DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Plebiscite on an Outlaw Empire
By Tom Engelhardt
The wave - and make no mistake, it's a global one - has just crashed on
America's shores, soaking our imperial masters. It's a sight for sore eyes.
It has been a long time since we've seen an election in the United States like
mid-term 2006. After all, it's a truism of US politics that Americans are
almost never driven to the polls by foreign-policy issues, no less by a single
one that dominates everything else, no less by a catastrophic war (and the
presidential-approval ratings that go with it). This strange phenomenon has
been building since the moment, in May 2003, that President George
W Bush stood under that White House-prepared "Mission Accomplished" banner on
USS Abraham Lincoln and declared "major combat operations have ended".
That "Top Gun" stunt - when a cocky president helped pilot an S-3B Viking
submarine-reconnaissance naval jet on to a carrier deck and emerged into the
golden glow of "magic hour light" (as his handlers then called it) - was meant
to give him the necessary victory photos to launch his 2004 re-election
campaign.
As it turned out, that moment was but the first "milestone" on the path to
Iraqi, and finally electoral, hell. Within mere months, those photos would
prove useless for anyone but liberal bloggers. By now, they seem like artifacts
from another age. On the way to the present "precipice" (or are we already over
the edge?), there have been other memorable "milestones" - from Bush's July
2003 petulant "bring 'em on" taunt to Iraq's then-forming insurgency to Vice
President Dick Cheney's June 2005 "last throes" gaffe. All such statements
have, by now, turned to dust in American mouths.
In the context of the history of great imperial powers, how remarkably quickly
this has happened. A US president, ruling the last superpower on this or any
other planet, and his party have been driven willy-nilly into global and
domestic retreat a mere three-plus years after launching the invasion of their
dreams, the one that was meant to start them on the path to controlling the
planet - and by one of the more ragtag minority rebellions imaginable. I'm
speaking here, of course, of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, of perhaps 15,000
relatively lightly armed rebels whose main weapons have been the roadside bomb
and the sniper's bullet. What a grim, bizarre spectacle it has been.
The fall of the new Rome
But let's back up a moment. After such an election, a bit of history, however
quick and potted, is in order - in this case of the post-Cold War era of US
supremacy, now seemingly winding down.
In the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, to be followed by the
relatively violence-free collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a brief moment
of conceptual paralysis among leadership elites in the US, none of whom had
even imagined the loss of the "Evil Empire" (in president Ronald Reagan's
famous Star Warsian phrase) until it suddenly, miraculously evaporated. In this
forgotten moment, we even heard hopeful mutterings about a "peace dividend"
that would take all the extra military money that obviously was no longer
needed to defend against a missing superpower and use it to rebuild the United
States.
A mighty country, soon to be termed a "hyperpower", straddling the globe alone
and without obvious enemies - that should have been a formula for declaring
victory (as many Cold Warriors promptly did) and acting accordingly (which none
of them did). It should have been the moment for the "long peace".
But in an enemy-less world, there was a small problem called the Pentagon (and
the vast military-industrial complex that had grown up around it). So while the
peace dividend that never was vanished in the post-Cold War morning fog, some
new, prefab enemies did make their appearances with startling speed. In
essence, they had to.
These new dangers to the US were termed "rogue states", an obvious step or two
down from a single Evil Empire. They were, in fact, so relatively weak
militarily that you needed to pile them up into a conceptual heap to get an
enemy that would keep an empire and its global network of bases in
military-restocking mode. Not too many years down the line, the Bush
administration would indeed pile three of them up in just this way into the
gloriously labeled "axis of evil"; this was that old Evil Empire rejiggered for
midget powers (or alternatively the Axis powers of World War II shrunk to
Mini-Me standards).
