  Barack Obama didn’t just inherit the presidency. He went for it. And he isn’t just sitting atop it. He’s actively using it. He’s wielding power. In foreign policy terms, Obama is settling in—and doing so in largely predictable ways. He may, for example, have declared a sunshine policy when it comes to transparency in government, but in his war policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, his imperial avatar is already plunging deep into the dark, distinctly opaque valley of death. He chose to appoint as his Afghan commander General Stanley A. McChrystal, who from 2003 to 2008 ran a special operations outfit in Iraq (and then Afghanistan) so secret that the Pentagon avoided mention of it. In those years, its operatives were torturing, abusing, and killing Iraqis as part of a systematic targeted assassination program on a large scale. It was, for those who remember the Vietnam era, a mini-Phoenix program in which possibly hundreds of enemies were assassinated: al-Qaeda-in-Iraq types, but also Sunni insurgents, and Sadrists (not to speak of others, since informers always settle scores and turn over their own personal enemies as well). Although he’s being touted in the press as the man to bring the real deal in counterinsurgency to Afghanistan (and “protect” the Afghan population in the bargain), his actual field is “counterterrorism.”