American Way of War

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American Way of War Page 25

by Tom Engelhardt


  Kenneth Pollack, a drumbeater for that invasion, is now wary of removing “the cast”—his metaphor for the U.S. military presence—on the “broken arm” of Iraq too soon, since states that have “undergone a major inter-communal civil war have a terrifying rate of recidivism.” For Kimberly and Frederick Kagan, drumbeaters extraordinaire, writing for the Wall Street Journal, the United States must start discussing “a long-term military partnership with Iraq beyond 2011,” especially since that country will not be able to defend itself by then.

  Why, you might well ask, must we stay in Iraq, given our abysmal record there? Well, say these experts, we are the only force all Iraqis now accept, however grudgingly. We are, according to Pollack, the “peacekeepers…the lev[ee] holding back violence…Iraq’s security blanket, and the broker of political deals…we enforce the rules.” According to Ricks, we are the only “honest brokers” around. According to the Kagans, we were the “guarantor” of the recent elections, and have a kind of “continuing leverage” not available to any other group in that country, “should we choose to use it.”

  Today, Iraq is admittedly a mess. On our watch, the country crashed and burned. No one claims that we’ve put it back together. Multibillions of dollars in reconstruction funds later, the United States has been incapable of delivering the simplest things like reliable electricity or potable water to significant parts of the country. Now, the future sits empty and threatening before us. So much time in which so many things could happen, and all of them horrifying, all calling out for us to remain because they just can’t be trusted, they just don’t deliver.

  The Sally Fields of American Foreign Policy

  Talk about blaming the victim. An uninvited guest breaks into a lousy dinner party, sweeps the already meager meal off the table, smashes the patched-together silverware, busts up the rickety furniture, and then insists on staying ad infinitum because the place is such a mess that someone responsible has to oversee the cleanup process.

  What’s remained in all this, remarkably enough, is our confidence in ourselves, our admiration for us, our—well, why not say it?—narcissism. Nothing we’ve done so far stops us from staring into that pool and being struck by what a kindly, helpful face stares back at us. Think of those gathering officials, pundits, journalists, and military figures seemingly eager to imagine the worst and so put the brakes on a full-scale American withdrawal as the Sally Fields of foreign policy. (“I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!”)

  When you have an administration that has made backpedaling its modus operandi, this rising chorus in Washington and perhaps among the military in Iraq could prove formidable in an election year (here, not there). What, of course, makes their arguments particularly potent is the fact that they base them almost entirely on things that have yet to happen, that may, in fact, never happen. After all, humans have such a lousy track record as predictors of the future. History regularly surprises us, and yet their dismal tune about that future turns out to be an effective cudgel with which to beat those in favor of getting all U.S. troops out by the end of 2011.

  Few remember anymore, but we went through a version of this forty years ago in Vietnam. There, too, Americans were repeatedly told that the United States couldn’t withdraw because, if we left, the enemy would launch a “bloodbath” in South Vietnam. This future bloodbath of the imagination appeared in innumerable official speeches and accounts. It became so real that sometimes it seemed to put the actual, ongoing bloodbath in Vietnam in the shade, and for years it provided a winning explanation for why any departure would have to be interminably and indefinitely delayed. The only problem was, when the last American took that last helicopter out, the bloodbath didn’t happen.

  In Iraq, only one thing is really known: After our invasion and with U.S. and allied troops occupying the country in significant numbers, the Iraqis did descend into the charnel house of history, into a monumental bloodbath. It happened in our presence, on our watch, and in significant part thanks to us.

  But why should the historical record—the only thing we can, in part, rely on—be taken into account when our pundits and strategists have such privileged access to an otherwise unknown future? Based on what we’re seeing now, such arguments may intensify. Terrible prophesies about Iraq’s future without us may multiply. And make no mistake, terrible things could indeed happen in Iraq. They could happen while we are there. They could happen with us gone. But history delivers its surprises more regularly than we imagine—even in Iraq.

  In the meantime, it’s worth keeping in mind that not even Americans can occupy the future. It belongs to no one.

  Note on the Text

  If, soon after 9/11, you had told me that I would, in the coming years, write hundreds of thousands of words on America’s wars, the Pentagon, its garrisoning of the planet, and the militarization of the United States, I would, to say the least, have been surprised. I surely would have thought you had no knack for predicting the future. That this actually happened still surprises me. My only explanation is that I couldn’t help myself, that this was the way the world looked to me and I found myself continually amazed that it didn’t look similarly to hordes of reporters, pundits, and analysts.

  Mind you, I was never in the military and I certainly think of myself as the most peaceable of guys. Sometimes, however, it takes a complete outsider to see that what’s in front of us all is a forest, not a random grouping of trees, or, in the case of this book, an identifiable American way of war rather than a set of disparate political and military acts full of sound and fury but signifying little.

