Voting in the 2010 election was the single most reflexive political act of my life, in the single most dispiriting election I can remember. As I haven’t missed a midterm or presidential election since my first vote in 1968, that says something. Certainly, my version of election politics started long before I could vote. I remember collecting campaign buttons in the 1950s and also—for the 1956 presidential campaign in which Dwight Eisenhower (and his vice president, Richard Nixon) faced off against Democratic Party candidate Adlai Stevenson—singing this ditty:
Even in the world of kids, even then, politics could be gloves-off stuff. Little good my singing did, though: Stevenson was trounced, thus beginning my political education. My father and mother were dyed-in-the-wool Depression Democrats, and my mother was a political caricaturist for the then-liberal (now Murdoch-owned) tabloid the New York Post. I still remember the fierce drawings she penned for that paper’s front page of red-baiting senator Joe McCarthy. She also came away from those years filled with political fears, reflected in her admonition to me throughout the 1960s: “It’s the whale that spouts that gets caught.”
Still, I was sold on the American system. It was a sign of the times that I simply couldn’t wait to vote. The first election rally I ever attended, in 1962, was for John F. Kennedy, already president. I remember his face, a postage-stamp-sized blur of pink, glimpsed through a sea of heads and shoulders. Even today, I can feel a remnant of the excitement and hope of that moment. In those years before our government had become “the bureaucracy” in young minds, I was imbued with a powerful sense of civic duty that, I suspect, was commonplace. I daydreamed relentlessly about becoming an American diplomat and so representing my country to the world.
The first presidential campaign I followed with a passion was in 1964, after Kennedy’s assassination. In memory, I feel as if I voted in it, though I couldn’t have since the voting age was then twenty-one, and I was only twenty. Nonetheless, I all but put my X beside the “peace candidate” of that moment, Lyndon B. Johnson, who had, in such an untimely manner, inherited the Oval Office and a war in Vietnam. What other vote was there, since he was running against a Republican extremist and warmonger, an Arizona senator named Barry Goldwater?
Not long after his inauguration, however, Johnson launched Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing of North Vietnam. It had been planned before the election, but was kept suitably under wraps while Goldwater was being portrayed as a man intent on getting American boys killed in Asia and maybe nuking the planet as well.
Four years later, with half a million U.S. troops in South Vietnam and the war reaching conflagration status, I was “mad as hell and not going to take this anymore”—and that was years before Paddy Chayefsky penned those words for the film Network. I was at least as mad as any present-day Tea Partier and a heck of a lot younger. By 1968, I had been betrayed by my not-quite-vote for Johnson and learned my lesson—they were all warmongers—and so, deeply involved in antiwar activities, I rejected both Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who had barely peeped about the war, and his opponent Richard Nixon (that “jerk” of my 1956 ditty), who was promising “peace with honor,” but as I understood quite well, preparing to blast any Vietnamese, Cambodian, or Laotian within reach. I voted instead, with some pride, for Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver.
Nor was it exactly thrilling in 1972 when “tricky Dick,” running for reelection, swamped Senator George McGovern, who actually wanted to bring American troops home and end the war, just before the Watergate scandal fully broke. And don’t forget the 1980 election in which Jimmy Carter was hung out to dry by the Iran hostage crisis. As I remember it, I voted late and Democratic that Tuesday in November, came home, made a bowl of popcorn, and sat down in front of the TV just in time to watch Carter concede to Ronald Reagan. Don’t think I didn’t find that dispiriting.
And none of this could, of course, compare to campaign 2000 with its “elected by the Supreme Court” tag or election night 2004, when early exit polls seemed to indicate that Senator John Kerry, himself an admittedly dispiriting figure, might be headed for the White House. My wife and I threw a party that night, which started in the highest of spirits, only to end, after a long, dismal night, in the reelection of George W. Bush. On the morning of November 3, I wrote at TomDispatch.com that I had “the election hangover of a lifetime,” as I contemplated the way American voters had re-upped for “the rashest presidency in our history (short perhaps of that of Jefferson Davis).”
“They have,” I added, “signed on to a disastrous crime of a war in Iraq, and a losing war at that, which will only get worse; they have signed on to whatever dangerous schemes these schemers can come up with. They have signed on to their own impoverishment. This is the political version of the volunteer army. Now they have to live with it. Unfortunately, so do we.”
