[
Note for TomDispatch Readers: Returning from a
rare dispatchless vacation weekend, here's a thought for those of you
who might want to contribute to this site and have a love for history.
It's an offer I hope you can’t refuse. I wrote a book back in the
1990s, The End of Victory Culture,
in which I saw, early on, that American triumphalism was on its last
legs. Studs Terkel said of the book: “As powerful as a Joe Louis jab to
the solar plexus.” (I’m proud of that one.) It’s a history of the
Cold War with a sideline in the comics, toy soldiers, TV shows, movies,
and other cultural detritus of my youth. In its latest updated
edition, it’s also a book for the twenty-first century. As you’ll see,
it’s the basis for today’s post as well. I’ve never offered it to site
readers before, but for a donation of $85 (or more), I’ll send you a
signed, personalized copy. Check out the offer at our donation page,
where signed copies of books by Peter Van Buren, Noam Chomsky, Nick
Turse, and me are also available, and many thanks in advance!
And don’t forget to join our ever-livelier Facebook page and follow us on Twitter @TomDispatch. Tom]
Overwrought Empire
The Discrediting of U.S. Military Power
By
Tom Engelhardt
Americans lived in a “
victory culture”
for much of the twentieth century. You could say that we experienced
an almost 75-year stretch of triumphalism -- think of it as the real
“American Century” -- from World War I to the end of the Cold War, with
time off for a destructive stalemate in Korea and a defeat in Vietnam
too shocking to absorb or shake off.
When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, it all seemed so
obvious. Fate had clearly dealt Washington a royal flush. It was
victory with a capital V. The United States was, after all, the last
standing superpower, after centuries of unceasing great power rivalries
on the planet. It had a military beyond compare and no enemy, hardly a
“rogue state,” on the horizon. It was almost unnerving, such clear
sailing into a dominant future, but a moment for the ages nonetheless.
Within a decade, pundits in Washington were
hailing us as “the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome.”
And here’s the odd thing: in a sense, little has changed since then
and yet everything seems different. Think of it as the American
imperial paradox: everywhere there are now “threats” against our
well-being which seem to demand action and yet nowhere are there
commensurate enemies to go with them. Everywhere the U.S. military
still reigns supreme by almost any measure you might care to apply; and
yet -- in case the paradox has escaped you -- nowhere can it achieve
its goals, however modest.
At one level, the American situation should simply take your breath
away. Never before in modern history had there been an arms race of
only one or a great power confrontation of only one. And at least in
military terms, just as the
neoconservatives imagined
in those early years of the twenty-first century, the United States
remains the “sole superpower” or even “hyperpower” of planet Earth.
The Planet’s Top Gun
And yet the more dominant the U.S. military becomes in its ability to
destroy and the more its forces are spread across the globe, the more
the defeats and semi-defeats pile up, the more the missteps and mistakes
grow, the more the strains show, the more
the suicides rise, the more the nation’s treasure
disappears down a black hole -- and in response to all of this, the more moves the Pentagon makes.
A great power without a significant enemy? You might have to go back
to the Roman Empire at its height or some Chinese dynasty in full
flower to find anything like it. And yet Osama bin Laden is dead.
Al-Qaeda is reportedly a shadow of its former self. The great regional
threats of the moment, North Korea and Iran, are regimes held together
by baling wire and the suffering of their populaces. The only incipient
great power rival on the planet, China, has
just launched
its first aircraft carrier, a refurbished Ukrainian throwaway from the
1990s on whose deck the country has no planes capable of landing.
The U.S. has
1,000 or more bases around the world; other countries, a
handful. The U.S. spends as much on its military as the next
14 powers (mostly allies) combined. In fact, it’s investing an estimated
$1.45 trillion
to produce and operate a single future aircraft, the F-35 -- more than
any country, the U.S. included, now spends on its national defense
annually.
The U.S. military is singular in other ways, too. It alone has divided the globe -- the complete world -- into
six “commands.” With (lest anything be left out) an added command,
Stratcom, for the heavens and another, recently established, for the only space not previously occupied,
cyberspace, where we’re already unofficially “
at war.” No other country on the planet thinks of itself in faintly comparable military terms.
When its high command plans for its future “needs,” thanks to
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, they
repair (don’t say “retreat”) to a military base south of the capital
where they argue out their future and war-game various possible crises
while
striding across a map of the world larger than a basketball court. What other military would come up with such a method?
The president now has at his command not one, but two private armies. The first is the CIA, which in
recent years has been
heavily militarized, is overseen by a former four-star general (who calls the job “
living the dream”),
and is running its own private assassination campaigns and drone air
wars throughout the Greater Middle East. The second is an
expanding elite, the Joint Special Operations Command,
cocooned inside the U.S. military, members of whom are now deployed to hot spots around the globe.
