Bush the War Criminal proposes over $700 billion for waste production and wars =Doubling down on the imperial mission
B.T.World
Jan 4, 2007
DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
Doubling down on the imperial mission
By Tom Engelhardt
Okay, folks, it's time for a year-opening sermon. And like any good
sermon, this one will be based on illustrative texts, in this case
from
2006, and inspirational passages plucked from them. Its goal, as in
any
such quest, will be to reveal a world normally hidden from us in our
daily lives.
Every day, it seems, essential choices are being made in Americans'
names by their top officials, civilian and military, many
of whom, as the year ended, only reaffirmed that the United States is
headed down an imperial path in the Middle East and elsewhere, a path
based on dreams of domination and backed, above all else, by the
principle of force. No matter their disagreements over the US
administration's Iraq catastrophe, on this, agreement has remained so
widespread as to make all discussion of the basics seem beside the
point. Despite recent failures on the imperial path, consideration of
other paths remains almost inconceivable.
Naturally, the continual act of choosing the path the US is on, and
the
hardly noticed Pentagonization and Homeland Securitization of
America's
own society that go with it, are never presented to Americans as such.
If no alternatives to what we are doing are ever suggested, then logic
is with the doers, no matter the staggering problems on the horizon.
In fact, what we Americans do in the world - how, for instance, we
choose to garrison the planet - is seldom presented as a matter of
choice at all. Either it has been forced on us by "them" - the rogues,
the jihadis, the madmen, the evil ones - and so is the only path to
our
obvious safety (as defined by our betters in Washington); or it's so
obvious that nothing needs to be done but reaffirm it. As in all
Washington debates at this moment, what's truly important is simply to
decide how to make that imperial path less rocky and those dreams of
domination that pass for US "security" more achievable (or even, as in
Iraq, less noticeably catastrophic).
End of introduction to sermon. Now to the illustrative texts and
examples.
Expand the mission
For my first text, let me take an e-letter that the college-age
daughter of a friend received the other day from a US Marine Corps
(USMC) officer-selection officer, inviting her to "an awesome summer
training program called the Platoon Leader's Course". Think of it as
Marine Corps summer camp. No uniforms ("This is not ROTC!" - Reserve
Officer Training Corps), but reasonable amounts of moolah. Here's some
of what was on offer to her, part of a desperate military's Iraq-era
appeal to citizenly duty:
You will earn approximately $2,400 (six weeks) or $4,000 (10 weeks)
plus room and board during the training. How's that for a summer job?
... You will not incur any obligation to the Marine Corps even after
completing the training. (You can choose whether or not to continue
with the program) ... Tuition assistance will be available to you
after
you complete training this summer. You could potentially earn $8,000
to
$25,000 for school, depending on graduation date.
Imagine! The US Marine Corps is willing to pay young people to go to a
uniform-less summer camp to test their "leadership potential", with no
commitment to the corps necessary. Consider that; then consider what
was certainly President George W Bush's only significant decision of
the holiday season past - to expand the US military permanently by as
many as 70,000 troops.
Now, as in some old math problem, the question is: How do you connect
these two points? (Hint: Not with a straight line.)
Faced with a public shot across the bow in testimony before the US
Congress by Army Chief of Staff Peter J Schoomaker, who warned that
the
US Army "will break" under present war-zone rotation needs, Bush
responded on December 19. He brought up the "stressed" nature of the
US
Armed Forces and, while still officially hesitating about his "way
forward" in Iraq, said, "I'm inclined to believe that we do need to
increase our troops - the army, the marines. And I talked about this
to
Secretary [of Defense Robert] Gates, and he is going to spend some
time
talking to the folks in the building [the Pentagon], come back with a
recommendation to me about how to proceed forward on this idea." All
this was, he added, "to meet the challenges of a long-term global
struggle against terrorists".
Ah ... that makes things clearer.
Of course, to get those new "volunteer" officers and men, who have
generally been none too eager to volunteer for the army and the
marines
in the midst of a disastrous, faraway, increasingly incomprehensible
set of double wars, you'll have to pay even more kids more money to go
to no-commitment summer camp; and, while you're at it, you'll have to
lower standards for the US military radically.
