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Back in September 2001, Dick Cheney was, according to Jane Mayer in The Dark Side, being chauffeured around Washington “in an armored motorcade that varied its route to foil possible attackers." In the backseat of his car (just in case), adds Mayer, "rested a duffel bag stocked with a gas mask and a biochemical survival suit." And lest danger rear its head, "rarely did he travel without a medical doctor in tow."
Ah, weren’t those the days? How quiet, how boring his life must be now, his new ticker in place, hosting fundraisers for Mitt Romney in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, auctioning off lunches with himself for charity, and -- for a little genuine excitement -- slamming President Obama as an “unmitigated disaster.” And yet, what if thousands of miles from Washington, years from his "taking off the gloves” heyday, promoting “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and plunking for invasions in the Greater Middle East, his ghost still lives in the nation's capital, and not in some vague way somewhere in the Republican opposition, but deep in the beating heart of the Obama administration. It’s the sort of thought that should take you aback and yet Michael Klare, TomDispatch regular and author most recently of The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources, makes the case that the Cheney ticker is beating hard right now in President Obama’s chest. Don’t believe it? Then, take a deep dive into Cheney’s... I mean, Obama’s world. (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Klare discusses imperial geopolitics as the default mode for Washington since 1945, click here or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
Is Barack Obama Morphing Into Dick Cheney?
Four Ways the President Is Pursuing Cheney’s Geopolitics of Global Energy
By Michael T. KlareAs details of his administration’s global war against terrorists, insurgents, and hostile warlords have become more widely known -- a war that involves a mélange of drone attacks, covert operations, and presidentially selected assassinations -- President Obama has been compared to President George W. Bush in his appetite for military action. “As shown through his stepped-up drone campaign,” Aaron David Miller, an advisor to six secretaries of state, wrote at Foreign Policy, “Barack Obama has become George W. Bush on steroids.”
When it comes to international energy politics, however, it is not Bush but his vice president, Dick Cheney, who has been providing the role model for the president. As recent events have demonstrated, Obama’s energy policies globally bear an eerie likeness to Cheney’s, especially in the way he has engaged in the geopolitics of oil as part of an American global struggle for future dominance among the major powers.
More than any of the other top officials of the Bush administration -- many with oil-company backgrounds -- Cheney focused on the role of energy in global power politics. From 1995 to 2000, he served as chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Halliburton, a major supplier of services to the oil industry. Soon after taking office as vice president he was asked by Bush to devise a new national energy strategy that has largely governed U.S. policy ever since.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Check out the latest review of our new Dispatch Books volume, Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare. Foreign Policy in Focus’s John Feffer wrote it for Inter Press Service: “Guarding the Empire From Four Miles Up.” He calls the book “terrifying.” Tom]
Recently, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta finally said it. The U.S. is “fighting a war” in the Pakistani tribal belt. Similarly, observers are starting to suggest that “war” is the right word for the American air and special operations campaign against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in southern Yemen. (There have already been 23 U.S. air strikes there this year.) Call that a war and you’re already up to three, including the Afghan one.
But consider the possibility that a fourth (partial) American war is underway in the shadows, and that it’s in Iran. This seems more evident today because of a recent New York Times report on the release of Stuxnet, the advanced cyberworm President Obama ordered sent to destroy Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. Since the Pentagon has defined such a release as an “act of war,” it’s reasonable to suggest that the U.S. is now “at war” with Iran, too.
In fact, you could say that, since at least 2008, when Congress granted the Bush administration up to $400 million “to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran,” including “cross-border” operations from Iraq, war has been the name of the game. Meanwhile, U.S. special operations forces were secretly training members of M.E.K., an Iranian opposition-group-cum-cult that’s still on the State Department’s terror list, at a Department of Energy site in the Nevada desert; the CIA was running a large-scale drone surveillance operation against the country -- and that just touches on the shadowy American (as well as Israeli) state of war vis-à-vis Iran.
Having relabeled those conflicts, it might also be worth considering the way we describe our ongoing nuclear mania about Iran. After all, the world is already chock-a-block full of nuclear weapons, including the thousands the U.S. and Russia still possess, as well as those of Pakistan, a country we seem intent on destabilizing. And yet, the only nuclear weapon that ever seems to make the news, obsessively, repetitively, is the one that doesn’t exist -- the Iranian bomb.
In times long gone, when a Chinese dynasty took over the “mandate of heaven,” one of the early ceremonies carried out by the new emperor was called “the rectification of names.” The thought was that the previous dynasty had fallen into ruin in part because the gap between reality and the names for it had grown so wide. We are, it seems, now in such a world. Some renaming is surely in order.
