[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Scott Horton writes the No Comment column for Harper’s Magazine online. He’s one of the earliest figures whose writing I began following post-9/11 (and still read regularly). Today, his column is a Q&A with me about my new book, The United States of Fear. Read it by clicking here. And remember, for a $75 donation to this website, you can get a signed, personalized copy of that book or for $85 of Adam Hochschild’s bestselling new World War I history, To End All Wars. Visit our donation page to check out the offers. Or, if you just want to buy either book (or both) and you’re an Amazon customer, click one of the titles above. They’ll take you to Amazon. If you arrive there from any TD book link and buy anything, we get a small cut of your purchase, which is a nice way to contribute to the site at no cost to you. Tom]
When I covered the Occupy Wall Street protests last fall, I just couldn’t stay focused, despite the fact that people from across the country and around the world were traveling to that block-long half-acre park of granite walls and honey-locust trees in lower Manhattan to build a new mini-society. It boasted free housing, free food, free medical care, free education, and free music. Every day in Zuccotti Park there were thrilling rap sessions and you could watch direct democracy in action as people came together to exchange ideas in provocative new ways. To steal a well-worn activist phrase, it looked like another world was possible.
And there I was, staring across the street. While it seemed like 99% of the 99% were captivated by the excitement in the park, I was transfixed by the police.
Day after day, I would cover Occupy Wall Street and day after day, I would get hassled by members of the New York City Police Department. They didn’t like it when I asked questions about their Sky Watch tower -- a two-story-tall, Panopticon-like structure outfitted with black-tinted windows, a spotlight, sensors, and multiple cameras that spied on the park. They got angry when I counted their dozens of police vehicles around the plaza’s perimeter, or when I asked questions about the unmarked white truck that just happened to have a camera mounted on a forty-foot pole protruding from its roof.
They trailed me, took pictures of me, demanded my identification, and repeatedly confronted me. One cop even declared my reporting “illegal.” But I couldn’t help myself. Watching the NYPD was like gawking at a car wreck. I was reminded of the police response to the 2004 Republic National Convention, but on steroids. To take just one example, back then, the NYPD had around 9,000 steel barricades to pen in protesters around the city -- enough, that is, to stretch from one tip of Manhattan to the other. More than seven years later, the approximately 150 steel barricades that formed a cordon around Zuccotti Park were part of a NYPD inventory that could enclose the entire island in a formidable ring of steel.
In his latest article, TomDispatch regular Stephan Salisbury assures me that I was never alone in my fixation on the rise of a homeland security state, and his reporting gives even me pause. With Occupy protesters gearing up for a spring resurgence, Salisbury spells out just what activists will be up against -- think unmanned drones, tanks, and super-sophisticated surveillance systems from New York City to Scottsbluff, Nebraska -- in the months ahead. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Salisbury discusses post-9/11 police “mission creep” in this country, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Nick Turse
How to Fund an American Police State
Real Money for an Imaginary War
By Stephan SalisburyAt the height of the Occupy Wall Street evictions, it seemed as though some diminutive version of “shock and awe” had stumbled from Baghdad, Iraq, to Oakland, California. American police forces had been “militarized,” many commentators worried, as though the firepower and callous tactics on display were anomalies, surprises bursting upon us from nowhere.
There should have been no surprise. Those flash grenades exploding in Oakland and the sound cannons on New York’s streets simply opened small windows onto a national policing landscape long in the process of militarization -- a bleak domestic no man’s land marked by tanks and drones, robot bomb detectors, grenade launchers, tasers, and most of all, interlinked video surveillance cameras and information databases growing quietly on unobtrusive server farms everywhere.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Many thanks to those of you who made a contribution to this site in return for a signed paperback copy of Adam Hochschild’s remarkable new history of World War I, To End All Wars. Please note that the paperback is, in fact, so new that Hochschild doesn’t yet have copies. If all goes well, they will, however, be in the mail to you by next week, so be patient. In the meantime, if you meant to get your own signed, personalized copy of either his book or my latest, The United States of Fear, check out our recent offer by clicking here or simply go to the TD donation page. Tom]
In a recent TomDispatch introduction, I pointed out that, when it comes to America’s wars, you can’t afford to be right. I suggested that those who had foreseen disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan should logically be celebrated in this country and “should be in the Rolodexes of every journalist reporting on American foreign policy, the Iran crisis, or our wars.” But, I asked, “When was the last time you heard from one of them or saw one spotlighted?”