You'll have to let in even more volunteers without high-school
diplomas
but with "moral" and medical "waivers" for criminal records and mental
problems. You'll have to fast-track even more new immigrants willing
to
join for the benefits of quick citizenship; you'll have to ramp up
already high cash bonuses of all sorts; you'll have to push the
top-notch ad agency recently hired on a five-year contract for a cool
billion US dollars to rev up its new "Army Strong" recruitment drive
even higher; you'll certainly have to jack up the numbers of military
recruiters radically, to the tune of perhaps a couple of hundred
million more dollars; and maybe just for the heck of it, you better
start planning for the possibility of recruiting significant numbers
of
potential immigrants before they even think to leave their own
countries. After all, it's darn romantic to imagine a future US
all-volunteer force that will look more like the old French Foreign
Legion - or an army of mercenaries anyway.
All in all, you'll have to commit to the fact that your future soldier
in your basic future war will cost staggering sums of money to hire
and
even more staggering sums to retain after he or she has had a taste of
what "leadership potential" really entails.
Put another way, as long as Iraq remains a classic quagmire for the US
Army and Marine Corps, any plan to expand the US military to make it
easier to fight such wars in the future threatens to become a classic
financial quagmire as well. In other words, Iraq and military
expansion
don't fit together well at all. And yet, looking at the state of the
US
military in Iraq in a certain light, expansion seems so ... well,
logical.
After all, the US military, now at just over 500,000 troops, stood, at
the time of the first Gulf War, at 703,000. (Of course, no one now
counts the quite expensive hired mercenaries who envelop
the US military - the privatized, Halliburton-style adjuncts, who cook
the food, build the bases, do the cleaning, deliver the mail and
supplies, perform interrogation duties, and so on, and whose increase
has been striking, as has the growth of rent-a-mercenary corporations
whose armed employees are, for instance, all over Iraq.)
In addition, it has long been clear that the US Armed Forces could not
take the strain of failing wars in Central Asia and the Middle East
forever, not to speak of increased "commitments" in the Persian Gulf
and the normal massive global basing and policing that the Pentagon
regularly refers to as America's "footprint" on the planet. Added to
this, Bush seems to be leaning toward increasing the pressure on
military manpower needs by "surging" - the Vietnam-era word would, of
course, have been "escalating" - up to 30,000 troops into Baghdad and
al-Anbar province, while naval and air forces (with an obvious eye to
Iran) are simultaneously ramped up in the Persian Gulf.
In light of Iraq, military manpower needs cry out to be dealt with. In
light of Iraq, dealing with them any time soon will be prohibitively
expensive.
In Washington, this conundrum leads nowhere in particular. Instead, in
the spirit of imperial-mission logic (and with the urge to bash the
Bush administration for being late to such an obvious
support-our-troops position), Democrats simply leaped on to the
expand-the-military bandwagon even faster than Republicans. In fact,
leading Democrats had long been calling for just this sort of
expansion. ("I am glad [the president] has realized the need for
increasing the size of the armed forces ... but this is where the
Democrats have been for two years," commented Congressman Rahm
Emanuel,
the new House of Representatives Democratic caucus chairman.) The
Democratic leadership promptly pledged to make such an expansion one
of
its top reform priorities in the new year.
To get those numbers significantly higher will, it's estimated, take a
decade and unimaginable sums of money (as well as those lowered
standards). And, if the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan worsen, as
they almost certainly will, and American casualties rise with no end
in
sight, you can start going through your multiplication tables. This
could be considered but a form of ongoing blowback from US imperial
shock-and-awe tactics in Iraq and presents some curious choices to US
leaders. After all, to take but one example, those most eager to
expand
the US military, with their eyes on the imperial future, should be
eager to liquidate the Iraqi mission as soon as possible.
But a far more basic choice lurks - one rarely alluded to in the
mainstream. If we Americans voted on such things - and, in truth, we
vote on less and less that matters - the choice that actually lies
behind the marine e-letter to my friend's daughter might be put this
way: Expand the military or shrink the mission?