This, in a sense, is the task Iran experts Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett, who run the Race for Iran blog, take on in their first appearance at TomDispatch. They remind us, among other things, that an American president did once decide to bring names and reality back together when it came to another rising regional power (which actually had nuclear weapons) -- and he traveled to China to do it, startling the world. Unfortunately, though our planet has its surprises, it’s hard to imagine that a second-term Obama or a first-term Romney would be among them when it comes to our country's Iran policy, which, in terms of reality, is the saddest story of all. Tom
Deep-Sixing the China Option
How the Obama Administration Is Stalling Its Way to War with Iran
By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann LeverettSince talks with Iran over its nuclear development started up again in April, U.S. officials have repeatedly warned that Tehran will not be allowed to “play for time” in the negotiations. In fact, it is the Obama administration that is playing for time.
Some suggest that President Obama is trying to use diplomacy to manage the nuclear issue and forestall an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear targets through the U.S. presidential election. In reality, his administration is “buying time” for a more pernicious agenda: time for covert action to sabotage Tehran’s nuclear program; time for sanctions to set the stage for regime change in Iran; and time for the United States, its European and Sunni Arab partners, and Turkey to weaken the Islamic Republic by overthrowing the Assad government in Syria.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Don’t miss Pepe Escobar’s super review at Asia Times of Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050, the book Nick Turse and I have just published. A few excerpts: “Learn everything there is to learn about All Things Drone... [The book is] even more crucial now that U.S. and world public opinion know U.S. President Barack Obama is the certified Droner-in-Chief... essential reading for contextualizing the lineaments of an already de facto surveillance state, where everyone is a suspect by definition, and the only 'winner' is the military-industrial complex. Welcome to Motown as Dronetown: 'Nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide...' Obama and the Dronellas, anyone?” Check it out by clicking here. Tom]
It Couldn’t Happen Here, It Does Happen There
The Value of American -- and Afghan -- Lives
By Tom Engelhardt
"Do you do this in the United States? There is police action every day in the United States... They don't call in airplanes to bomb the place." -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai denouncing U.S. air strikes on homes in his country, June 12, 2012
It was almost closing time when the siege began at a small Wells Fargo Bank branch in a suburb of San Diego, and it was a nightmare. The three gunmen entered with the intent to rob, but as they herded the 18 customers and bank employees toward a back room, they were spotted by a pedestrian outside who promptly called 911. Within minutes, police cars were pulling up, the bank was surrounded, and back-up was being called in from neighboring communities. The gunmen promptly barricaded themselves inside with their hostages, including women and small children, and refused to let anyone leave.
The police called on the gunmen to surrender, but before negotiations could even begin, shots were fired from within the bank, wounding a police officer. The events that followed -- now known to everyone, thanks to 24/7 news coverage -- shocked the nation. Declaring the bank robbers “terrorist suspects,” the police requested air support from the Pentagon and, soon after, an F-15 from Vandenberg Air Force Base dropped two GBU-38 bombs on the bank, leaving the building a pile of rubble.
All three gunmen died. Initially, a Pentagon spokesman, who took over messaging from the local police, insisted that “the incident” had ended “successfully” and that all the dead were “suspected terrorists.” The Pentagon press office issued a statement on other casualties, noting only that, “while conducting a follow-on assessment, the security force discovered two women who had sustained non-life-threatening injuries. The security force provided medical assistance and transported both women to a local medical facility for treatment." It added that it was sending an “assessment team” to the site to investigate reports that others had died as well.
Of course, as Americans quickly learned, the dead actually included five women, seven children, and a visiting lawyer from Los Angeles. The aftermath was covered in staggering detail. Relatives of the dead besieged city hall, bitterly complaining about the attack and the deaths of their loved ones. At a news conference the next morning, while scenes of rescuers digging in the rubble were still being flashed across the country, President Obama said: “Such acts are simply unacceptable. They cannot be tolerated.” In response to a question, he added, “Nothing can justify any airstrike which causes harm to the lives and property of civilians.”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Martin Dempsey immediately flew to San Diego to meet with family members of the dead and offer apologies. Heads rolled in the local police department and in the Pentagon. Congress called for hearings as well as a Justice Department investigation of possible criminality, and quickly passed a bill offering millions of dollars to the grieving relatives as “solace.” San Diego began raising money for a memorial to the group already dubbed the Wells Fargo 18.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Thanks to all of you who stepped up and helped make our initial publishing experiment, Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050, a modest success and a great fundraiser for this site. We appreciate it. Of course, we know just how many subscribers we have and how many books we’ve sold -- so it’s apparent that some of you haven’t quite gotten around to picking up a copy yet. We hope that you’ll consider doing so, either at CreateSpace, where you can buy a paperback edition of our book by clicking here or at Amazon.com, where you can download the ebook in mere seconds by clicking here. Special thanks to all of you who made a donation of $75 or more for a signed copy of Terminator Planet (or of my book The United States of Fear) to help support TomDispatch. The offer still stands. Just visit our donation page to check it out. Tom]
The frustration has long been growing. Now, it’s been put into words. On his recent trip to Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who has earned a reputation for saying whatever comes into his head, insisted that Washington had just about had it with Pakistan. "Reaching the limits of our patience" was the way he put it (not once but twice). Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Martin Dempsey spoke only slightly more mildly of being “extraordinarily dissatisfied.” The Obama administration, so went the message, was essentially losing it in South Asia. It was mad and wasn’t about to take it any more!