Years later, we are indeed poorer in all the obvious ways, and some not so obvious ones as well. How, then, could the 2010 midterms have been the most dispiriting elections of my life, especially when Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News assured us, in the days leading up to the event, that it would have “the power to reshape our nation’s politics.” Okay, you and I know that’s BS, part of the endless, breathless handicapping of the midterms that went on nonstop for weeks on the TV news.
Still, the most dispiriting? After all, I’m the guy who penned a piece eight days after the 2008 election entitled “Don’t Let Barack Obama Break Your Heart.” In what was, for most people I knew, a decidedly upbeat moment, I then wrote, for instance: “So, after January 20th, expect Obama to take possession of George Bush’s disastrous Afghan War; and unless he is far more skilled than Alexander the Great, British Empire builders, and the Russians, his war, too, will continue to rage without ever becoming a raging success.”
And take my word for it, when I say dispiriting I’m not even referring to just how dismal my actual voting experience was for the 2010 election in New York City. I mean, two senators and a governor I don’t give a whit about and not a breath of fresh air anywhere—not unless you count the Republican gubernatorial and “Tea Party” candidate, a beyond-mad-as-hell businessman who made a fortune partially thanks to state government favors and breaks of every sort and then couldn’t wait to take out that government. (And when Carl Paladino talks about taking something out, you instinctively know that he’s not a man of metaphor.) Okay, that is dispiriting, just not in a lifetime award kind of way.
No, it’s the whole airless shebang we call elections that’s gotten to me, the bizarrely hermetic, self-financing, self-praising, self-promoting system we still manage to think of as “democratic.” That includes, of course, the media echo chamber that ginned up a nationally nondescript political season into an epochal life-changer via a powerfully mad—as in mad elephant—populace ready to run amok.
I’m no expert on elections, but sometimes all you need is a little common sense. So let’s start with a simple principle: what goes up must come down.
For at least thirty years now, what’s gone up is income disparity in this country. Paul Krugman called this period “the Great Divergence.” After all, between 1980 and 2005, “more than 80 percent of total increase in Americans’ income went to the top 1 percent” of Americans in terms of wealth, and today that 1 percent controls 24 percent of the nation’s income. Or put another way, after three decades of “trickle-down” economics, what’s gone up are the bank accounts of the rich. In 2009, for instance, as Americans generally scrambled and suffered, lost jobs, watched pensions, IRAs, or savings shrink and houses go into foreclosure, the number of millionaires actually increased. The combined wealth of the four hundred richest Americans (all billionaires) rose by 8 percent in 2010, even as, in the second quarter of the year, the net worth of American households fell by 2.8 percent.
Up at the top, individually and corporately, ever more money is on hand to “invest” in protecting what one already possesses or might still acquire. Hence, the 2010 elections had a price tag that obliterates all previous midterm records, estimated at $4 billion to $4.2 billion, mostly from what is politely called “fundraising” or from “outside interest groups”—from that 1 percent and some of the wealthiest corporations, mainly for media and influence campaigns. In other words, the already superrich and the giant corporations that sucked up so much dough over the last thirty years now have tons of it to “invest” in our system in order to reap yet more favors—to invest, that is, in Sharron Angle and Harry Reid. If that isn’t dispiriting, what is?
The right-wing version of this story is that a thunderstorm of money is being invested in a newly aroused, mad-as-hell collection of Americans ready to storm to power in the name of small government, radically reduced federal deficits, and, of course, lower taxes. This is a fantasy concoction, though, even if you hear it on the news 24-7. First of all, those right-wing billionaires and corporate types are not for small government. They regularly and happily back, and sometimes profit from, the ever-increasing power of the national security state to pry, peep, suppress, and oppress, abridge liberties and make war endlessly abroad. They are Pentagon lovers. They adore the locked-down “homeland.”
In addition, they are for the government giving them every sort of break, any sort of hand—just not for that government laying its hands on them. They are, in this sense, America’s real welfare queens. They want a powerful, protective state, but one that benefits them, not us. All of those dollars that scaled the heights in these last decades are now helping to fund their program. For what they need, they only have to throw repeated monkey wrenches into the works and the Tea Party, which really isn’t a party at all, is just the latest of those wrenches.
