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DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Doubling down on the
imperial mission By Tom Engelhardt
with this comment in a press briefing:
I think the message that we are
sending to everyone, not just Iran, is that the United States is an enduring
presence in this part of the world. We have been here for a long time. We will
be here for a long time and everybody needs to remember that - both our friends
and those who might consider
themselves our adversaries.
When the "realist" secretary of
defense talks in this fashion about America's enduring regional "footprint",
he's voting for the imperial path in the name of all Americans. He's also
reminding us that, with every passing moment, that path and the military one
are becoming a single way into the future. He's ensuring that when our
counterinsurgency warriors, armed with their latest weaponry and manuals, hit
the sands of wherever, they won't sound that different from the soldier at that
breakfast in Iraq who described what it's like to "advise" the Iraqi military:
"The more they work with us, the more they're slowly picking up on our traits.
I mean, you see them sort of starting trying to act like us and stuff, and it's
good; you know, little brother trying to act like a big brother ..."
This is offered in the same patronizing imperial spirit in which President
Bush, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others once talked about
teaching the Iraqi child how to ride the "bike" of democracy and debated when
to take off the "training wheels". It helps explain why America's imperial path
and that giant "footprint", all of which seem so natural to us as hardly to be
an imposition on others, appeal so little elsewhere in the world. It helps
explain why no counterinsurgency guide, no deployment of aircraft carriers to
the Persian Gulf, no upping of the Pentagon budget, or sending of
"intelligence" agents, military or CIA, into the universe with an
"expeditionary mentality" will ever make this planet a comfortable,
conquerable, garrison-able place. It helps explain just why the imperial path
is ever more costly.
Flies and sledgehammers
Recently, the deputy director for the "war on terrorism" within the Strategic
Plans Office of the Pentagon's Joint Staff, General Mark O Schissler, told the
Washington Times:
We're in a generational war.
You can try and fight the enemy where they are and where they're attacking you,
or prevent them and defend your own homeland ... [Islamist extremists are]
absolutely committed to the 50-, 100-year plan.
It was a
typical comment of our moment in which "they" invariably leave helpless us no
other option but to prepare for their 100-year or multi-generational struggle.
So, with us headed down what various Bush administration officials have long
thought of as a century-long path of war, let me conclude this little sermon by
returning to the marine recruitment e-letter my friend's daughter received. It
ends with an encouraging challenge: "This is an unparalleled opportunity to see
if you have what it takes to be a leader in one of the most elite organizations
in the world without committing yourself to service." Then, after the
recruiting officer's sign-off, comes what clearly is meant to be an
inspirational quote for the prospective military leader of America's future:
Sometimes
killing a fly with a sledgehammer is entirely appropriate. It doesn't make the
fly any more dead, but the rest of the flies sure sit up and take notice. -
Major I L Holdridge, USMC
Retired marine Major Holdridge, it
turns out, is the creator of a video game, TacOps, used by military trainers
and available in commercial form. His comment reminded me of something Boston
Globe columnist James Carroll said in a Tomdispatch interview back in September
2005 (see
The mosquito and the hammer, Asia Times Online, September
13, 2005). Carroll was pointing out that George Bush's response to the attacks
of September 11, 2001, was partly a result of his particular character (and
faith) and partly of what was available to him in our "arsenal" of responses,
so to speak - because the process of Pentagonization, of militarization, had
already been under way in the United States for so long.
The meshing of
Bush's temperament and a long-prepared American institutional response was
unfortunate, but there it was. As somebody said, when he turned to his tool bag
to respond to the mosquito of Osama bin Laden, the only tool he had in it was a
hammer, so he brought it down on Afghanistan and destroyed it; then he brought
it down on Iraq and destroyed it, missing the mosquito, of course.
Rest assured, as the year 2007 begins, America's imperialists and militarists
are deep into preparations for General Schissler's 100 Year War. They are
already producing the next set of sledgehammers, the next set of military
responses, for America's next set of crises. At this point, it would be
shocking (not to say awesome) if these weren't sooner or later applied.
Expand the military or shrink the mission?
We Americans may never vote on this question, symbolic as it is of the critical
choices being made in our name; but make no mistake, the rest of the world is
already "voting" - some literally on ballots, as in Latin America; some by arms
(and polls), as in the Middle East; some via old-style great-power politics, as
in Central Asia. Americans may not know it, but the mission is shrinking, even
as the weaponry grows ever more dangerous and the imperial path gets ever
bumpier, more potholed, better mined. Expanding the US military will only
increase the costs in every sense of the word.
Tom Engelhardt is editor of
Tomdispatchand 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.