In 1990, Saddam Hussein, the United States' former ally in a Persian Gulf
struggle with Iran for regional supremacy, invaded Kuwait and voila! you had
the first Gulf War. His military, already weakened by its eight-year
bloodletting with Iran, was not exactly a Goliath for a superpower to reckon
with; but Americans took a tip from the dictator (who liked to see images of
himself puffed up to gigantic proportions everywhere in his land), blew his
face up to Hitlerian size, and stuck it on every magazine and in every
television news report in town ("Showdown with Saddam"). His genuinely
evil-dictator face took the place of a whole nuclear-armed Evil Empire, while
US troops slaughtered helpless Iraqi conscripts, burying them alive in their
own trenches or wiping them out from the air on the aptly named "Highway of
Death" out of Kuwait City.
Not so long after, in 1992, under the aegis of then-secretary of defense Dick
Cheney, a small group of unknown Defense Department staffers - Paul Wolfowitz,
I Lewis Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad - unveiled a new draft Defense Planning
Guidance, a document for developing military strategy and planning Pentagon
budgets.
It was the first such since the Cold War ended and, leaked to the New York
Times, it was denounced as an extremist vision and buried. As the website Right
Web describes it, the document "called for massive increases in defense
spending, the assertion of lone-superpower status, the prevention of the
emergence of any regional competitors, the use of preventive - or preemptive -
force, and the idea of forsaking multilateralism if it didn't suit US
interests".
Sound familiar? No wonder. It was the very imperial program for eternal US
dominance and endless war against the planet's rogue states that Bush's
administration would officially adopt. By then, Wolfowitz was the No 2 man at
the Pentagon; Libby, the vice president's good right hand; and Khalilzad was
the new, post-invasion US ambassador to Afghanistan.
In a post-September 11, 2001, atmosphere of belligerent fear, their program
went mainstream. Having been attacked not by a rogue state but by a squad of 19
terrorists pledging allegiance to a stateless terrorist organization, the US
was "at war" with evil itself. By 2002, the administration had conducted a
"successful" war in Afghanistan; the Taliban had been crushed; Osama bin Laden
was missing in action; and the neo-conservatives were riding high. The rest of
us found ourselves in a global "war on terror", or the Long War, or World War
III, or even World War IV or whatever the US rulers chose to call it that week.
(As we would learn in Iraq, counting was not one of their skills.)
Dazzled beyond any reasonable imperial sense by the power they believed US
military superiority gave them, top Bush administration officials in essence
proclaimed the United States an empire by fiat, a superduperpower the likes of
which the world had never seen. In their infamous 2002 National Security
Strategy of the United States of America (in essence the 1992 Defense Planning
Guidance document recycled), they swore that the US would remain so forever and
feed the Pentagon so much money that it would be bulked up into the distant
future to suppress any potential superpower or bloc of powers that might
emerge.
They insisted that the US would go its own way, strike whomever it pleased,
torture anyone it wished, and jail without recourse anyone it cared to sweep up
or kidnap anywhere on Earth. The rest of the world could either approve or be
damned, but it would be full speed ahead for the US. Their acolytes in
right-wing think-tanks and lobbying outfits around Washington, along with
Washington's assembled punditry (and some liberal tag-alongs), declared the
world on the verge of a Pax Americana and the US the globe's new Rome.
In the meantime, domestically, presidential adviser Karl Rove and his pals were
working to ensure that the Republican Party would be dominant against all
challengers for a generation or more. This was to be a domestic version of
"full-spectrum dominance". The two - the global Pax Americana and the party's
Pax Republicana - seemed joined at the hip then, each reinforcing the
unilateral, don't-tread-on-me, I'll-do-anything-I-wish dominance of the other.
How deeply they misunderstood the nature of power in the world, and how
thoroughly they miscalculated the limited nature of the power of the new Rome!
If you want to take the measure of how far the US has come since then, consider
the spectacle of this past election season. Take Senate Majority Leader Bill
Frist. Like the president, deep into September he was still excoriating the
Democrats not just for their positions on the Iraq war, but for their
"surrender" policies in the "war on terror". As he put it in an Public
Broadcasting Service interview with Jim Lehrer on September 14:
I'd
say, "Wake up, [Senate Democratic leader] Harry Reid. Wake up, Harry Reid ..."
