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Monopolizing War?
What America Knows How to Do Best
By Tom Engelhardt

It’s pop-quiz time when it comes to the American way of war: three questions, torn from the latest news, just for you.  Here’s the first of them, and good luck!

Two weeks ago, 200 U.S. Marines began armed operations in…?:

a) Afghanistan
b) Pakistan
c) Iran
d) Somalia
e) Yemen
f) Central Africa
g) Northern Mali
h) The Philippines
i) Guatemala

If you opted for any answer, “a” through “h,” you took a reasonable shot at it.  After all, there’s an ongoing American war in Afghanistan and somewhere in the southern part of that country, 200 armed U.S. Marines could well have been involved in an operation.  In Pakistan, an undeclared, CIA-run air war has long been underway, and in the past there have been armed border crossings by U.S. special operations forces as well as U.S. piloted cross-border air strikes, but no Marines.

When it comes to Iran, Washington’s regional preparations for war are staggering.  The continual build-up of U.S. naval power in the Persian Gulf, of land forces on bases around that country, of air power (and anti-missile defenses) in the region should leave any observer breathless.  There are U.S. special operations forces near the Iranian border and CIA drones regularly over that country.  In conjunction with the Israelis, Washington has launched a cyberwar against Iran’s nuclear program and computer systems.  It has also established fierce oil and banking sanctions, and there seem to have been at least some U.S. cross-border operations into Iran going back to at least 2007.  In addition, a recent front-page New York Times story on Obama administration attempts to mollify Israel over its Iran policy included this ominous line: “The administration is also considering... covert activities that have been previously considered and rejected.”  So 200 armed Marines in action in Iran -- not yet, but don’t get down on yourself, it was a good guess.

In Somalia, according to Wired magazine's Danger Room blog, there have been far more U.S. drone flights and strikes against the Islamic extremist al-Shabaab movement and al-Qaeda elements than anyone previously knew.  In addition, the U.S. has at least partially funded, supported, equipped, advised, and promoted proxy wars there, involving Ethiopian troops back in 2007 and more recently Ugandan and Burundi troops (as well as an invading Kenyan army).  In addition, CIA operatives and possibly other irregulars and hired guns are well established in Mogadishu, the capital.

In Yemen, as in Somalia, the combination has been proxy war and strikes by drones (as well as piloted planes), with some U.S. special forces advisors on the ground, and civilian casualties (and anger at the U.S.) rising in the southern part of the country -- but also, as in Somalia, no Marines. Central Africa?  Now, there’s a thought.  After all, at least 100 Green Berets were sent in there this year as part of a campaign against Joseph Kony’s Ugandan-based Lord’s Resistance Army.  As for Northern Mali, taken over by Islamic extremists (including an al-Qaeda-affiliated group), it certainly presents a target for future U.S. intervention -- and we still don’t know what those three U.S. Army commandos who skidded off a bridge to their deaths in their Toyota Land Rover with three “Moroccan prostitutes” were doing in a country with which the U.S. military had officially cut its ties after a democratically elected government was overthrown.  But 200 Marines operating in war-torn areas of Africa?  Not yet.  When it comes to the Philippines, again no Marines, even though U.S. special forces and drones have been aiding the government in a low-level conflict with Islamic militants in Mindanao.

As it happens, the correct, if surprising, answer is “i.”  And if you chose it, congratulations!

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[Special Offer for TomDispatch Readers:  State Department whistleblower and TomDispatch regular Peter Van Buren’s wild account of how the U.S. deconstructed Iraq, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, is now out in paperback. It’s a must-read anatomy of what the American “stimulus package” in our war zones has really been all about. Should you be willing to contribute $75 (or more) to this website, Van Buren will personally autograph a copy of his new paperback for you.  Check out the offer at our donation page (where a signed book by Noam Chomsky remains available, as does Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 by Nick Turse and me).  Keep in mind that if you’re an Amazon customer and buy one of this site’s book recommendations or anything else your heart desires at that site and you arrive there via a TomDispatch book link or cover image link, we get a small percentage of your purchase at no extra cost to you.  It’s a painless way to help keep this site rolling along.  Tom]

I hope you know that, on the 11th anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001, you live in a country so exceptional it’s blessed by God; that, in fact, it’s -- no point in pulling punches -- “the greatest nation on earth.”  If you don’t believe me, just listen to President Obama, who used the last words of his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention to say exactly that.  And depending on your political druthers, you don’t have to believe him either.  After all, the stages of the Republican and Democratic conventions were filled with politicos insisting on the same thing.  (Who says there’s no bipartisanship in America?) 