This is the essential question that goes largely unmentioned - and
largely unthought as well. In the meantime, money will continue to
pour
into military recruitment ad campaigns, bonuses, and summer camps. In
the meantime, those marine e-letters will continue to go out. In the
meantime, money will continue to pour into the Pentagon and the US
national-security world generally. In the meantime, the US will
continue to build its near-billion-dollar embassy, the largest on the
planet, in the heart of Baghdad's Green Zone. In the meantime, the
imperial and military paths will continue to fuse, and the Pentagon
will continue to take on new roles, even outside "declared war zones",
in intelligence, diplomacy, "information operations", and other
"self-assigned missions"; so that, as Mark Mazzetti of the New York
Times recently described it, even America's embassies will
increasingly
be militarized outposts in the "global war on terror".
Shrinking the mission - choosing some path other than the imperial one
(in part by redefining what exactly America's national interests are)
-
would, of course, address many problems. It would make paying young
people thousands of dollars to test their leadership potential or
thinking about scouring Central America for a future Foreign Legion
far
less necessary. But no one in Washington - not in the Bush
administration, not in James A Baker's Iraq Study Group, which
recently
captured the Inside-the-Beltway "middle ground" on Iraq policy, not in
the Democratic leadership - is faintly interested in shrinking the US
global mission. No one in Washington, where a kind of communal voting
does go on, is about to vote "no" to that mission, or cast a ballot
for
democracy rather than empire.
Expanding the US military may seem like a no-brainer in response to
the
Iraq crisis. As it happens, it's anything but. Unfortunately, few ever
discuss (as, for instance, Chalmers Johnson did in his book The
Sorrows
of Empire) the 700-plus military and intelligence bases the US retains
around the world or ask why exactly we're garrisoning the planet. No
one, in these past years, has seriously challenged the ever-expanding
Pentagon budget; nor the mushrooming supplemental requests for Iraq
and
Afghanistan, including the record-setting latest for almost $100
billion; nor, generally, the fact that paying for actual war-fighting
is no longer considered an appropriate part of the Pentagon's normal
budget process.
No one challenged it when, in 2002, the United States gained a new
North American Command (Northcom), making US citizens but another
co-equal part of the Pentagon's division of its imperial world, along
with those who live in regions covered by Centcom, Paccom, and the
just
authorized Africa Command (Africom). No one challenged the vast
expansion of Pentagon intelligence activities. No one offered a
challenge as the US military took on ever more civilian domestic
duties, including planning for the potential arrival of a pandemic
disease on US shores or for future Hurricane Katrinas. No one
seriously
challenges the plans the Pentagon has on the drawing boards for
exotic,
futuristic hardware meant to come online decades from now that, along
with futuristic military tactics already being worked out, will help
predetermine the wars most Americans don't even know we are going to
fight - from the vast mega-slum-cities of the Third World to the
borderlands of space.
No one considers what the Pentagonization of the world and the
Homeland
Securitization of the United States is doing to us Americans, because
militarism here has never taken on the expectable forms - few vast
military parades or displays (despite the almost full-scale
militarization of presidential funerals); few troops in the streets;
no
uniforms in the high councils of government. In fact, it's one of the
ironies of America's particular form of militarization that when the
US
military - no longer really a citizen army - goes to war and troops
begin to die, fewer Americans are touched by this than perhaps at any
time in recent history.
Shrink the mission or expand the military? Your choice?
Fat chance.
An expeditionary mentality
Like all crucial questions, the one never asked nonetheless remains
deeply embedded in our most essential texts as in our lives and our
world. All you have to do is keep an eye out and you can catch endless
examples of the choices that have already been made for us Americans -
and are being regularly ratified in our names, but largely without our
knowledge or the slightest consultation by the men (and they are
largely men) who define what an American world is supposed to mean and
simply can't imagine it any other way.
Let me just offer a few illustrative and largely overlooked gems from
2006 (with modest commentary):
Last May, in the opening statement at his confirmation hearings before
the Senate Intelligence Committee for the post of director of the
Central Intelligence Agency, General Michael Hayden, former head of
the
National Security Agency, offered the following promise to Congress:
If confirmed as director, I would reaffirm CIA's proud culture of
risk-taking and excellence, particularly through the increased use of
non-traditional operational platforms, a greater focus on the
development of language skills, and the inculcation of what I would
call an expeditionary mentality.