I think that [the president] has got it right, that we're not going to do what
Harry Reid wants to do, and that is surrender, to wave a white flag, to cut and
run at a time when we're being threatened ... as we all saw just three or four
weeks ago, in a plot from Britain that was going to send 10 airplanes over
here.
He then characterized the Democratic Party as a group
"who basically belittle in many ways this 'war on terror', who do want to wave
this white flag and surrender".
By late October, however, according to Washington Post reporters Peter Slevin
and Michael Powell, Frist had fully grasped that the global and domestic
programs of dominance no longer were working together. So he offered the
following succinct advice - a flip-flop of the first order - to congressional
candidates: "The challenge is to get Americans to focus on pocketbook issues,
and not on the Iraq and terror issue."
Just another "milestone" on the path to ... well, that's the question, isn't
it?
Oil wars
After September 11, 2001, President Bush and his advisers were determined to
run an invasion of, and war against, Iraq that would be the anti-Vietnam
conflict of all time. From the draft to the body count, they were going to
reverse all the United States' Vietnam "mistakes". Above all, they were going
to win quickly and decisively. The result? In no time at all, they had brought
the US deep into the Iraqi "big muddy" (as the Vietnam-era phrase went). Now,
looming in the distance - think of it as the dark at the end of this particular
horror-fest of a tunnel - is the worst Vietnam nightmare of all: defeat. Just
check Juan Cole's Informed Comment website for his "Top Ten Ways We Know We
Have Lost in Iraq" if you don't believe me.
Unlike in Indochina, however, this time there's something essential at stake.
Whatever the US was doing in the largely peasant land of Vietnam, in terms of
global wealth and resources, it was just what Henry Kissinger and other
frustrated US policymakers of that era always called it, a third- or
fourth-rate power of no real value to anyone (other, of course, than its own
inhabitants).
In Iraq, where a continuing US presence only ensures a deeper plunge into
chaos, mayhem, blood and horror as well as fragmentation and potential
dissolution, departure nonetheless remains largely inconceivable. After all,
Iraq has something everyone desperately values: oil. In quantity. A "sea" of
oil in the words of former deputy secretary of defense Wolfowitz. In a
backhanded way, Bush has finally acknowledged the obvious - that his war in
Iraq was, in significant part, an oil invasion, an oil occupation (remember it
was only the Oil Ministry that the US guarded in otherwise looted Baghdad), and
so is also bound to be an oil defeat.
As energy-obsessed Bush administration planners saw it, Iraq was to be the
linchpin - hence those permanent bases that were on the drawing boards as US
troops invaded - of administration strategy for dominating the oil heartlands
of the planet.
After Vietnam, the US proved quite capable of putting itself back together
(despite years of fierce culture wars). After Iraq - and keep in mind that the
US undoubtedly has at least a couple of years of horror to go - the question is
whether the world will be similarly capable or whether the oil lands of the
planet will lie in ruins along with the global economy.
Extremity on display
So, just past the mid-term election mark of 2006, what's left of the new Rome?
You could say that Bush's dark success story has involved bringing his version
of the United States into line with the look of the "rogue" enemies and
terrorist groups he set out to destroy. By the time Americans went to the polls
on Tuesday to repudiate his policies, he had given the US the ultimate in
makeovers, creating the look of an Outlaw Empire.
The US now has its own killing fields in Iraq where, the latest casualty study
tells us, somewhere between 400,000 and 900,000-plus "excess Iraqi deaths" have
occurred since the 2003 invasion. And do you remember Saddam's "torture
chambers" (which Bush used to cite all the time)? Now, the US is the possessor
of its own global prison system, its own (rented, borrowed or jury-rigged)
torture chambers, its own leased airline to transport kidnapped prisoners
around the planet, and a vice president who has openly lobbied Congress for a
torture exemption for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and spoken glibly
on the radio about "dunking" people in water. And, thanks to a supine Congress,
the US has the laws to go with it all.
The administration went after the right to torture or treat captives any way
its agents pleased in places not open to any kind of oversight remarkably
quickly after the September 11 attacks. By late 2001, Rumsfeld's office was
instructing agents in the field in Afghanistan to "take the gloves off" with a
captive. (Inside the CIA, as Ron Suskind has told us in his book The One Percent
Doctrine, director George Tenet was talking even more vividly about
removing "the shackles" on the agency.)