  The twenty-nine pieces that make up this book were written between March 2004 and the early months of 2010. They span the tumultuous era in which my website, TomDispatch.com, was born and has lived its relatively short life. However, I thought it important to acknowledge here that the essays you have just read are not simply the ones I originally wrote. Most have been trimmed, and the tell-tale signs of the immediate moment—the recentlys and next weeks, along with examples that were gripping at the time but are forgotten today—have been removed; so have most of the thematic repetitions that are bound to pop up in any set of weekly responses to ongoing events. In a few cases, the essays have even been very modestly updated. Nothing basic about them has, however, been changed, including my conclusions, which, on the whole, still hold up well.

  Generally speaking, the book moves chronologically from the moment before 9/11, through the disastrous Bush years and year one of the Obama administration, right up to late last night (thanks to the ability of a small independent press these days to put out a book with remarkable speed). For the sake of whatever flow this book may have, I decided not to include in the text the original date on which each piece was posted. But for the record, and in case readers should wish to check out any of the essays in their original form at TomDispatch.com, here is a list of them with their original titles and the dates they were posted. In each case below, the title of a piece in this book is followed by the original title and date, unless of course the title remained the same:

  The World Before September 11—Shark-bit World, December 8, 2005

  9/11 in a Movie-Made World—September 7, 2006

  The Billion-Dollar Gravestone—May 16, 2006

  Looking Forward, Looking Backward—Don’t Turn the Page on History, July 23, 2009

  Twenty-First-Century Gunboat Diplomacy—March 30, 2004

  Wonders of the Imperial World—The Colossus of Baghdad, May 29, 2007

  How to Garrison a Planet (and Not Even Notice)—Going on an Imperial Bender, September 4, 2008

  Icarus (Armed with Vipers) Over Iraq—December 5, 2004

  The Barbarism of War from the Air—Degrading Behavior, July 28, 2006

  An Anatomy of Collateral Damage—The Value of One, the Value of None, September 11, 2008

  Launching the Drone Wars—Terminator Planet, April 7, 2009

  Which War Is This Anyway?—Are We in World War IV? M
arch 10, 2005

  The Imperial Unconscious—March 1, 2009

  Fixing What’s Wrong in Washington…in Afghanistan—February 21, 2010

  Ponzi Scheme Presidency—January 5, 2009

  With Us or Against Us?—The $100 Barrel of Oil vs. the Global War on Terror, January 8, 2008

  Hold Onto Your Underwear, This Is Not a National Emergency—February 14, 2010

  How Safe Do You Want to Be?—Killing Civilians, April 23, 2009

  General “Manhunter”—Going for Broke, May 21, 2009

  Obama and the Imperial Presidency—Obama Looses the Manhunters, June 14, 2009

  A War That No Longer Needs a Justification—Biking out of Iraq, August 13, 2009

  How the Pentagon Counts Coups in Washington—Seven Days in January, January 31, 2010

  G.I. Joe, Post-American Hero—August 26, 2009

  Why Military Dreams Fail—and Why It Doesn’t Matter—Drone Race to a Known Future, November 10, 2009

  The Afghan Speech Obama Should (But Won’t) Give—November 19, 2009

  A Symbolic Surrender of Civilian Authority—Meet the Commanded-in-Chief, December 3, 2009

  The Nine Surges of Obama’s War—December 10, 2009

  Pentagon Time: Tick…Tick…Tick…—January 26, 2010

  Premature Withdrawal—March 10, 2010

  This book has no footnotes. The original posts at TomDispatch.com were, however, heavily footnoted in the style of the Internet—through links that led readers to my sources and also sometimes offered directions for further exploration. Linking is, in fact, the first democratic form of foot-noting, making sources instantly accessible to normal readers who, unlike scholars, may not have quick access to a good library. URLs in a book, however, are both cumbersome and useless. So if you want to check my sources, you’ll need to go to the originals online at TomDispatch.com. Fair warning, however: One of the debits of linking is that links regularly die, so the older the piece, the greater the chance that some of the links won’t work.

  Acknowledgments

  I’ve been a book editor for almost forty years now and lived in a world of editors. I know good editing—a rare enough commodity—when I stumble across it. Anthony Arnove, who works at Haymarket Books, is a superb editor (as well as a jack-of-all-trades, the fate of any independent book publisher). If this collection is now really a book, it’s thanks to his ministrations. He made me work, which—having been on the other side of the process—I consider one of the best things you can say about an editor. A special bow to him. Thanks go as well to Mikki Smith, copyeditor extraordinaire, Dao Tran, eagle-eyed proofer, and to the hardworking duo, Rachel Cohen and Julie Fain, also of Haymarket.

  TomDispatch.com has been the odyssey of my later life and for its existence and ongoing health I have a number of people to thank: Ham Fish of The Nation Institute, who made it an institute project and me a fellow; Taya Kitman, also of the institute, who’s been remarkably supportive through the years; Joe Duax, who offers youth for my age and savvy about an Internet and computer world I don’t faintly grasp; Chris Holmes, who wandered into my life from Tokyo (as can only happen in the world of the Web), and defined generosity for me even as he stopped endless small mistakes and errors from entering the world; and Tam Turse, whose eagle eye has made such a difference. Another kind of gratitude is reserved for Nick Turse, who has worked with me all these years, lived through my endless phone calls, and helped make TomDispatch such an adventure for me.

