Page 3 of 4 DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA Doubling down on the
imperial mission By Tom
Engelhardt
expectable forms - few vast
military parades or displays (despite the almost
full-scale militarization of presidential
funerals); few troops in the streets; no uniforms
in the high councils of government. In fact, it's
one of the ironies of America's particular form of
militarization that when the US military - no
longer really a citizen army - goes to war and
troops begin to die, fewer Americans are touched
by this than perhaps at any time in
recent
history.
Shrink the
mission or expand the military? Your choice?
Fat chance.
An expeditionary
mentality Like all crucial questions, the
one never asked nonetheless remains deeply
embedded in our most essential texts as in our
lives and our world. All you have to do is keep an
eye out and you can catch endless examples of the
choices that have already been made for us
Americans - and are being regularly ratified in
our names, but largely without our knowledge or
the slightest consultation by the men (and they
are largely men) who define what an American world
is supposed to mean and simply can't imagine it
any other way.
Let me just offer a few
illustrative and largely overlooked gems from 2006
(with modest commentary):
Last May, in the
opening statement at his confirmation hearings
before the Senate Intelligence Committee for the
post of director of the Central Intelligence
Agency, General Michael Hayden, former head of the
National Security Agency, offered the following
promise to Congress:
If confirmed as director, I would
reaffirm CIA's proud culture of risk-taking and
excellence, particularly through the increased
use of non-traditional operational platforms, a
greater focus on the development of language
skills, and the inculcation of what I would call
an expeditionary mentality.
"An
expeditionary mentality" - to "keep America safe".
The phrase, so Kiplingesque, so British Empire,
did not so much as draw a comment from the
assembled senators or a peep from the press. While
much in Hayden's testimony was highlighted, this
essential promise passed essentially unnoticed.
And why should that surprise anyone? After the
tenure of the previous two directors, George "Slam
Dunk" Tenet and the ham-handed Republican Party
hack Porter Goss, it was, in the Washington
context, a simple promise of performance
enhancement. On the imperial path, after all, an
expeditionary mentality is a perfectly reasonable
thing to have.
Let's do it again!
Or consider the following comment from
Colonel Conrad Crane, director of the US Army
Military History Institute and a key figure in
overseeing the production and recent release of a
279-page joint army/marine Counterinsurgency
Field Manual.
If we've created a manual that is
just good for Iraq and Afghanistan, we've failed
... This thing has got to be focused on the
future and the next time we do this.
The next time we do this. Okay, call
that realism along the imperial path. After all,
if somehow, post-Vietnam, the US military was in
denial about waging future counterinsurgency wars,
it's perfectly logical to assume that it shouldn't
be again; not if these are to be "our" wars of the
future. Or as another of the key drafters of the
guidebook, Lieutenant-Colonel John A Nagl, put it,
"We are codifying the best practices of previous
counterinsurgency campaigns and the lessons we
have learned from Iraq and Afghanistan to help our
forces succeed in the current fight and prepare
for the future."
And yet, like so much
else, that counterinsurgency how-to-do-it is also
a functional vote for an imperial mission few of
us have ever had the chance really to consider, no
less opt for. And why is it that when I read
Crane's comment, I think to myself - as if I were
a parent dealing with thoughtless children - no,
no, the lesson of our moment isn't: Do it right
the next time. It's: Don't do it!
'We're going to be here a long time'
But you can hardly blame Colonels Conrad
and Nagl, not when just about all strands of
official thought in and around Washington point
toward those future wars. On the one hand, we have
the latest neo-conservative proposal, direct from
the American Enterprise Institute, promoted
personally to the president by former vice chief
of staff of the US Army General Jack Keane and AEI
star Frederick Kagan, and heavily lobbied for by
presidential candidate Senator John McCain. It
calls for Bush to order a "surge" of 30,000 or
more US troops (long-term) into what former
counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke now calls
the "Iraqi sinkhole". These are the people who, as
Inter Press Service analyst Jim Lobe commented
recently, are intent on making "one final effort
... to persuade the president that, by 'doubling
down' on his gamble on Iraq, he can still leave
the table a winner and 'transform' the entire
Middle East" (see A risky throw of the dice for
Bush, Asia Times Online, December 22,
2006).
If taken, this will be but the
latest in a long line of gambler's choices on the
neo-con imperial path to remaking the Middle East.
And while others in Washington or Iraq, including
top US commanders, may not back such an obviously
wobbly policy decision, doubling down on the
imperial path itself is another matter entirely.
News reports late last month indicated that the
United States and Britain were already deploying a
new set of warships to the Persian Gulf, possibly
including a second US aircraft-carrier task force,
which would join the USS Dwight D Eisenhower
already on station there. No one had any doubt
that these moves were aimed at Iran.
In
the meantime, America's new Secretary of Defense
Robert A Gates, until recently a member of the
"realist" Iraq Study Group, sent in from Papa
Bush's world to clean up the mess in Baghdad, made
his first official trip to the Iraqi capital to
meet with American commanders. While those ships
headed Gulf-ward, he had a few choice things to
say on the subject of the US imperial mission in
the Middle East. In a breakfast meeting with
American soldiers, he offered the following:
We need to make damn sure that the
neighbors understand we're going to be here a
long time, "here" meaning the Persian Gulf area,
not necessarily here in Iraq.
That
this was no passing spontaneous outburst he made
clear