The interviewee in today’s post is a case in point. When it comes to being right, there may be no journalist, analyst, or writer who has been more on target than Jonathan Schell, whether on Vietnam, the Nixon White House (and its early cult of executive power), nuclear weapons, the Afghan War, or the invasion of Iraq. His is a remarkable and remarkably unblemished record. If you want to know what to expect from the latest in American war, who better to go to than the man who was never wrong?
Now that a possible war with Iran is regularly in the news, every week reporters are scrambling to check in with “experts” who couldn’t have been more mistaken when it came to the invasion of Iraq. Who else should you ask in Washington, where “wrong” is the ticket to media success, a guarantee that your opinion will have value?
As for right? Well, just how many calls a week do you imagine Jonathan Schell gets from reporters wanting his opinion on the latest in American war.
Zero.
Of course, give the media credit. Schell’s record does have a blemish. He wrote a book called The Unconquerable World (and in a world of full disclosure and with great pride let me add that, in my other life as a book editor, I edited it). As TomDispatch Associate Editor Andy Kroll points out today, in that volume Schell essentially foresaw the path that would lead to both Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park, but -- and here’s the blemish -- he didn’t know that. So when those events unfolded, he was as startled as the rest of us. Still, we at TomDispatch thought it our duty to step out of line, do the unpopular thing, and ask someone who has a record for being right, not wrong, about the present moment and how we got to it. Tom
How Empires Fall (Including the American One)
A TomDispatch Interview With Jonathan Schell
By Andy KrollWhen Jonathan Schell’s The Unconquerable World, a meditation on the history and power of nonviolent action, was published in 2003, the timing could not have been worse. Americans were at war -- and success was in the air. U.S. troops had invaded Iraq and taken Baghdad (“mission accomplished”) only months earlier, and had already spent more than a year fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. Schell's book earned a handful of glowing reviews, and then vanished from the public debate as the bombs scorched Iraq and the body count began to mount.
Now, The Unconquerable World's animating message -- that, in the age of nuclear weaponry, nonviolent action is the mightiest of forces, one capable of toppling even the greatest of empires -- has undergone a renaissance of sorts. In December 2010, the self-immolation of a young Tunisian street vendor triggered a wave of popular and, in many cases, nonviolent uprisings across the Middle East, felling such autocrats as Tunisia's Zine el Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak in mere weeks. Occupations, marches, and protests of all sorts spread like brushfire across Europe, from England to Spain to Greece, and later Moscow, and even as far as Madison, Wisconsin. And then, of course, there were the artists, students, and activists who, last September, heard the call to "occupy Wall Street" and ignited a national movement with little more than tents, signs, and voices on a strip of stone and earth in lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park.
You might say that Schell, a former New Yorker staff writer renowned for his work on nuclear weapons and disarmament (his 1981 book The Fate of the Earth was a best-seller and instant classic), prophesied Occupy and the Arab Spring -- without even knowing it. He admits to being as surprised as anyone about the wave of nonviolent action that swept the world in 2011, but those who had read Unconquerable World would have found themselves uncannily well prepared for the birth of a planet of protest whenever it happened.
Blown Away
How the U.S. Fanned the Flames in Afghanistan
By Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse
Is it all over but the (anti-American) shouting -- and the killing? Are the exits finally coming into view?
Sometimes, in a moment, the fog lifts, the clouds shift, and you can finally see the landscape ahead with startling clarity. In Afghanistan, Washington may be reaching that moment in a state of panic, horror, and confusion. Even as an anxious U.S. commander withdrew American and NATO advisors from Afghan ministries around Kabul last weekend -- approximately 300, military spokesman James Williams tells TomDispatch -- the ability of American soldiers to remain on giant fortified bases eating pizza and fried chicken into the distant future is not in doubt.