At the Republican convention, Mitt Romney, speaking in his acceptance speech of Neil Armstrong’s first footfall on the moon, said: “Like all Americans we went to bed that night knowing we lived in the greatest country in the history of the world.” Chris Christie in his keynote speech drove home this point: “Standing strong for freedom will make the next century as great an American century as the last one.” Michelle Obama praising her husband as a great dad wasn’t going to miss an opportunity to say: “Every day [the people I meet] remind me how blessed we are to live in the greatest nation on earth”; and Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser and secretary of state (she of double-hulled oil tanker fame) gave the Republicans a primer on foreign policy for the Romney era, and this was her version of it: “Because it just has to be -- that the most compassionate and freest country on the face of the earth -- will continue to be the most powerful!”  And that’s just to name a few among a bevy of American exceptionalists from whom you certainly wouldn’t want to exclude Vice President Joe Biden.  After all, leaving Mongol horsemen, Apache warriors, Roman legionnaires, Napoleon’s Army, and every other war-fighter twitching in the dust, he claimed President Obama was well aware that our special forces are “the finest warriors the world has ever known.”

Think of all this as a kind of exceptional post-9/11 fever.  The more ordinary Americans worry about their country being on the “wrong track” or “in decline,” the more loudly, emphatically, aggressively (and yet defensively) politicians seem to insist, against all evidence, that we are and always will be (unless my opponent gets into office) the greatest, finest, freest etc. around. By the way, tell that to Peter Van Buren or John Kiriakou.  Both were government officials who told the truth about bad things happening inside the government of the greatest country the universe has ever seen.  One wrote the book We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People about just what a laughable mess the State Department’s “reconstruction of Iraq” turned out to be and, for doing that with remarkable honesty and wit, he is being forced into early retirement by the bureaucrats of the greatest State Department in the history of the world.  The other, a CIA agent, told reporters the truth about some of the practices of the greatest spy agency in the history of the galaxy, including acts of torture by operatives in his own agency, and he’s going to celebrate the 9/11 anniversary with a court date the following day.

These are indications of the real state of affairs in this country 11 years after they attacked us because they “hated our freedoms.”  Now, on September 11, 2012, the national security complex is, as Peter Van Buren indicates below, beyond accountability for any crimes it may commit.  It exists in a post-legal America not available to 99% of us.  As for our freedoms, a lack of the slightest urge to prosecute anyone who committed a crime on Washington time means that our governmental officials now have extraordinary new freedoms -- more license than 007 ever did -- to kidnap, torture, abuse, murder, surveil, and assassinate (including American citizens).  That’s a record to ponder as another September 11th rolls around and, living in the greatest nation on earth, you ask yourself: Who really won, them or us? Tom

The Persecution of John Kiriakou
Torture and the Myth of Never Again
By Peter Van Buren

Here is what military briefers like to call BLUF, the Bottom Line Up Front: no one except John Kiriakou is being held accountable for America’s torture policy. And John Kiriakou didn’t torture anyone, he just blew the whistle on it.

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Here, to my mind, was one strange aspect of the political convention season just past: since the great meltdown of 2008, brilliantly engineered by various giant financial institutions gone wild, we’ve seen a collapse in the wealth of middle-class African Americans and Hispanics, and a significant drop in the wealth of middle-class whites.  Only the rich have benefitted.  Though the draining of wealth from the middle and its fortification at the top have been a long time coming, the near collapse of the economy four years ago was a disaster whether you look at the rise in unemployment figures, poverty, the use of food stamps, gauges of upward mobility, or just about any other grim measure you’d care to employ.

All this suggests that the twenty-first century has largely been an American riches-to-rags story.  It was this that gave both political conventions an almost fairy-tale-like quality, since the single life trajectory featured prominently at each of them by just about every speaker you’d want to cite was the opposite.  Everybody, even Mitt Romney (“My dad never made it through college and apprenticed as a lath and plaster carpenter...”), was obliged to offer a wrenching, heartwarming tale of rags (or relative rags) to riches (no relative about it).  The theme, heavily emphasized at the Republican convention and an undercurrent at the Democratic one, wasn’t I feel your pain, but I celebrate my gain.