"An expeditionary mentality" - to "keep America safe". The phrase, so
Kiplingesque, so British Empire, did not so much as draw a comment
from
the assembled senators or a peep from the press. While much in
Hayden's
testimony was highlighted, this essential promise passed essentially
unnoticed. And why should that surprise anyone? After the tenure of
the
previous two directors, George "Slam Dunk" Tenet and the ham-handed
Republican Party hack Porter Goss, it was, in the Washington context,
a
simple promise of performance enhancement. On the imperial path, after
all, an expeditionary mentality is a perfectly reasonable thing to
have.
Let's do it again!
Or consider the following comment from Colonel Conrad Crane, director
of the US Army Military History Institute and a key figure in
overseeing the production and recent release of a 279-page joint
army/marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual.
If we've created a manual that is just good for Iraq and Afghanistan,
we've failed ... This thing has got to be focused on the future and
the
next time we do this.
The next time we do this. Okay, call that realism along the imperial
path. After all, if somehow, post-Vietnam, the US military was in
denial about waging future counterinsurgency wars, it's perfectly
logical to assume that it shouldn't be again; not if these are to be
"our" wars of the future. Or as another of the key drafters of the
guidebook, Lieutenant-Colonel John A Nagl, put it, "We are codifying
the best practices of previous counterinsurgency campaigns and the
lessons we have learned from Iraq and Afghanistan to help our forces
succeed in the current fight and prepare for the future."
And yet, like so much else, that counterinsurgency how-to-do-it is
also
a functional vote for an imperial mission few of us have ever had the
chance really to consider, no less opt for. And why is it that when I
read Crane's comment, I think to myself - as if I were a parent
dealing
with thoughtless children - no, no, the lesson of our moment isn't: Do
it right the next time. It's: Don't do it!
'We're going to be here a long time'
But you can hardly blame Colonels Conrad and Nagl, not when just about
all strands of official thought in and around Washington point toward
those future wars. On the one hand, we have the latest neo-
conservative
proposal, direct from the American Enterprise Institute, promoted
personally to the president by former vice chief of staff of the US
Army General Jack Keane and AEI star Frederick Kagan, and heavily
lobbied for by presidential candidate Senator John McCain. It calls
for
Bush to order a "surge" of 30,000 or more US troops (long-term) into
what former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke now calls the "Iraqi
sinkhole". These are the people who, as Inter Press Service analyst
Jim
Lobe commented recently, are intent on making "one final effort ... to
persuade the president that, by 'doubling down' on his gamble on Iraq,
he can still leave the table a winner and 'transform' the entire
Middle
East" (see A risky throw of the dice for Bush, Asia Times Online,
December 22, 2006).
If taken, this will be but the latest in a long line of gambler's
choices on the neo-con imperial path to remaking the Middle East. And
while others in Washington or Iraq, including top US commanders, may
not back such an obviously wobbly policy decision, doubling down on
the
imperial path itself is another matter entirely. News reports late
last
month indicated that the United States and Britain were already
deploying a new set of warships to the Persian Gulf, possibly
including
a second US aircraft-carrier task force, which would join the USS
Dwight D Eisenhower already on station there. No one had any doubt
that
these moves were aimed at Iran.
In the meantime, America's new Secretary of Defense Robert A Gates,
until recently a member of the "realist" Iraq Study Group, sent in
from
Papa Bush's world to clean up the mess in Baghdad, made his first
official trip to the Iraqi capital to meet with American commanders.
While those ships headed Gulf-ward, he had a few choice things to say
on the subject of the US imperial mission in the Middle East. In a
breakfast meeting with American soldiers, he offered the following:
We need to make damn sure that the neighbors understand we're going to
be here a long time, "here" meaning the Persian Gulf area, not
necessarily here in Iraq.
That this was no passing spontaneous outburst he made clear with
this
comment in a press briefing:
I think the message that we are sending to everyone, not just Iran,
is
that the United States is an enduring presence in this part of the
world. We have been here for a long time. We will be here for a long
time and everybody needs to remember that - both our friends and those
who might consider themselves our adversaries.