No set of Taliban guerrillas, suicide bombers, or armed Afghan “allies” turning their guns on their American “brothers” can alter that -- not as long as Washington is ready to bring the necessary supplies into semi-blockaded Afghanistan at staggering cost. But sometimes that’s the least of the matter, not the essence of it. So if you’re in a mood to mark your calendars, late February 2012 may be the moment when the end game for America’s second Afghan War, launched in October 2001, was initially glimpsed.
Amid the reportage about the recent explosion of Afghan anger over the torching of Korans in a burn pit at Bagram Air Base, there was a tiny news item that caught the spirit of the moment. As anti-American protests (and the deaths of protestors) mounted across Afghanistan, the German military made a sudden decision to immediately abandon a 50-man outpost in the north of the country.
True, they had planned to leave it a few weeks later, but consider the move a tiny sign of the increasing itchiness of Washington’s NATO allies. The French have shown a similar inclination to leave town since, earlier this year, four of their troops were blown away (and 16 wounded) by an Afghan army soldier, as three others had been shot down several weeks before by another Afghan in uniform. Both the French and the Germans have also withdrawn their civilian advisors from Afghan government institutions in the wake of the latest unrest.
Now, it's clear enough: the Europeans are ready to go. And that shouldn’t be surprising. After all, we’re talking about NATO -- the North Atlantic Treaty Organization -- whose soldiers found themselves in distant Afghanistan in the first place only because, since World War II, with the singular exception of French President Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, European leaders have had a terrible time saying “no” to Washington. They still can’t quite do so, but in these last months it’s clear which way their feet are pointed.
Which makes sense. You would have to be blind not to notice that the American effort in Afghanistan is heading into the tank.
[Special Offer for TomDispatch Readers: Adam Hochschild’s new book on World War I, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, was a big hit and boy did it deserve it! With a front-page New York Times Book Review rave, it became a bestseller. At the moment, it’s a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was also a big hit at TomDispatch when Hochschild offered to sign copies of the hardcover in return for a donation to this site. Now, with the paperback just coming out, he’s ready to do it again. This time, you’ll get a signed, personalized copy of the new paperback in return for a donation of $85 (or more). Just pay a visit to our donation page and check it out for yourself. For anyone who watched Downton Abbey or went to War Horse, here’s World War I as it really was, a remarkable tale, including the unknown story of that war’s critics. (My book, The United States of Fear, is similarly available on the donation page for a contribution of $75 or more.) Tom]
Here’s how, in his classic Vietnam War history, The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam summed up Washington life via the career of Dean Rusk, the hawkish Secretary of State under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson: “If you are wrong on the hawkish side of an event you are all right; if you are accurate on the dovish side you are in trouble.”
Wouldn’t it be wonderful, so many decades later, to be able to say that such a statement is thoroughly out of date in Washington and elsewhere in this country? Unfortunately, on the evidence of the Iraq War years, it would be a lovely lie.
Where, after all, are those who went out into the streets in their millions globally to say: don’t do it, it’s madness! And the far smaller crew who said the same about the Afghan War? Logically, they should be celebrated today. They were on target. To the extent anyone could, they saw it coming. Logically, some of the more prescient among them should be our experts of the moment. They should be the media’s go-to guys and gals as a war atmosphere builds vis-a-vis Iran that has eerie similarities to the pre-Iraq invasion period (despite the intervening decade-plus of disaster in the Greater Middle East).
The antiwar figures who protested then, who said the war hawks of the Bush administration and the many pundits beating the war drums for them were fools, and an invasion a fool’s task, should be in the Rolodexes of every journalist reporting on American foreign policy, the Iran crisis, or our wars. But when was the last time you heard from one of them or saw one spotlighted?
For years, to give a single example, on anniversaries of the Iraq invasion, my hometown paper, the New York Times, called on the very figures who had gotten it wrong or actively helped make it wrong to assess the war, to tell us just where we were. Now, the urge to surge once again seems to have parts of the polity in its grips, as 58% of Americans in a recent Pew poll favor someone using military force to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. (Of course, in a recent CNN/Gallup poll, 71% were already convinced that Iran has a nuclear weapon!) At this very moment, the experts being called on are regularly those who were “wrong on the hawkish side.” Meanwhile, the Republican candidates (Ron Paul excepted) are all but swearing they will launch a war on Iran if elected. In the midst of this, remind me: Is anyone in that mainstream world checking in with those who were “accurate on the dovish side”? If so, I haven’t noticed, and I’m not holding my breath waiting for them to do so either.