Inside the White House counsel's office and the Justice Department,
administration lawyers were already hauling out their dictionaries to figure
out how to redefine "torture" out of existence. But why such an emphasis on
torture (which is largely useless in the field, as everyone knows)?
What administration officials grasped, I believe, is this: if you could manage
to get the legal right to employ extreme (and normally repugnant) acts of
torture, then you would have in your possession the right to do anything. Think
of the urge to abuse as the initial extreme expression of this administration's
secret obsession with the creation of a "wartime" commander-in-chief presidency
that would leave Congress and the courts in the dust.
If you want to measure where this has taken Bush officialdom in five years,
consider their latest legal defensive measure. According to the Washington
Post, the administration has just gone to court to declare US "alternative
interrogation techniques" - which simply means "torture" - as "among the
nation's most sensitive national-security secrets". It is trying to get a
federal judge to bar "terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons" from even
revealing to their own lawyers details about what was done to them by American
interrogators. In other words, torture is now to be put in the secrecy vault
like a national treasure. Next thing you know, we'll be sending it to the
Smithsonian.
Reflected in this desperate maneuver, you can catch a glimpse of an
administration driven to the extremity of going to courts it despised - and
thought it had cut out of the process of foreign imperial governance - simply
to bury its own extreme misdeeds. You can feel the fear of the docket (and
perhaps of history) in such a stance.
Another example of the extremity into which this administration has driven
itself and the rest of the US lies in an editorial published in the four main
(officially private) military magazines, the Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy
Times and Marine Corps Times, on the very eve of the mid-term elections. It
called for Rumsfeld's resignation just after the president had given him his
vote of confidence once again. Realistically speaking, this can only be seen as
an extreme military intervention in the US electoral process.
In so many ways, the US constitutional system has been shredded, and this -
whether we are to be an Outlaw Empire (and a failing one at that) - is what
Americans were voting about this Tuesday (though it was called "Iraq").
The wave
The history of recent US politics at the polls might be seen this way: not so
long after he declared the successful completion of his Iraqi dreams, Bush
found himself, to the surprise of his top advisers and supporters, hounded by
Iraq's Sunni insurgency. He in essence raced not John Kerry (who recently
offered yet another example of his special lack of dexterity on the campaign
trail) but that insurgency to the finish line in November 2004. With a little
help from his friends in Ohio and the Rove smear-and-turnout operation, he
managed to squeak by. Then, in another of those milestone moments on the way to
disaster, he declared that he had "political capital" to spare and would spend
it.
The next summer, two storms hit the endlessly vacationing president in
Crawford, Texas - hurricanes Cindy and Katrina. Cindy Sheehan tore away the
bloodless look of casualty-lessness in Iraq (where body counts, body bags and
the return of the dead to US shores was being hidden away from both cameras and
attention). She gave a mother's face to a son's death and to a nation's
increasing frustration.
Katrina revealed to many Americans that the Bush administration had been
creating Iraq-like conditions in the "homeland". And that was more or less
that. The president's approval rating plunged under 40% and has (a few
momentary blips aside) bounced around between there and the low 30s ever since.
By election 2006, presidential "capital" was a concept long consigned to the
dustbin of history.
Imagine where that "capital" will be by 2008. The US president has been wedded
to his war of choice in a way unimaginable since Lyndon Baines Johnson quit the
presidential race after the Tet offensive in Vietnam in 1968. Based on what has
happened so far, there's every reason to believe that, in 2008, he will still
be wedded to it (as would potential presidential candidate Senator John McCain)
and his approval ratings may be bouncing in the 20-30% range by then.
So what part of the 2001 dream team and its "vision" of the world are we left
with? To answer this, you first have to realize that the electoral "wave" of
repudiation is hardly a US phenomenon. It's global and, if anything, the US was
way late into the water. All you have to do is look at the latest polling
figures (which are but extensions of previous, similar polls) to see that wave
in country after country.
