DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA He was 22 ... She was 12 ...
By Tom Engelhardt
He was 22, a corporal in the US marines from Preston, Iowa, a "city"
incorporated in 1890 with a present population of 949. He died in a hospital in
Germany of "wounds received from an explosive device while on patrol in Helmand
province" in Afghanistan. Of him, his high-school principal said, "He was a
good kid". He is survived by his parents.
He was 20, a private in the 10th Mountain Division from Boyne City, population
3,735 souls, which bills itself as "the fastest-growing city in northern
Michigan". He died of "wounds suffered when insurgents attacked his unit with
small-arms fire" and is survived by his parents.
These were the last two of the 10 Americans whose deaths in Afghanistan and
Iraq were announced by the Pentagon during Thanksgiving week in late November.
The other eight came from
Apache Junction, Arizona; Fayetteville, North Carolina; Greensboro, North
Carolina; Navarre, Florida; Wichita, Kansas; San Jose, California; Moline,
Illinois; and Danville, California. Six of them died from improvised explosive
devices (roadside bombs), assumedly without ever seeing the Afghan enemies who
killed them. One died of "indirect fire" and another "while conducting combat
operations". On such things, Defense Department press releases are relatively
tight-lipped, as was the US Army, for instance, when it released news that same
week of 17 "potential suicides" among active-duty soldiers in October.
These days, the names of the dead dribble directly on to the inside pages of
newspapers, or simply into the ether, in a war now opposed by 63% of Americans,
according to the latest CNN/Opinion Research Corp opinion poll, but in truth
barely remembered by anyone in the US. It's a reality made easier by the fact
that the dead of America's All-Volunteer Army tend to come from forgettable
places - small towns, obscure suburbs, third- or fourth-rank cities - and a
military that ever fewer Americans have any connection with.
Aside from those who love them, who pays much attention anymore to the deaths
of American troops in distant lands? These deaths are, after all, largely
dwarfed by local fatality counts like the 16 Americans who died in accidents on
Ohio's highways over the long Thanksgiving weekend of 2010 or the 32,788
Americans who died in road fatalities that same year.
So who, that same week, was going to pay the slightest attention to the fate of
50-year-old Mohammad Rahim, a farmer from Kandahar province in southern
Afghanistan? Four of his children - two sons and two daughters, all between
four and 12 years old - were killed in a "NATO" (undoubtedly American) air
strike, while working in their fields. In addition, an eight-year-old daughter
of his was "badly wounded". Whether Rahim himself was killed is unclear from
the modest reports we have of the "incident".
In all, seven civilians and possibly two fleeing insurgents died. Rahim's uncle
Abdul Samad, however, is quoted as saying, "There were no Taliban in the field;
this is a baseless allegation that the Taliban were planting mines. I have been
to the scene and haven't found a single bit of evidence of bombs or any other
weapons. The Americans did a serious crime against innocent children; they will
never be forgiven."
As in all such cases, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has opened an
"investigation" into what happened. The results of such investigations seldom
become known.
Similarly, on Thanksgiving weekend, 24 to 28 Pakistani soldiers, including two
officers, were killed in a set of "NATO" helicopter and fighter-jet attacks on
two outposts across the Afghan border in Pakistan. One post, according to
Pakistani sources, was attacked twice. More soldiers were wounded. Outraged
Pakistani officials promptly denounced the attack, closed key border crossings
to US vehicles supplying the war in Afghanistan, and demanded that the
Americans leave a key airbase used for the Central Intelligence Agency's drone
war in the Pakistani tribal areas. In response, American officials, military
and civilian, offered condolences and yet pleaded "self-defense", while
offering promises of a thorough investigation of the circumstances surrounding
the "friendly-fire incident".
Amid these relatively modest death counts, don't forget one staggering figure
that came to light that same Thanksgiving week: the estimate that, in Iraq,
900,000 wives have lost their husbands since the US invasion in March 2003. Not
surprisingly, many of these widows are in a state of desperation and reportedly
getting next to no help from either the Iraqi or the US governments. Though
their 900,000 husbands undoubtedly died in various ways, warlike,
civil-war-like, and peaceable, the figure does offer a crude indicator of the
levels of carnage the US invasion loosed on that country over the past eight
and a half years.
Creative destruction in the Greater Middle East
Think of all this as just a partial one-week's scorecard of American-style war.
While you're at it, remember Washington's high hopes only a decade ago for what
America's "lite", "shock and awe" military would do, for the way it would
singlehandedly crush enemies, reorganize the Middle East, create a new order on
Earth, set the oil flowing, privatize and rebuild whole nations, and usher in a
global peace, especially in the Greater Middle East, on terms pleasing to the
planet's sole superpower.
That such sky-high "hopes" were then the coin of the realm in Washington is a
measure of the way delusional thinking passed for the strategic variety and a
reminder of how, for a time, pundits of every sort dealt with those hopes as if
they represented reality itself. And yet it should have come as no shock that a
military-first "foreign policy" and a military force with staggering
technological powers at its command would prove incapable of building anything.
No one should have been surprised that such a force was good only for what it
was built for: death and destruction.