Faced with all our national woes, are we really a mad-as-hell nation? On that, the jury is out, despite the fact that you’ve heard how “angry” we are a trillion times in the news. Maybe we’re a depressed-as-hell nation. What we do know, however, is that the rich-as-hell crew are making good use of the mad-as-hell one.
In October 2010, Amy Gardner of the Washington Post offered a revealing report on the Tea Party landscape. Of the 1,400 Tea Party groups nationwide that the Post tried to contact, it reached 647. Many of the rest may have ceased to exist or may never have existed at all. (“The findings suggest that the breadth of the tea party may be inflated.”) What the Post researchers found bore little relationship to the angry, Obama-as-Hitler-sign-carrying bunch supposedly ready to storm the gates of power. They discovered instead a generally quiescent movement in which “70 percent of the grass-roots groups said they have not participated in any political campaigning this year.” Most of them were small, not directly involved in electoral politics, and meant to offer places to talk and exchange ideas. Not exactly the stuff of rebellion in the streets.
On the other hand, the funding machines like Tea Party Express (run by Sal Russo, longtime Republican operative, aide to Ronald Reagan, and fundraiser/media strategist for former New York governor George Pataki), FreedomWorks (run by Dick Armey, former Republican House majority leader), and Americans for Prosperity (started by oil billionaire David Koch) had appropriated the Tea Party name nationally and were pouring money into “Tea Party candidates.” And don’t forget the Tea-Partyish funding groups set up by Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s bosom buddy and close adviser. That these influential “tea partiers” turn out to be familiar right-wing insiders—“longtime political players,” as the Post put it, who since the 1980s “have used their resources and know-how to help elect a number of candidates”—shouldn’t be much of a shock. Nor can it be so surprising that familiar right-wing political operatives are intent on creating a kind of political mayhem under the Tea Party label.
As for the TV set that filled your living room with the sound and fury of an “epochal” election, isn’t it curious how little attention all the commentators, pundits, and talking heads on that screen paid to where so much of that money was actually landing? I mean, of course, in the hands of their bosses. Vast amounts of it have come down on the media itself, particularly television. I’m talking about all those screaming “attack ads,” including the ones sponsored by the unnamed outside interest groups that the talking heads just love to analyze, rebroadcast, and discuss endlessly? These are the very ads enriching the media outfits that employ them in a moment when the news world is in financial turmoil. It was estimated that, for election 2010, the TV ad bill would reach $3 billion (up from $2.7 billion in the 2008 presidential campaign year, and $2.4 billion in the 2006 midterms that brought the Democrats back to power in Congress). For the companies behind the screen, in other words, those ads are manna from heaven.
If, in another context, someone was selling you on the importance of a phenomenon and was at the same time directly benefiting from that phenomenon, it would be considered a self-evident conflict of interest. In this particular case, all those ad dollars are visibly to the benefit of the very media promoting the world-shaking importance of each new election season. But remind me, when was the last time you saw anyone on television, or really just about anywhere, even suggest that this might represent a conflict of interest?
The media aren’t just reporting on a particular election season, they’re also filling every space they can imagine with boosterism for just the kinds of elections we now experience. They are, in a sense, modern-day carnies, offering endless election spiels to usher you inside the tent. Whatever they themselves may individually think about it, they are working to boost the profitability of their companies just as surely as any of those right-wing funders are boosting their corporate (or personal) profits. They are not outsiders looking in, but a basic part of the hermetic, noisy, profitable system we think of as an election campaign.
As for the election itself, none of us really had to wait for the results of midterm 2010, the Anger Extravaganza, to know that it wouldn’t be transformative. This isn’t rocket science. We already knew what the Democrats were capable of (or, more exactly, not capable of) with sixty votes in the Senate and a humongous advantage in the House of Representatives, as well as the presidency. So you should have a perfectly realistic assessment of how much less of “the people’s business” is likely to be done in a more divided Congress, in which the Republicans control the House.
