Here’s an odd question: Is it possible that the U.S. military is present in more countries and more places now than at the height of the Cold War? It’s true that the U.S. is reducing its forces and giant bases in Europe and that its troops are out of Iraq (except for that huge, militarized embassy in Baghdad). On the other hand, there’s that massive ground, air, and naval build-up in the Persian Gulf, the Obama administration’s widely publicized “pivot” to Asia (including troops and ships), those new drone bases in the eastern Indian Ocean region, some movement back into Latin America (including a new base in Chile), and don’t forget Africa, where less than a decade ago, the U.S. had almost no military presence at all. Now, as TomDispatch Associate Editor Nick Turse writes in the latest in his “changing face of empire” series, U.S. special operations forces, regular troops, private contractors, and drones are spreading across the continent with remarkable (if little noticed) rapidity.
Putting together the pieces on Africa isn’t easy. For instance, only the other day it was revealed that three U.S. Army commandos in a Toyota Land Cruiser had skidded off a bridge in Mali in April. They died, all three, along with three women identified as “Moroccan prostitutes.” This is how we know that U.S. special operations forces were operating in chaotic, previously democratic Mali after a coup by a U.S.-trained captain accelerated the unraveling of the country, leading more recently to its virtual dismemberment by Tuareg rebels and Islamist insurgents. Consider this a sample of what Nick Turse calls the U.S. military’s “scramble for Africa” in a seamy, secretive nutshell.
So here’s another question: Who decided in 2007 that a U.S. Africa Command should be set up to begin a process of turning that continent into a web of U.S. bases and other operations? Who decided that every Islamist rebel group in Africa, no matter how local or locally focused, was a threat to the U.S., calling for a military response? Certainly not the American people, who know nothing about this, who were never asked if expanding the U.S. global military mission to Africa was something they favored, who never heard the slightest debate, or even a single peep from Washington on the subject. (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Turse discusses the Pentagon’s shadowy, but fast-expanding mission in Africa, click here or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
Obama’s Scramble for Africa
Secret Wars, Secret Bases, and the Pentagon’s “New Spice Route” in Africa
By Nick TurseThey call it the New Spice Route, an homage to the medieval trade network that connected Europe, Africa, and Asia, even if today’s “spice road” has nothing to do with cinnamon, cloves, or silks. Instead, it’s a superpower’s superhighway, on which trucks and ships shuttle fuel, food, and military equipment through a growing maritime and ground transportation infrastructure to a network of supply depots, tiny camps, and airfields meant to service a fast-growing U.S. military presence in Africa.
Few in the U.S. know about this superhighway, or about the dozens of training missions and joint military exercises being carried out in nations that most Americans couldn’t locate on a map. Even fewer have any idea that military officials are invoking the names of Marco Polo and the Queen of Sheba as they build a bigger military footprint in Africa. It’s all happening in the shadows of what in a previous imperial age was known as “the Dark Continent.”
[For TomDispatch Readers: Thanks to all of you who, in response to my pleadings, urged your friends, neighbors, relatives, and associates to sign up for TomDispatch over the last weeks. You are a major force in getting us new readers! If you meant to but haven’t done so yet, a last reminder: send everyone to the "subscribe" window at the upper right of TD's main screen, tell them to put in their email addresses, hit “submit,” answer the “opt-in” email that instantly arrives in their email boxes (or spam folders), and receive notices whenever a new post goes up. And while you’re at it, tell them to pick up a copy of the new TD book Nick Turse and I just published, Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050, or if they’re already hooked on TomDispatch suggest that they get a signed, personalized copy of that volume or my latest book, The United States of Fear, for a contribution of $75 (or more) by checking out the offers at our donation page. Tom]
It shouldn’t surprise you that Illegal Drugs R' Us. In fact, nearly 9% of this country’s population above the age of 12 uses them -- more than 22 million people, according to the government’s 2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Nor should it surprise you that the business behind such use is booming on one side of the U.S. border and blowing remarkable numbers of heads off to get its product to market on the other. After all, what businessman, assured that his venture would have a guaranteed 9% market in the U.S. (and that, in the future, those numbers would only rise) wouldn’t be eager to plunge in?