The most recent international survey of opinion - in Britain, Canada, Israel
and Mexico - found that Bush's United States is viewed as "a threat to world
peace by its closest neighbors and allies". In Britain, the land of the
"special relationship", only Osama bin Laden outranks the US president as a
global "danger to peace". While he comes in a dozen points behind bin Laden, he
does manage to best Kim Jong-il, North Korea's grim leader, as well as those
shining stars of the diplomatic firmament, the president of Iran and the leader
of Hezbollah. And these are the countries most likely to have positive views of
the US.
As hectorer-in-chief, Bush has, hands down, used the word "must" more than any
combination of presidents in US history. Only recently, he repeatedly told the
North Koreans that they must not develop (and then test) nuclear weapons; he
told the Iranians that they must halt their nuclear-enrichment program; and his
minions told the Nicaraguans that they must not vote for former Sandinista
leader Daniel Ortega. The results: the North Koreans tested a weapon; the
Iranians went right on enriching uranium; and the Nicaraguans, poverty-stricken
and threatened with nothing short of economic ruin if their democratic vote
went into the wrong column, simply ignored him.
All these decisions were based on assessments of the limits of power that had
been revealed by the desperate acts of a failing empire stretched to its
military and economic limits. If these are the "rogue" parts of the global
wave, all you have to do is look at Russia's reassertion of interest and power
in its old energy-rich Central Asian bailiwick (much coveted by the Bush
administration); or the expansion of Chinese economic power in Southeast Asia
and energy power in Africa to see other aspects of the global wave of
reassessment under way.
In fact, the global part of the election was long over by Tuesday. For vast
majorities abroad, the vision of the US as an Outlaw Empire is nothing new at
all. The wave in the US has perhaps only begun to rise, but here, too, those
presidential "musts" (along with the president's designation of the Democrats
as little short of "enemy noncombatants") have begun to lose their effect.
Hence the presidential plebiscite of Tuesday. No matter what else flows from
it, the fact that it happened is of real significance. A majority of the
American people - those who voted anyway - did not ratify Bush's Outlaw Empire.
They took a modest step toward sanity. But what will follow?
Here, briefly, are five "benchmark" questions to ask when considering the
possibilities of the final two years of the Bush administration's wrecking-ball
regime:
Will Iraq go away?
The political maneuvering in Washington and Baghdad over the chaos in Iraq was
only awaiting election results to intensify. Desperate call-ups of more
reserves and National Guards will go out soon. Negotiations with Sunni rebels,
coup rumors against the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, various
plans from James Baker's Iraq Study Group and congressional others will
undoubtedly be swirling.
Tuesday's plebiscite (and exit polls) held an Iraqi message. It can't simply be
ignored. But nothing will matter, when it comes to changing the situation for
the better in that country, without a genuine commitment to US withdrawal,
which is not likely to be forthcoming from this president and his advisers any
time soon. So expect Iraq to remain a horrifying, bloody, devolving fixture of
the final two years of the Bush administration. It will not go away. Bush (and
Rove) will surely try to enmesh congressional Democrats in their disaster of a
war. Imagine how bad it could be if - with, potentially, years to go - the
argument over who "lost" Iraq has already begun.
Is an attack on Iran on the agenda?
Despite all the alarums on the political Internet about a pre-election air
assault on Iran, this was never in the cards. Even the hint of an attack on
Iranian "nuclear facilities" (which would certainly turn into an attempt to
"decapitate" the Iranian regime from the air) would send oil prices soaring.
The Republicans were never going to run an election on oil selling at
US$120-$150 a barrel. This will be no less true of election year 2008. If Iran
is to be a target, 2007 will be the year. So watch for the pressures to ratchet
up on this one early in the new year. This is madness, of course. Such an
attack would almost certainly throw the Middle East into utter chaos, send oil
prices through the roof, possibly wreck the global economy, cause serious
damage in Iran, not fell the Iranian government, and put US troops in
neighboring Iraq in peril.