After the election, whatever the results, we already knew that Obama would move even more toward “the center,” even if for decades the so-called center has been drifting rightward without ever settling on a home; that he would try to “work with” the Republicans; that this would prove the usual jokes; and that the election, however breathlessly reported as a Republican triumph or Tea Party miracle (or anything else), would essentially be a gum-it-up-more event. Though none of the voluble prognosticators and interpreters you’ll listen to or read are likely to say so, those right-wing fundraisers and outside interest groups pouring money into Tea Party candidates, angry maniacs, dopes, and whoever else is on the landscape undoubtedly could care less. Yes, a Congress that gave them everything they wanted on a proverbial silver platter would be a wonder, but gum-it-up works pretty darn well, too. For most Americans, a Washington in gridlock in a moment of roiling national crisis may be nothing to write home about, but for those fundraisers and outside interest groups, it only guarantees more manna from heaven.
And the good news, as far as they are concerned, is that the state that matters, the national security, war-making one, hardly needs Congress at all, or rather knows that no Congress will ever vote “no” to moneys for such matters. Meanwhile, the media will begin cranking up for an even more expensive Election 2012. Long before this election season came to a close, my hometown paper was already sporting its first pieces with headlines like “Looking Ahead to the 2012 Race” and beginning to handicap the presidential run to come. (“Although [President Obama] will not say so, there is at least a plausible argument that he might be better off if [the Democrats] lose… [I]f Republicans capture Congress, Mr. Obama will finally have a foil heading toward his own re-election battle in 2012.”)
Whether the country I once wanted to represent was ever there in the form I imagined is a question I’ll leave to the historians. What I can say is that it’s sure not there now.
Even though we promptly dubbed the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York City “Ground Zero”—once a term reserved for an atomic blast—Americans have never really come to grips either with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or with the nuclear age that they ushered in. There can be no question that, as the big bang that might end it all, the atomic bomb haunted Cold War America. In those years, while the young (myself included) watched endless versions of nuclear disaster transmuted into B-horror films, the grown-ups who ran our world went on a vast shopping spree for world-ending weaponry, building nuclear arsenals that came to number in the tens of thousands.
When the Cold War finally ended with the Soviet Union’s quite peaceful collapse, however, a nuclear “peace dividend” never quite arrived. The arsenals of the former superpower adversaries remained quietly in place, drawn down but strangely untouched, awaiting a new mission, while just beyond sight, the knowledge of the making of such weapons spread to other countries ready to launch their own threatening mini–Cold Wars.
Even fifty years after that first bomb went off over the Aioi Bridge in Hiroshima, it still proved impossible in the United States to agree upon a nuclear creation tale. Was August 6, 1945, the heroic ending to a global war or the horrific beginning of a new age? The Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the Hiroshima bomb, and a shattered schoolchild’s lunchbox from Hiroshima could not yet, it turned out, inhabit the same exhibit space at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
Still, for people of a certain age like me, Hiroshima is where it all began. So I would like to try, once again, to lay out the pieces of a nuclear story that none of us, it seems, can yet quite tell.
In my story, there are three characters and no dialogue. There is my father, who volunteered at age thirty-five for the Army Air Corps, immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He fought in Burma, was painfully silent on his wartime experiences, and died on Pearl Harbor Day in 1983. Then there’s me, growing up in a world in which my father’s war was glorified everywhere, in which my play fantasies in any park included mowing down Japanese soldiers—but whose nightmares were of nuclear destruction. Finally, there is a Japanese boy whose name and fate are unknown to me.
This is a story of multiple silences. The first of those, the silence of my father, was once no barrier to the stories I told myself. If anything, his silence enhanced them, since in the 1950s male silence seemed a heroic attribute (and perhaps it was, though hardly in the way I imagined at the time). Sitting in the dark with him then at any World War II movie was enough for me.
As it turned out though, the only part of his war I possessed was its final act, and around this too, there grew a puzzling silence. The very idea of nuclear destruction seemed not to touch him. Like other schoolchildren, I went through nuclear-attack drills with sirens howling outside, while—I had no doubt—he continued to work unfazed in his office. It was I who watched the irradiated ants and nuclearized monsters of our teen-screen life stomp the Earth. It was I who went to the French film Hiroshima Mon Amour, where I was shocked by my first sight of the human casualties of the A-bombing, and to On the Beach to catch a glimpse of how the world might actually end. It was I who saw the mushroom cloud rise in my dreams, felt its heat sear my arm before I awoke. Of all this I said not a word to him, nor he to me.
