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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Overwrought
empire By Tom Engelhardt
Americans lived in a "victory culture" for
much of the twentieth century. You could say that
we experienced an almost 75-year stretch of
triumphalism - think of it as the real "American
Century" - from World War I to the end of the Cold
War, with time off for a destructive stalemate in
Korea and a defeat in Vietnam too shocking to
absorb or shake off.
When the Soviet Union
disintegrated in 1991, it all seemed so obvious.
Fate had clearly dealt Washington a royal flush.
It was victory with a capital V. The United States
was, after all, the last standing superpower,
after centuries of unceasing great power rivalries
on the planet. It had a military beyond compare
and no enemy, hardly a "rogue state," on the
horizon. It was almost
unnerving, such clear
sailing into a dominant future, but a moment for
the ages nonetheless. Within a decade, pundits in
Washington were hailing us as "the dominant power
in the world, more dominant than any since Rome."
And here's the odd thing: in a sense,
little has changed since then and yet everything
seems different. Think of it as the American
imperial paradox: everywhere there are now
"threats" against our well-being which seem to
demand action and yet nowhere are there
commensurate enemies to go with them. Everywhere
the US military still reigns supreme by almost any
measure you might care to apply; and yet - in case
the paradox has escaped you - nowhere can it
achieve its goals, however modest.
At one
level, the American situation should simply take
your breath away. Never before in modern history
had there been an arms race of only one or a great
power confrontation of only one. And at least in
military terms, just as the neo-conservatives
imagined in those early years of the twenty-first
century, the United States remains the "sole
superpower" or even "hyperpower" of planet Earth.
The planet's Top Gun And yet the
more dominant the US military becomes in its
ability to destroy and the more its forces are
spread across the globe, the more the defeats and
semi-defeats pile up, the more the missteps and
mistakes grow, the more the strains show, the more
the suicides rise, the more the nation's treasure
disappears down a black hole - and in response to
all of this, the more moves the Pentagon makes.
A great power without a significant enemy?
You might have to go back to the Roman Empire at
its height or some Chinese dynasty in full flower
to find anything like it. And yet Osama bin Laden
is dead. Al-Qaeda is reportedly a shadow of its
former self. The great regional threats of the
moment, North Korea and Iran, are regimes held
together by baling wire and the suffering of their
populaces. The only incipient great power rival on
the planet, China, has just launched its first
aircraft carrier, a refurbished Ukrainian
throwaway from the 1990s on whose deck the country
has no planes capable of landing.
The US
has 1,000 or more bases around the world; other
countries, a handful. The US spends as much on its
military as the next 14 powers (mostly allies)
combined. In fact, it's investing an estimated
$1.45 trillion to produce and operate a single
future aircraft, the F-35 - more than any country,
the US included, now spends on its national
defense annually.
The US military is
singular in other ways, too. It alone has divided
the globe - the complete world - into six
"commands." With (lest anything be left out) an
added command, Stratcom, for the heavens and
another, recently established, for the only space
not previously occupied, cyberspace, where we're
already unofficially "at war." No other country on
the planet thinks of itself in faintly comparable
military terms.
When its high command
plans for its future "needs," thanks to Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin
Dempsey, they repair (don't say "retreat") to a
military base south of the capital where they
argue out their future and war-game various
possible crises while striding across a map of the
world larger than a basketball court. What other
military would come up with such a method?
The president now has at his command not
one, but two private armies. The first is the CIA,
which in recent years has been heavily
militarized, is overseen by a former four-star
general (who calls the job "living the dream"),
and is running its own private assassination
campaigns and drone air wars throughout the
Greater Middle East. The second is an expanding
elite, the Joint Special Operations Command,
cocooned inside the US military, members of whom
are now deployed to hot spots around the globe.
The US Navy, with its 11 nuclear-powered
aircraft carrier task forces, is dominant on the
global waves in a way that only the British Navy
might once have been; and the US Air Force
controls the global skies in much of the world in
a totally uncontested fashion. (Despite numerous
wars and conflicts, the last American plane
possibly downed in aerial combat was in the first
Gulf War in 1991.) Across much of the global
south, there is no sovereign space Washington's
drones can't penetrate to kill those judged by the
White House to be threats.
In sum, the US
is now the sole planetary Top Gun in a way that
empire-builders once undoubtedly fantasized about,
but that none from Genghis Khan on have ever
achieved: alone and essentially uncontested on the
planet. In fact, by every measure (except
success), the likes of it has never been seen.
Blindsided by predictably unintended
consequences By all the usual measuring
sticks, the US should be supreme in a historically
unprecedented way. And yet it couldn't be more
obvious that it's not, that despite all the bases,
elite forces, private armies, drones, aircraft
carriers, wars, conflicts, strikes, interventions,
and clandestine operations, despite a labyrinthine
intelligence bureaucracy that never seems to stop
growing and into which we pour a minimum of $80
billion a year, nothing seems to work out in an
imperially satisfying way. It couldn't be more
obvious that this is not a glorious dream, but
some kind of ever-expanding imperial nightmare.
This should, of course, have been
self-evident since at least early 2004, less than
a year after the Bush administration invaded and
occupied Iraq, when the roadside bombs started to
explode and the suicide bombings to mount, while
the comparisons of the United States to Rome and
of a prospective Pax Americana in the Greater
Middle East to the Pax Romana vanished like a
morning mist on a blazing day. Still, the wars
against relatively small, ill-armed sets of
insurgents dragged toward their dismally
predictable ends. (It says the world that, after
almost 11 years of war, the 2,000th US military
death in Afghanistan occurred at the hands of an
Afghan "ally" in an "insider attack.") In those
years, Washington continued to be regularly
blindsided by the unintended consequences of its
military moves. Surprises - none pleasant - became
the order of the day and victories proved
vanishingly rare.
One thing seems obvious:
a superpower military with unparalleled
capabilities for one-way destruction no longer has
the more basic ability to impose its will anywhere
on the planet. Quite the opposite, US military
power has been remarkably discredited globally by
the most pitiful of forces. From Pakistan to
Honduras, just about anywhere it goes in the old
colonial or neocolonial world, in those regions
known in the contested Cold War era as the Third
World, resistance of one unexpected sort or
another arises and failure ensues in some often
long-drawn-out and spectacular fashion.
Given the lack of enemies - a few thousand
jihadis, a small set of minority insurgencies, a
couple of feeble regional powers - why this is so,
what exactly the force is that prevents
Washington's success, remains mysterious.
Certainly, it's in some way related to the more
than half-century of decolonization movements,
rebellions, and insurgencies that were a feature
of the previous century.
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