The nightmare of those dead bodies south of the border and the deadheads north of it is a “problem” that is quickly being militarized as the U.S. employs its experiences in places like Iraq and Afghanistan (still the heroin poppy capital of the world, by the way) to go after the drug trade in Central America and Mexico, drones soaring and guns blasting (only adding to the pyramid of bodies along the way). You might think that the same old militarized same old that had been such a dismal failure in the Greater Middle East might give way to a little new thinking when it came to our “war” on drugs. But not in Washington. Not these days.
Fortunately, every now and then TomDispatch regular Rebecca Solnit has the urge to write a letter to someone, alive or dead -- or in this case, the living, the barely living, and the dead -- to offer new ways of thinking about our world, including today about the drug horror show that the Americas have become. Too bad our government doesn’t call a truce in that “war” for 24 hours, just to give a little new thought to how to proceed. If it won’t, the rest of us still should. Tom
Apologies to Mexico
The Drug Trade and GNP (Gross National Pain)
By Rebecca SolnitDear Mexico,
I apologize. There are so many things I could apologize for, from the way the U.S. biotech corporation Monsanto has contaminated your corn to the way Arizona and Alabama are persecuting your citizens, but right now I’d like to apologize for the drug war, the 10,000 waking nightmares that make the news and the rest that don’t.
You've heard the stories about the five severed heads rolled onto the floor of a Michoacan nightclub in 2006, the 300 bodies dissolved in acid by a servant of one drug lord, the 49 mutilated bodies found in plastic bags by the side of the road in Monterrey in May, the nine bodies found hanging from an overpass in Nuevo Laredo just last month, the Zeta Cartel’s videotaped beheadings just two weeks ago, the carnage that has taken tens of thousands of Mexican lives in the last decade and has terrorized a whole nation. I've read them and so many more. I am sorry 50,000 times over.
The drug war is fueled by many things, and maybe the worst drug of all is money, to which so many are so addicted that they can never get enough. It’s a drug for which they will kill, destroying communities and ecologies, even societies, whether for the sake of making drones, Wall Street profits, or massive heroin sales. Then there are the actual drugs, to which so many others turn for numbness.
I can still remember sneaking with two friends into the balcony of some Broadway movie palace to see the world end. The year was 1959, the film was On the Beach, and I was 15. It was the movie version of Neville Shute’s still eerie 1957 novel about an Australia awaiting its death sentence from radioactive fallout from World War III, which had already happened in the northern hemisphere. We three were jacked by the thrill of the illicit and then, to our undying surprise, bored by the quiet, grownup way the movie imagined human life winding down on this planet. (“We're all doomed, you know. The whole, silly, drunken, pathetic lot of us. Doomed by the air we're about to breathe.”)
It couldn’t hold a candle to giant, radioactive, mutant ants heading for L.A. (Them!), or planets exploding as alien civilizations nuclearized themselves (This Island Earth), or a monstrous prehistoric reptile tearing up Tokyo after being awakened from its sleep by atomic tests (Godzilla), or for that matter the sort of post-nuclear, post-apocalyptic survivalist novels that were common enough in that era.
It’s true that anything can be transformed into entertainment, even versions of our own demise -- and that there’s something strangely reassuring about then leaving a theater or turning the last page of a book and having life go on. Still, we teenagers didn’t doubt that something serious and dangerous was afoot in that Cold War era, not when we “ducked and covered” under our school desks while (test) sirens screamed outside and the CONELRAD announcer on the radio on the teacher’s desk offered chilling warnings.
Nor did we doubt it when we dreamed about the bomb, as I did reasonably regularly in those years, or when we wondered how our “victory weapon” in the Pacific in World War II might, in the hands of the Reds, obliterate us and the rest of what in those days we called the Free World (with the obligatory caps). We sensed that, for the first time since peasants climbed into their coffins at the millennium to await the last days, we were potentially already in our coffins in everyday life, that our world could actually vanish in a few moments in a paroxysm of superpower destruction.