How far Washington has come from the days (back in 2001) when an American official could reportedly march self-confidently into the office of Pakistan’s intelligence chief, and tell him that his country had better decide whether it was for us or against us. Otherwise, he reportedly added, Pakistan should expect to be bombed “back to the Stone Age.”
In the ensuing years, the great imperial power of our age repeatedly recalibrated its Pakistan policy in growing frustration, only to see it run ever more definitively off the rails. The Obama administration, in particular, has sent its high officials, like so many caroming pinballs, flying in and out of Pakistan in droves for years now to demand, order, chide, plead, wheedle, cajole, intimidate, threaten, twist arms, and bluster, as it repeatedly flipped from good-guy ally to fierce, missile-wielding frenemy, and back again.
Recently, in the wake of U.S. air strikes that killed 24 Pakistani border guards (without a U.S. apology), it has faced a more-than-six-month closure of its crucial Pakistani war supply lines into Afghanistan. Its response: to negotiate ever more frenetically, and pull the trigger in its drone war in the Pakistani borderlands ever more often. Recently, it even announced a multimillion dollar cut-off of funds for Pakistan’s version of Sesame Street, while reaching a highly touted agreement with some former Central Asian SSRs of the former Soviet Union to transport American equipment out of Afghanistan (as our forces draw down there), at up to six times the cost of the blockaded routes through Pakistan.
If you want a living, panting, post-9/11 parable of imperial self-confidence and mastery gone to hell, Pakistan is the first (but not the last) place to look. Behind the visible failure of U.S. policy in that country lies a devastating self-deception: the thought that, in the twenty-first century, even the greatest of powers, playing its cards perfectly, can control this planet, or simply significant regions of it.
If you want a prospectively breathtaking version of the same disastrous principle check out the latest piece by TomDispatch Associate Editor Nick Turse, co-author of the new book Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050. A new American global way of war is emerging to replace the double disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Turse puts its sinews together strikingly, suggesting that Washington is once again bedazzled by the possibility of mastering the planet -- in a new, cheaper, less profligate way. Once again, the top officials of our ever-expanding national security state are evidently convinced of their own prospective brilliance in organizing the next version of the global Great Game. As with Pakistan in late 2001, so -- from Central Africa to the Philippines -- this, too, looks like a winner in their eyes. Much on this planet is unpredictable and yet the crash-and-burn fate of what Turse calls the Obama doctrine is painfully predictable. Unfortunately, as it goes down in flames, it may help send the world up in flames, too. Tom
The New Obama Doctrine, A Six-Point Plan for Global War
Special Ops, Drones, Spy Games, Civilian Soldiers, Proxy Fighters, and Cyber Warfare
By Nick TurseIt looked like a scene out of a Hollywood movie. In the inky darkness, men in full combat gear, armed with automatic weapons and wearing night-vision goggles, grabbed hold of a thick, woven cable hanging from a MH-47 Chinook helicopter. Then, in a flash, each “fast-roped” down onto a ship below. Afterward, “Mike,” a Navy SEAL who would not give his last name, bragged to an Army public affairs sergeant that, when they were on their game, the SEALs could put 15 men on a ship this way in 30 seconds or less.
Once on the aft deck, the special ops troops broke into squads and methodically searched the ship as it bobbed in Jinhae Harbor, South Korea. Below deck and on the bridge, the commandos located several men and trained their weapons on them, but nobody fired a shot. It was, after all, a training exercise.