When the "realist" secretary of defense talks in this fashion about
America's enduring regional "footprint", he's voting for the imperial
path in the name of all Americans. He's also reminding us that, with
every passing moment, that path and the military one are becoming a
single way into the future. He's ensuring that when our
counterinsurgency warriors, armed with their latest weaponry and
manuals, hit the sands of wherever, they won't sound that different
from the soldier at that breakfast in Iraq who described what it's
like
to "advise" the Iraqi military: "The more they work with us, the more
they're slowly picking up on our traits. I mean, you see them sort of
starting trying to act like us and stuff, and it's good; you know,
little brother trying to act like a big brother ..."
This is offered in the same patronizing imperial spirit in which
President Bush, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others
once talked about teaching the Iraqi child how to ride the "bike" of
democracy and debated when to take off the "training wheels". It helps
explain why America's imperial path and that giant "footprint", all of
which seem so natural to us as hardly to be an imposition on others,
appeal so little elsewhere in the world. It helps explain why no
counterinsurgency guide, no deployment of aircraft carriers to the
Persian Gulf, no upping of the Pentagon budget, or sending of
"intelligence" agents, military or CIA, into the universe with an
"expeditionary mentality" will ever make this planet a comfortable,
conquerable, garrison-able place. It helps explain just why the
imperial path is ever more costly.
Flies and sledgehammers
Recently, the deputy director for the "war on terrorism" within the
Strategic Plans Office of the Pentagon's Joint Staff, General Mark O
Schissler, told the Washington Times:
We're in a generational war. You can try and fight the enemy where
they
are and where they're attacking you, or prevent them and defend your
own homeland ... [Islamist extremists are] absolutely committed to the
50-, 100-year plan.
It was a typical comment of our moment in which "they" invariably
leave
helpless us no other option but to prepare for their 100-year or
multi-generational struggle.
So, with us headed down what various Bush administration officials
have
long thought of as a century-long path of war, let me conclude this
little sermon by returning to the marine recruitment e-letter my
friend's daughter received. It ends with an encouraging challenge:
"This is an unparalleled opportunity to see if you have what it takes
to be a leader in one of the most elite organizations in the world
without committing yourself to service." Then, after the recruiting
officer's sign-off, comes what clearly is meant to be an inspirational
quote for the prospective military leader of America's future:
Sometimes killing a fly with a sledgehammer is entirely appropriate.
It
doesn't make the fly any more dead, but the rest of the flies sure sit
up and take notice. - Major I L Holdridge, USMC
Retired marine Major Holdridge, it turns out, is the creator of a
video
game, TacOps, used by military trainers and available in commercial
form. His comment reminded me of something Boston Globe columnist
James
Carroll said in a Tomdispatch interview back in September 2005 (see
The
mosquito and the hammer, Asia Times Online, September 13, 2005).
Carroll was pointing out that George Bush's response to the attacks of
September 11, 2001, was partly a result of his particular character
(and faith) and partly of what was available to him in our "arsenal"
of
responses, so to speak - because the process of Pentagonization, of
militarization, had already been under way in the United States for so
long.
The meshing of Bush's temperament and a long-prepared American
institutional response was unfortunate, but there it was. As somebody
said, when he turned to his tool bag to respond to the mosquito of
Osama bin Laden, the only tool he had in it was a hammer, so he
brought
it down on Afghanistan and destroyed it; then he brought it down on
Iraq and destroyed it, missing the mosquito, of course.
Rest assured, as the year 2007 begins, America's imperialists and
militarists are deep into preparations for General Schissler's 100
Year
War. They are already producing the next set of sledgehammers, the
next
set of military responses, for America's next set of crises. At this
point, it would be shocking (not to say awesome) if these weren't
sooner or later applied.
Expand the military or shrink the mission?
We Americans may never vote on this question, symbolic as it is of the
critical choices being made in our name; but make no mistake, the rest
of the world is already "voting" - some literally on ballots, as in
Latin America; some by arms (and polls), as in the Middle East; some
via old-style great-power politics, as in Central Asia. Americans may
not know it, but the mission is shrinking, even as the weaponry grows
ever more dangerous and the imperial path gets ever bumpier, more
potholed, better mined. Expanding the US military will only increase
the costs in every sense of the word.
Tom Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the author of The End of
Victory Culture. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has recently
come out in paperback. Most recently, he is the author of Mission
Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and
Dissenters (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch
interviews.
(Copyright 2007 Tomdispatch. Used by permission.)