On his erstwhile enemies, however, my father was not silent. He hated the Japanese with a war-bred passion. They had, he told me, “done things” that could not be discussed to “boys” he had known. Subsequent history—the amicable American occupation of Japan or the emergence of that defeated land as an ally—did not seem to touch him. His hatred of all things Japanese was not a ruling passion of my childhood only because Japan was so absent from our lives. There was nothing Japanese in our house (one did not buy their products), we avoided the only Japanese restaurant in our part of town, and no Japanese ever came to visit. Even the evil Japanese I saw in war movies, who might sneeringly hiss, “I was educated in your University of Southern California” before they met their suicidal fates were, I now know, regularly played by non-Japanese actors.
In the end, I followed my own path to Hiroshima, drawn perhaps to the world my father so vehemently rejected. In 1979, as an editor, I published Unforgettable Fire, the drawings of Hiroshima residents who had lived through that day, the first time any sizable number of images of the human damage there made it into mainstream American culture. I visited Japan in 1982, thanks to the book’s Japanese editor who took me to Hiroshima, an experience I found myself unable to talk about on return. This, too, became part of the silences my father and I shared.
To make a story thus far would seem relatively simple. Two generations face each other across the chasm of a war and an act that divided them. It is the story we all know. And yet, there is my third character and third silence—the Japanese boy who drifted into my consciousness after an absence of almost four decades only a few years ago. I no longer remember how he and I were put in contact sometime in the mid-1950s. Like me, my Japanese pen pal must have been eleven or twelve years old. If we exchanged photos, I have no memory of his face, nor does a name come to mind. If I can remember half-jokingly writing my own address at that age (“New York City, New York, USA, Planet Earth, the Solar System, the Galaxy, the Universe”), I can’t remember writing his. I already knew by then that a place called Albany was the capital of New York State, but New York City still seemed to me the center of the world. In many ways, I wasn’t wrong.
Even if he lived in Tokyo, my Japanese pen pal could have had no such illusions. Like me, he had undoubtedly been born during World War II. Perhaps in his first year of life he had been evacuated from one of Japan’s charred cities. For him, that disastrous war would not have been a memory. If he had gone to the movies with his father in the 1950s, he might have seen Godzilla (not the U.S. Air Force) dismantle Tokyo and he might have hardly remembered those economically difficult first years of American occupation. But he could not at that time have imagined himself at the center of the universe.
I have a faint memory of the feel of his letters; a crinkly thinness undoubtedly meant to save infinitesimal amounts of weight (and so, money). We wrote, of course, in English, for much of the planet, if not the solar-system-galaxy-universe, was beginning to operate in that universal language that seemed to radiate from my home city to the world like the rays of the sun. But what I most remember are the exotic-looking stamps that arrived on (or in) his letters. For I was, with my father, an avid stamp collector. On Sunday afternoons, my father and I prepared and mounted our stamps, consulted our Scott’s Catalog, and pasted them in. In this way, the Japanese section of our album was filled with that boy’s offerings, without comment, but also without protest from my father.
We exchanged letters—none of which remain—for a year or two, and then who knows what interest of mine or his overcame us. Perhaps only the resistance boys can have to writing letters. In any case, he, too, entered a realm of silence. Only now, remembering those quiet moments of closeness when my father and I worked on our albums, do I note that he existed briefly and without discussion in our lives. He existed for both of us, perhaps, in the ambiguous space that silence can create. And now I wonder sometimes what kinds of nuclear dreams my father may have had.
For all of us, in a sense, the Earth was knocked off its axis on August 6, 1945. In that one moment, my father’s war ended and my war—the Cold War—began. But in my terms it seems so much messier than that. For we and that boy continued to live in the same world together for a long time, accepting and embroidering each other’s silences. When I think of him now, when I realize that he, my father, and I still can’t inhabit the same story except in silence, a strange kind of emotion rushes up in me, which is hard to explain.
The bomb still runs like a fissure, but also like an attracting current—a secret unity—through our lives. The rent it tore in history was deep and the generational divide, given the experiences of those growing up on either side of it, profound. But any story would also have to hold the ways, even deeper and harder to fathom, in which we lived through it all together in pain, hatred, love, and, most of all, silence.
With at least six wars cooking (in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and more generally, the Global War on Terror), Americans find themselves in a new world of war.