The U.S. Navy, with its
11 nuclear-powered aircraft carrier
task forces, is dominant on the global waves in a way that only the
British Navy might once have been; and the U.S. Air Force controls the
global skies in much of the world in a totally uncontested fashion.
(Despite numerous wars and conflicts, the
last
American plane possibly downed in aerial combat was in the first Gulf
War in 1991.) Across much of the global south, there is no sovereign
space Washington’s drones can’t penetrate to kill those
judged by the White House to be threats.
In sum, the U.S. is now the sole planetary
Top Gun
in a way that empire-builders once undoubtedly fantasized about, but
that none from Genghis Khan on have ever achieved: alone and essentially
uncontested on the planet. In fact, by every measure (except success),
the likes of it has never been seen.
Blindsided by Predictably Unintended Consequences
By all the usual measuring sticks, the U.S. should be supreme in a
historically unprecedented way. And yet it couldn’t be more obvious
that it’s not, that despite all the bases, elite forces, private armies,
drones, aircraft carriers, wars, conflicts, strikes, interventions, and
clandestine operations, despite a
labyrinthine intelligence bureaucracy that never seems to stop growing and into which we pour a minimum of
$80 billion a year,
nothing seems to work out in an imperially satisfying way. It couldn’t
be more obvious that this is not a glorious dream, but some kind of
ever-expanding imperial nightmare.
This should, of course, have been self-evident since at least early
2004, less than a year after the Bush administration invaded and
occupied Iraq, when the roadside bombs started to explode and the
suicide bombings to mount, while the comparisons of the United States to
Rome and of a prospective
Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East to the
Pax Romana
vanished like a morning mist on a blazing day. Still, the wars against
relatively small, ill-armed sets of insurgents dragged toward their
dismally predictable ends. (It says the world that, after almost 11
years of war, the 2,000th U.S. military death in Afghanistan
occurred
at the hands of an Afghan “ally” in an “insider attack.”) In those
years, Washington continued to be regularly blindsided by the unintended
consequences of its military moves. Surprises -- none pleasant --
became the order of the day and victories proved vanishingly rare.
One thing seems obvious: a superpower military with unparalleled
capabilities for one-way destruction no longer has the more basic
ability to impose its will anywhere on the planet. Quite the opposite,
U.S. military power has been remarkably discredited globally by the most
pitiful of forces. From Pakistan to Honduras, just about anywhere it
goes in the old colonial or neocolonial world, in those regions known in
the contested Cold War era as the Third World, resistance of one
unexpected sort or another arises and failure ensues in some often
long-drawn-out and spectacular fashion.
Given the lack of enemies -- a few thousand
jihadis,
a small set of minority insurgencies, a couple of feeble regional
powers -- why this is so, what exactly the force is that prevents
Washington’s success, remains mysterious. Certainly, it’s in some way
related to the more than half-century of decolonization movements,
rebellions, and insurgencies that were a feature of the previous
century.
It also has something to do with the way economic heft has spread
beyond the U.S., Europe, and Japan -- with the rise of the “tigers” in
Asia, the explosion of the Chinese and Indian economies, the advances of
Brazil and Turkey, and the movement of the planet toward some kind of
genuine economic multipolarity. It may also have something to do with
the end of the Cold War, which put an end as well to several centuries
of imperial or great power competition and left the sole “victor,” it
now seems clear, heading toward the exits wreathed in
self-congratulation.
Explain it as you will, it’s as if the planet itself, or humanity, had somehow been
inoculated
against the imposition of imperial power, as if it now rejected it
whenever and wherever applied. In the previous century, it took a
half-nation, North Korea, backed by Russian supplies and Chinese troops
to fight the U.S. to a draw, or a popular insurgent movement backed by a
local power, North Vietnam, backed in turn by the Soviet Union
and
China to defeat American power. Now, small-scale minority
insurgencies, largely using roadside bombs and suicide bombers, are
fighting American power to a draw (or worse) with no great power behind
them at all.
Think of the growing force that resists such military might as the
equivalent of the “dark matter” in the universe. The evidence is in.
We now know (or should know) that it’s there, even if we can’t see it.
Washington's Wars on Autopilot
After the last decade of military failures, stand-offs, and
frustrations, you might think that this would be apparent in
Washington. After all, the U.S. is now visibly an overextended empire,
its sway waning from the Greater Middle East to Latin America, the
limits of its power
increasingly evident. And yet, here’s the curious thing: two
administrations in Washington have drawn none of the obvious
conclusions, and no matter how the presidential election turns out, it’s
already clear that, in this regard, nothing will change.
Even as military power has proven itself a bust again and again, our
policymakers have come to rely ever more completely on a military-first
response to global problems. In other words, we are not just a
classically overextended empire, but also an overwrought one operating
on some kind of militarized autopilot. Lacking is a learning curve. By
all evidence, it’s not just that there isn’t one, but that there can’t
be one.
