DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Seven days in January
By Tom Engelhardt
Sometimes it pays to read a news story to the last paragraph where a reporter
can slip in that little gem for the news jockeys, or maybe just for the hell of
it. You know, the irresistible bit that doesn't fit comfortably into the larger
news frame, but that can be packed away in the place most of your readers will
never get near, where your editor is likely to give you a free pass.
So it was, undoubtedly, with New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, who
accompanied Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as he stumbled through a
challenge-filled, error-prone two-day trip to Pakistan. Gates must have felt a
little like a punching bag by
the time he boarded his plane for home having, as Juan Cole pointed out,
managed to signal "that the US is now increasingly tilting to India and wants
to put it in charge of Afghanistan security; that Pakistan is isolated ... and
that Pakistani conspiracy theories about Blackwater were perfectly correct and
he had admitted it. In baseball terms, Gates struck out".
In any case, here are the last two paragraphs of Bumiller's parting January 23
piece on the trip:
Mr Gates, who repeatedly told the Pakistanis that he
regretted their country's "trust deficit" with the United States and that
Americans had made a grave mistake in abandoning Pakistan after the Russians
left Afghanistan, promised the military officers that the United States would
do better.
His final message delivered, he relaxed on the 14-hour trip home by watching Seven
Days in May, the Cold War-era film about an attempted military coup in
the United States.
Just in case you've forgotten, three major
cautionary political films came out in the anxiety-ridden year of 1964, not so
long after the Cuban missile crisis - of which only Dr Strangelove,
Stanley Kubrick's classic vision of the end of the world, American-style, is
much remembered today. ("I don't say we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do
say no more than 10 to 20 million people killed.")
All three concerned nuclear politics, "oops" moments, and Washington. The
second was Fail Safe, in which a computerized nuclear response system
too fast for human intervention malfunctions and fails to stop an erroneous
nuclear attack on Moscow, forcing an American president to save the world by
nuking New York City. It was basically Dr Strangelove done straight
(though it's worth pointing out that Americans loved to stomp New York City in
their fantasies long before the September 11, 2001 attacks).
The third was the secretary of defense's top pick, Seven Days in May,
which came with this tagline: "You are soon to be shaken by the most awesome
seven days in your life!" In it, a right-wing four-star general linked to an
incipient fascist movement attempts to carry out a coup d'etat against a dovish
president who has just signed a nuclear disarmament pact with the Soviet Union.
The plot is uncovered and defused by a marine colonel played by Kirk Douglas.
("I'm suggesting, Mr President, there's a military plot to take over the
government, and it may occur sometime this coming Sunday ...")
These were, of course, the liberal worries of a long-gone time. Now, one of the
films is iconic and the other two clunky hoots. All three would make a perfect
film festival for a secretary of defense with 14 hours to spare. Just the sort
of retro fantasy stuff you could kick back and enjoy after a couple of rocky
days on the road, especially if you were headed for a "homeland" where no one
had a bad, or even a challenging, thing to say about you. After all, in the
last two decades our fantasies about nuclear apocalypse have shrunk to a far
more localized scale, and a military plot to take over the government is
entertainingly outre exactly because, in the Washington of 2010, such a thought
is ludicrous. After all, every week in Washington is now the 21st century
equivalent of Seven Days in May come true.
Think of the week after the secretary of defense flew home, for instance, as
Seven Days in January.
After all, if Gates was blindsided in Pakistan, he already knew that a US$626
billion Pentagon budget, including more than $128 billion in war-fighting
funds, had passed Congress in December and that his next budget for fiscal year
2011 (soon to be submitted) might well cross the $700 billion mark. He probably
also knew that, in the upcoming State of the Union address, President Barack
Obama was going to announce a three-year freeze on discretionary domestic
spending starting in 2011, but leave national security expenditures of any sort
distinctly unfrozen. He undoubtedly knew as well that, in the week after his
return, news would come out that the president was going to ask Congress for
$14.2 billion extra, most for 2011, to train and massively bulk up the Afghan
security forces, more than doubling the funds already approved by Congress for
2010.
Or consider that only days after his plane landed, the non-partisan
Congressional Budget Office released its latest "budget outlook" indicating
that the Iraq and Afghan wars had already cost the American taxpayer more than
$1 trillion in Congressionally-approved dollars, with no end in sight. Just as
the non-freeze on defense spending in the State of the Union address caused
next to no mainstream comment, so there would be no significant media response
to this (and these costs didn't even include the massive projected societal
price of the two wars, including future care for wounded soldiers and the
replacement of worn out or destroyed equipment, which will run so much higher).
Each of these announcements could be considered another little coup for the
Pentagon and the US military to count. Each was part of Pentagon
blank-check-ism in Washington. Each represented a national security
establishment ascendant in a way that the makers of Seven Days in May might
have found hard to grasp.
To put just the president's domestic cost-cutting plan in a Pentagon context:
If his freeze on domestic programs were to go through Congress intact (an
unlikely possibility), it would still be chicken-feed in the cost-cutting
sweepstakes. The president's team estimates savings of $250 billion over 10
years. On the other hand, the National Priorities Project has done some sober
figuring, based on projections from the Office of Management and Budget, and
finds that, over the same decade, the total increase in the Pentagon budget
should come to $522 billion. (Keep in mind that that figure doesn't include
possible increases in the budgets of the Department of Homeland Security,
non-military intelligence agencies, or even any future war-fighting
supplemental funds appropriated by Congress.)
That $250 billion in cuts, then, would be but a small brake on the guaranteed
further rise of national-security spending. American life, in other words, is
being sacrificed to the very infrastructure meant to provide this country's
citizens with "safety". That's what "Seven Days in January" really means.
Or consider that $14.2 billion meant for the Afghan military and police.
Forget, for a moment, all the obvious doubts about training, by 2014, up to
400,000 Afghans for a force bleeding deserters and evidently whipping future
Taliban fighters into shape, or the fact that impoverished Afghanistan will
never be able to afford such a vast security apparatus (which means it's ours
to fund into the distant future), or even that many of those training dollars
may go to Xe Services (formerly Blackwater) or other mercenary private
contracting companies. Just think for a minute, instead, about the fact that
the State of the Union address offered not a hint that a single further dollar
would go to train an adult American, especially an out-of-work one, in anything
whatsoever.
Hollywood loves remakes, but a word of advice to those who admire the secretary
of defense's movie tastes: do as he did and get the old Seven Days in May
from Netflix. Unlike Star Trek, James Bond, Bewitched, and
other 1960s "classics", Seven Days isn't likely to come back, not even
if Matt Damon were available to play the marine colonel who saves the country
from a military takeover, because these days there's little left to save - and
every week is the Pentagon's week in Washington.
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