Given the Bush administration record, however, all this is practically an
argument for launching such an attack. (And don't count on the military to stop
it, either. They're unlikely to do so.) Failing empires have certainly been
known to lash out or, as neo-con writer Robert Kagan put the matter recently in
a Washington Post op-ed, "Indeed, the preferred European scenario [of a
Democratic Congressional victory] - 'Bush hobbled' - is less likely than the
alternative: 'Bush unbound'. Neither the president nor his vice president is
running for office in 2008. That is what usually prevents high-stakes
foreign-policy moves in the last two years of a president's term." So when you
think about Iran, think of Bush unbound.
Are the Democrats a party?
Rovian plans for a Republican Party ensconced in Washington for eons to come
now look to be in tatters; the Democrats have retaken the House of
Representatives (and possibly the Senate). The election may leave the
Republicans with a dead presidency and a leading candidate for 2008 wedded to
possibly the least popular war in US history; the Democrats may arrive
victorious but without the genuine desire for a mandate to lead.
Unlike the Republicans, the Democrats in recent years were not, in any normal
sense, a party at all. They were perhaps a coalition of four or five or six
parties (some trailing hordes of pundits and consultants, but without a base).
Now, with the recruitment of so many ex-Republicans and conservatives into
their House and Senate ranks, they may be a coalition of six or seven parties.
Who knows? They have a genuine mandate on Iraq and a mandate on oversight. What
they will actually do - what they are capable of doing (other than the normal
money, career and earmark-trading in Washington) - remains to be seen. They
will be weak, the surroundings fierce and strong.
Will the US be ruled by the facts on the ground?
In certain ways, it may hardly matter what happens to which party. By now - and
this perhaps represents another kind of triumph for the Bush administration -
the facts on the ground are so powerful that it would be hard for any party to
know where to begin.
Will the US, for instance, ever be without a second Defense Department, the
so-called Department of Homeland Security, now that a burgeoning $59 billion a
year private "security" industry with all its interests and its herd of
lobbyists in Washington has grown up around it? Not likely in any of our
lifetimes.
Will an ascendant Democratic Party dare put on a diet the ravenous Pentagon,
which now feeds off two budgets - its regular, near-half-trillion-dollar
defense budget and a regularized series of multibillion-dollar "emergency"
supplemental appropriations, which are now part of life on the Hill?
What this means is that the defense budget is not what the US wages its wars on
or pays for a variety of black operations (not to speak of earmarks galore)
with. Don't bet your bottom dollar that this will get better any time soon
either. In fact, I have my doubts that a Democratic Congress with a Democratic
president in tow could even do something modestly small like shutting down
Guantanamo, no less begin to deal with the empire of bases that undergirds the
United States' failing Outlaw Empire abroad. So, from time to time, take your
eyes off what passes for politics and check out the facts on the ground. That
way you'll have a better sense of where the world is actually heading.
What happens when the commander-in-chief presidency and
the unitary executive theory meet what's left of the republic?
The answer on this one is relatively uncomplicated and less than three months
away from being in US faces; it's the mother of all constitutional crises. But
writing that now, and living with the reality then, are two quite different
things.
So when the new Congress arrives in January, buckle your seatbelts and wait for
the first requests for oversight information from some investigative committee;
wait for the first subpoenas to meet Cheney's men in some dark hallway. Wait
for this crew to feel the "shackles" and react. Wait for this to hit the courts
- even a Supreme Court that, despite the president's best efforts, is probably
still at least one justice short when it comes to unitary-executive-theory
supporters. I wouldn't even want to offer a prediction on this one. But a year
down the line, anything is possible.
So the US has finally had its plebiscite, however covert, on the failing Outlaw
Empire of Bush and Cheney. But what about their autocratic inclinations at
home? How will that play out?
Will it be: all hail Caesar, we who are about to dive back into prime-time
programming?
Or will it be: all the political hail is about to pelt our junior Caesars as we
dive back into prime-time programming? Stay tuned.
Tom Engelhardt is editor of
Tomdispatch and the author of The End of Victory Culture. His
novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has recently come out in paperback.
Most recently, he is the author of
Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American
Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch
interviews.