War has a way of turning almost anything upside down, including language. This undoubtedly means that you’re using a set of antediluvian war words or definitions from your father’s day. It’s time to catch up. So here’s the latest word in war words: what’s in, what’s out, what’s inside out. What follows are nine common terms associated with our present wars that probably don’t mean what you think they mean.
Victory: Like defeat, it’s a loaded word and rather than define it, Americans should simply avoid it.
In his final press conference before retirement, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was asked whether the United States was “winning in Afghanistan.” He replied, “I have learned a few things in four and a half years, and one of them is to try and stay away from loaded words like ‘winning’ and ‘losing.’ What I will say is that I believe we are being successful in implementing the president’s strategy, and I believe that our military operations are being successful in denying the Taliban control of populated areas, degrading their capabilities, and improving the capabilities of the Afghan national security forces.”
In 2005, George W. Bush, whom Gates also served, used the word victory fifteentimes in a single speech (“National Strategy for Victory in Iraq”). Keep in mind, though, that our previous president learned about war in the movie theaters of his childhood where the marines always advanced and Americans actually won. Think of his victory obsession as the equivalent of a mid–twentieth-century hangover.
In 2011, despite the complaints of a few leftover neocons dreaming of past glory, you can search Washington high and low for “victory.” You won’t find it. It’s the verbal equivalent of a Yeti. Admittedly, the assassination of Osama bin Laden was treated as if it were VJ Day ending World War II, but actually win a war? Don’t make Gates laugh!
Maybe, if everything comes up roses, in some year soon we’ll be celebrating DE (Degrade the Enemy) Day.
Enemy: Any super-evil pipsqueak on whose back you can raise at least $1.2 trillion a year for the National Security Complex.
“I actually consider al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula with Al-Awlaki as a leader within that organization probably the most significant risk to the U.S. homeland.” So said Michael Leiter, presidential adviser and the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, in February 2011, months before Osama bin Laden was killed (and Leiter himself resigned). Since bin Laden’s death, Leiter’s assessment has been heartily seconded in word and deed in Washington. For example, in June 2011, New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti wrote, “Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen is believed by the C.I.A. to pose the greatest immediate threat to the United States, more so than even al-Qaeda’s senior leadership believed to be hiding in Pakistan.”
Now, here’s the odd thing. Once upon a time, statements like these might have been tantamount to announcements of victory: That’s all they’ve got left? Of course, once upon a time, if you asked an American who was the most dangerous man on the planet, you might have been told Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, or Mao Zedong. These days, don’t think enemy at all. Think comic book–style arch villain like Lex Luthor or Doctor Doom—anyone, in fact, capable of standing in for globe-encompassing Evil.
Post–bin Laden, America’s super-villain of choice is Anwar al-Awlaki, an enemy with seemingly near superhuman powers to disturb Washington, but no army, no state, and no significant finances. The U.S.-born “radical cleric” lives as a semi-fugitive in Yemen, a poverty-stricken land of which, until recently, few Americans had heard. Al-Awlaki is considered at least partially responsible for two high-profile plots against the United States: the underwear bomber and package bombs sent by plane to Chicago synagogues. Both failed dismally, even though neither Superman nor the Fantastic Four rushed to the rescue.
As an Evil One, al-Awlaki is a voodoo enemy, a YouTube warrior (“the bin Laden of the Internet”) with little but his wits and whatever superpowers he can muster to help him. He was reputedly responsible for helping to poison the mind of army psychiatrist major Nidal Hasan before he blew away thirteen people at Fort Hood, Texas. There’s no question of one thing: he’s gotten inside Washington’s war-on-terror head in a big way. As a result, the Obama administration is significantly intensifying its war against him and the ragtag crew of tribesmen he hangs out with who go by the name of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Covert war: It used to mean secret war, a war “in the shadows” and so beyond the public’s gaze. Now, it means a conflict in the full glare of publicity that everybody knows about, but no one can do anything about. Think: in the news, but off the books.
Go figure: today, our “covert” wars are front-page news. And America’s most secretive covert warriors, elite SEAL Team 6, caused “SEAL-mania” to break out nationwide after Osama bin Laden was killed. Moreover, no minor drone strike in the “covert” CIA-run air war in the Pakistani tribal borderlands goes unreported. In fact, future plans for the launching or intensification of Pakistani-style covert wars are now openly discussed, debated, and praised in Washington, as well as widely reported on.