A case might be made that the US military's version of "creative destruction",
driven directly into the oil heartlands of the planet, did prepare the way,
however inadvertently, for the Arab Spring to come, in part by unifying the
region in misery and visceral dislike. In the meantime, the "mistakes", the
"incidents", the "collateral damage", the slaughtered wedding parties and
bombed funerals, the "mishaps", and "miscommunications" continued to pile up -
as did dead Afghans, Iraqis, Pakistanis, and Americans, so many from places
you've never heard of if you weren't born there.
None of this should have surprised anyone. Perhaps at least marginally more
surprising was the inability of the US military to wield its destructive power
to win anything whatsoever. Since the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001,
there have been so many proclamations of "success", of "mission accomplished",
of corners turned and tipping points reached, of "progress" made, and so very,
very little to show.
Amid the destruction, destabilization and disaster, the high hopes quietly
evaporated. Now, of course, "shock and awe" is long gone. Those triumphant
"surges" are history. Counterinsurgency, or COIN - for a while the hottest
thing around - has been swept back into the dustbin of history from which
General (now CIA Director) David Petraeus rescued it not so many years ago.
After a decade in Afghanistan in which the US military has battled a minority
insurgency, perhaps as unpopular as any "popular" movement could be, the war
there is now almost universally considered "unwinnable" or a "stalemate". Of
course, what a stalemate means when the planet's most powerful military takes
on a bunch of back-country guerrillas, some armed with weapons that deserve to
be in museums, is at best an open question.
Meanwhile, after almost nine years of war and occupation, the US military is
shutting down its multibillion-dollar mega-bases in Iraq and withdrawing its
troops. Though it leaves behind a monster State Department mission guarded by a
5,000-man army of mercenaries, a militarized budget of US$6.5 billion for 2012,
and more than 700 mostly hire-a-gun trainers, Iraq is visibly a loss for
Washington. In Pakistan, the US drone war combined with the latest "incident"
on the Pakistani border, evidently involving American special forces
operatives, has further destabilized that country and the US alliance there. A
major Pakistani presidential candidate is already calling for the end of that
alliance, while anti-Americanism grows by leaps and bounds.
None of this should startle either. After all, what exactly could an obdurately
military-first foreign policy bring with it but the whirlwind (and not just to
foreign lands either)? As the Occupy Wall Street protests and their repression
remind us, US police forces, too, were heavily militarized. Meanwhile, its wars
and national-security spending have drained the United States of trillions of
dollars in national treasure, leaving behind a country in political gridlock,
its economy in something close to a shock-and-awe state, its infrastructure
crumbling, and vast majorities of its angry citizens convinced that their land
is not only "on the wrong track", but "in decline".
Into the whirlwind
A decade later, perhaps the only thing that should truly cause surprise is how
little has been learned in Washington. The military-first policy of choice that
rang in the century - there were, of course, other options available - has
become the only option left in Washington's impoverished arsenal. After all,
the country's economic power is in tatters (which is why the Europeans are
looking to China for help in the euro crisis), its "soft power" has gone down
the tubes, and its diplomatic corps has either been militarized or was long ago
relegated to the back of the bus of state.
What couldn't be stranger, though, is that from the whirlwind of policy
disaster, the administration of President Barack Obama has drawn the least
likely conclusion: that more of what has so visibly failed us is in order -
from Pakistan to Uganda, Afghanistan to Somalia, the Persian Gulf to China.
Yes, COIN is out and drones as well as special operations forces are in, but
the essential policy remains the same.
The evidence of the past decade clearly indicates that nothing of significance
is likely to be built from the rubble of such a global policy - most obviously
in relations with China, America's greatest creditor. However, there too, as
Obama signaled (however feebly) with his recent announcement of a symbolic
permanent deployment of US marines to Darwin, Australia, the military path
remains the path of least resistance. As Michael Klare put it recently in The
Nation magazine, "It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the White House
has decided to counter China's spectacular economic growth with a military
riposte."
As Barry Lando, former 60 Minutes producer, points out, China, not the
US, is already "one of the largest oil beneficiaries of the Iraq war". In fact,
America's military buildup throughout the Persian Gulf region is, in essence,
guarding Chinese commerce. "Just as American troops and bases have spread along
the Gulf," Lando writes, "so have China's businessmen, eager to exploit the
vital resources that the US military is thoughtfully protecting ... A strange
symbiosis: American bases and Chinese markets."
In other words, the single most monstrous mistake of the years of George W
Bush's presidency - the confusion of military with economic power - has been
set in stone. Washington continues to lead with its drones and ask questions or
offer condolences or launch investigations later. This is, of course, a path
guaranteed to bring destruction and blowback in its wake. None of it is likely
to benefit us in the long run, least of all in relation to China.
When history, that most unpredictable of subjects, becomes predictable, watch
out.
In what should be a think-outside-the-box moment, the sole lesson Washington
seems capable of absorbing is that its failed policy is the only possible
policy. Among other things, this means more "incidents", more "mistakes", more
"accidents", more dead, more embittered people vowing vengeance, more
investigations, more pleas of self-defense, more condolences, more money
draining out of the US treasury, and more destabilization.
As it has been since September 12, 2001, Washington remains engaged in a fierce
and costly losing battle with ghosts in which, unfortunately, perfectly real
people die, and perfectly real women are widowed.
He was 22 years old ...
She was 12 ...
Those are lines you will read again and again in our no-learning-curve world,
and no condolences will be enough.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author
of The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's as well as
The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His
latest book, The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), has just been
published.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
