Page 2 of 4 DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA Doubling down on the
imperial mission By Tom
Engelhardt
to become a classic financial
quagmire as well. In other words, Iraq and
military expansion don't fit together well at all.
And yet, looking at the state of the US military
in Iraq in a certain light, expansion seems so ...
well, logical.
After all, the US military,
now at just over 500,000 troops, stood, at the
time of the first Gulf War, at 703,000. (Of
course, no one now counts the quite expensive
hired mercenaries who envelop
the
US military - the privatized, Halliburton-style
adjuncts, who cook the food, build the bases, do
the cleaning, deliver the mail and supplies,
perform interrogation duties, and so on, and whose
increase has been striking, as has the growth of
rent-a-mercenary corporations whose armed
employees are, for instance, all over Iraq.)
In addition, it has long been clear that
the US Armed Forces could not take the strain of
failing wars in Central Asia and the Middle East
forever, not to speak of increased "commitments"
in the Persian Gulf and the normal massive global
basing and policing that the Pentagon regularly
refers to as America's "footprint" on the planet.
Added to this, Bush seems to be leaning toward
increasing the pressure on military manpower needs
by "surging" - the Vietnam-era word would, of
course, have been "escalating" - up to 30,000
troops into Baghdad and al-Anbar province, while
naval and air forces (with an obvious eye to Iran)
are simultaneously ramped up in the Persian Gulf.
In light of Iraq, military manpower needs
cry out to be dealt with. In light of Iraq,
dealing with them any time soon will be
prohibitively expensive.
In Washington,
this conundrum leads nowhere in particular.
Instead, in the spirit of imperial-mission logic
(and with the urge to bash the Bush administration
for being late to such an obvious
support-our-troops position), Democrats simply
leaped on to the expand-the-military bandwagon
even faster than Republicans. In fact, leading
Democrats had long been calling for just this sort
of expansion. ("I am glad [the president] has
realized the need for increasing the size of the
armed forces ... but this is where the Democrats
have been for two years," commented Congressman
Rahm Emanuel, the new House of Representatives
Democratic caucus chairman.) The Democratic
leadership promptly pledged to make such an
expansion one of its top reform priorities in the
new year.
To get those numbers
significantly higher will, it's estimated, take a
decade and unimaginable sums of money (as well as
those lowered standards). And, if the situations
in Iraq and Afghanistan worsen, as they almost
certainly will, and American casualties rise with
no end in sight, you can start going through your
multiplication tables. This could be considered
but a form of ongoing blowback from US imperial
shock-and-awe tactics in Iraq and presents some
curious choices to US leaders. After all, to take
but one example, those most eager to expand the US
military, with their eyes on the imperial future,
should be eager to liquidate the Iraqi mission as
soon as possible.
But a far more basic
choice lurks - one rarely alluded to in the
mainstream. If we Americans voted on such things -
and, in truth, we vote on less and less that
matters - the choice that actually lies behind the
marine e-letter to my friend's daughter might be
put this way: Expand the military or shrink the
mission?
This is the essential question
that goes largely unmentioned - and largely
unthought as well. In the meantime, money will
continue to pour into military recruitment ad
campaigns, bonuses, and summer camps. In the
meantime, those marine e-letters will continue to
go out. In the meantime, money will continue to
pour into the Pentagon and the US
national-security world generally. In the
meantime, the US will continue to build its
near-billion-dollar embassy, the largest on the
planet, in the heart of Baghdad's Green Zone. In
the meantime, the imperial and military paths will
continue to fuse, and the Pentagon will continue
to take on new roles, even outside "declared war
zones", in intelligence, diplomacy, "information
operations", and other "self-assigned missions";
so that, as Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times
recently described it, even America's embassies
will increasingly be militarized outposts in the
"global war on terror".
Shrinking the
mission - choosing some path other than the
imperial one (in part by redefining what exactly
America's national interests are) - would, of
course, address many problems. It would make
paying young people thousands of dollars to test
their leadership potential or thinking about
scouring Central America for a future Foreign
Legion far less necessary. But no one in
Washington - not in the Bush administration, not
in James A Baker's Iraq Study Group, which
recently captured the Inside-the-Beltway "middle
ground" on Iraq policy, not in the Democratic
leadership - is faintly interested in shrinking
the US global mission. No one in Washington, where
a kind of communal voting does go on, is about to
vote "no" to that mission, or cast a ballot for
democracy rather than empire.
Expanding
the US military may seem like a no-brainer in
response to the Iraq crisis. As it happens, it's
anything but. Unfortunately, few ever discuss (as,
for instance, Chalmers Johnson did in his book
The Sorrows of Empire) the 700-plus
military and intelligence bases the US retains
around the world or ask why exactly we're
garrisoning the planet. No one, in these past
years, has seriously challenged the ever-expanding
Pentagon budget; nor the mushrooming supplemental
requests for Iraq and Afghanistan, including the
record-setting latest for almost $100 billion;
nor, generally, the fact that paying for actual
war-fighting is no longer considered an
appropriate part of the Pentagon's normal budget
process.
No one challenged it when, in
2002, the United States gained a new North
American Command (Northcom), making US citizens
but another co-equal part of the Pentagon's
division of its imperial world, along with those
who live in regions covered by Centcom, Paccom,
and the just authorized Africa Command (Africom).
No one challenged the vast expansion of Pentagon
intelligence activities. No one offered a
challenge as the US military took on ever more
civilian domestic duties, including planning for
the potential arrival of a pandemic disease on US
shores or for future Hurricane Katrinas. No one
seriously challenges the plans the Pentagon has on
the drawing boards for exotic, futuristic hardware
meant to come online decades from now that, along
with futuristic military tactics already being
worked out, will help predetermine the wars most
Americans don't even know we are going to fight -
from the vast mega-slum-cities of the Third World
to the borderlands of space.
No one
considers what the Pentagonization of the world
and the Homeland Securitization of the United
States is doing to us Americans, because
militarism here has never taken on the