All of those ship-searchers were SEALs, but not all of them were American. Some were from Naval Special Warfare Group 1 out of Coronado, California; others hailed from South Korea’s Naval Special Brigade. The drill was part of Foal Eagle 2012, a multinational, joint-service exercise. It was also a model for -- and one small part of -- a much publicized U.S. military “pivot” from the Greater Middle East to Asia, a move that includes sending an initial contingent of 250 Marines to Darwin, Australia, basing littoral combat ships in Singapore, strengthening military ties with Vietnam and India, staging war games in the Philippines (as well as a drone strike there), and shifting the majority of the Navy’s ships to the Pacific by the end of the decade.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: If you’ve been waiting for the perfect time to support TomDispatch, it’s arrived. We’re nearing the end of the initial print run of the paperback version of our DIY publishing experiment, Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050. If you would like to get one of the last remaining copies of that printing, personalized and signed by both Nick Turse and me for $75 (or more), just check out the offer at our donation page by clicking here and give a real boost to TomDispatch. (My own book The United States of Fear is similarly available there.) To buy a copy of Terminator Planet in ebook form, click here. Tom]
Last week, touching down in India on his way to Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta described reality as you seldom hear it in the confines of Washington and, while he was at it, put his stamp of approval on a new global doctrine for the United States. Panetta is, of course, the man who, as director of the CIA, once called its drone air campaign in the Pakistani borderlands “the only game in town.” (At the time, as now, it was a classified, “covert” set of air strikes that were a secret to no one in Washington, Islamabad, or anywhere else on Earth.)
In India, expressing his frustration over U.S. relations with Pakistan, he spoke the “W-word” aloud for the first time. “We are,” he told his Indian hosts, “fighting a war in the FATA [the Pakistani tribal areas].” How true. Washington has indeed long been involved in a complex, confusing, escalating, and undoubtedly self-defeating partial war with Pakistan, never until now officially called by that name, even as the intensity of the drone air campaign in that country’s borderlands continues to ratchet up. So give Panetta credit for rare bluntness.
In India, he said something else previously unspoken, acknowledging a breathtaking new reality: "We have made it very clear that we are going to continue to defend ourselves. This is about our sovereignty as well." In other words, he claimed that, while the sovereignty of other countries might be eternally violable, U.S. sovereignty extends inviolably over Pakistani territory. This is, in fact, the concept that underpins the use of drones there and elsewhere. When it comes to its presidential version of war-making, only the U.S. has a claim to global sovereignty, against which the more traditional concept of national sovereignty doesn't stand a chance.
In Washington, a controversy has now broken out over what are clearly administration leaks about our drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, and our new cyberwar against Iran. It’s clear enough that, in its urge to run a Republican-proof election campaign on the image of a tough-guy president, those in the Oval Office, themselves fierce anti-leakers in other circumstances, didn’t know when to stop leaking information they considered advantageous to the president and so badly overplayed their hand. Now, as prosecutors from the Justice Department (one with a pedigree that should leave the administration shaking in its combat boots) are being appointed to look into the leaks, all bets should be off in the capital. Hold onto your hats, tell your journalist friends that, as the investigations begin, they are the ones likely to find themselves in the hottest water, and expect almost anything in the coming months.
One thing won’t happen, though. You’re not going to get tons more Panetta-style realism. It’s clear that all of Washington's players, however intensely they might argue with one another, will be pulling together to shut down those leaks and any others heading our way. We at TomDispatch are convinced, on the other hand, that its time to open the faucets, turn those drips into a steady stream, and let the American people know just what is being done, what wars (even when not called wars) are being fought in their name, what new weapons are being released into the world with their imprimatur (if not their knowledge).
It’s with some pride, then, that TomDispatch turns to its whistleblower-in-residence, State Department official Peter Van Buren, author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, to offer his take on what this controversy really means for us all and just how it looks to someone who has been on the other end of the Obama administration’s fierce crackdown on governmental truth-tellers, rather than image-padders. (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Van Buren discusses how Washington has changed when it comes to both leaking and stifling information, click here or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
Leaking War
How Obama’s Targeted Killings, Leaks, and the Everything-Is-Classified State Have Fused
By Peter Van BurenWhite is black and down is up. Leaks that favor the president are shoveled out regardless of national security, while national security is twisted to pummel leaks that do not favor him. Watching their boss, bureaucrats act on their own, freelancing the punishment of whistleblowers, knowing their retaliatory actions will be condoned. The United States rains Hellfire missiles down on its enemies, with the president alone sitting in judgment of who will live and who will die by his hand.
The issue of whether the White House leaked information to support the president’s reelection while crushing whistleblower leaks it disfavors shouldn’t be seen as just another O’Reilly v. Maddow sporting event. What lies at the nexus of Obama’s targeted drone killings, his self-serving leaks, and his aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers is a president who believes himself above the law, and seems convinced that he alone has a preternatural ability to determine right from wrong.