There are, in our world, so many journeys of every sort.  It’s strange to see only one of them emphasized and celebrated, the one that, at the moment, is perhaps the least likely to speak to the actual experience of most Americans.  With this in mind, TomDispatch today offers quite a different journey -- not economic, but political, and of a sort no one usually thinks to write about.  It’s Jeremiah Goulka’s trip out of a particular kind of fantasy world and into what, in 2004, Karl Rove (then an unnamed source for journalist Ron Suskind) pejoratively called “‘the reality-based community’ which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'”  Rove added -- that moment being the highpoint of Bush-era imperial self-celebration -- “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'”

Goulka’s is a tale of how one man left a party that, in recent years, has had, in Jonathan Schell’s pungent phrase, “a will to fantasy,” and embarked on a hard-won trip into reality. There are so many more such stories in our country.  Maybe someday some political convention will have the nerve to celebrate some of them.  (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Goulka discusses his political journey, click here or download it to your iPod here.) Tom

Joining the Reality-Based Community
Or How I Learned to Stop Loving the Bombs and Start Worrying
By Jeremiah Goulka

I used to be a serious Republican, moderate and business-oriented, who planned for a public-service career in Republican politics.  But I am a Republican no longer.

There’s an old joke we Republicans used to tell that goes something like this: “If you’re young and not a Democrat, you’re heartless. If you grow up and you’re not a Republican, you’re stupid.” These days, my old friends and associates no doubt consider me the butt of that joke. But I look on my “stupidity” somewhat differently.  After all, my real education only began when I was 30 years old.

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Think back to the election of 2008. Do you remember how one candidate had it easy?  He had eight years of abject failure to run against.  Eight years that included the launching of two dismal wars, the creation of a torture gulag with its crown jewel at Guantánamo Bay, the ushering in of a program of robotic assassination missions and secret spying programs, all presided over by an administration that talked tough about silencing leakers and reporters who aided them, and a president who kept a list with mug shots of people he wanted bumped off.  (When his triggermen killed one, he’d cross off his face.)  The roster of the administration's “triumphs” reads like something out of dystopian fiction and people were tired of it.  They wanted change, which was good news for the change candidate, because his rival was an old hawk who talked more of the same.   

Fast forward to today.  The candidate who won the 2008 contest expanded the country’s war in Afghanistan, struggled to keep American troops in Iraq (before fulfilling his predecessor’s pledge to withdraw), and oversaw escalating military interventions in Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, and elsewhere.  The winning candidate failed to close Guantánamo, radically expanded the robotic assassination program, continued and expanded domestic surveillance, vigorously pursued and used the Espionage Act against more governmental whistleblowers than all other administrations combined (but prosecuted no one else in the National Security Complex for illegal activities), and kept his own extensive kill list, personally okaying assassinations.  Could it really be that the “change” candidate won?  Could it have been any worse than if the old hawk had? 

Another question follows.  Almost four years later, are people happy about the types of “change” he ushered in?  After all, as president, the change candidate killed public enemy number one and he’s still fighting for his political life against a challenger whose own party once rejected him and now does little more than tolerate him. He, too, is now talking “change.”  Yet the type of change the challenger is speaking about includes even more profligate military spending, even more troops to send to war, and possibly the addition of a new war or two to the American agenda.  So much change and yet so much remains the same.  Confusing, isn’t it?  Luckily, TomDispatch regular John Feffer, author of Crusade 2.0: The West’s Resurgent War on Islam, makes some sense of this strain of American politics and what four more years under President Obama or four years under President Romney is likely to mean for us -- and the rest of the world.  No matter who wins, be ready to lose hope and fear change. (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which John Feffer discusses power -- hard, soft, smart, and dumb -- click here or download it to your iPod here.)  Nick Turse

Dumb and Dumber
Obama’s “Smart Power” Foreign Policy Not Smart at All
By John Feffer

Barack Obama is a smart guy. So why has he spent the last four years executing such a dumb foreign policy? True, his reliance on “smart power” -- a euphemism for giving the Pentagon a stake in all things global -- has been a smart move politically at home.  It has largely prevented the Republicans from playing the national security card in this election year. But “smart power” has been a disaster for the world at large and, ultimately, for the United States itself.