  I also want to thank all those authors (and friends) who have written for TomDispatch. You add spice to my day, and sometimes a sense of collective joy as well. And let me offer a bow to those at other websites and blogs I’ve run into online (and sometimes in person). Dealing with, working with, exchanging ideas with you has been dizzying and wonderful. You include: David Swanson and Chip Yost of After Downing Street, Tony Allison of Asia Times, Jan Frel of AlterNet, Eric Garris of Antiwar.com, Mark Karlin of Buzzflash, Jon Queally and Andrea Germanos of Common-dreams, Rick Shenkman of History News Network, David Weiner and Cara Parks of the Huffington Post, Juan Cole of Informed Comment, Mamoon Alabbasi of Middle East Online, Sam Baldwin and Nikki Gloudeman of Mother Jones magazine, Tony Karon of Rootless Cosmopolitan, Victoria Harper of Truthout, and Paul Woodward of the War in Context, among others. You have helped keep a world of critical and oppositional thinking alive through the worst of times. My gratitude to all of you.

  Finally, I want to offer thanks and love to my wife, Nancy, who lived her own life unflappably and wonderfully in the midst of my craziness.

  Index

  A

  Abdulmutallab, Umar Farouk

  Aiken, George

  airpower

  airbases

  Azizabad air strikes

  civilian deaths and

  drones

  historical use of

  newspeak and

  proliferation of

  space-based platforms and

  Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

  Albright, Madeleine

  al-Maliki, Nouri

  al-Sadr, Moqtada/Sadrists

  Alston, Philip

  al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab

  al-Zawihari, Ayman

  American way of war, the

  as conceptually unending

  good governance

  as Hollywood movie

  militarization and

  newspeak and

  recent historical context/choice and

  sovereignty and

  victim discourse and

  anthrax

  Apple, R. W.

  Arkin, William

  Armitage, Richard

  Ashcroft, John

  Azizabad air strikes

  B

  Bacevich, Andrew J.

  Bagram Air Base

  Baker, Peter

  Balad Air Base

  barbarism

  air wars and

  Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and

  Barnard, Anne

  Barnes, Julian

  Barry, John

  Barstow, David

  Bayh, Evan

  Bearak, Barry

  Berger Devine Yaeger, Inc. (BDY)

  Berke, Richard L.

  Biddle, Stephen

  Biden, Joseph

  bin Laden, Osama

  Blanchette, Richard

  body counts

  Bolton, John

  Boyd, Robert S.

  Boyer, Paul

  Branigin, William

  Bremer, L. Paul

  Brokaw, Tom

  Bumiller, Elisabeth

  Burns, John

  Bush, George W./Bush administration

  9/11 and

  armed diplomacy and

  body counts

  Bush Doctrine

  homeland security and

  presidential power and

  Global War on Terror and

  C

  Cambodia

  Carroll, James

  Cheney, Richard (Dick)

  Churchill, Winston

  civilian deaths. See also collateral damage

  Clarke, Richard

  Clarke, Victoria

  Clinton, Hillary

  COIN (counterinsurgency) doctrine

  Cole, August

  Cole, Juan R.

  Coll, Steve

  collateral damage. See also civilian deaths

  Conrad, Joseph

  Conway, James

  Cooper, Helene

  Cordesman, Anthony

  counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine

  D

  Dean, Howard

  Declaration of Independence (1776)

  defense contractors (private)

  DeYoung, Karen

  Dowd, Maureen

  Drew, Christopher

  Dreyfuss, Robert

  drones. See also Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

  Dr. Strangelove (1964)

  E

  Eaton, Paul D.

  Eikenberry, Karl

  embassies
r />   endless war discourse

  Erlanger, Steven

  Erulkar, Matthew D.

  extraordinary rendition (kidnapping)

  F

  Fail-Safe (1964)

  Feingold, Russell

  Feith, Douglas

  Filkins, Dexter

  Flaherty, Anne

  Fleischer, Ari

  Franklin, H. Bruce

  Franks, Tommy

  Frantz, Douglas

  Fratto, Tony

  Freedland, Jonathan

  Freedom Tower

  Friedman, Tom

  G

  Gabler, Neal

  Gall, Carlotta

  Gant, Jim

  Garlasco, Marc

  Gates, Robert

  Gearan, Anne

  Gibbs, Robert

  G.I. Joe

  G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009)

  Givhan, Walter

  Global War on Terror

  Goodman, Melvin

  “Gorgon Stare” video system

  Gorman, Siobhan

  Graham, Bradley

  Graham, Robert (Bob)

  Ground Zero

  Grozny (Chechnya)

  gunboat diplomacy

  H

  Hayden, Tom

  Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin

  Hersh, Seymour

  Hiroshima

  Hirsh, Michael

  Hitchens, Theresa

  Holbrooke, Richard

  Hollywood movie, war as. See also Dr. Strangelove (1964); G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009); Pearl Harbor (2001); Terminator movies

  homeland security

  Humphrey, Hubert

  Hussein, Saddam

  Hutton, James

  I

  Ignatius, David

  imprisonment. See also torture

  Israel

  J

  Jamail, Dahr

  James, Caryn

 

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