Think of covert war today as the equivalent of a heat-seeking missile aimed directly at the mainstream media newshole. The “shadows” that once covered whole operations now only cover accountability for them.
Permanent bases: In the American way of war, military bases built on foreign soil are the equivalent of heroin. The Pentagon can’t help building them and can’t live without them, but “permanent bases” don’t exist, not for Americans. Never.
That’s simple enough, but let me be absolutely clear anyway: Americans may have at least 865 bases around the world (not including those in war zones), but we have no desire to occupy other countries. And wherever we garrison, we don’t want to stay, not permanently anyway.
In the grand scheme of things, for a planet more than four billion years old, our ninety bases in Japan, a mere sixty-odd years in existence, or our 227 bases in Germany, some also around for sixty-odd years, or those in Korea, fifty-odd years, count as little. Moreover, we have it on good word that permanent bases are un-American. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said as much in 2003 when the first of the Pentagon’s planned Iraqi megabases were already on the drawing boards. Hillary Clinton said so again in June 2011 about Afghanistan, and an anonymous American official added for clarification: “There are U.S. troops in various countries for some considerable lengths of time which are not there permanently.” Korea anyone? So get it straight, Americans don’t want permanent bases. Period.
And that’s amazing when you think about it, since globally Americans are constantly building and upgrading military bases. The Pentagon is hooked. In Afghanistan, it’s gone totally wild—more than four hundred of them and still building! Not only that, Washington is now deep into negotiations with the Afghan government to transform some of them into “joint bases” and stay on them if not until hell freezes over, then at least until Afghan soldiers can be whipped into an American-style army. Latest best guesstimate for that? 2017without even getting close. Fortunately, we plan to turn those many bases we built to the tune of billions of dollars, including the gigantic establishments at Bagram and Kandahar, over to the Afghans and just hang around, possibly “for decades,” as—and the word couldn’t be more delicate or thoughtful—“tenants.”
And by the way, accompanying reports that the CIA is preparing to lend the U.S. military a major covert hand, drone-style, in its Yemen campaign, was news that the agency is building a base of its own on a rushed schedule in an unnamed Persian Gulf country. Just one base. But don’t expect that to be the end of it. After all, that’s like eating one potato chip.
Withdrawal: We’re going, we’re going… just not quite yet, and stop pushing!
If our bases are shots of heroin, then for the U.S. military leaving anyplace represents a form of “withdrawal,” which means the shakes. Like drugs, it just feel so darn good to go in that Washington keeps doing it again and again. Getting out’s the bear. Who can blame them if they don’t want to leave?
In Iraq, for instance, Washington has been in the grips of withdrawal fever since the Bush administration agreed in 2008 that all U.S. troops would leave by the end of 2011. You can still hear those combat boots dragging in the sand with top administration and military officials practically begging the Iraqis to let us remain on a few of our monster bases, like the ill-named Camp Victory or Balad Air Base. But here’s the thing: even if the U.S. military officially departs, lock, stock, and (gun) barrel, Washington’s still not really planning on leaving. Instead, the Obama administration is planning to militarize the State Department, turning its embassy in Baghdad and its consulates into a little archipelago of bases defended by 5,100 hire-a-guns and a small mercenary air force.
In sum, “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Ya” is not a song that Washington likes to sing.
Drone War (see also covert war): A permanent air campaign using missile-armed pilotless planes that banishes both withdrawal and victory to the slagheap of history.
Is it even a “war” if only one side ever appears in person and only one side ever suffers damage? In this sense, America’s drones are something new in the history of warfare. Drones are, of course, the weaponry of choice in our covert wars, which means that the military just can’t wait to usher chosen reporters into its secret labs and experimental testing grounds to reveal dazzling visions of future robotic destruction.
To make sense of drones, we probably have to stop thinking about “war” and start envisaging other models—for example, that of the executioner who carries out a death sentence on another human being at no danger to himself. If a pilotless drone is actually an executioner’s weapon, a modern airborne version of the guillotine, the hangman’s noose, or the electric chair, the death sentence it carries with it is not decreed by a judge and certainly not by a jury of peers.