Power was not always Obama’s strong suit. When he ran for president in 2008, he appeared to friend and foe alike as Mr. Softy. He wanted out of the war in Iraq. He was no fan of nuclear weapons. He favored carrots over sticks when approaching America’s adversaries.

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One of the jokes of our era is the Republican Party's claim that it favors “small government.”  An accurate description might go more like this: the present-day Republican Party (libertarians excepted) has never seen an oppressive power of the national security state it didn’t want to bolster or grow.  And it loves big government -- the bigger the better -- as long as we’re talking about the military-industrial complex.  Mitt Romney, for instance, is eager to build ever more naval vessels, increase the size of U.S. ground forces, and up by an extra $2 trillion or more over the next decade the Pentagon’s already staggering budget.  As the Bush administration proved and the Obama administration emphasized, stimulus packages, including massive infrastructural projects, are fine and dandy when pursued in Baghdad (biggest embassy on Earth) or Afghanistan (most bases ever).  Consider it an irony, that even undocumented aliens are a Republican “go,” if they happen to be part of the semi-slave labor force that helps to build and service American bases in war zones abroad. 

And lest anyone claim that we’re now a can’t-do nation with a can’t-do government, it’s simply not true.  Increasingly true, however, is that governmental “doing” only happens these days when the U.S. military is doing it.  This is, of course, the definition of a militarizing society.  And yet, let’s face it, the Pentagon’s ability to create infrastructure remains impressive -- and something Americans know remarkably little about.

Take today’s piece by TomDispatch Associate Editor Nick Turse: to build untold hundreds of bases, some humongous, in a poverty-stricken, landlocked country (with few building resources of its own) thousands of miles from ours is little short of stunning.  In fact, thought of a certain way, the whole American way of war has the same quality.  Take the largest base built in Iraq, the ill-named Camp Victory with a 27-mile perimeter.  Housing 40,000 military personnel and 20,000 contractors, it had, among the usual brand-name fast-food restaurants, Internet cafes, and PXes, “a reverse osmosis water plant that could generate 1.85 million gallons a day, an ice plant, a 50-megawatt power generating station, stadium-sized chow halls, and a laundromat with 3,000 machines able to do 36,000 loads a day.”

Since any style of warfare emerges from the society that spawns it, we shouldn’t be surprised that we carry our particular version of a consumer society to war with us.  Think, for instance, of the final withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, when the U.S. military shipped out much of what we had brought in with us.  That turned out to be an estimated three million objects, ranging from tanks and laptop computers to toilets and tables (with at least another four million objects turned over to the Iraqis, “including 89,000 air conditioners worth $18.5 million”). 

Now, as if to remind us of the profligate nature of the American way of war, comes the news that to withdraw U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, the U.S. military may have to send in extra troops to sort through the more than $60 billion worth of equipment and materiel that needs to leave with them.  Think of it not as an urge but a surge to depart, and a part of the general madness of war, American-style, in these last years.  Those extra troops will, by the way, be sending out at least 200,000 shipping containers and vehicles.

Big government?  It couldn’t get bigger.  Can-do, you bet.  Successful?  Not for a second.  Maybe the next time Washington wants to build the biggest embassy on Earth and hundreds of bases, large and small, it should do so here and create a few of the fantasy 12 million jobs Mitt Romney is promising Americans.  Tom 

Afghanistan’s Base Bonanza
Total Tops Iraq at That War’s Height
By Nick Turse

Afghanistan may turn out to be one of the great misbegotten “stimulus packages” of the modern era, a construction boom in the middle of nowhere with materials largely shipped in at enormous expense to no lasting purpose whatsoever.  With the U.S. military officially drawing down its troops there, the Pentagon is now evidently reversing the process and embarking on a major deconstruction program.  It’s tearing up tarmacs, shutting down outposts, and packing up some of its smaller facilities.  Next year, the number of International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) coalition bases in the southwest of the country alone is scheduled to plummet from 214 to 70, according to the New York Times.

But anyone who wanted to know just what the Pentagon built in Afghanistan and what it is now tearing down won’t have an easy time of it.

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