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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Overwrought
empire By Tom
Engelhardt
It also has something to do with
the way economic heft has spread beyond the US,
Europe, and Japan - with the rise of the "tigers"
in Asia, the explosion of the Chinese and Indian
economies, the advances of Brazil and Turkey, and
the movement of the planet toward some kind of
genuine economic multipolarity. It may also have
something to do with the end of the Cold War,
which put an end as well to several centuries of
imperial or great power competition and left the
sole "victor," it now seems clear, heading toward
the exits wreathed in self-congratulation.
Explain it as you will, it's as if the
planet itself, or humanity, had somehow been
inoculated against the imposition of imperial
power, as if it now rejected it whenever and
wherever applied. In
the previous century, it
took a half-nation, North Korea, backed by Russian
supplies and Chinese troops to fight the US to a
draw, or a popular insurgent movement backed by a
local power, North Vietnam, backed in turn by the
Soviet Union and China to defeat American power.
Now, small-scale minority insurgencies, largely
using roadside bombs and suicide bombers, are
fighting American power to a draw (or worse) with
no great power behind them at all. Think of
the growing force that resists such military might
as the equivalent of the "dark matter" in the
universe. The evidence is in. We now know (or
should know) that it's there, even if we can't see
it.
Washington's wars on
autopilot After the last decade of military
failures, stand-offs, and frustrations, you might
think that this would be apparent in Washington.
After all, the US is now visibly an overextended
empire, its sway waning from the Greater Middle
East to Latin America, the limits of its power
increasingly evident. And yet, here's the curious
thing: two administrations in Washington have
drawn none of the obvious conclusions, and no
matter how the presidential election turns out,
it's already clear that, in this regard, nothing
will change.
Even as military power has
proven itself a bust again and again, our
policymakers have come to rely ever more
completely on a military-first response to global
problems. In other words, we are not just a
classically overextended empire, but also an
overwrought one operating on some kind of
militarized autopilot. Lacking is a learning
curve. By all evidence, it's not just that there
isn't one, but that there can't be one.
Washington, it seems, now has only one
mode of thought and action, no matter who is at
the helm or what the problem may be, and it always
involves, directly or indirectly, openly or
clandestinely, the application of militarized
force. Nor does it matter that each further
application only destabilizes some region yet more
or undermines further what once were known as
"American interests."
Take Libya, as an
example. It briefly seemed to count as a rare
American military success story: a decisive
intervention in support of a rebellion against a
brutal dictator - so brutal, in fact, that the CIA
previously shipped "terrorist suspects," Islamic
rebels fighting against the Gaddafi regime, there
for torture. No US casualties resulted, while
American and NATO air strikes were decisive in
bringing a set of ill-armed, ill-organized rebels
to power.
In the world of unintended
consequences, however, the fall of Gaddafi sent
Tuareg mercenaries from his militias, armed with
high-end weaponry, across the border into Mali.
There, when the dust settled, the whole northern
part of the country had come unhinged and fallen
under the sway of Islamic extremists and al-Qaeda
wannabes as other parts of North Africa threatened
to destabilize. At the same time, of course, the
first American casualties of the intervention
occurred when Ambassador Christopher Stevens and
three other Americans died in an attack on the
Benghazi consulate and a local "safe house."
With matters worsening regionally, the
response couldn't have been more predictable. As
Greg Miller and Craig Whitlock of the Washington
Post recently reported, in ongoing secret
meetings, the White House is planning for military
operations against al-Qaeda-in-the-Magreb (North
Africa), now armed with weaponry pillaged from
Gaddafi's stockpiles. These plans evidently
include the approach used in Yemen (US special
forces on the ground and CIA drone strikes), or a
Somalia "formula" (drone strikes, special forces
operations, CIA operations, and the support of
African proxy armies), or even at some point "the
possibility of direct US intervention".
In
addition, Eric Schmitt and David Kilpatrick of the
New York Times report that the Obama
administration is "preparing retaliation" against
those it believes killed the US ambassador,
possibly including "drone strikes, special
operations raids like the one that killed Osama
bin Laden, and joint missions with Libyan
authorities". The near certainty that, like the
previous intervention, this next set of military
actions will only further destabilize the region
with yet more unpleasant surprises and unintended
consequences hardly seems to matter. Nor does the
fact that, in crude form, the results of such acts
are known to us ahead of time have an effect on
the unstoppable urge to plan and order them.
Such situations are increasingly legion
across the Greater Middle East and elsewhere. Take
one other tiny example: Iraq, from which, after
almost a decade-long military disaster, the "last"
US units essentially fled in the middle of the
night as 2011 ended. Even in those last moments,
the Obama administration and the Pentagon were
still trying to keep significant numbers of US
troops there (and, in fact, did manage to leave
behind possibly several hundred as trainers of
elite Iraqi units). Meanwhile, Iraq has been
supportive of the embattled Syrian regime and
drawn ever closer to Iran, even as its own
sectarian strife has ratcheted upward. Having
watched this unsettling fallout from its last
round in the country, according to the New York
Times, the US is now negotiating an agreement
"that could result in the return of small units of
American soldiers to Iraq on training missions. At
the request of the Iraqi government, according to
General Caslen, a unit of Army Special Operations
soldiers was recently deployed to Iraq to advise
on counter-terrorism and help with intelligence."
Don't you just want to speak to those
negotiators the way you might to a child: No,
don't do that! The urge to return to the scene of
their previous disaster, however, seems
unstaunchable. You could offer various
explanations for why our policymakers, military
and civilian, continue in such a repetitive - and
even from an imperial point of view -
self-destructive vein in situations where
unpleasant surprises are essentially guaranteed
and lack of success a given. Yes, there is the
military-industrial complex to be fed. Yes, we are
interested in the control of crucial resources,
especially energy, and so on.
But it's
probably more reasonable to say that a deeply
militarized mindset and the global maneuvers that
go with it are by now just part of the way of life
of a Washington eternally "at war." They are the
tics of a great power with the equivalent of
Tourette's Syndrome. They happen because they
can't help but happen, because they are engraved
in the policy DNA of our national security
complex, and can evidently no longer be altered.
In other words, they can't help themselves.
That's the only logical conclusion in a
world where it has become ever less imaginable to
do the obvious, which is far less or nothing at
all. (Northern Chad? When did it become crucial to
our well being?) Downsizing the mission?
Inconceivable. Thinking the unthinkable? Don't
even give it a thought!
What remains is,
of course, a self-evident formula for disaster on
autopilot. But don't tell Washington. It won't
matter. Its denizens can't take it in.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of
the American Empire Project and author of The
United States of Fear as well as The End of
Victory Culture, his history of the Cold War,
runs the Nation Institute'sTomDispatch.com.
His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse,
is Terminator Planet: The First History of
Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.
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