Washington, it seems, now has only one mode of thought and action, no
matter who is at the helm or what the problem may be, and it always
involves, directly or indirectly, openly or clandestinely, the
application of militarized force. Nor does it matter that each further
application only destabilizes some region yet more or undermines further
what once were known as “American interests.”
Take Libya, as an example. It briefly seemed to count as a rare
American military success story: a decisive intervention in support of a
rebellion against a brutal dictator -- so brutal, in fact, that the CIA
previously
shipped
“terrorist suspects,” Islamic rebels fighting against the Gaddafi
regime, there for torture. No U.S. casualties resulted, while American
and NATO air strikes were decisive in bringing a set of ill-armed,
ill-organized rebels to power.
In the world of unintended consequences, however, the fall of Gaddafi
sent Tuareg mercenaries from his militias, armed with high-end
weaponry,
across the border
into Mali. There, when the dust settled, the whole northern part of
the country had come unhinged and fallen under the sway of Islamic
extremists and al-Qaeda wannabes as other parts of North Africa
threatened to destabilize. At the same time, of course, the first
American casualties of the intervention occurred when Ambassador
Christopher Stevens and three other Americans died in an attack on the
Benghazi consulate and a local “safe house.”
With matters worsening regionally, the response couldn’t have been more predictable. As Greg Miller and Craig Whitlock of the
Washington Post recently
reported,
in ongoing secret meetings, the White House is planning for military
operations against al-Qaeda-in-the-Magreb (North Africa), now armed with
weaponry pillaged from Gaddafi’s stockpiles. These plans evidently
include the approach used in Yemen (U.S. special forces on the ground
and CIA drone strikes), or a Somalia “formula” (drone strikes, special
forces operations, CIA operations, and the support of African proxy
armies), or even at some point “the possibility of direct U.S.
intervention.”
In addition, Eric Schmitt and David Kilpatrick of the
New York Times report
that the Obama administration is “preparing retaliation” against those
it believes killed the U.S. ambassador, possibly including “drone
strikes, special operations raids like the one that killed Osama bin
Laden, and joint missions with Libyan authorities.” The near certainty
that, like the previous intervention, this next set of military actions
will only further destabilize the region with yet more unpleasant
surprises and unintended consequences hardly seems to matter. Nor does
the fact that, in crude form, the results of such acts are known to us
ahead of time have an effect on the unstoppable urge to plan and order
them.
Such situations are increasingly
legion
across the Greater Middle East and elsewhere. Take one other tiny
example: Iraq, from which, after almost a decade-long military disaster,
the “last” U.S. units essentially fled in the
middle of the night as 2011 ended. Even in those last moments, the Obama administration and the Pentagon were
still trying to keep significant numbers of U.S. troops there (and, in fact, did manage to
leave behind
possibly several hundred as trainers of elite Iraqi units). Meanwhile,
Iraq has been supportive of the embattled Syrian regime and drawn ever
closer to Iran, even as its own sectarian strife has ratcheted upward.
Having watched this unsettling fallout from its last round in the
country,
according to the
New York Times,
the U.S. is now negotiating an agreement “that could result in the
return of small units of American soldiers to Iraq on training missions.
At the request of the Iraqi government, according to General Caslen, a
unit of Army Special Operations soldiers was recently deployed to Iraq
to advise on counterterrorism and help with intelligence.”
Don’t you just want to speak to those negotiators the way you might
to a child: No, don’t do that! The urge to return to the scene of their
previous disaster, however, seems unstaunchable. You could offer
various explanations for why our policymakers, military and civilian,
continue in such a repetitive -- and even from an imperial point of view
-- self-destructive vein in situations where unpleasant surprises are
essentially guaranteed and lack of success a given. Yes, there is the
military-industrial complex to be fed. Yes, we are interested in the
control of crucial resources, especially energy, and so on.
But it’s probably more reasonable to say that a deeply militarized
mindset and the global maneuvers that go with it are by now just part of
the way of life of a Washington eternally “at war.” They are the tics
of a great power with the equivalent of Tourette's Syndrome. They
happen because they can’t help but happen, because they are engraved in
the policy DNA of our national security complex, and can evidently no
longer be altered. In other words, they can’t help themselves.
That’s the only logical conclusion in a world where it has become
ever less imaginable to do the obvious, which is far less or nothing at
all. (Northern Chad? When did it become crucial to our well being?)
Downsizing the mission? Inconceivable. Thinking the unthinkable?
Don’t even give it a thought!
What remains is, of course, a self-evident formula for disaster on
autopilot. But don’t tell Washington. It won’t matter. Its denizens
can’t take it in.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as The End of Victory Culture, his history of the Cold War, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.