It’s assembled by intelligence agents based on fragmentary (and often self-interested) evidence, organized by targeters, and given the thumbs-up by military or CIA lawyers. All of them are scores, hundreds, thousands of miles away from their victims, people they don’t know and may not faintly understand or share a culture with. In addition, the capital offenses are often not established, still to be carried out, never to be carried out, or nonexistent. The fact that drones, despite their “precision” weaponry, regularly take out innocent civilians as well as prospective or actual terrorists reminds us that, if this is our model, Washington is a drunken executioner.
In a sense, Bush’s Global War on Terror called drones up from the depths of its unconscious to fulfill its most basic urges: to be endless and to reach anywhere on Earth with an Old Testament–style sense of vengeance. The drone makes mincemeat of victory (which involves an endpoint), withdrawal (for which you have to be there in the first place), and national sovereignty (see below).
Corruption: Something inherent in the nature of war-torn Iraqis and Afghans from which only Americans, in and out of uniform, can save them.
Don’t be distracted by the $6.6 billion that, in the form of shrink-wrapped $100 bills, the Bush administration loaded onto C-130 transport planes, flew to liberated Iraq in 2003 for “reconstruction” purposes, and somehow mislaid. The U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction did suggest that it might prove to be “the largest theft of funds in national history.” On the other hand, accidents happen.
Iraq’s parliamentary speaker claims that up to $18.7 billion in Iraqi oil funds have gone missing in action, but Iraqis, as you know, are corrupt and unreliable. So pay no attention. Anyway, not to worry, it wasn’t our money. All those crisp Benjamins came from Iraqi oil revenues that just happened to be held by U.S. banks. And in war zones, what can you do? Sometimes bad things happen to good $100 bills!
In any case, corruption is endemic to the societies of the Greater Middle East, which lack the institutional foundations of democratic societies. Not surprisingly then, in impoverished, narcotized Afghanistan, it’s run wild. Fortunately, Washington has fought nobly against its ravages for years. Time and again, top American officials have cajoled, threatened, even browbeat Afghan president Hamid Karzai and his compatriots to get them to crack down on corrupt practices and hold honest elections to build support for the American-backed government in Kabul.
Here’s the funny thing though: a report on Afghan reconstruction released by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Democratic majority staff in June 2011 suggested that the military and foreign “developmental” funds that have poured into the country, and which account for 97 percent of its gross domestic product, have played a major role in encouraging corruption. To find a peacetime equivalent, imagine firemen rushing to a blaze only to pour gasoline on it and then lash out at the building’s dwellers as arsonists.
National sovereignty: 1. Something Americans cherish and wouldn’t let any other country violate; 2. Something foreigners irrationally cling to, a sign of unreliability or mental instability.
Here’s the credo of the American war state in the twenty-first century. Please memorize it. The world is our oyster. We shall not weep. We may missile (bomb, assassinate, night raid, invade) whom we please, when we please, where we please. This is to be called “American safety.”
Those elsewhere, with a misplaced reverence for their own safety or security, or an overblown sense of pride and self-worth, who put themselves in harm’s way—watch out. After all, in a phrase: Sovereignty ‘R’ Us.
Note: As we still live on a one-way imperial planet, don’t try reversing any of the above, not even as a thought experiment. Don’t imagine Iranian drones hunting terrorists over Southern California or Pakistani special operations forces launching night raids on small Midwestern towns. Not if you know what’s good for you.
War: A totally malleable concept that is purely in the eye of the beholder.
Which is undoubtedly why the Obama administration decided not to ask Congress for approval of its Libyan intervention as required by the War Powers Resolution of 1973. The administration instead issued a report essentially declaring Libya not to be a “war” at all, and so not to fall under the provisions of that resolution. As that report explained: “U.S. operations [in Libya] do not involve [1] sustained fighting or [2] active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve [3] the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties, or a serious threat thereof, or [4] any significant chance of escalation into a conflict characterized by those factors.”
This, of course, opens up the possibility of quite a new and sunny American future, one in which it will no longer be wildly utopian to imagine war becoming extinct. After all, the Obama administration is already moving to intensify and expand its (fill in the blank) in Yemen, which will meet all of the above criteria, as its (fill in the blank) in the Pakistani tribal borderlands already does. Someday, Washington could be making America safe all over the globe in what would, miraculously, be a thoroughly warless world.