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4 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Seven years in
hell By Tom Engelhardt
managed to add a second
Defense Department - the Department of Homeland
Security (with its own "industrial complex") - to
the American agenda; they passed ever more
draconian laws curtailing American rights in the
name of "homeland security"; they went remarkably
far in turning what was already an imperial
presidency into something like a Caesarian
commander-in-chief presidency; they presided over
a far more politicized Defense
Department (whose commanders
today speak out, while in uniform, on what once
would have been civilian political matters); they
initiated far more sweeping means of government
surveillance at home.
And they opened offshore
prisons, giving their covert intelligence
operatives the possibility of disappearing just
about any human being they cared to target and
their interrogators permission to use the most
sophisticated kinds of torture. In short, they
presided over a striking increase in the state's
coercive powers, as embodied in a single,
theoretically unrestrained commander-in-chief
presidency and the first imperial vice-presidency
in American history. (Of course, from the Reagan
"revolution" on, the American conservative
movement that first took power over a quarter of a
century ago never meant to throttle the state,
only the capacity of the state to deliver any
services except "security" to its
citizenry.)
How distant now is the American moment when a
peacetime US Army could still exist as a
minimalist force (as between the two world wars or
even, to some extent and briefly, after the
demobilization of World War II). Similarly, it is
no longer possible for American politicians of
either party to imagine any region of the globe as
not part of our national security sphere or not an
object of our attentions, not to say our duty, if
push comes to shove (or far earlier), to intervene
or make war. As a name, Bush's "war on terror" was
no more meant as blather than that "greatest force
for liberation the world has ever seen".
By the time the top officials of this
administration and their various neo-con backers
arrived in power in 2000, they had already fallen
deeply in love with the all-volunteer US armed
forces and the semi-militarized land they were
about to inherit. They fervently believed their
own propaganda about what such a military could
accomplish in the world, despite the cautionary
lessons of history stretching from Vietnam back to
what the Catholic peasants of Spain, the Sunni
fundamentalists of their moment, did to Napoleon's
vaunted armies of occupation. (They would, of
course, hardly be the first ruling group to
mistake their own propaganda for reality.)
Like all fundamentalist believers, like
their eternally "resolute" president, in the face
of the flood of disasters the Big Muddy of reality
has delivered to their doorstep, they remain
undeterred - at least, those who are left.
Changing their minds was never an option, though
they might indeed still opt to double-down their
bets and launch an attack on Iran before January
2009.
They truly believed that when you
wrapped the flag of American exceptionalism, of
American goodness, around the US military, you
would have the greatest force for liberation on
the planet. Of course, they defined "liberation"
in a way that coincided exactly with their desires
for remaking the world. Hence, whenever democratic
elections didn't produce the results they wanted,
they simply rejected the results. In the bargain,
they were convinced that, wielding that "greatest
force", they could reshape the Middle East to
their specifications, establish an unassailably
dominant position at the heart of the oil
heartlands of the planet, roll back the Russians
even further, cow the Chinese and create a Pax
Americana planet. From their fervent unipolarity,
they would, in fact, help to give premature birth
to a newly multipolar world.
Because their
faith was of the blind sort, they thoroughly
misread the nature of power - of what was powerful
- in our world. Among other disastrous
miscalculations, they confused the power that lay
in the threat of losing the American military, for
the actual act of losing it (as they would soon
find out to their chagrin in both Afghanistan and
Iraq). Like the monotheists they were, they
believed that a single God, personified by the
military at their command, would sweep all before
Him; that, with a "coalition of the willing" (that
is, the submissive) but without the need for
actual allies or peers, and so for restraints of
any kind, they could take their God of force to
the heathen at the point of a shock-and-awe cruise
missile and that victory - in fact, an endless
string of victories - would be theirs. How
predictably wrong they were.
They did move
far toward completing the strange process by which
American society has, since World War II, been
militarized without taking on the normal signs of
militarization. We are now a nation armed for
global war - from under and on the sea, on the
land, in the air, and from the heavens, in jungles
and urban jungles, in oil lands, wetlands and arid
lands. The US is prepared to make war on the
planet itself with an arsenal that is indeed a
techno-wonder. As the president suggested in his
speech, not thoughts of Thomas Jefferson, but of
the latest wondrous armed robot or
Hellfire-missile-armed Predator drone are the true
hallmarks of early 21st century American
civilization.
The result of all this has
been seven years of hell (so far) delivered by an
administration of boys with lethal toys at their
command (and the women who enabled them). The
dwindling band now left presides over a
militarized land that lacks a citizenry of
warriors. Think Teutonic without the Teutons. The
president caught the essence of America's odd form
of militarization when, while launching his wars,
he urged American citizens to show their mettle by
visiting Disney World and spending up a storm.
A chasm, unimaginable when the US still
had a citizen's army, has emerged between American
society and a military increasingly from the
forgotten towns of the rural hinterland (as the
lists of the dead regularly remind us) and new
immigrant communities, an all-volunteer military
that has become ever less like the public it
defends, ever more mercenary (as huge "quick-ship"
bonuses are used to attract the reluctant
"volunteer") and ever more privatized.
These days, the US military and the vast
mercenary legions of private contractors who
accompany them to war are beginning to take on
something of the look of the Roman imperial
legions in that empire's last years when they were
increasingly filled with Goths and other despised
"barbarian" peoples from the empire's frontier
regions.
As David Walker, US comptroller
and head of the non-partisan Government Accounting
Office, pointed out recently, the American
government has also, in a remarkably short period
of time, taken on the look of a faltering imperial
Rome with "an over-confident and over-extended
military in foreign lands and fiscal
irresponsibility by the central government". And
imagine - it was only a few years ago that neo-con
pundits were hailing the US as a power "more
dominant than any since Rome". Think instead: The
Roman Empire on crack cocaine.
Looking
back, it will undoubtedly be clear, if it isn't
already, that, with the adherents of the cult of
force at the helm of the ship of state, the world
of fantasy took over and, even in imperial terms,
what resulted was an empire of stupidity, hustling
headlong down the slope of decline. That's often
the way with blind faith, with anything, in fact,
that prevents you from actually taking in the
world as it is.
Defeat Recently, I watched a June bug caught in a
spider's web. It had evidently hit the web almost
dead center; and, big as it was, had torn a hole
in the fine filaments. Now, it dangled below the
web, barely held (so it seemed) by a few strands
of the spider's silk. A small brownish thing,
glowing in the night light, the spider was working
its way methodically around the madly struggling
bug in what, for all the world, looked like the
most unbelievable of contests. And yet, over time,
the bug's flailing grew weaker, the filaments ever
more numerous. By morning, with that bug fully
wrapped, all its efforts long defeated, the
visibly fantastic had turned into the most mundane
of realities.
Now, what's left of an
American fundamentalist cult of force, based on a
prophesy of victory, led by naturals in the arts
of destruction and deconstruction, but incapable
of overseeing any task of construction or
reconstruction anywhere on the planet or altering
their path through the world, are faced with a
word Americans have long proven themselves
ill-equipped to handle - defeat. Today, as in the
past, it's a word you only use as a curse to be
laid biblically on your opponents. (Oppositional
Democrats are reputedly now referred to privately
in the White House as "defeatocrats".)
The
Bush administration is not alone in being unable
to face the idea of defeat. Sometimes even crushed
imperial states, blind
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