Perhaps because they managed to snag the more impressive bird, the hawks remain eternally wrong and triumphant when it comes to war, and the doves remarkably right and yet eternally erased from the scene. It’s a story that Adam Hochschild, author of the bestseller To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (just out in paperback), reminds us is anything but new. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Hochschild discusses the largely untold stories of those in England who opposed involvement in World War I and the message they offer for our own time, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
The Untold War Story -- Then and Now
Going Beyond the Tale of a Boy and His Horse
By Adam HochschildWell in advance of the 2014 centennial of the beginning of “the war to end all wars,” the First World War is suddenly everywhere in our lives. Stephen Spielberg’s War Horse opened on 2,376 movie screens and has collected six Oscar nominations, while the hugely successful play it’s based on is still packing in the crowds in New York and a second production is being readied to tour the country.
In addition, the must-watch TV soap opera of the last two months, Downton Abbey, has just concluded its season on an unexpected kiss. In seven episodes, its upstairs-downstairs world of forbidden love and dynastic troubles took American viewers from mid-war, 1916, beyond the Armistice, with the venerable Abbey itself turned into a convalescent hospital for wounded troops. Other dramas about the 1914-1918 war are on the way, among them an HBO-BBC miniseries based on Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End quartet of novels, and a TV adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’s novel Birdsong from an NBC-backed production company.
In truth, there’s nothing new in this. Filmmakers and novelists have long been fascinated by the way the optimistic, sunlit, pre-1914 Europe of emperors in plumed helmets and hussars on parade so quickly turned into a mass slaughterhouse on an unprecedented scale. And there are good reasons to look at the First World War carefully and closely.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Many thanks to all of you who answered my modest plea for donations last week with such generosity! The response from around the country (and the world), which truly does help keep this site going, always surprises me. Any of you who meant to contribute, but didn’t quite make it to our donation page, please do visit. And remember, you can get a copy of The United States of Fear, my new book, personalized, signed, and delivered to the post office by yours truly for a contribution of $75 or more. By the way, click here to check out the latest review of the book -- at Mother Jones magazine.
And, while I’m at it, a recommendation: Hamilton Fish, the man responsible for bringing TomDispatch into existence -- it was until then a no-name listserv -- back in 2003 when he was running the Nation Institute, has long been publishing the Washington Spectator. An invaluable in-print newsletter, it has finally made it online. You should definitely check it out. Tom]
Remotely Piloted War
How Drone War Became The American Way of Life
By Tom Engelhardt
In the American mind, if Apple made weapons, they would undoubtedly be drones, those remotely piloted planes getting such great press here. They have generally been greeted as if they were the sleekest of iPhones armed with missiles.
When the first American drone assassins burst onto the global stage early in the last decade, they caught most of us by surprise, especially because they seemed to come out of nowhere or from some wild sci-fi novel. Ever since, they've been touted in the media as the shiniest presents under the American Christmas tree of war, the perfect weapons to solve our problems when it comes to evildoers lurking in the global badlands.
And can you blame Americans for their love affair with the drone? Who wouldn’t be wowed by the most technologically advanced, futuristic, no-pain-all-gain weapon around?
Here’s the thing, though: put drones in a more familiar context, skip the awestruck commentary, and they should have been eerily familiar. If, for instance, they were car factories, they would seem so much less exotic to us.
Think about it: What does a drone do? Like a modern car factory, it replaces a pilot, a skilled job that takes significant training, with robotics and a degraded version of the same job outsourced elsewhere. In this case, the “offshore” location that job headed for wasn’t China or Mexico, but a military base in the U.S., where a guy with a joystick, trained in a hurry and sitting at a computer monitor, is “piloting” that plane. And given our experience with the hemorrhaging of good jobs from the U.S., who will be surprised to discover that, in 2011, the U.S. Air Force was already training more drone “pilots” than actual fighter and bomber pilots combined?