Today, from climate change to pandemics, apocalyptic scenarios (real and imaginary) have only multiplied. But the original world-ender of our modern age, that wonder weapon manqué, as military expert, TomDispatch regular, and author of Prophets of War: Lockheed and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex Bill Hartung points out, is still unbelievably with us and still proliferating. Yes, logic -- and the evidence from Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- should tell us that nuclear weapons are too staggeringly destructive to be usable, but in crisis moments, logic has never been a particularly human trait. How strange, then, that a genuine apocalyptic possibility has dropped out of our dreams, as well as pop culture, and as Hartung makes clear, is barely visible in our world. Which is why, on a landscape remarkably barren of everything nuclear except the massive arsenals that dot the planet, TomDispatch considers it important to raise the possibility of returning the nuclear issue to the place it deserves in the human agenda. (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Hartung discusses the upside-down world of global nuclear politics, click here or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
Beyond Nuclear Denial
How a World-Ending Weapon Disappeared From Our Lives, But Not Our World
By William D. HartungThere was a time when nuclear weapons were a significant part of our national conversation. Addressing the issue of potential atomic annihilation was once described by nuclear theorist Herman Kahn as “thinking about the unthinkable,” but that didn’t keep us from thinking, talking, fantasizing, worrying about it, or putting images of possible nuclear nightmares (often transmuted to invading aliens or outer space) endlessly on screen.
Now, on a planet still overstocked with city-busting, world-ending weaponry, in which almost 67 years have passed since a nuclear weapon was last used, the only nuke that Americans regularly hear about is one that doesn’t exist: Iran’s. The nearly 20,000 nuclear weapons on missiles, planes, and submarines possessed by Russia, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, China, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea are barely mentioned in what passes for press coverage of the nuclear issue.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: After a July 4th break, we’re back and wanted to thank all of you who urged your friends, neighbors, relatives, and associates to sign up for TomDispatch over the last two weeks. If you meant to, but haven’t done so yet, one final reminder: urge them to go to the "subscribe" window at the upper right of TD's main screen, put in their email addresses, hit “submit,” answer the “opt-in” email that instantly arrives in your email box (or spam folder), and receive notices whenever a new post goes up. Your willingness to spread the word about this website makes such a difference to us! And while you’re at it, don’t forget to pick up your copy of the first volume in a new series from Dispatch Books that Nick Turse and I just published: Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050. Pepe Escobar calls it “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.”]
The Military Solution
The Lessons Washington Can't Draw From the Failure of the Military Option
By Tom Engelhardt
Americans may feel more distant from war than at any time since World War II began. Certainly, a smaller percentage of us -- less than 1% -- serves in the military in this all-volunteer era of ours and, on the face of it, Washington’s constant warring in distant lands seems barely to touch the lives of most Americans.
And yet the militarization of the United States and the strengthening of the National Security Complex continues to accelerate. The Pentagon is, by now, a world unto itself, with a staggering budget at a moment when no other power or combination of powers comes near to challenging this country’s might.
In the post-9/11 era, the military-industrial complex has been thoroughly mobilized under the rubric of “privatization” and now goes to war with the Pentagon. With its $80 billion-plus budget, the intelligence bureaucracy has simply exploded. There are so many competing agencies and outfits, surrounded by a universe of private intelligence contractors, all enswathed in a penumbra of secrecy, and they have grown so large, mainly under the Pentagon’s aegis, that you could say intelligence is now a ruling way of life in Washington -- and it, too, is being thoroughly militarized. Even the once-civilian CIA has undergone a process of para-militarization and now runs its own “covert” drone wars in Pakistan and elsewhere. Its director, a widely hailed retired four-star general, was previously the U.S. war commander in Iraq and then Afghanistan, just as the National Intelligence Director who oversees the whole intelligence labyrinth is a retired Air Force lieutenant general.
In a sense, even the military has been “militarized.” In these last years, a secret army of special operations forces, 60,000 or more strong and still expanding, has grown like an incubus inside the regular armed forces. As the CIA’s drones have become the president’s private air force, so the special ops troops are his private army, and are now given free rein to go about the business of war in their own cocoon of secrecy in areas far removed from what are normally considered America’s war zones.
Diplomacy, too, has been militarized. Diplomats work ever more closely with the military, while the State Department is transforming itself into an unofficial arm of the Pentagon -- as the secretary of state is happy to admit -- as well as of the weapons industry.
