Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Why the troops are coming home
By Tom Engelhardt
Compare the following two assessments of the American future.
In the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in which 61% of Americans
interviewed considered "things in the nation" to be "on the wrong track," 66%
did "not feel confident that life for our children's generation will be better
than it has been for us." (Seven percent were "not sure" and only 27% "felt
confident.") But here was the polling question you're least likely to see
discussed in your local newspaper or by Washington-based pundits: "Do you think
America is in a state of decline, or do you feel that this is
not the case?" Sixty-five percent of respondents chose as their answer: "in a
state of decline."
Meanwhile, Afghan war commander General David Petraeus was interviewed last
week by Martha Raddatz of ABC News. Asked whether the American war in
Afghanistan, almost a decade old, was finally on the right counter-insurgency
track and could go on for another nine or 10 years, Petraeus agreed that we
were just at the beginning of the process, that the "clock" was only now
ticking, and that we needed "realistic expectations" about what could happen
and how fast. "Progress" in Afghanistan, he commented, was often so slow that
it could feel like "watching grass grow or paint dry."
Now, I'm not a betting man, but I'd head for Vegas tomorrow and put my money
down against the general and on Americans generally when it comes to assessing
the future. I'd put money on the fact that the United States is indeed "in a
state of decline" and I'd make a wager at odds that US troops won't be in
Afghanistan in nine or ten years. And I'd venture to suggest as well that the
two bets would be intimately connected, and that the American people understand
at a visceral level far more than Washington cares to know about our real
situation in the world. And I'd put my money on one more thing: however lousy
it may feel, it's not all bad news, not by a long shot.
Decline today, not tomorrow
Let's start with Afghanistan. Yes, we've been "in" or intimately involved with
Afghanistan not just for almost a decade, but for a significant chunk of the
last 30 years. And for much of that time we've poured our wealth into creating
chaos and mayhem there in the name of "freedom," "liberation,"
"reconstruction," and "nation-building."
We started in the distant days of the Ronald Reagan administration with the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) funneling vast sums of money and advanced
weaponry into the anti-Soviet jihad. At that time, we happily supported
outright terror tactics, including car-bomb and even camel-bomb attacks on the
Soviets in Afghan cities and bomb attacks on movie theaters as well. These acts
were committed by Islamic fundamentalists of the most extreme sort, and our
officials, labeling them "freedom fighters", couldn't say enough nice things
about them.
That was our expensive first decade in Afghanistan. In 1989, when the Russians
withdrew in defeat, we departed in triumph. You know the next round well
enough: we returned in 2001, armed and eager, carrying suitcases full of cash,
and ready to fight many of the same fundamentalists we (or our allies the
Pakistanis) had set loose, funded, and armed in the previous two decades.
If, back in 1979, you had told a polling group of Americans that their country
would soon embark on a never-ending war that would involve spending hundreds of
billions of dollars, building staggering numbers of military bases, squandering
startling sums (including at least $27 billion to train Afghan military and
police forces whose most striking trait is desertion), losing significant
numbers of American lives (and huge numbers of Afghan ones), and launching the
first robot air war in history, and then asked them to pick the likely country,
not one in a million would have chosen Afghani-where(?). And yet, today, our
leading general ("perhaps the greatest general of his generation") doesn't
blink at the mention of another nine or 10 years doing more of the same.
After 30 years, it might almost seem logical. Why not 10 more? The answer is
that you have to be the Washington equivalent of blind, deaf, and dumb not to
know why not, and Americans aren't any of those. They know what Washington is
in denial about, because they're living American decline in the flesh, even if
Washington isn't. Not yet anyway. And they know they're living it not in some
distant future, but right now.
Here's a simple reality: the US is an imperial power in decline - and not just
the sort of decline which is going to affect your children or grandchildren
someday. We're talking about massive unemployment that's going nowhere and an
economy which shows no sign of ever returning good jobs to this country on a
significant scale, even if "good times" do come back sooner or later. We're
talking about an aging, fraying infrastructure - with its collapsing bridges
and exploding gas pipelines -that a little cosmetic surgery isn't going to
help.
And whatever the underlying historical trends, George W Bush, Dick Cheney, and
company accelerated this process immeasurably. You can thank their two mad
wars, their all-planet-all-the-time global "war on terror", their dumping of
almost unlimited taxpayer dollars into the Pentagon and war planning for the
distant future, and their scheme to privatize the military and mind-meld it
with a small group of crony capitalist privateers, not to speak of ramping up
an already impressively over-muscled national security state into a national
state of fear, while leaving the financial community to turn the country into a
giant, mortgaged Ponzi scheme.
It was the equivalent of driving a car in need of a major tune-up directly off
the nearest cliff - and the rest, including the economic meltdown of 2008, is,
as they say, history, which we're all now experiencing in real time. Then,
thank the Obama administration for not having the nerve to reverse course while
it might still have mattered.
Public opinion and elite opinion
The problem in all this isn't the American people. They already know the score.
The problem is Afghan war commander Petraeus. It's Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates. It's Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It's National Security Adviser
James Jones. It's all those sober official types, military and civilian, who
pass for "realists" and are now managing "America's global military presence,"
its vast garrisons, its wars and alarums. All of them are living in Cloud
Cuckoo Land.
Ordinary Americans aren't. They know what's going down, and to judge by polls,
they have a perfectly realistic assessment of what needs to be done. Jim Lobe
of Inter Press Service recently reported on the release of a major biennial
survey, "Constrained Internationalism: Adapting to New Realities," by the
Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA). Here's the heart of it, as Lobe
describes it:
The survey's main message, however, was that the US
public is looking increasingly toward reducing Washington's role in world
affairs, especially in conflicts that do not directly concern it. While
two-thirds of citizens believe Washington should take an "active part in world
affairs," 49% - by far the highest percentage since the CCGA first started
asking the question in the mid-1970s - agreed with the proposition that the US
should "mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along
the best they can on their own."
Moreover, 91% of respondents agreed that it was "more important at this time
for the [US] to fix problems at home" than to address challenges to the [US]
abroad - up from 82% who responded to that question in CCGA's last survey in
2008.
That striking 49% figure is no isolated outlier. As
Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz point out in an article in the journal
International Security, a December 2009 Pew poll got the same 49% response to
the same "mind its own business" question. It was, they comment, "the highest
response ever recorded, far surpassing the 32% expressing that attitude in
1972, during the height of opposition to the Vietnam War."
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