And keep in mind that we now have two Pentagons, thanks to the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which is focused, among other things, on militarizing our southern border. Meanwhile, with the help of the DHS, local police forces nationwide have, over the last decade, been significantly up-armored and have, in the name of fighting terrorism, gained a distinctly military patina. They have ever more access to elaborate weaponry and gadgets, including billions of dollars of surplus military equipment of every sort, often being funneled to once peaceable small town police departments.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: With today’s post, TomDispatch is closing until July 5th. By the way, I recently asked you to consider writing friends, colleagues, relatives -- whomever -- and urge them to go to the "subscribe" window at the upper right of TD's main screen, put in their email addresses, hit “submit,” answer the “opt-in” email that instantly arrives in your email box (or, unfortunately, spam folder), and receive notices whenever a new post goes up. (Word of mouth is, of course, still the major kind of publicity this site can afford.) A number of you did so and TD is getting a nice stream of new subscribers. Many thanks indeed! If some of you meant to do this but didn't quite get around to it, now's as perfect a time as any! And it really does make a difference to us.
Similarly, as summer begins, those of you in a giving mood shouldn’t forget TomDispatch. You really do help keep us turning out something close to 150 well-edited, provocative, original posts a year with only the rare week off. For our small crew, that’s an undertaking, believe me. Check out our donation page by clicking here. Remember that, for contributions of $75 (or more), you can get personalized signed copies of our newest book, Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare: 2001-2050, or my book The United States of Fear. Or simply click on any TomDispatch book link, buy either of those books or anything else at Amazon and you’ve also made a contribution to us. We get a small percentage of your purchase price at no cost to you. Thanks again! See you in a week. Tom]
“It's a day of picnics and patriotic parades, a night of concerts and fireworks, and a reason to fly the American flag.” That, at least, is how the federal government describes July 4th on its official website, USA.gov. “Independence Day,” it tells us, “honors the birthday of the United States of America and the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.”
As you may recall, however foggily, from grammar school social studies classes, that document struck a decidedly anti-military tone, castigating America’s then-ruler for having:
“kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
“He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
“He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
“For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us.”
Today, of course, America’s rulers have saddled the country with a large standing army, created an exceptionally powerful military establishment largely divorced from civilian life, created secret laws and enforced abridgments of basic civil liberties while quartering among us, at military bases all over America, large bodies of troops.
Given these developments, it’s hardly surprising that, over the years, the signing of this country’s foundational document as it was launching its anti-colonial War of Independence has somehow been wrapped in “warrior” values that go with the neo-colonial wars we have been fighting in distant lands. In fact, Independence Day has become prime-time for military recruiting. The Navy’s high-flying Blue Angels, for example, are taking their aerial acrobatics to the skies above Boston Harbor as part of this July 4th’s festivities. Meanwhile, the “Golden Knights,” the Army’s trick parachute team, will dramatically descend on celebrations in St. Louis. It’s military à go-go all day long.
With so many martial myths afoot, the time seems ripe for a candid discussion of the troops we’re so often called upon to “support” on July 4th and every other day of the year. In her first piece for TomDispatch, journalist Nan Levinson examines the veterans of our post-9/11 wars, their “sacred wounds,” “moral injuries,” and just what America’s uniformed sons and daughters have experienced during the last decade of far-flung occupations. With new military interventions blossoming all the time, the subjects she raises ought to be at the forefront of American minds. If U.S. troops find themselves morally injured, shouldn’t we ask: Who put them in the position to suffer such wounds in the first place? Nick Turse
Mad, Bad, Sad
What’s Really Happened to America’s Soldiers
By Nan Levinson"PTSD is going to color everything you write," came the warning from a stepmother of a Marine, a woman who keeps track of such things. That was in 2005, when post-traumatic stress disorder, a.k.a. PTSD, wasn't getting much attention, but soon it was pretty much all anyone wrote about. Story upon story about the damage done to our guys in uniform -- drinking, divorce, depression, destitution -- a laundry list of miseries and victimhood. When it comes to veterans, it seems like the only response we can imagine is to feel sorry for them.
Victim is one of the two roles we allow our soldiers and veterans (the other is, of course, hero), but most don't have PTSD, and this isn't one of those stories.
Civilian to the core, I've escaped any firsthand experience of war, but I've spent the past seven years talking with current GIs and recent veterans, and among the many things they've taught me is that nobody gets out of war unmarked. That’s especially true when your war turns out to be a shadowy, relentless occupation of a distant land, which requires you to do things that you regret and that continue to haunt you.
